Women composers deserve much better

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/05/women-composers-deserve-better

Version 0 of 1.

Jessica Duchen (Why the male domination of music may be coming to an end, 28 February) mentions St Hildegard of Bingen, Barbara Strozzi and Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre as examples of female composers of the past, and says these examples “were in sharp opposition to the norm”. This is correct, but maintains the impression that there is no point in trying to play historical female composers because they (virtually) don’t exist.

This is not true. There was a sudden flowering of women’s composition in the 17th century, with several dozen female composers active. Many were nuns (Isabella Leonarda, Bianca Maria Meda, Vittoria Aleotti, Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani), and it was the convent environment that gave them the freedom to write music, although the church was not always tolerant and sometimes clamped down on their activity, preventing further compositional work or destroying existing music (Maria Cattarina Calegari’s work may be the biggest loss: a composer of a large body of work and famous in her time, all her music was apparently destroyed in 1663 on the instruction of Archbishop Alfonso Litta). But there were also many professional female musicians in the 18th century, who were successful as composers, including Strozzi and Antonia Bembo (both singers), Jacquet de la Guerre (a harpsichordist) and lutenist Mlle Bocquet (a lutenist).

The 18th century appears to have been a more difficult time for women composers, but by the end of that century and into the 19th and 20th centuries there are increasing numbers active. We apply a further sexism by giving predominant attention to those whose names are familiar from the male composers they were married or related to (Schumann, Mendelssohn, Mahler), and ignoring the likes of Maria Szymanowska, Amy Beach, Elisabeth Lutyens, Grace Williams, Elisabeth Maconchy and Vítězslava Kaprálová, as well as the composers mentioned in Diana Ambache’s letter (2 March).

While it is very encouraging to see that there are so many promising young women composers producing music today, there is no excuse for ignoring the large body of excellent music written by women in the past, despite the extreme limitations that were placed on them.James PokeArtistic director, Icebreaker

• In his excellent sketch of the collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, Philip Hensher (Sin city, G2, 4 March) cuts short their work together, omitting to mention The Seven Deadly Sins. If this work (dance with songs) were not so magnificent in its own right, it might be called a coda to Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, showing how the logic of a woman’s survival in capitalist America leads to her splitting herself in two, one half prostituting herself to provide for the consumerist other. It is sometimes called Anna-Anna, was choreographed by George Balanchine and premiered in Paris in June 1933. Two other Brecht-Weill collaborations – sadly hardly ever performed – are He Who Said Yes/He Who Said No, an opera for children, after a text by Arthur Waley, from the Japanese, first performed in 1930, and an even rarer and equally beautiful piece for radio, concert or dance – The Flight over the Ocean, of the same year, in the course of which a solo pilot addresses the engine of his plane halfway across the Atlantic. So long after the end of the cold war, when are such precious works going to enter our cultural bloodstream?Nicholas JacobsLondon

• This article was amended on 6 March 2015. Because of an editing error, an earlier version misspelled Bertolt Brecht’s name.