Whether on the concert stage or as composers, women in classical music have long been on the frontiers of the struggle for equality. The question "Why have there been no great women composers?" perennially appears in print, ignoring the many who have been the equals of the "masters." Until the twentieth century, females as professional musicians in the public sphere were rare in the United States. The nineteenth-century ideology of domesticity encouraged women to cultivate music in the home. Ladies' seminaries offered lessons in harp, guitar, piano, and voice, alongside embroidery and other domestic skills. Toward the end of the century, as more young women turned to careers in teaching and the professions, normal schools and music conservatories were established, many by women. Clara Baur founded the Cincinnati Conservatory in 1867, and Jeanette Thurber opened the National Conservatory of Music in New York in 1886. Crane Normal Institute of Music of Potsdam, New York, was founded in 1886 by Julia Ettie Crane.
Women organists, choir directors, and singers were the first to enter the concert stage. Sophia Hewitt (1799-1846) was invited to fill the position of organist for Boston's prestigious Handel and Haydn Society when she was only seventeen. In the 1840s and 1850s, singers Eliza Ostinelli Biscaccianti (1824-96) and soprano Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (1809-76), the "Black Swan" and a former slave, pursued concert careers. Clara Louise Kellogg (1842-1916); Sissieretta Jones (1869-1933), the "Black Patti"; Emma Eames (1865-1952); the African American Hyers sisters Anna and Emma; Mary Garden (1874-1967); and Lillian Russell (1861-1922) were among the many successful operatic, vaudeville, and musical comedy performers. Maria Callas (1923-77) and African Americans Marian Anderson (1902-94) and Leontyne Price (b. 1927) are among the most celebrated divas of this century.
In the instrumental realm, women performers' public visibility emerged more gradually. Pianists Julie Rivé-King (1854-1937) and Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler (1863-1927) toured in the 1870s and 1880s, and violinist Maud Powell (1867-1920) played with leading orchestras in Europe and the United States. In the twentieth century, pianists Rosalyn Tureck (b. 1914) and Ruth Slenczynski (b. 1925) have enjoyed illustrious careers. The late cellist Jacqueline duPré was active in the 1960s and early 1970s, and violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg has been prominent since the 1980s.
Female choruses began in the women's music clubs of the 1870s. Some, such as the St. Cecilia Society of New York and the Rubenstein Club of Cleveland, gave ambitious and highly polished concerts. All-women orchestras began to flourish in the 1880s. Caroline B. Nichols founded the long-lasting Boston Fadette Lady Orchestra in 1888, performing classical music and vaudeville acts. By 1908 some thirty all-women orchestras catered to popular demand for this novelty. Although women substituted in "regular" orchestras during the world wars, they gave up their jobs when the men returned. Not until the 1960s did major orchestras include women players. Meanwhile, all-women orchestras in many cities have continued to train both conductors and instrumentalists, from the Los Angeles Woman's Orchestra and Chicago Woman's Symphony Orchestra to the Bay Area Women's Philharmonic. In 1925 Ethel Leginska (1886-1970) became the first woman to conduct the New York Symphony Orchestra. Frédérique Petrides (1903-83) and Antonia Brico (1902-89) formed their own orchestras. Women conductors such as Sarah Caldwell, Margaret Hillis, JoAnne Falletta, Marin Alsop, and Afro-Cuban Tania León are at last entering the predominantly male world of major and community orchestras.
If women conductors have struggled for acceptance in roles of authority, composers have had to combat the widely held prejudice that women are incapable of the complex, abstract thought necessary to create "serious" music. Nevertheless, by 1900 at least 230 U.S.-born women composers were active, and by 1985 their number exceeded two thousand. The earliest compositions by U.S. women were published anonymously, often by "a lady." By the 1830s a few allowed their names to be used in women's journals such as Godey's Ladies' Book. The greatest flowering of nineteenth-century women composers took place in Boston. Mrs. H.H.A. Beach (1867-1944), a self-taught prodigious talent, was particularly well known; her "Gaelic Symphony" (1897) was the first symphony by a U.S. woman to be performed anywhere. No doubt the young Florence Price (1887-1953), studying at the New England Conservatory in 1902, heard Beach's works. Price's Symphony in E Minor, performed in 1933 at the Chicago World's Fair, was the first symphony to be composed by a Black woman. Marion Bauer (1897-1955) was among the first Americans to study in Paris with the great pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. She and Mary Howe (1882-1964), one of the founders of the Association of American Women Composers, wrote orchestral tone poems and piano pieces.
Ruth Crawford Seeger's life and work (1901-53) took two paths: during the 1920s and 1930s her ultramodern compositions earned her the first Guggenheim Fellowship for composition awarded to a woman. On her return from Europe, she joined husband Charles Seeger and stepson Pete Seeger on another path, collecting and publishing folksongs.
Boulanger protegée Louise Talma (b. 1906) employed twelve-tone techniques freely, permitting her exuberant rhythmic vitality and open, bell-like sounds to dominate her piano works. Barbara Kolb (b. 1939) and Joan Tower (b. 1938) also combine twelve-tone techniques with a focus on one or more other elements: sonority, rhythm, texture, timbre, and performance improvisation. Tower received the 1990 Grawemeyer Award for her orchestral work Silver Ladders (1985). Nancy Van de Vate (b. 1930) founded the International League of Women Composers in 1975; her Chernobyl (1987) for orchestra evokes impending disaster through dense sound clusters. Julia Perry (1924-79) was the first Black woman to win the Guggenheim Fellowship for composition.
New concepts in sound and performance are being explored by Annea Lockwood in her works using sounds in nature; Priscilla McLean in processed whale sounds; Lucia Dlugoszewski in her newly invented percussion instruments; Joan La Barbara in radically new vocal techniques; and Meredith Monk in her total-art-experience pieces. Electronic music is favored by many women composers, from pioneer Bebe Barron, who founded the earliest electronic music studio with her husband in 1951, to Jean Eichelberger Ivy, Joyce Mekeel, and Beth Anderson.
A pioneer in performance experiments, Pauline Oliveros explores theatricality, humor, feminism, meditation, electronic music (including tones outside the range of human hearing), the accordion (her favorite instrument), and audience participation. Laurie Anderson combines music, storytelling, humor, and the visual arts — video, slides, lighting effects — in evening(s)-long concerts.
Amidst this new technology and experimentation, some composers continue to explore traditional forms: Miriam Gideon was the first woman to receive a commission for a complete synagogue service, Sacred Service for Sabbath Morning (1970). Neoclassicist Ellen Taafe Zwilich was the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize in music, for her Symphony No. 1 (1982). Her chamber works and orchestral works employ established developmental principles. This brief survey of women in U.S. classical music history highlights only a few of the many composers, performers, and works deserving attention.
Christine Ammer, Unsung: A History of Women in American Music (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980); J. Michelle Edwards and Leslie Lassetter, "North America since 1920," Women and Music: A History, edited by Karin Pendle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Helen Walker-Hill
See also
Music.
