To the Editor:

It is sad to discover that gender politics has finally seeped into the hitherto seemingly apolitical preserves of university music departments, as Terry Teachout has done us the favor of pointing out [“Ms. Wonder-Child, For Example,” March]. It was probably inevitable, but, fortunately, except for Mr. Teachout, no one outside the circle of feminist devotees seems to be spaying much attention to these misanthropic noises. . . . Still, why there is a creative musical gender gap is an intriguing question for which Mr. Teachout himself offers a “hypothesis” as simplistic as the rabid claims of the feminist musicologists he criticizes: that is, that “women as a group may simply have a lower mean innate aptitude for large-scale musical composition than men.” If Mr. Teachout will admit that women are “innately” capable of making significant contributions to literature, I do not understand why he does not think that they are also, most probably, innately capable of writing “large-scale” excellent music and that if they have not done so, there has to be a more logical explanation than the one he offers. . . . It is, in fact, hard to believe that his statement was made for any reason other than to take pleasure in ruffling feminist feathers (which I admit is almost irresistible).

The complicated truth of the matter probably lies somewhere in the murky middle ground between the anti-masculine thesis of the feminists and the archeo-sexist-sounding one of Mr. Teachout, in that mysterious intersection between genes and culture that no one has yet been able to elucidate satisfactorily. That women’s brains are “wired” differently from men’s is documented, but to conclude from this an innate female ineptitude at “large-scale” musical creativity requires quite a pre-sump-tuous leap over logic—it is amusing to see Mr. Teachout call as yet nonexistent “empirical verification” to his aid. He does, however, prudently cover his bases and admit that “it is of course conceivable . . . that women have not composed masterpieces in part because men have told them they are incapable of doing so.”

If the feminists’ explanation of the gap is a caricature of the cultural explanation, then Mr. Teachout’s is a caricature of a caricature. But whether intended or not, caricatures contain elements of truth, distorted and exaggerated though they may be. . . . Only a little knowledge of the modern humanistic era makes it easy to see that, up until very recently, Western culture in the broad sense (including all the men and women who informed it) has offered no motive or encouragement to women to excel in this or comparable realms.

Among the classes from which composers (and playwrights and scientists, etc.) typically sprang, up to and throughout the 19th century, it was unthinkable for women (1) to practice an art or science requiring so many long years of serious, systematic training and practice, and, conversely, material and personal sacrifice, and (2) to exercise a profession which, unlike science, required so much public display and wheeling and dealing. (After all, the women who practiced quasi-artistic professions in public—singers, dancers, and actresses, were considered for many generations little better than whores.). . .

It is ironic that now, when women as well as men are free to practice just about any profession they like, . . . and when there are more proficient musicians than ever, both male and female, there are no great composers whose work rivals that of the 17th- and 18th-century European giants—this is the real rub. Does Mr. Teachout have any explanation for that? . . .

But in spite of the musical hard times we have feilen on, Mr. Teachout admits that all this does not mean there never will be any great female composers. After all, humanity had to wait a long time for Bach & Co. to come along, and even when they did, they were not fully appreciated. So it is only a matter of time . . . until a handful of female musical greats enters the elite pantheon of composers.

Sally Reynolds
Raleigh, North Carolina

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To the Editor:

In “Ms. Wonder-Child, For Example,” Terry Teach-out claims to be baffled by the fact that through the ages there have been great women poets, novelists, and designers but not a single great woman composer. . . . In fact, it is not at all difficult to understand: writing large-scale musical compositions (opera, sacred and secular orchestral music) requires a full-time commitment, extensive musical training, financial support, hands-on experience working with an orchestra and singers, and opportunities for performance.

All these requirements lay beyond the reach of women until recently. Society expected respectable women to stay home, keep house, and tend their families. . . . Since families would neither encourage nor finance a daughter’s musical career, musically gifted women were never able to progress beyond the amateur stage. In short, a woman who wanted to compose would have had to do so in a virtual artistic vacuum and without any expectation of getting her work performed in a concert hall.

Unlike large-scale musical composition, writing novels and poems required only an elementary education and pen and paper; doing needlepoint, knitting, or dressmaking required fabric, thread, and needles; and painting required a canvas and paints. These were all activities that could be carried out within a woman’s own home, on her own time, and at her own convenience. . . .

The important point is that, until very recently, women were routinely denied access to the particular resources they needed in order to become serious composers. Even the most gifted woman would have found it impossible to develop her musical potential to the point of greatness in such a restrictive environment. Any conjecture about the biological fitness of women for musical composition must therefore be postponed until it becomes standard for women composers to enjoy all the same musical and social advantages as men composers.

Lyn T. Daniels
Brookline, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

. . . I am an admirer of Terry Teachout and agree with many of his opinions, and I do not believe most of the propaganda and nonsense being disseminated by feminists and the politically-correct crowd. . . . Nevertheless, it is obvious that he totally lacks any understanding of what it is like to be a woman composer.

I started composing at the age of six, and continued to do so with absolutely no encouragement, and, in fact, active discouragement. . . . This continued right through music school at the university. . . .

Creative artists need encouragement, and cannot go on producing with no recognition. Compositions are not music until they are played; therefore, performance is mandatory to encourage a composer to continue. With a husband and children to look after, my first composition lessons began after I was thirty, when my youngest child entered school.

