“History has a way of women falling off the back of it. […] The canonical doesn’t hold on to women in the same way as it holds on to artists who happen not to be women.”
~ALI SMITH, SCOTTISH NOVELIST, SPEAKING ON THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS PODCAST 45, 2019
“By sidelining women’s history and feminist theory in our survey courses, we have already taught our music students that we do not place high value on these subjects.”
~CLAUDIA MACDONALD, “ARE WE THERE YET? WOMEN’S STUDIES IN A PROFESSIONAL MUSIC PROGRAM,” WOMEN & MUSIC (2004)
One often hears the argument that music is music, and the fact that women composers are not played is not because they are women, but because their music does not have the same objective value. This course aims to challenge this notion.
The decision to teach Music History 40D (the third leg in an undergraduate music history survey) with only women composers does not imply that male composers no longer matter, but rather it acknowledges a disparity in the reception history of men and women composers during this time period and aims to begin to address this disparity. In designing this syllabus for the inauguration of this course in March 2020, I consulted with various colleagues. Numerous suggestions were made as to how the syllabus might be designed. Conscious of the risks of perpetuating the separation of works by women from the remainder of the repertory, one suggestion was to consider pairing composers, one man and one woman composer in each class. Given the glaring disparity of recordings, scholarship, and entries in music history textbooks in these two categories, however, there is no feasible way to do this without dwarfing the importance of women in relation to their male counterparts. The approach taken in this course aims to ensure that knowledge of women’s presence in the history of 20/21C music for our students is basic, and not supplementary. It is a very exciting prospect to teach this course for the third time in the 2021/2022 academic year with a new and vibrant group of students. Much has changed for the better since the course was first designed in 2019, with a greater richness of recordings, sources, and writings on the music of women composers. It is heartening to witness this progress.
I wish to express my gratitude to the NYC-based new music pianist Isabelle O’Connell who provided much valued input as I first developed this syllabus. I also wish to thank our UCI Librarian for the Performing Arts, Scott Stone, for his help in identifying and finding suitable sources to allow this course to move ahead.
Teaching Team
Instructor: Dr Nicole Grimes
Teaching Assistant: Jonathan Gerrard
***
Header art: Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), Music Pink and Blue II (1919)
