A couple of weeks ago, I taught a class entitled “Oh no, I left Beethoven in my locker!”, complete with GIF of a poor Martian with exploding head. It was centred around the oddity of using a composer’s name as shorthand for a whole host of musicmaking. The surname of a ‘canonic’ composer such as Beethoven encompasses everything from the person themselves (if they’re lucky) to scores, recordings, performances, and even some amorphous concept behind the notes. It’s a big burden for Beethoven to carry, and is a major tool of exclusion as well.
Why do I start with this? It’s because I find that the reviews of this week’s CD, added to the website of the recording label, encapsulate many of the tensions between mainstream and less-performed repertoire. While they are unanimously positive – as the album more than deserves – it’s worth unpicking the language chosen to describe both Owen herself and the music she wrote.
First, it’s worth noting that in writing about Owen as composer, we have to split her from her music. She can’t engender as many categories as the word Beethoven does. This is already clear when the BBC magazine reviewer of February 2017 muses on the way that the performance ‘serves to underscore the paradoxical strength and fragility of Owen herself’, and points out that ‘[l]ike many of her peers she sang and played piano, but it was her precocious talent as a composer – and her beauty – that dazzled audiences in London.’
Hmm. This is already feeling pretty gendered, although I doubt it was conscious. We are being reminded of both the composer-performer hierarchy, and the fact that a woman composer is being measured against the unimpeachable and all-encompassing standard of her male counterpart. The reviewer writes that ‘a recent resurgence of interest in her music proves justified.’Justified in what way? Is it still that male standard that is being used to decide whether music is worth our attention, time and money?Owen’s performing is dismissed in a few short words; even a small amount of searching through newspaper reviews and Royal Academy of Music student records demonstrates that audiences were indeed just as ‘dazzled’ by her appearance on the concert platform in other repertoire.
The Globe, 11 January 1917
The second review is equally positive about both Owen’s music and the performance being offered on the CD, though it falls into a couple of traps too. First, Owen’s music is divided into two types; some ‘do tend to be in the prevailing style of sentimental Edwardian parlour music, but other pieces show a more adventurous spirit at work.’
Readers will know already of my constant defence of sentimentality (OED definition: ‘Arising from or determined by feeling rather than by reason’. Nothing ‘feminine’ about that, right?), and my suspicion of approaching works that might belong in the category of ‘parlour’ music with modern (and gendered) sensibilities. The notion that being adventurous is the polar opposite to this feels unadventurous in itself. Our canonic interpretations, aesthetics and performing contexts fit some music very well, but forces exclusion on music that needs a different approach before we can unlock its fullness.
The second trap is sprung with the use of the composer’s first name – ‘These two fine artists had extensive experience of performing Morfydd’s music together’. It is clear that this is an affectionate and deferential use of the name, but it cannot be denied that we attach an awful lot of worth to a surname, and the way in which we address a composer positions them in the hierarchy (see how I began this post). This was remarked upon as early as 1902, when a writer in theWorthing Gazetteremarked upon the tendency to call women composers ‘Miss Lastname’, as opposed to how male composers were written down:
“Chaminade was perhaps the first female composer whose name began to be used without the formal prefix – a distinction which denotes so much in the musical world, and which is only attained by those who are in the front rank of their profession.
Who, for instance, ever speaks of that great violinist otherwise than as Kubelik, without the prefix which is customary in the case of lesser lights of genius?”
As I have said, both reviews are positive, and it’s great to see this kind of analysis of women’s music, light touch though it must be in this kind of writing. It’s just a reminder that language is still so skewed towards current hierarchies in so many ways, making it worthwhile to take a step back.
The album is a beautifully programmed selection of Owen’s solo songs and piano music. Most of the songs are in English, with the exception of ‘Tristesse’, a setting of a French poem by Alfred de Musset, and ‘Gweddi y Pechadur’, a Welsh poem with Owen’s own words. The range of poets that Owen chose to set is fascinating and thoughtful. She worked with texts by well-known and obscurer poets, as well as writing some of her own, as in the case noted above (actually quite common for song composers at the time). These vocal selections are performed with poise, clarity and a deceptive simplicity. The piano music offers an equally interesting array. This ranges from the early E minor piano sonata, described by one reviewer as “patchy juvenilia to miniatures such as the one-minute Little Eric. The sonata feels to me like an exploration of piano textures, a sonata journey across the keyboard rather than across harmonic structures. This results in a fragmentation that is contrary to ideas of sonata form, but offers an improvisatory feel to the structure, or the notion of a song composer experimenting with what an accompaniment might do. Much of the instrumental music gets described currently, as with so many unknown composers, by comparing the language to that of mainstream names. Here Owen sounds like Rachmaninov, there like Satie. It’s a shorthand, but for composers ‘off the canon’, there is a constant and often impossible pull between needing to ‘sound like’ a known name, and innovation. When does familiarity become pastiche, and conversely, innovation become craftless?
Here is Tristesse, the one French language song on the CD: ‘I have lost my strength and my life… when I knew Truth, I thought she was a friend.’