Robert Schumann’s 1840 song cycle, Frauenliebe und Leben, is a first-person account of the courtship, marriage, and widowhood of a young woman (the text was written by a man, the poet Adelbert von Chamisso). A new recording of it has appeared by the mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, and the liner notes contain the following sentence: “The ‘woman’ in [these] poems is actually the voice of 19th-century male culture instructing wives how they should properly regard their husbands.”¹

That so baldly political a statement should have found its way into the notes for a major-label recording is a sign of how deeply the musical scene has been affected by the rise of a new academic discipline, feminist musicology. Like “queer” musicology, its intellectual first cousin, feminist musicology is a branch of the gender-studies movement. Practitioners of this discipline believe that visible events in the world around us are merely outward manifestations of a hidden struggle between “privileged” oppressors and their powerless, alienated victims, and that it is therefore the duty of scholars to help “liberate” the victim class by unmasking the machinations of its victimizers. In thrall to this mode of thought, progressive-minded musicologists have proceeded to construe the culture of classical music as a sexual battlefield.

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To date, the most widely circulated introduction to the new musicology is a collection of essays edited by Ruth A. Solie, a professor of music at Smith College, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship.² The titles of the various essays in this book tell much about its basic tendenz: “Difference and Power in Music”; “Loving It: Music and Criticism in Roland Barthes”; “The Ethnomusicologist as Midwife”; “Lesbian Fugue: Ethel Smyth’s Contrapuntal Arts”; and “Reading as an Opera Queen.” As for the book’s overall flavor, it is adequately conveyed by Solie’s comments on an essay by Susan McClary, a much-cited feminist musicologist at McGill University whose publications include a “homosexual analysis” of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. McClary, Solie says,

has elaborated an analysis of musical tonality as the representation of Self and Other, and one all the more profoundly ideological because the terms of the system predetermine the outcome. Her essay here reads Brahms’s Third Symphony as a gendered encounter that makes use of musical codes of publicly understood signification—understood because once associated with texted music before having been cut loose to carry their familiar meanings into the “absolute” realm.

It is easy to make fun of such faux-Marxist jabber. It is also easy to overstate its significance: although gender-conscious musicology is at present a hot ticket in many music departments, comparatively few working musicians have even heard of its existence. Still, the movement has had its practical consequences, perhaps the most salient of which is the growing attention paid by the musical establishment to the work of women composers. Not only are contemporary women composers—Libby Larsen, Tania Léon, Thea Musgrave, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and others—represented with increasing frequency on the programs of symphony orchestras, but a number of older female composers have been granted quasi-classic status by a new generation of critics—most of them men—eager to demonstrate their solidarity with the feminist cause.

The latest manifestation of this phenomenon is The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers.³ This volume is one of the many offshoots of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the principal English-language encyclopedia of the history of music. Many, perhaps most, of its 875 biographical entries on women composers of Western classical music are perfectly matter-of-fact and betray no political agenda. (I particularly like the one on Anne Boleyn: “Though often said to be a composer, she is not in fact known to have written any music”) But other entries are tendentious—some extremely so.

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One way to look at The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers is to consider its approach, both implicit and explicit, to a question that has long bedeviled feminists: why are there no great women composers?

Aaron Copland summed up the state of this question circa 1960 in an essay about his distinguished teacher of composition, Nadia Boulanger:

Everyone knows that the high achievement of women musicians as vocalists and instrumentalists has no counterpart in the field of musical composition. This historically poor showing has puzzled more than one observer. It is even more inexplicable when one considers the reputation of women novelists and poets, of painters and designers. . . . The future may very well have a different tale to tell; for the present, however, no woman’s name will be found on the list of world-famous composers.

Why was this so? Feminists have given varying answers over the years. Their original explanation was conventionally ideological: male oppression made it impossible for women to develop successfully as composers, a situation that would change as they liberated themselves. But this “answer” soon proved unsatisfactory. As The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers shows, women have always written music (the earliest known being Sappho); the problem is that their work has failed to make a lasting impression. And so a new answer was proposed: there were great women composers, but their achievements were suppressed by the male ruling class. It follows, according to this logic, that the job of feminist critics and musicologists is to find such hitherto unknown masterpieces, and revise the canon so as to include them.

