Finns find 126 unknown female composers
NewsA pair of feminist musicologists, Susanna Välimäki and Nuppu Koivisto-Kaasik, have been investigating the missing women in Finland’s music.
Their new, 480-page book includes biographies of 126 Finnish women composers in the 19th and 20th centuries. The subjects were born between 1784 and 1909.
Life was tough. Lilli Leinberg, who lost her mother at 13, married at 19 and gave birth to 14 children. Somehow she kept on composing. The national Library has 104 of her works.
WOW! More female composers are “unearthed” with every passing day it seems! Hurray for the ladies! It’s high time they all got their due desserts (just watch out for all those “calories”)!
Any Bachs or Nozarts we missed?
Maybe. But more likely a lot of Alice Mary Smiths and Florence Prices. But maybe it will inspire some record companies something to do besides more unneeded Bach, Beethoven and Mahler.
Just remember how many of Bach’s works were lost before Mendelssohn re-established him in the canon of much-performed composers. There was a time when your comment would have pertained to Bach himself.
When people referred to “Bach” around 1780, they meant Johann Christian. And yeah, didn’t he have a father who was a famous organ player in his days?
Of course, some people (a certain Mozart in Vienna) were well aware of JSB’s genius.
So, there might some very interesting stuff here. Hope we’ll get to hear it.
Sort of worthy project, but what will it likely achieve? For every Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann or Boulanger (either) there will naturally be a vast heap of justifiably forgotten,
second-rate stuff. It stands to reason really. You could equally do some in-depth research into “forgotten” male composers and come up with the same old same old.
Has anything useful been achieved? Probably not but you can bet good money that it will appear regularly on BBC R3 anyway!
I don’t know anything of the other lady, but Susanna Valimaki has surely earned the street cred necessary for her views to be taken into consideration. The pair of them have discovered the historically interesting fact that there were many Finnish women composing in those years. Seems a good chance the odd one had real talent, and these two seem like a good starting point for discovering the gems in the rock.
So far what they have done is genuine academic and artistic inquiry. What, alas, is likely to happen is that the wokies will use what at the moment, sound unheard, is a list of names as a tool for campaigning in a cause where musical ability is just incidental.
Which is what it is becoming in certain academic departments, orchestras, broadcasting outlets…
One can only hope that something in the Finnish landscape inspired great creative work by these women — though, surprisingly, I am stuck when it comes to naming more than two or three male Finnish composers.
It will be interesting to see what happens.
One could say the same about an equal number of unknown male composers.
Listen to (or play) enough music and you will start to build your own list of respectable and even very fine composers who are less known than they should be, or even not known at all. Prior generations did not necessarily do a perfect job of separating the wheat from the chaff. Someone has to do the unearthing for us but isn’t there value in making up our own minds rather than relying on received opinion, even if our conclusion is to agree with received opinion? We can’t judge what we can’t hear, unless we judge based only on reputation.
A fair comment, correctly made but basically I’m thinking that if someone wants to sift through it all then good luck. In my 70+ years on God’s Earth I just know deep down that it will be a thankless task. Old and cynical? Most probably but also a purely pragmatic solution to living a bit longer and not dying of boredom.
Looking forward to yet more newly discovered works, especially that these composers were all born in classical music’s golden age.
Will any of these composers turn out to be be worthy of standing alongside such luminaries as Salieri, Abbiate, Leopold Mozart, Draeseke or Silas G Pratt?
To all those who are mocking music by women composers before even getting to know the music you are mocking: in case you believe you are a true music lover, my answer to you is that you are just name-droppers who have no understanding of music and no true love to music.