Institute at Cal State Northridge Hopes to Even the Score on Women Composers : Donated Records, Music Put Library on a Grander Scale

Cardboard boxes fill the room, waiting to be unpacked. They contain thousands of rare record albums and music books: symphonies ignored because they were composed by women, decades of music bypassed by historians.

“It’s frustrating,” said Jeannie Pool, standing beside the newly arrived shipment. “You can read a whole textbook on musical history and not read a single woman’s name.”

Pool and her colleague, Beverly Grigsby, are trying to change that.

Three years ago, they opened the International Institute for the Study of Women in Music at Cal State Northridge. Now, a wealthy South African businessman has donated 10,000 records and 500 books to the institute, giving it one of the world’s largest collections on women in music.

The only other place that some of these records can be found is at the Vatican library, Pool said. Some albums are from the Soviet Union and aren’t available anywhere else.

Pool, a 36-year-old music librarian, and Grigsby, a 60-year-old music professor, covet their new treasure. In the months to come, they will don grubby clothes to sort through and arrange the material in the institute’s library. They will eventually share this music with the rest of the world.

“We have great hopes that, in the future, we will put ourselves out of business,” Grigsby said. “Everyone will know all this music.”

The acquisition of businessman Aaron Cohen’s vast personal collection could bring international attention to the institute, an archive that scholars say has quickly become the country’s primary library for women’s works.

“It’s a terrific collection and it’s at a large institution, where people from all over the world can come and use the materials,” said Stephen Fry, a librarian at the UCLA music library who specializes in women’s music. “It’s very important.”

Because the donation came from South Africa--which has a policy of apartheid--there was some discussion among university officials before the collection was accepted. Pool consulted the chairman of the school’s Pan-African Studies Department.

Such contributions usually aren’t opposed by groups that boycott South Africa, said Ibrahim Gassama, a legislative assistant for Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid in Washington.

“I don’t believe that by accepting a collection of academic materials, a university would be undermining the cultural boycott,” Gassama said. “The thrust of the cultural boycott is not to promote ignorance.”

Not all of the materials pertain to women composers, and the recordings and scores of men’s compositions and will be added to Cal State Northridge’s general music library.

The university would never have received Cohen’s archives were it not for a fateful combination of hard work by Pool and Grigsby and a bet between two South African businessmen.

In the early 1970s, Cohen, a classical music aficionado, was looking for a hobby to keep him busy during retirement. According to Pool, he got into an argument with a music industry executive who insisted there weren’t many women composers. Cohen set out to prove him wrong.

Over the next eight years, he traveled Europe, the Soviet Union and Asia. He pursued the recordings, scores and memoirs of living and dead composers: names like Grazyna Bacewicz of Poland; Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph of South Africa and Ethel Smyth, a suffragette English composer. Cohen discovered a male composer who had a sex change but did not include him with the women.

Pool and Grigsby, meanwhile, were researching the subject at CSUN, and Pool became director of the International Congress of Women in Music.

Eventually, Cohen called Pool and asked for her help in gathering information for his 1982 book, “The International Encyclopedia of Women Composers.” The two became friends and Cohen, now in his 80s, decided to place his collection in a permanent home at CSUN.

Now that the records and books (there are also 6,800 biographical files on women composers) have arrived at the institute, they will be held in a library that already includes a large body of recordings, books and memorabilia. The institute also funds symposiums and workshops for female composers and publishes a scholarly journal.

Pool and Grigsby hope their work will inspire more women to compose music. They say women are getting respect in the world of classical music--more of their work is being performed and there are even a few textbooks that mention women.

Fry said a number of music publishers regularly handle women’s scores and recordings. And Ellen T. Zwilich won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in music for “Three Movements for Orchestra.”

Yet, Pool and Grigsby also speak of a Mexico City woman who stopped composing because no one would perform her work. They tell of a Romanian composer who hides her music in a tomb, fearful that government authorities will seize it.

The struggle for recognition continues.

“It’s a difficult task because women have not been prominent in the music books,” Pool said. “This is wonderful music we’re talking about. If it was mediocre stuff, we wouldn’t be bothered with it.”