“I’m embarrassed to admit this, I had a lightbulb moment a few years ago when I realized I had never played a piece by a female composer," says author Anna Beer. "I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times I’d heard a work by a female composer, and I couldn’t actually think of a concert that I’d been to. Once I was aware of that silence, it’s all that I heard.”
The Oxford literature fellow took it upon herself to fill that void, and this spring saw the publication of her book, Sounds and Sweet Airs. It tells about the lives of eight female composers from the 17th to the 20th centuries who, despite their gender, wrote works that were performed and were celebrated during their lifetimes (though their renown was fleeting). We spoke to Beer earlier this month. Listen to her explain the inspiration for her book in the audio above, and below read her thoughts and hear the music of the women profiled in her book.
Francesca Caccini
"So often a name would not be put to [a piece of music], because the composer was just a small cog in a big machine. That’s one reason that the first composer I write about, Francesca Caccini, at the Medici court in the early 17th century, her job description in the records is ‘La Musica,’ the music. Caccini, we know she wrote week in and week out — like J.S. Bach — because it was their job. But unlike J.S. Bach we don’t have her music. It just doesn’t survive."
Barbara Strozzi
"Women like Barbara Strozzi from the 17th century are being championed by early music groups and I find that very interesting. It marks a change in our musical culture over the last 20 or 30 years — the lessening of the power of the conductor, the testosterone driven maestro — and the smaller orchestral groups or chamber groups which are often led from the fiddle or the violin or the harpsichord. And once you take out that traditionally dominant male position of the conductor and the massive orchestra that only he can control, you change the dynamics in which music is produced, you create a space to hear music that was written for those forces by women."
Élizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre
"The late 17th-century early 18th-century court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, Versailles’ glittering world, mistresses all over the place and Jacquet de la Guerre was one of King Louis’s favorite composers, and she did the impossible. Louis wanted French music. He didn’t like Italian music — sonatas are Italian. He didn’t like modern music — sonatas are modern. Jacquet de la Guerre did that incredible thing of taking the sonata, making it French and delighting the king with it."
Marianna Martines
"Martines was writing her music in the time of Haydn and Mozart in Vienna. It’s very difficult to get hold of her music. When I was writing the book there was only one recording, now there are two. I am a Marianna Martines fan. I think she’s fantastic. She’s been described as a more athletic Haydn, and she is. She’s not radical, but what she does she does with such energy and verve and joy she’s my go-to composer whenever I feel a bit down, but I don’t think that I’m going to see a or hear a live performance of her work before I die."
Fanny (Mendelssohn) Hensel
"The real revelation of writing this book is Fanny Hensel to me. She wrote a piano cycle called Das Jahr (the Year). It’s 12 months plus epilogue. I would passionately recommend a movement such as 'March' for it speaks to so much that I’m writing about in the book. It’s a superbly composed piece; it builds slowly to a glorious climax of affirmation and joy. Along the way Fanny Hensel inserts something that sounds very much like a Bach chorale. She was obsessed by Bach — she called her son Sebastian Felix — so it’s got that tension in it."
Clara Schumann
"One of the ironies of this book is at least two of the women, Fanny Hensel, the little sister to Felix Mendelssohn, and Clara Schumann, of course married to Robert Schumann, are in a sense responsible for creating the very canon that excluded them. Fanny Hensel and Felix worked tirelessly to bring us Bach. And Clara Schumann, of course, lived and breathed to make her husband’s work part of the cannon and she succeeded. I’m not seeing other people do the same thing in return."
Lili Boulanger
“Lili Boulanger won the most important music prize in France of her time, the Prix de Rome. She watched her big sister Nadia Boulanger fail to win that prize three times, and Lili learned and realized that if she wanted to win she needed to remain feminine according to the values of her time. There’s a wonderful description of her conducting her prize-winning piece in which she conducts but does not conduct. In fact, she’s almost still, and the only way that you can do that is if you’ve rehearsed assiduously beforehand and you have all your ducks in a row and you know you can rely on those musicians.”
Elizabeth Maconchy
“Elizabeth Maconchy is the composer I finish the book with. She only died in the 1990s, and in her lifetime she was described as the finest British composer of her generation — there is absolutely no question. If somebody sat down a room of music critics or academics and said ‘Maconchy is second rate,’ there would be a resounding 'oh no she isn’t.' Why is her music not heard? She did a cycle through her long life of 13 string quartets which are the pinnacle of achievement in the genre.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
