The Sound of Symbols by Clarissa Payne

Two of the world’s largest mass participation events, one sacred and one secular, have at their very heart music written by women - but unless you’re an Orthodox nun or priest, or a Rio sambista, you probably didn't know it.

The musical high point of Greek Orthodox Easter is I En Polles Amarties - The Fallen Woman - a hymn to Mary Magdalene written by the first female composer on record.
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Kassia or St. Kassiani (c. 810-between 843 and 867) was a nun in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Once a year on the Tuesday before Easter, The Fallen Woman is sung and chanted for ten or twenty minutes to congregations in Greece and around the world, and has been ever since Kassia wrote it over 1400 years ago. 

​Before Easter comes the austerity of Lent; around the world there are many different traditions of pre-Lent feast and festival. The most famous is surely the Carnival of Rio de Janeiro where millions fill the streets with music and dance. The march that opens Carnival, Ó Abre Alas! - Open the Way! - is by Francisca ‘Chiquinha’ Gonzaga (1847-1935), a woman who dared to leave the marriage arranged for her at age sixteen to make her own way as a composer and conductor. 
 
Kassia was born into an aristocratic family. The story goes that she was sent to stand in a lineup of possible brides for the Emperor Theophilus. She was very beautiful, and Theophilus spotted her straight away, commencing his wooing with the charming line: 
‘Women are the source of evil in this world’. 
Kassia had the perfect comeback, and so broke the first rule for a Byzantine lady - keep silent. 

​‘What about the Virgin Mary?’ she replied. 
The Emperor was horrified that she’d dared to speak back to him - instead of becoming Empress, Kassia founded a convent. We can’t of course know how true the story is, how Kassia felt about it, or what degree of choice over any of this she had. 

It is however recorded that even as an abbess, Kassia still opposed the emperor. He oversaw the second period of destruction of religious icons in the Byzantine Empire which she was deeply against, saying: ‘I hate silence when it is time to speak’. 
And we know that she was a composer and poet, with more than fifty of her vocal works surviving, many still part of the Orthodox liturgy sung daily around the world. 
 
The Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene - women have often been symbols, empty vessels used by mostly male artists to represent the sorrows of Easter and the joy of Carnival, sacred and secular, purity and corruption, wisdom and folly. Summer and winter. Absolute good and absolute evil. 
 
Meanwhile, actual flesh and blood women are and have always been something else entirely - human beings. No human being is all good or all bad. Humans are creative, and this concert explores the creativity of female composers, who often had to pursue their creativity and curiosity against tough odds. 
 
Chiquinha Gonzaga’s husband forbade her to compose and play music. Surely Gonzaga, a mixed-race woman and young mother in 19th-century Brazil, would have had no choice but to do so? Like Kassia, she answered back. 
‘I cannot imagine a life without harmony’, she’s said to have told him. She left, and her father and husband declared her ‘dead and of unpronounceable name’. 

Gonzaga lived a long life and had a prolific career - she wrote choro music, Rio’s pop music of the day, which combined elements of the music of the enslaved people who had been taken from different parts of Africa with that of immigrants from various regions of Europe. There was great shock at the Presidential Palace when Gonzaga and a friend played a new tune on piano and guitar - how could they have brought this street riff-raff music into such refined ​surroundings?

​Her grandfather had been a slave, and Gonzaga was active in the movement to abolish slavery, as well as the women’s suffrage movement. 
She wrote operas and theatre music, and worked as a conductor. There was no Portuguese word for a woman conductor so she was referred to in Italian as Maestrina. A literal choice between silence and finding a new way to do things. 
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Her music was everywhere - I imagine her ex-husband and her father, sworn never to say her name again, having to hear one of her songs floating out of an open window, or walk by a group on a corner playing her dance music. 
Success brought its own problems, and Gonzaga became frustrated with people stealing her work and not paying her - so she worked to set up the first copyright society in Brazil for musicians. 