Indeed, a few women composers of secondary but nonetheless genuine quality have been rediscovered as a result of such endeavors. They include Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979), an English violist who produced a small body of chamber music and songs of considerable finish and originality, but who stopped composing in the 1940’s and subsequently vanished into obscurity. And at least one composer of still greater promise—Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), the younger sister of Nadia—is rightly praised in The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers for the “solemnity, grandeur, vivid contrasts, and technical mastery” of her music; her career was tragically cut short by fatal illness.⁴

But there is also a very great deal of inflation at work in this campaign of rediscovery. Thus, Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), a Victorian suffragette whose operas enjoyed a brief vogue in England at the turn of the century, is hailed in the Norton/Grove Dictionary as “a first-rate composer,” and Amy Beach (1867-1944), whose late-romantic scores received numerous performances in the United States around the same time, is praised as “the first American woman to succeed as a composer of large-scale art music.”

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Unfortunately, the music of these women does not hold up to the close scrutiny made possible by recent recordings of their compositions. In spite of the best efforts of sympathetic performers and critics, it is hard to argue that the work of Amy Beach, Ethel Smyth, or the French salon composer Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944), who has also been the object of especially fervent advocacy, is anything other than well-made, stylistically derivative, and of limited interest.⁵

The inability of the feminist musicological project successfully to uncover a vast number of unheralded major women composers seems, indeed, to have inspired yet another shift in tactics. It is nicely illustrated by Rhian Samuel, a co-editor of the Norton/Grove Dictionary, in her introductory essay, “Women’s Music: A Twentieth-Century Perspective”:

The issue of “quality” in music can provide a convenient means of dismissing women’s music, both heard and unheard. . . . What if a woman composer should speak differently from a man? Should she not then be evaluated differently? The fact of sociological conditioning certainly encourages us to consider the likelihood of a “gendered voice” for both men and women. And given the physicality and sensuousness of music itself, is it beyond the realms of possibility that even biology might have some influence on musical utterance too?

Readers unfamiliar with the argot of literary theory may fail at first to grasp the implications of this passage. But those who know the territory will see at once that Samuel is here adhering to the belief, popular among literary theorists and minority critics, that time-honored standards of aesthetic “quality” and “greatness” are in fact tools of oppression. The compositions of men and women are thus not to be judged according to the same criteria: to do so would be “phallocentric.” The idea of greatness itself being an arbitrary construct, a manifestation of the false consciousness of our patriarchal culture, the awkward fact that there have been no great women composers is thus rendered altogether meaningless.

In practice, most of the dictionary’s appraisals of pre-19th-century composers reflect conventional standards of critical judgment. (Chiefly responsible for these entries is the other co-editor, Julie Anne Sadie, a much-admired early-music scholar.) But these standards grow ever more flexible as the dictionary moves forward in time, until we reach entries like the one devoted to Kay Gardner, also known as “Cosmos Wonder-Child,” an American composer born in 1941. Her professional activities are described as follows:

A pioneer of women’s music who declared her lesbianism in 1971, she has been an active composer-performer of women’s music since 1973 and has appeared regularly at festivals of women’s music. Her exploration of healing music has gained recognition through her presentations to medical schools and health workers, as well as her work to develop the use of music as a substitute for surgical anaesthesia. . . . She believes in specifically feminine modes of expression, for example cyclical form with central points of climax.

No room was found in the original New Grove for Ms. Wonder-Child; in the present volume, she is represented by a 27-line article, a work list, a bibliography, and a photograph. By such yardsticks can the long march of feminist consciousness-raising be measured.

