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Libby Larsen Interview (2/99)
5. Women in Music
RK: I want to get onto another very big question. Basically, if you look at the statistics concerning performance of concert music, the statistics clearly prove that there are remarkably fewer performances of works by women composers than men. It's staggering, the numbers, and it's been this way for decades.
LL: Which set of concert statistics are you looking at?
RK: Take a look at the data put out in the last five or ten years by the American Symphony Orchestra League. I believe also, some things you see about chamber music. Take a look at catalogs. Take a look at our membership. You'll see that there are more men than women. It used to be this way in many fields. But you're seeing some remarkable changes in rock. You're seeing remarkable changes in country music. I know many talented young-to-mid career women composers, but we're still looking at a predominant number of performances coming from male composers. You're probably still looking at a predominant number of teaching positions held by men. What do you think of all this? To what do you attribute this imbalance, and do you perceive any changes taking place for women concert composers?
LL: The statistics that I've studied show the same thing you described. When people ask the question -- "How is it for women composers?" -- you'll hear many people saying, "Oh, it's hardly a question anymore. Things have gotten so good for women composers; there's a lot of representation for women composers." And in fact, the statistics don't bear that out at all. I accept an average of four residencies in colleges every year. I've noticed over the past twelve years that there is a definite pattern. In the graduate schools, you have a handful of graduate composers, maybe one or two are women, and maybe ten or twelve are men. The questions that I hear from women composers are quite different than the questions I get from men. Once we move beyond the technical and aesthetic questions of composing, the personal questions are quite different.
RK: How so?
LL: Generally the men ask about the business of composing and the young women ask about the lifestyle. Because of a thousand years of history, I think it's easier for young men to envision themselves as composers. Even if they don't know what that means, there has been a thousand years and a very long list of role models to emulate. Young women find it more difficult for them to envision their whole lives as composers, even though we have a few models. There are only a few models. There isn't a critical mass of these adventurers (...which is what composers are, adventurers...). I ask the young women, "Well, look around you, how is it for the people around you?" And most of them describe rather traditional gender models that are available to them in the universities. Hardly any of them envision a professional life outside the universities. It's difficult for a composer anyway, but for some reason, women seem to have a harder time visualizing surviving on their own. That's part of it. Another part is that the art of performance is really a social art. To succeed you have to strike up good working relationships with performers and conductors, and it's very difficult to do with integrity...very difficult.
RK: Well, it makes sense - with performers, there's mixing going on. They know each other. They freelance. They get together. They join groups, any number of things.
LL: Right, and a composer can mix with performers with some regularity. But to try to mix with conductors, it is difficult. You have to meet them in social situations which often are dominated by ingrained gender stereotypes. And so to establish yourself as an intellectual partner to the conductor is a difficult task.
RK: Do you see any changes brewing? Do you see anything occurring with younger women. Do you see any signs, or does this thing continue to roll?
LL: While I see great artistry and vigor with many young women composers, I think it's going to continue to roll until there is a critical mass of women who are also in administration positions and the power positions. We've got to see many more women on the podium. There are a number of really fine women conductors who ought to be considered for major positions. And do you see that happening?
RK: Well, Jo Ann Falletta got appointed at the Buffalo Philharmonic, and Marin Alsop has the Colorado Symphony, but otherwise women conductors rarely move up the ladder. Even the ones that everyone thought were even heading towards those positions, like Catherine Comet or Gisèle Ben-Dor. It's the most capricious, hard-to-understand ladder I've ever seen. It's very bizarre, almost mystical. What a system!
LL: In composition, we have two Pulitzer Prize winners, and there ought to be more. I don't think it's malicious. I think it's ingrained.
RK: What do you attribute that to? In terms of kids studying music, for instance, there are more and more music education programs and more teachers being hired. More and more partnerships between schools and musical organizations are emerging, such as the SPCO Connect Program. That's one where during the early grades, the curriculum is very heavy with basic composition: using basic sounds and letting kids manipulate these sounds. And when you look at that you think it should be an absolute even playing field, there should be no predetermining factor. These kids are collecting sounds. They have this thing called the Sound Museum. They collect their sounds and they draw pictures of them. They have any number of composers and musicians going into the classrooms, helping them understand how they can put together and create all sorts of things. So you look at that, and it's dead even gender-wise. Now, these are kids today. What kids were doing, if they were even doing that, ten or 15 years ago, that's another story.
LL: Right. Kind of like my grade school experience where everybody wrote music.
RK: So where do you think the trigger and the filter occur?
LL: In lower school, things tend not to be gender biased at all. But the kids are still taught that Beethoven is the best composer who ever lived. And the canon of composers' names that they're still being given already sets the thing in motion, because they're all men. Nowadays people may add Hildegaard von Bingen, but Hildegaard is so distant from anybody's current life experience. It is very difficult to equate a visionary abbess who composed chant with a modern young girl's life path! Then you move into instruments, and the gender stereotyping that goes on in assigning kids instruments is unbelievable. The boys are headed towards brass and percussion; the girls are steered towards flutes, clarinets, a little percussion, and maybe one or two saxophones. Maybe some brave girl tries the double bass. And then the kids start to learn jazz and the girls are often filtered out by senior high school. If they go on in orchestra, then they'll head into their school orchestras or into their youth orchestras where the compositional canon is overwhelmingly male again.
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