International Women's Day

On International Women's Day, I can't do any better than point to composer Pauline Oliveros's 1970 NY Times essay on women composers. I am driven slightly mad by it, because what she said 55 years ago is still so true today. Take this, for example:

At last, the dying symphony and opera organizations may have to wake up to the fact that music of our time is necessary to draw audiences from the people under 30. The mass media, radio, TV and the press, could have greater influence in encouraging American music by ending the competition between music of the past and music of the present.

JFC, some things never change. Audience members who were under 30 in 1970 are now 55 and up. Then there's this:

The second trend is, of course, dependent on the first because of the cultural deprivation of women in the past. Critics do a great deal of damage by wishing to discover “greatness.” It does not matter that not all composers are great composers; it matters that this activity be encouraged among all the population, that we communicate with each other in non-destructive ways. Women composers are very often dismissed as minor or light weight talents on the basis of one work by critics who have never examined their scores or waited for later developments.

It's infinitely harder to get anywhere in classical music if you're a woman than if you're a man, from getting your music performed if you're a composer to getting into an orchestra or getting a principal position if you're an instrumentalist to getting a highly visible job if you're a conductor. Just think about how many top level orchestras in the U.S. have or about about to have women as their music directors: three (3). 

Those are the Atlanta Symphony, where Nathalie Stutzmann is music director; the Buffalo Philharmonic, an orchestra that seriously punches about its budget, where JoAnn Falletta has been music director for many years, following in the footsteps of Lukas Foss, MTT, and other fine conductors, and the New Jersey Philharmonic, where Xian Zhang is shortly moving to the Seattle Symphony. Do you think a woman will replace her? I suppose we can hope that one or more of the LA Phil, SFS, and Cleveland might hire women, not that I'm holding my breath over this.

And of course, you are way more likely to be harassed or raped than a man when you're in school or in a male-dominated organization like an orchestra.

Updated, March 9, because I forgot Stutzmann at Atlanta.

Babies. Babies! BABIES!

Die Frau ohne Schatten

San Francisco Opera

June, 2023

Johan Reuter (Barak) and Nina Stemme (Dyer's Wife)

Photo: Cory Weaver, Courtesy of San Francisco Opera

The Metropolitan Opera has revived the late Herbert Wernicke's production of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's monumental Die Frau ohne Schatten, giving me an opportunity to get up on a soapbox that's been waiting for me for roughly 18 months, since San Francisco Opera's magnificent staging of the same opera.

Back then, I had a couple of friends telling me, oh no, it's not about babies! They're just a metaphor! Look beyond the words of the libretto!

I'm here to tell you, they were wrong. There was a moment when I pointed out to one of them that the Spirit Messenger makes it quite clear with his first words, which happen to be the second speech in the opera, that Keikobad, the Empress's father, is monitoring her fertility, and he told me he'd never noticed that:

Not our master, not Keikobad but his messenger! Eleven of them have sought you out, a new one with each waning moon. The twelfth moon is down: the twelfth messenger stands before you.

That is, there's been a monthly visit from one of Keikobad's messengers. They're checking to see whether the Empress is pregnant.

I went through the libretto last year and compiled a list of references to babies and fertility in the libretto. Here it is, including the reference above:

1. Keikobad is monitoring the Empress’s fertility, as the Spirit Messenger says in Act 1.

2. Keikobad threatens to turn the Emperor to stone unless she obtains a shadow, though it’s hard to see what he has to do with the Empress’s lack of a shadow. Is it because they really like all of the sex they’re having?

3. The nurse says in Act 1 “He has not loosened the knot of your heart, no unborn babe stirs in your womb.”

4. Barak to the Dyer’s Wife: “If you give me children to cluster round the dishes each evening, I’ll see that none of them gets up hungry. I’ll applaud their appetites, and give thanks in my heart that it falls to me to fill their stomachs." (Touches her gently.) "When will you give me the children to feed?”

5. Dyer’s Wife to Barak: “Two-and-a-half years I’ve been your wife– and you have garnered no fruit from me and have not made a mother of me.”

6. Barak: “I don’t reproach you, my heart is content, and I will be patient and wait for the precious children which will come.”

7. The Nurse of the Dyer’s Wife: “Alas! And she is to bear his children, and waste her life here in obscurity!”

8. The Nurse and the Dyer’s Wife: “Have you wept tears of blood because you have borne no children yet to that block? Quickly, quickly, Do you yearn for them in your heart, night and day? Do you long for a troop of little dyers to trample through you into the world? Is your body to turn into a high road, your slim grace to be compacted under their feet? Are your breasts to droop and their glory to wither so soon?” WIFE “My soul has grown weary of motherhood before even tasting it. I live here in this house, and that man shall not come near me!”