​For any composer, balancing creative curiosity and financial security has always been difficult. 
Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729) was a French composer working at the court of Louis XIV. The Versailles of the Sun King was a world of aristocrats with no need to worry about earning a living. De la Guerre was from the artisan classes, born in the heart of Paris - her musician and instrument maker father had given her a music education alongside her brothers. Her music was her meal ticket, from her child prodigy days singing to the King as ‘sweet little Mademoiselle Jacquet’ and being described in the papers as ‘the marvel of our century’ to the later period in her life, when she wrote in an innovative ‘Italian’ style. She was the first woman to have an opera performed and a great success in her own time, despite working at the same time as Jean-Baptiste Lully, whose name was almost interchangeable with ‘French music’ at that time, and who was not a fan of the new musical ideas coming from Italy. De la Guerre wrote many large-scale works such as cantatas and ballets, showing that women musicians could be much more than sweet little singers. 

Over three centuries after de la Guerre, a century after Gonzaga, and over a millennium since Kassia created music and sang in her nunnery, a female composer in the USA faced bemusement and disbelief when she started training in her chosen career. 
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Composer and flautist Katherine Hoover (1937-2018) studied at Eastman School of Music in the 1950s. 
‘There were no women involved with composition at all. I got rather discouraged – being the only woman in my classes, not being paid attention to and so forth’, she said in a 2013 interview.

‘For boys, and even more so for girls, in music school there was a sense of ‘What are you doing, writing? Who do you think you are, Beethoven?’ It was really not a good attitude. ‘All the good music has been written’ was basically it. And I was the only female in class, with six guys, all grad students. I was an undergrad, and I just sat there, and they never bothered to look at my work, and that’s the way it was.’
This experience didn’t crush Hoover’s curiosity and desire to create. She was fascinated by Native American art, literature and music. The flute and flute players have an important role in many Native American cultures, and Hoover, a flute player herself, has written beautiful, unique music for the flute which explores these ideas and images. Playing them is like being in a shimmering kaleidoscope of light and colour. 
 
Sometimes people ask ‘Why have a women composers concert?’, and I have sympathy for women artists, tired of being put in a box and wanting to be recognised for their work first and foremost, who correctly complain that ‘female isn’t a genre’. The music by the female composers in this concert doesn’t all sound the same. 
Most of the classical music that I have learned and performed has been by men, and the simple reason for that is that there have been and are numerically more male composers. But that’s not the end of curiosity - why is that? And how can it be that millions and millions of people have heard the music of women every year for decades, centuries, millennia, without even knowing it? Why did de la Guerre achieve huge success in her lifetime only for her work to slide into obscurity for centuries? 
 
Women composers had to tramp out more difficult, uphill paths while they were alive and working. Emperors, husbands, pregnancy, children, rivals, kings and God could all come between a woman and her music while she was alive, and after she was dead those same factors and a male-led ‘posterity’ meant the path she’d stamped out could easily become overgrown and disappear. 
 
When the silent symbol decides that she has her own ideas to express, it can be very disruptive. 
 
Simply, without performers and programmers making the effort to open the way, the music of women won’t be played or acknowledged as much, and there’s no pretending otherwise. Illuminate founder Angela Slater has made a huge contribution to this work, not only with Illuminate but with her earlier analysis of the ABRSM music exam syllabuses, which found that only 4.4% of listed works were by women. This has already begun to change - I’ve noticed a massive increase in works by women in their most recent flute syllabus. They are great pieces; the broader repertoire will enrich the learning of young players. 
 
This concert is a celebration of women from different times and places who were told ‘you can’t do that’ and did it anyway. Women who took themselves seriously when nobody else did. Perhaps that extra pressure is what gives their work its diamond shine. 
 
If you’d like to read more about Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre and seven other female classical composers, I highly recommend Anna Beer’s brilliant book Sounds and Sweet Airs. 

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