Defiant Women Who Deserve a Hearing

“Beth Anderson writes pretty music,” begins an article by Kyle Gann in the February issue of Chamber Music magazine, “the prettiest music I know of, after Schubert, Faure, Debussy, and a few other long-dead white males.”

Anderson happens to have been a classmate of mine at Mills College in Oakland in the early 1970s. At that time she was a wonderfully outrageous composer. A feminist opera she staged at Mills was so bizarre and provocative that one newspaper critic walked out and refused to set foot on the campus for years. She also helped start EAR magazine, to which I contributed a polemic or two when it was still a mimeographed handout--it eventually became a respectable and important new music journal that lasted two decades.

I did not recognize Anderson by her picture in the magazine nor by the description of her music. But it’s been a long time, and she has had so little visibility during the past quarter century that it was almost as though she had vanished altogether. If hers is, as Gann writes, “charming, accessible music, striking and sturdy,” why haven’t we heard of it?

Gann contends that it’s because new music distribution is controlled by composers loath to program works more audience-friendly than their own. I wonder if the reason may not have something to do with Anderson herself. As feisty a composer as I have ever known, she is hardly the type to play other people’s games, even if, or maybe especially if, she now writes pretty music. And she is a woman.

Some of the best composers in America are, in fact, women who are not very well-known. Take Lois V Vierk. As a student at CalArts in the late ‘70s, she was already blowing minds, writing pieces for single instrument ensembles that sound like the acoustical equivalent of an M.C. Escher drawing. She has long since branched out to writing for standard ensembles, but the acoustical marvels continue, with each piece sounding more exhilarating than the last.

The narrow new-music community does, in fact, know her. She’s had a Kronos Quartet commission and been championed by the pianist Ursula Oppens. She’s received her share of awards, commissions and performances on the international festival circuit. Her music can be found on CD, with four brilliant recent works just out on the Tazdik label. Nevertheless, one of our most interesting and mesmerizing composers remains an undeservedly minor figure in American music.

Vierk has not had much experience with orchestras, which, arguably, prevents her from achieving greater exposure. But that doesn’t explain the situation with Gloria Coates. I first heard a Coates symphony in 1989 at a New Music America festival and thought it one of the most unusual and gripping symphonies by a living American composer. Coates, who divides her time between Munich and New York, has written extensively for orchestra. She has had two CDs released by the German CPO label, which specializes in obscure music. It includes her Symphonies Nos. 1, 2, 4 and 7, along with some other orchestral pieces that are hard to describe because their sound is so new and striking. The music swirls around the listener in eerie, riveting, unforgettable sonic clouds. Like Vierk’s music, the very sound of Coates’ work can be addictive. And yet her name draws a blank even among professionals well-informed about new music.

I can’t prove that these three accomplished American composers are neglected simply because they are women. They all flout convention in one way or another, and none is particularly adept at politicking or self-promotion. Perhaps once you factor gender into the equation, that makes for an unsurmountable hurdle.

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Certainly, gender alone is no longer the detriment for women composers that it once was. These can be very good times for women composers.

Augusta Reed Thomas, a well-respected composer who is rapidly gaining international prominence, is composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony, one of the few American orchestras to still support such a post. Her predecessor was an Israeli woman, Shulamit Ran, another composer of substance. And the most recent composer-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic was the lively Cuban American Tania Leon. Joan Tower, whose music is often a delight, was a composer-in-residence for the St. Louis Symphony. When Carnegie Hall decided, some years ago, that it should have a house composer, it turned to Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in music. Los Angeles Opera has commissioned a new opera by Deborah Dratell.

These are intelligent and personable composers who write music that musicians find agreeable to play and audiences find agreeable to hear. They make a necessary contribution to maintaining the life force in our musical culture by refreshing it with new work. But why are they so successful in the musical establishment and the likes of Anderson, Vierk and Coates, so much less so?

One explanation may be that better known composers are writing music that behaves the way established musical organizations expect music to behave, and that the composers themselves are good team players. Those attributes, along with a healthy respect for self-promotion, will help any composer get ahead, but women need them to a greater degree than men. And when a woman composer does have it all, she is still not likely to receive equal rewards. A woman has yet to be offered, for instance, a well-publicized exclusive classical record contract with a major label, as Richard Danielpour and Tan Dan have been from Sony Classical.

That is not to say that some nonconformist women composers don’t get recognized. Laurie Anderson is a star, and she does have a new exclusive contract with a major label, Nonesuch. Meredith Monk, who has long recorded for ECM, is finally getting the recognition she deserves as a unique and important voice. But it took decades before either was recognized by the musical establishment. Anderson was a stellar performance artist who successfully entered the pop arena; Monk’s renown was first based on her remarkable work as a choreographer and dancer. Nor are Nonesuch and ECM exactly traditional classical labels.

There are many similar examples. The late Lucia Dlugoszewski’s fame, what there is of it, rests on her collaborations with choreographer Erick Hawkins and not on the fact that she was a marvelously inventive composer. Pauline Oliveros, the maverick accordion-playing creator of incomparable trance music, is the one woman avant-gardist who has made an impact, but even she has spent her career fighting to be taken seriously. A standard reference book once listed her, presumably because she is a feminist and a lesbian, as a member of SCUM (the Society to Cut Up Men). She wasn’t, and the citation hurt her reputation. It also stood as a warning to women who are too defiant.

Yet it is the defiant ones who change music, who, through work that challenges the audience’s basic beliefs, can even change lives. It is just this kind of defiance that has made the history of Western music what it is--from the romantic image of gruff Beethoven raising his musical fist to the aristocracy, through the revolutionary ideas of John Cage. Even the sainted Bach was, in his own subtle way, a musical subversive.

These anti-establishment men had their own obstacles to overcome, of course. And defiant male composers can continue to expect more of the same. But sooner or later, their time comes.

For a Johanna Beyer, however, no amount of patience was enough. A German American composer and musicologist who lived from 1888 to 1944, she wrote advanced and unexpected experimental dissonant music in the 1930s, music 50 years ahead of its time. She was a pioneer in percussion and electronic music in the mold of Varese, Ives and Cage. But today, she is only a name in the history books, and barely that. The four-volume New Grove Dictionary of American Music, which was published in 1986 and is thought to be the greatest authority in the field, had no entry where she belonged, between two standard, academic composers, Thomas Beversdorf and Philip Bezanson. (Coates isn’t in there either.)

The latest version of the full Grove Dictionary of Music, just out, has finally noticed Beyer with a curt, unsigned paragraph, which states that she was ignored “even by the experimental music community in New York to which her music appropriately belongs.” She wasn’t, however, ignored on the West Coast. She had close contact with composer Henry Cowell, and her percussion pieces were regularly played in the Bay Area and Seattle. Still, the fact that she is now one name in Grove’s tens of thousands (as is Coates, with an equally unimpressive entry) is progress of sorts.

The situation for distinctive European women composers is much better. The mystical Russian composer Sophia Gubaidulina is justly celebrated everywhere. The success of Kaija Saariaho’s opera “L’Amour de Loin” at Salzburg last summer has put this experimental Finnish composer in a new limelight. But then it is easier, in general, for forward-looking composers to get opportunities in Europe--Coates is more performed in Germany than in the United States.

Which is why the American musical world--seemingly unable to recognize its most distinctive and potentially important female voices--still feels stuck in a 20th century that was stuck in the 19th century.