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The emergence of a critical theory that attacks the very idea of greatness is, of course, a sign not of self-assurance but of deep-seated anxiety—in other words, a sign of the times. Feminist criticism notwithstanding, it remains the case that no woman composer of the past has yet been widely acknowledged as great. Nor has any contemporary woman composer attained a stature in the world of music similar to that of such postwar male composers as Benjamin Britten or Dmitri Shostakovich. In fact, one is hard-pressed to name a recent piece of music by a woman composer (of whom there are plenty) that has made an impression on the listening public—positive or negative—remotely comparable to that of, say, Henrik Górecki’s Third Symphony or John Adams’s opera, The Death of Klinghoffer.

In his 1960 essay, Aaron Copland dared to ask the unspoken question that lies just behind the aggressive advocacy of feminist musicologists: “Is it possible that there is a mysterious element in the nature of musical creativity that runs counter to the nature of the feminine mind?” The starkness of the alternatives implied by this question makes less sense now than it did 36 years ago; it is abundantly clear that women can compose, and that they can compose music of quality. (In addition, Copland failed to consider the notable achievements of women in jazz and American popular music, two fields which also go largely unaddressed by the editors of the Norton/Grove Dictionary.) But the underlying question has not gone away: why have women so far failed to compose music on a level with that of Mozart, Schubert, or Bartók—or, for that matter, Copland?

It is of course conceivable, as some feminists suggest, that women have not composed masterpieces in part because men have told them they are incapable of doing so. But the complete absence of major women composers from the history of Western classical music—a situation which, as Copland points out, has no counterpart in other art forms—suggests another possibility: women as a group may simply have a lower mean innate aptitude for large-scale musical composition than men.

This hypothesis, it seems to me, has numerous advantages over the various feminist explanations of the gender gap in musical greatness. It lends itself to empirical verification. It does not assume that no great woman composer will ever appear, merely that the odds against it are at present higher for women than for men. It allows for the existence of environmental effects, whether partial or decisive, on group differences in compositional aptitude. And it is compatible with another hypothesis popular among feminists (including Rhian Samuel): the belief that the minds of men and women do not work in the same way—that they are, to use the word so beloved of feminist musicologists, different.

In a less intensely politicized culture, musicologists might be expected to give serious consideration to such a hypothesis. But one need only recall the critical reception of Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve to gauge the likely response to it of the academic community, most of which passionately embraces a credo of radical egalitarianism. In the court of academic opinion, genetic explanations of group differences, including differences between women and men, are only allowed to be entertained when these differences are presumed to result in equal outcomes.

Small wonder, then, that those who begin by refusing to accept the plain fact that there are as yet no great women composers inevitably end by asserting that there is no such thing as aesthetic quality; that Cosmos Wonder-Child and Lili Boulanger are in some meaningful sense “equal” to each other; and that both are equal to Mozart.

¹ Von Otter's superlative performance of Frauenliebe und Leben, accompanied by Bengt Forsberg, is part of a recital of songs by Schumann released earlier this year on DGG 445 881-2GH.

² University of California Press, 355 pp., $15.00 (paper).

³ Norton, 548 pp., $45.00.

⁴ Clarke's Viola Sonata (1919) and Piano Trio (1921) have been recorded in excellent performances by pianist Martin Roscoe and members of the Endellion Quartet (ASV CD DCA 932). Boulanger's lovely song cycle, Clairières dans le ciel, is available on Hyperion CDA 66726, performed by tenor Martyn Hill and pianist Andrew Ball; in addition, French EMI has reissued a CD of her works for chorus and orchestra, conducted by Igor Markevitch (EMI France CDM 7 64281 2).

⁵ Beach's “Gaelic” Symphony, Op. 32, has been recorded by Neeme Järvi and the Detroit Symphony (Chandos CHAN 8958). The Wreckers, Smyth's most ambitious opera, can be heard in a live performance by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Odaline de la Martinez, who specializes in women's music (Conifer 75605-51250-2, two CD's). Chaminade's Concertino for Flute and Orchestra, Op. 107, has been recorded several times, most recently by Susan Milan, Richard Hickox, and the City of London Sinfonia (Chandos CHAN 8840).