I tried to “peddle” my large-scale works to local orchestra conductors in order to have them performed. As with smaller works, unless you personally know the performer, or have connections, no one will even look at a manuscript. They do not even return them. Just like music publishers, they do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

One local conductor, however, told me he would be glad to perform my piece in return for sexual favors. The composition still sits on the shelf, and I never wrote another large-scale orchestral work. Who knows what musical gems have thus been lost forever?

Mr. Teachout should try to imagine how it feels, after earning a masters degree in composition with honors at a first-rate university school of music, to be told by the head of that school that you will not be accepted into the doctoral program because you are a woman over a certain age (forty!)—and that he would forever deny saying this. In order to study elsewhere, I would have had to leave my family.

So, I have been writing chamber music for friends who play it around town. I have glorious grandchildren. Perhaps, however, in looking for great women composers, as Marlon Brando said in On the Waterfront, “I coulda been a contender!” How will we ever know, Mr. Teachout?

Geraldine Schwartz
Farmington Hills, Michigan

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To the Editor:

Terry Teachout quotes an entry in The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers on Kay Gardner, a.k.a. the “Cosmos Wonder Child,” which states that “she believes in specifically feminine modes of expression [in musical composition], for example cyclical form with central points of climax.”

There is a simple way of dealing with this feminist theory. When a student musician seeks- entry into a symphony orchestra, he/she is auditioned by orchestra members. To ensure that there will be no discrimination, the listening panel is separated from the aspiring musician by a screen. Anonymity is thus assured and presumably the selection is made purely on merit

So, if there is such a phenomenon as “feminine modes of [musical] expression,” let us have a panel of musicologists listen to a musical performance, a sort of blindfold test. Let each listener state whether the composer is male or female and give reasons for the judgment. There is no point in metaphysical prose when an empirical test is quite feasible.

Arnold Beichman
Hoover Institution
Stanford, California

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To the Editor:

In his excellent article, Terry Teachout has brought insight to what could have been merely another dreary litany of the damage ideology is doing to our scholarship. His startling hypothesis on why there are no great women composers certainly got my attention.

There is another hypothesis that he should consider. It is possible that while women and men are equal in “mean innate aptitude,” women’s ability varies less around the mean (i.e., they have a smaller standard deviation). This would explain the dearth of great women composers since a smaller standard deviation would suggest that fewer women would fall so far above the mean as to compose music of the very highest order. This hypothesis still recognizes that the minds of women and men are different, but does not require that either group (as a whole) be judged “higher.”

Is it possible that “large-scale musical composition” shares something in common with chess and mathematics? All three fields produce prodigies (usually men) in a way that fiction or history does not. This point is intriguing in light of Mr. Teachout’s nod to women’s achievements in jazz and popular music.

His article certainly was thought-provoking. I hope that he will explore this subject further in the future.

Craig Henry
Charlotte, North Carolina

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Terry Teachout writes:

I like ruffling feminist feathers as much as the next privileged male, but that is not why I wrote “Ms. Wonder-Child, For Example.” For some twenty years now, I have been interested in the historic failure of women to produce first-rate large-scale musical compositions—I first noticed it as an undergraduate music major. The reasons advanced by Sally Reynolds and Lyn T. Daniels, though they certainly help to explain why there have been comparatively few women composers over the years, still seem to me inadequate as an explanation of the total absence of women, early and late, from the top ranks of classical composers. After all, the whole point of The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers (which both Sally Reynolds and Lyn T. Daniels conveniently ignore) is that a great many women, beginning as early as the 18th century, did in fact receive precisely the sort of musical training necessary to produce a major composer: it just has not worked yet Anyone accustomed to dunking in terms of frequency distributions among large populations would immediately spot this as an anomaly, and start looking for a more persuasive explanation.

Needless to say, anyone familiar with the methods of statistical analysis would also realize that, Sally Reynolds’s letter to the contrary notwithstanding, I did not “conclude . . . innate female ineptitude at ‘large-scale’ musical creativity”—I merely suggested the possibility that women as a group might not be as good at it as men, a hypothesis which says nothing whatsoever about the abilities of any individual woman. (This is precisely the same sort of misunderstanding Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein courted in publishing The Bell Curve.)

It is interesting, by the way, to note that Craig Henry should have mentioned a similar absence of women from the top ranks of chess and mathematics: to the best of my knowledge, no woman has ever done significant original work in higher mathematics, and the thought has occurred to me that these two phenomena may be related.

I wish to thank Geraldine Schwartz for her letter, which made my heart sink. I have heard similar stories from other women—but I have also heard different ones. Among my closest woman friends, for example, is a first-rate jazz composer who has had considerable success, and who in the process experienced nothing remotely approaching the horrors described by Mrs. Schwartz. I might add that I have high hopes that my friend will venture into large-scale composition, and make a great success of it (which, needless to say, would not disprove my hypothesis, any more than Mrs. Schwartz’s unhappy experiences disprove it).

I am not a musicologist, but I would certainly be delighted to sit on the sort of panel described by Arnold Beichman, especially if the feminist musicologist Susan McClary could be induced to sit on the same panel and put her theories to the test; I would also enjoy sitting on a panel convened to examine her theories about the existence of specifically homosexual modes of musical expression. I suspect it will be a very long time, however, before either such test takes place, at least with Susan McClar’s willing participation: rare is the academic theorist willing to put her reputation where her mouth is.

As for the reason there are at present no composers of either sex “whose work rivals that of the 17th- and 18th-century European giants,” as Sally Reynolds correctly notes, that is a good question—but one best saved for another time.