I said it yesterday when I was talking about the Ralph Vaughan Williams Oboe Concerto. But a lot of people look to me as a “new music” specialist, or a “women composer” specialist, or a “marginalized composer” specialist. They do that for a simple reason: I do some of this stuff now, and a lot of other people simply don’t touch it.
When I had my first public “scandal,” when I made fun of this ridiculous review by Wai Kit Leung, wherein Leung, an unpaid reviewer, falsely claimed I got him fired*, well-meaning anonymous commenters from ThatBlog suggested that I stick to my apparent skill with “new music” and “living composers.” Because, of course, that’s where we send bad musicians and shitty instrumentalists, to go make the first recordings of things we don’t want to really be playing. They can do the dirty work and spend their untalented labor on these less desirable works, while the most serious, most excellent artists can focus on Schumann, Beethoven, and you know, Poulenc. In orchestras with principals and assistant/associate principals, the music by living composers and premieres are almost always relegated to the purview of the assistant/associate, so that the glamorous principal can focus their efforts on reinterpreting their part of a Beethoven or Mahler Symphony for literally the 100th time.
Why is this? Well, because Beethoven, who is a dead, white guy is great, you say! Yeah, I know. I don’t disagree. But if Beethoven were born into a woman’s body in 1770, we’d probably have none of her music left. It either would have never happened or would have never been published, and left to some woman 250 years later to dig out of an attic and restore. Beethoven is also great because he’s a dead, white guy. He could not have been Beethoven without being a white guy. We still prefer white guys, especially when they are dead.
What if you got to play one of Beethoven’s symphonies at its premiere? If you rarely or never play new music, you might be missing out on that opportunity now. Maybe somebody’s doing something really great right now. And, I must tell you young people, because I’m sure I can’t tell the old Schubert/Mozart/Beethoven specialists: really, the biggest thrills of my musical life have been working closely with composers and premiering their stuff, and then taking their stuff back out to the public for a second or third time and watching the music evolve as a thread I wrap between and around the public and the composer. I don’t do it because I think I’m a shitty, less-than musician who needs to stay away from the “important” music of our canon. I do it because it can be thrilling. (It can also suck.)
A BFM Oboist who doesn’t normally speak to me and hadn’t messaged me for seven years got in touch with me a couple years ago (no hi, no hello, no Dear Katherine, no how are you) to ask me about a potential wrong note in a solo oboe piece by a woman composer. I have never played this piece. But I am a woman oboist. Am I am a woman composer specialist. And I am a woman composer/woman oboist. So I am suddenly an expert in this one specific thing in his view, even though I’ve never played the piece and don’t own the music, when of course, he never sees fit to talk to me about anything else at any other time. (Okay, aside, but why are these people so rude? It seems to start very early, even.)
What is the reason that women are so under-represented, compared to how many of us there are all over the profession? Is it because there is some idea that women can’t understand or interpret men’s music, and that’s the vast majority of what we think is important and good? Is there an idea that men can’t understand women’s music, too? I mean, I watch men’s baseball and like it quite a lot, especially the vegan burger at Camden Yards and my boyfriend, Cedric Mullins. I read books by men authors. Do men not read books by women authors? Do they not watch women’s sports? Maybe our world would be less of a shitshow if we tried to understand other people through their art. It’s moronic to limit yourself to just one thing, though I am pretty happy drinking gallons of iced cold brew every day right now.
Talking about someone being an expert in “women composers” is ridiculous, actually, just as ridiculous as being a specialist in men composers. “Serious artists” focus on Brahms and Beethoven, or Baroque music, or Mahler and Schoenberg, not every man who has ever written music in the history of music.
Let’s talk about my education. I began by teaching myself the piano. This would have been about 1985. I began by playing my own music and my own improvisations. After that, I moved into the James Bastien books and taught myself to read music. Then I got a teacher. Then there were anthologies of the music of dead, white men exclusively. I had an orange “contemporary composers” anthology whose most modern composer was Bela Bartok, who died in 1945, forty years prior. I got better and all I really wanted to play was Mozart, especially the concertos, but I was okay playing Bach, too. I thought Chopin sucked and it made me sick to my stomach. I still think the Chopin Piano Concertos are amongst my least favorite things to play (on the oboe), but Wagner’s Overture to Die Meistersinger will always win any competition with Liszt Les Preludes in second place.
