Composing the Feminists

The National Concert Hall’s major concert series, Composing the Island, aims to celebrate a century of Irish composition. Darragh Kelly asks what the programme’s lack of diversity says about the establishment vision of the future of music in Ireland.

 

When the Waking the Feminists movement emerged last November, a watershed moment in gender equality in the arts in Ireland seemed to have arrived. Conversations women had been having for decades about the unfair working situations they had been putting up with could no longer be ignored. Feminists mobilised en masse and demanded change. Such was the current of righteous indignation, that arts organisations guilty of sustaining inequality couldn’t help but be carried along with it. The director of the Abbey Theatre, Fiach Mac Conghail, expressed contrition for his oversights and listened – really listened (eventually) – to the women involved.

The National Concert Hall announced their Composing the Island series of concerts in May, just six months after that milestone movement for women in Ireland gained worldwide recognition and admiration. Billed as a centenary project, taking place from September 7th to 25th 2016, its stated aim was to celebrate classical music by Irish composers written from 1916-2016. Almost 200 works were to be performed, by over 90 composers, with a programme of 27 concerts, spanning three weeks. It promised to reveal “how [Irish] individuals struggled to have their music heard at all” and how “that hostile environment began to change” with the growth of RTE and bodies like the NCH. Arts minister Heather Humphreys (who has continued the Government’s noncommittal approach to raising Irish arts spending to even half that of the European average) proclaimed it would tell us “what to expect in the future”.

If the future for Irish theatre is one of checking privilege and artistic and economic parity, this goal seems to have elided the NCH and the Irish classical music establishment.

Of the 27 concerts in the Composing the Island brochure, 11 feature no female composers, and another 11 feature just one (averaging at just under 25% representation in those 11). A mere five concerts feature more than one female composer, yet these still average out at just over 25% female representation. Only two concerts surpass 30% representation of female composers. If Humphreys’ prophecy is anything to go by, the future of Irish art music will be exceptionally male.

In June, several female Irish composers – notably, Siobhán Cleary (whose work was included in the programme) and Jane Deasy – voiced a critique of the series upon undertaking a gender audit of its overall content. The group united under the title Composing the Feminists to communicate their dissatisfaction. Highlighting the disparity evinced in having 135 pieces by male composers and only 23 by female composers (or 76 to 17 when only living composers are considered)  they were met with indifference by the NCH. The NCH deemed these female composers’ anger premature and unwarranted. “Happily, due to the huge strides being made addressing gender imbalance, a retrospective of the 21st century will look very different”, they reassured in a Facebook post to Siobhán Cleary, saying that they could not “rewrite history”. So, according to the NCH, because of the self-proclaimed efforts by the NCH and others to achieve gender equality (a claim not supported by the facts presented to them by Deasy and Cleary), it will just be another hundred years before we can appreciate them. One has to ask whether these huge strides include the fact that all five commissions for Composing the Island are from male composers.

Jennifer Walshe. Photograph by Blackie Bouffant.
Jennifer Walshe. Photograph by Blackie Bouffant.

 

The NCH’s position represents one strand of musicological thinking. Four Centuries of Music in Ireland, edited by Brian Boydell (Professor of Music at Trinity College from 1962-82, featured in four Composing the Island concerts) in 1979 and with short essays by an all-male team, fails to mention a single female composer that lived during this period. Jennifer O’Connor of NUIM, however, has noted that “the loss of female composers from the pages of Irish history books is perhaps more to do with inequalities in the rediscovery of Irish composers and their works at the end of the twentieth century, than it has to do with inequalities in how easily they were discarded”, citing dozens of female composers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century who faded into obscurity, like many of their male counterparts. For the NCH to claim that history is written and they are merely reading it, misses the point. They are engaged in the act of writing history, and by viewing their own teleological projections through a retrospective lens, history’s contingency is denied.

More regretful, still, is the perpetuation of this flatly singular approach to programming once the chronologically linear series reaches the 1970s. As Jane O’Leary (the founder and artistic director of Concorde Ensemble) has recounted, there was a significant rise in female composers in Ireland from her arrival in the early 1970s through to the 1990s. While indicating there was “effectively nobody else” forty years ago, upon joining the International League of Women Composers in 1979, O’Leary found a community. It also provoked the thought that perhaps her gender had contributed to her exclusion from the developing Irish scene (an Irish Times music critic active from 1956-87, Charles Acton, had previously advised her to be quiet and observe). O’Leary’s absence from the Visions of Irish Modernism programme is striking, considering that her early work provides some of the scant examples of Serialism from Ireland at the time – the predominant method of modernist composition in the US and mainland Europe for the previous forty years.

Amid further coverage of the series’ gender inequality, the NCH sought to appease their critics in July by announcing a recital by Isabelle O’Connell of female-only piano works, after the pianist’s own objections. The NCH’s afterthought of presenting these female composers’ works, sequestered from the (still) overwhelmingly male original programming, has not allayed the misgivings of Composing the Feminists. Jennifer Walshe, whose composition will be featured in O’Connell’s concert, has lamented the debacle for contributing to an arts scene that repeatedly tells an entire generation of girls that they “do not belong”.

“That’s when the true history is written, as a generation of girls don’t pursue their dreams because they are constantly getting the message, whether subconsciously or consciously, that their music is not valued as much as music by boys”, Walshe says.

The issue of O’Connell’s recital creating an “atmosphere of gender ghettoisation” could have been avoided too, Walshe tells me. She also mentions that persistent economic inequality is further underlined by O’Connell’s piano recital, as larger scale, orchestral works by women still make up less than 15% of the total. “These larger scale works are the ones which will generate the most press and most definitely generate the largest royalty payouts of the festival”, Walshe explains.

Any substantial undertaking like Composing the Island is bound to not please everyone and commit some oversights – it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise. However, the aforementioned issues extensively detailed by the Composing the Feminists group are tantamount to state-funded neglect and injustice. The group are equally eager to point out that, despite their wish not to carry out the debate in binary terms, a need to do so has contributed further to a perpetuation of establishment neglect of trans and gender fluid people. The issue of representation of people of colour and other minorities is not to be forgotten either. With a scant four pieces included by composers under 30, the festival’s encouragement of young, developing compositional talent that will hopefully constitute the future of Irish art music is apparently not a priority. One would hope that it doesn’t take another hundred years for those in power to realise they acted too late to affect the change they claim to desire.

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