9. Nurse: “Putting away motherhood for ever and aye from your body! And dismissing with that gesture of contempt the importunate babes that will not be born!”

10. CHILDREN’S VOICES through the fish: “Mother, mother, let us come home! The door is bolted, we can’t get in, it’s dark and we’re frightened! Mother, oh, alas!”

11. “.....Or call our dear father and tell him to open the door! Or call our dear father and tell him to open the door!”

12. Dyer’s wife, Act 2: ”I put away from my body the children as yet unborn, and my womb will not bear fruit to you or to any other man, for I have given myself to the winds and the night air, and am at home here and elsewhere, and as a sign of that I have sold my shadow: and the buyers are willing, and the price is glorious and its like will not be found!”

13. The Brothers: “She has sold it and prevented the unborn children coming from her body!”

14. Dyer’s wife, Act 3: “Placed in your care, so as to attend to you, serve, love and bow to you: see you! breathe you, live you! And give you children, best of men!”

15. Voices of Unborn Children, Act 3: (above, from the dome) "Listen, we will say: 'Father!' Listen, we will cry: 'Mother!' Come up here! No, come down here! All the steps lead to us!”

16. EMPEROR: “Those are unborn children, rushing down into life on the red wings of morning and coming to us, who were nearly lost; These strong ones hasten down to us, like starlight. You overcame yourself. Now heavenly messengers release the father and the children— the children yet unborn! They have discovered us, and come hastening down! (steps down from the bottom step”

17. Voices of Unborn Children, to the Wife: “Mother, your shadow! Look, how beautiful! Look at your husband crossing over to you!”

18. EMPRESS AND BARAK’S WIFE "Both casting shadows as we were chosen to do, both of us steeled in the flames of trial. Close to the threshold of death, to being murdered in order to murder, but now blessed with children, and we shall be mothers!" EMPEROR AND BARAK "Both casting shadows as they were chosen to do, both of them steeled in the flames of trial, but now blessed with children and chosen to be mothers!" (A curtain falls, concealing the four figures and the landscape from sight) VOICES OF THE UNBORN CHILDREN "Father, nothing more threatens you, look, Mother, that terror is already dispelled, that led you both astray. Was there ever a feast at which we were not secretly always the guests, and also the hosts! Brothers! Friends!"

The above doesn’t include Barak almost killing the Wife when he thinks that she has sold her shadow or the way that Keikobad blackmails the Empress into seeking a shadow by threatening to turn the Emperor to stone. 

It's really beyond me how you can read the above (not to mention seeing the opera) and not conclude that yes, this opera is, front and center, about having children, and how having children is necessary for women to be fully human.

These points didn't evade Joshua Kosman, who got up on his soapbox about Frau in July, 2022, a year prior to the SFO production, and they're not evading Zachary Woolfe, who reviewed the opera in the NY Times this week ("You might think a four-hour allegorical ode to pregnancy isn’t your thing. But I’m here to tell you: Just go."). I'm going to slightly argue with Woolfe's description of Barak as kindly. The text suggests that his Wife is basically a slave, that she's someone he paid for.

Nobody is denying that one of the central points of this opera is the Empress's transformation as she realizes that she cannot take the shadow from the Dyer's Wife, one of the great moments in all opera, but neither are they denying the opera's focus on fertility and babies. And Joshua Kosman was clear about how this opera lands at a moment when the right wing in the United States has not only gotten Roe v. Wade struck down, it is openly discussing restricting access to contraception, doing away with no-fault divorce, and so on. If somehow this isn't pretty clear to you after reading the above excerpts, well, read them a few more times.

 

What It's Like to Be a Female Composer

Powerful articles in New Music Box from composers Sarah Kirkland Snider and Emily Doolittle.

• Candy Floss and Merry-Go-Rounds: Female Composers, Gendered Language, and Emotion, by Sarah Kirkland Snider. Read it and weep, and know also that men say this kind of garbage to women in all fields. Women have to put up with this in the sciences, in literature, in tech, in the arts, basically everywhere, from teachers, peers, and people who might commission a new work from you, buy your new novel, and so on. And you can bet that Eric Whitacre never hears this kind of thing these days (I own that it's possible his musical language has gotten criticism).
• Composing and Motherhood, by Emily Doolittle. How you get treated, how the structure of academic music works against mothers, what might be done to level the field more. 

You Don't Say

In the middle of a harrowing report on efforts to eliminate female genital mutilation in Egypt, comes this:

It is a challenge to get men to give up some of their control over women.