I got better, started playing the oboe, and auditioned for various music schools. I played music by all dead white men always. I played Vincent Persichetti at one audition I can recall, and he was just newly dead at that time, cutting edge. I played that Persichetti Parable because I heard Richard Woodhams play it at the 1991 IDRS Convention in Towson, Maryland, and if he was playing it, it was good and worthy of playing.
I went to a Very Big Fancy Music School and studied theory in books written by men, with all musical examples written by men. I played oboe etudes written by dead, white men. I played occasional pieces by dead, white men. I played the Oboe Concerto by Lukas Foss for the composer and it BLEW MY FUCKING MIND. He was a living, white man (now he’s dead). I played a chamber music piece by Ned Rorem called After Long Silence for tenor, oboe, and strings and coached it with the composer and it BLEW MY FUCKING MIND. He was a living white man (now he’s dead.) I played in orchestras and played exclusively music by white men, all of whom were dead except for John Corigliano. I studied orchestral pieces with big oboe parts which end up on orchestra auditions, and those were also written by exclusively dead, white men. I don’t play orchestra auditions any more, having given them and vomiting in dressing rooms up in 2018, but I never prepared any piece for one which was not written by a white man. Just once I played a piece by a living, white man (John Adams, still alive) for an audition. Once, in music school, I played a piece by a woman composer on a recital and hid it from my teacher. I never played the piece for him. It was a premiere of a sonata by a Taiwanese woman composer, and she played the piano—it BLEW MY FUCKING MIND.
Despite that final example, you can see that white men and dead, white men were so very important to my education. They were more important than everyone else by a factor of about 10,000 to 1. So, of course I am a specialist in men’s music. And so are you.
When I watched the Philadelphia Orchestra from the high balcony at the Academy of Music as a fawning student, the people I watched most closely on those stages were all white men. Still that orchestra has never once, in its 124-year history, had a woman sitting in a principal chair in the woodwind section. I absorbed a message from that, even though I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time.
I’ve played more concertos with orchestra than I can count, which is a privilege! But it’s easy for me to count the number of concertos I’ve played by women composers: two. One by Jennifer Higdon once with a community orchestra, and one by Ruth Gipps with three different orchestras. With the Baltimore Symphony, the place where I’ve had the most prestigious and repeated concerto outings, over 21 seasons, I’ve never played a concerto by a woman composer. And this pathetic number of oboe concertos and oboe concerto performances of works by women composers is not because I don’t know of more concertos, or that I haven’t tried to get people to program me in them. People just don’t want to program them. Though I’ve played some concertos by living white men, I’m absolutely a specialist in oboe concertos by dead white men.
I’ve also played more oboe recitals than I can count, which is also a privilege, but also perhaps representative of a problem. Besides that piece by the Taiwanese composer I mentioned in school (Chiayu Hsu’s Contrast), I didn’t play any works by women composers on my oboe recitals until I was 38 fucking years old. That’s pathetic. But, indeed, I am a specialist in the music of dead, white men.
I’ve played way more orchestra concerts, and more pieces in an orchestra than I could possibly ever count. I’ve played so many Pops and Holiday concerts with 20-some pieces on a program, but usually zero by anyone who’s not a white man. And of the regular classical programs, I think here are probably about only 20 women composers of orchestra music (many on serious repeat) I can recall playing.
If your education or career looks at all like mine, there is a disproportionate emphasis on the music and the value of dead, white men. Remember how I talked about playing only men composers until I was 38? Well, when I realized the gravity of my mistake, I changed course. And so can you. We will have to change course, actively and intentionally, if we are to make our industry a better place.
*(I think reviews are dumb. Also, Leung was actually let go from writing for free on that blog because of his crazy internet response to my share of his review.)
What a great summary of western music. As a living white man, I also don’t get the criticism of “tokenism” when trying to promote works by underrepresented composers. Yes, some of them will not be great but who cares? White men have benefited from tokenism for thousands of years. Voice promoting is what matters. A not great work, simply for the sake of being played, can lead to someone else commissioning that composer (or some other underrepresented person) to compose a great work. We’ll never know if we don’t try.
a thought- that the "standard" repertoire is considered by the conservative brains and ears to be more dignified, richer in content and history, more old world (Western Europe) rather than new world(USA), with the musty scent of high class. and therefore, everything else must be peripheral. I love most of it too, having spent my life learning how to interpret it.
side note-do you know of a duo by Hilary Tann for oboe and viola, and another by Hilary called The Walls of Morlais Castle, for oboe, viola and cello? Utterly beautiful, evocative of the rough coastline of Wales, immaculately composed. She was a wonderful person, and a brilliant musician. 🌹