THE COMPOSER IN A GENDER GHETTO?

As the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in music, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich says she has no room to gripe. But she is an exception.

“Music is a social art,” Zwilich says. “If you write a piece for orchestra and want to hear it played by professionals, know that you will need to win over armies or get the equivalent of a House and Senate vote. That’s what it takes to persuade the staggering amount of people involved to support you.

“Without their support--without the grants and recommendations that go into paying copyists’ fees for all those instrumental parts and without the clout for gaining a precious space on a symphony program designed for subscribers who would rather stay in the 19th Century--you’re nowhere.

“Men have a hard time inspiring belief among the hordes, so imagine what it’s like for women.”

Few would argue the point. In fact, Pennsylvania State University sociologist Edward A. Abramson says its political implications would seem to put the pursuit of composing beyond those of minority status. (He claims that women constitute a minority in that “they function without equal privilege.”)

If true, how do the disadvantaged wedge their way into such subjective, discretionary realms as the arts, where affirmative action, as a credo, does not resound?

Can the answer lie in the establishment of separate quarters? Is segregation a viable solution? Could an organization such as the International Congress of Women in Music bring acclaim and/or notoriety to those who are presented on its platform? Would there be a stigma attached to such a divided category? Does a new-music mainstream even exist, or is the term an oxymoron? The women who happen to be acknowledged American composers--among them Barbara Kolb, Joan Tower, Elizabeth (Libby) Larson, and Pauline Oliveros--disagree strenuously with each other on these issues. Especially pointed is the debate over whether they should strike out alone or band together in nationally organized groups.

“They (groups) are needed,” Larson says, “as validation of the isolated work that might not have any recognition otherwise. But it takes shrewd figuring to opt for that advantage and at the same time keep the mainstream door open.” The danger, she continues, is in creating a ghetto-like situation for women composers.

Disagreeing with Larson is Beverly Grigsby, professor of music at Cal State Northridge, who recently organized the International Congress on Women in Music for a campus festival that featured 40 new works.

“Mainstream, shmainstream,” she says. “If I couldn’t offer this platform to these talented people--frail souls, some, who might never have the temerity to stick their foot in a more formidable door--they would probably abandon the idea of composing altogether.”

Grigsby, who studied with Ernst Krenek and directs a computer music studio that she founded 10 years ago, sees the entire new-music establishment as “clubs” and particularly reviles “the ol’ boy system” that rewards its own members and excludes others. Locally, she brands the Monday Evening Concerts, Independent Composers Assn. and the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group as heavily political and thus casts doubt on whether a true mainstream exists. “Even at the university, what a person sees is a bunch of academics massaging each other’s egos.”

While Grigsby disparages the general ways in which one gains entry to the so-called mainstream, she does not deny that a women’s group could conceivably harbor some who are less than gifted. “But if what we have is a monastery functioning as a temporary hiding place, we also know that those who get strong do leave and advance themselves. The others, of course, constitute the old guild membership.”

However, Larson--who holds a whole slew of awards, grants and commissions, sits on numerous program boards judging others’ works, and is currently composer-in-residence with the Minnesota Orchestra--points out that women’s organizations can be “a trap, an excuse.

“To begin with, the programmers (of these groups) are naive. They think they’re bringing works to the spotlight. They think that an inconsequential forum counts as the real thing, that a performance given by sub-professionals and attended by a few friends and relatives means a great deal. It doesn’t,” she says.

“Such events provide an excuse to programmers on mainstream boards who can, with impunity, say: ‘Oh, well. So and so has already been taken care of (has heard her music played). We don’t have to concern ourselves now with scheduling her work for one of our concerts.’ ”

Oliveros, a musical libertine (or anarchist, depending on one’s vantage), has a nagging doubt as to the real gains achieved by all-women (or all-black or all-anything) groups.

“Any goal should embrace a sense of societal good,” Oliveros says. “By isolating, by prohibiting exotic mixtures, we’re thwarting natural enrichment. All musics color the picture--commercial, together with the so-called serious. Artificial boundaries must fall away. Institutions can only suppress creativity.”

Although she sits on the advisory board of the influential support system Meet the Composer and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the California-trained Oliveros operates philosophically apart from the establishment. Thus, she could scarcely be considered a company person. Her participatory pieces, outlined in a manifesto called “Software for People,” even break down the lines of formalism that separate performers from audiences.

“But the issue of a women’s organization is a primary one,” she says. “It’s a defense against a historic patriarchy in which women and children were merely chattel. It’s a case of birds of a feather flocking together.” Beyond this function, Oliveros feels that no purpose is served by the creative ghetto.

If Oliveros objects to segregated venues on the basis of social idealism, Kolb does so out of a sense of reality. The much-awarded composer, whose music has been played by Pierre Boulez at the New York Philharmonic and at IRCAM, by Seiji Ozawa at the Boston Symphony and other prestigious ensembles, says she “never joined a special interest group.

“No artist is about organizations. We’re not packs of dogs. And we can almost forget social stigmas because the 20th Century has made women equal to men. I’m averse to the whole mentality of such memberships. They tend to be amateurish and could even carry a dangerous, negative identity.”

Kolb, whose work Andre Previn will introduce to Los Angeles Philharmonic audiences in a coming season, goes on to say that those who seek out “an identity en masse (as opposed to an individual one) harm the chances of others. It does no good to be the Carrie Nation of composers.

“What finally counts is the attitude of (score-reading) juries. Some evaluators pay more attention to a woman’s piece because of the novelty than they would to a man’s. But the whole thing is so subjective that it’s hard to know what factors are at work.”

Tower, who has a cartload of prestigious commissions and awards, takes a humorously perverse comfort in the performance ghetto. When she stood onstage at the Japan America Theatre last spring, the composer-in-residence of the St. Louis Symphony said she didn’t mind having her work presented by the Philharmonic New Music Group under the banner of “Uptown, Downtown” (denoting the New York territorial split) because “it’s probably better than being on a program of dead composers.”

Yet, she turns serious long enough to condemn the existence of “two types of music series in every town: the prestige series, comprised of major orchestras and performers playing museum music--and the ghetto series, off in a corner somewhere, doing new music.”

Within that category, though, Tower sees “no observable discrimination against women composers, yet I don’t understand why so few of them get programmed.

“What is most interesting is the blind judging sessions (scores submitted without name identification). I’ve seen juries comprised of players actually reverse their opinions when there’s no chance for prejudice to be activated,” she says.

Her own experience, like Kolb’s, has been a happy one in that she was tagged early on as a gifted composer and didn’t have to come up the hard way. While she admits to being sympathetic to women’s groups, Tower says composers should spend more effort in winning over those artists who could champion their works.

“The reason so few of them play new music is because audiences are unfamiliar with it and they themselves have little confidence in their ability to judge and evaluate it.”

Someday, says Philharmonic composer-in-residence John Harbison, minority status will be a moot point and everyone will have equal access in the arts.

“We’ll look back on women’s groups and black groups as archaic. Even now they’re nothing more than harmless way-stations for those who are less far along,” he says.

“I think we’re over the hump in this country.”