I've been busy, very busy. Also a change in the weather here in Singapore has brought the germs and I came down with a nasty cold and cough.
At least I've got work to do. Not unlike the femnags who sit around on their great fat tushies all day and bash men.
Which got me thinking.
I was listening, well re-listening really, to the B-minor Mass whilst marking student assignments and the thought struck me: Where are the female composers?
That got me excited so I Googled it.
Wikipedia was the first entry and it trumpeted a long list of female composers from pre-1500 to the present. Trolling it, I made a surprising (!?) discovery: in over a millenia, there have been only a few notable female composers and these can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
1. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)\
2. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204)
3. Maria Malibran (1808-1836)
4. the Boulanger sisters - Lili (1893-1918) and Nadia (1887-1979)
And of these female composers, only Hildegard of Bingen and Nadia Boulanger have recordings attributed to them.
So, if women are better than men, why are the CD catalogues teeming with recordings by the greats - Bach, Charpentier, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Schumann et al? Why are the performance artists clamouring to perform works by the very same, and are not supremely eager to champion a work by, say Amy Beach? (By the way, Amy Beach "composes" such racuous nonsense I can't even call it music. I don't know anybody who does!)
So the point is clear: in music the men reign. Maybe they'll get round to it next time.
Onward!
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