This year, I decided to dedicate the Salon Without Boundaries social media presence to birthdays of women composers. Over three platforms, we have celebrated the birth of 1,405 composers, never missing a day. We covered women from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth - I decided to have a cutoff point of 1970, just to keep my time manageable. I found composers from all corners of the globe, from six continents – and one who at least had her music performed on the seventh – and in so doing, I earned far more than I had imagined I would, not just about the composers themselves, but also about the worlds they inhabited and the people with whom they interacted. I also learned what people are interested in today, sometimes to my surprise!
Of course, there are many, many composers whose exact date of birth is unknown, and some of these will be celebrated in the Salon throughout 2022. The Salon’s social media presence will be a little less this year, as we concentrate on building website content, not to mention rebuilding a real-world musical life after the ravages of the past two years. Still, on both website and SM we will be marking the bicentenary of The Royal Academy of Music in London. Founded in 1822, the Academy’s premise was to provide musical education to young teenagers:
“The object of the Institution, under His Majesty’s patronage, is to promote the cultivation of the science of Music, and afford facilities for attaining perfection in it, by assisting with general instruction the natives of this country, and thus enabling those who pursue this delightful branch of the fine arts to enter into competition with, and rival the natives of other countries, and to provide for themselves the means of an honourable and comfortable livelihood.
With this view it is proposed to found an academy, to be called the “Royal Academy of Music”, for the maintenance and general instruction in music of a certain number of pupils, not exceeding at present forty males and forty females.”
We have an upcoming blog entry devoted to the differences in provision for boys and girls, so we won’t go into that here; we can, despite this, acknowledge that the Academy was ahead of its time in allowing instruction at all to both sexes; its geographically closest equivalent, the Paris Conservatoire, would not admit its first female student until the nine-year-old violinist Camilla Urso entered in 1849. And later in the century, female composers would choose the Academy over its rival institution across London, because of its policy of playing student compositions in every concert, by both male and female composers. This would change around WW1, when the Royal College of Music became the preferred institution for many, due in large part to the stellar teaching staff in the department there. Meanwhile, however, Academy prizes were just as likely to be won by female students as by male, and the prize boards often read like a rollcall of the best composers of the time.
The Academy was one of the first to allow its girls to learn instruments other than the traditionally female singing and piano. In the 1890s there were more female violinists than male, and in 1901 there was at least one female cornet player, Catherine Fidler. This was also the year in which Maude Melliar became the first female winner of a wind instrument scholarship in the UK. Edith Penville on flute followed closely behind. And despite the perceived ‘femininity’ of the piano as an instrument, the sheer weight of talent amongst the women pianists at this time was phenomenal. The singers, too, offered an extraordinary raft of talent and achievement, and it is not an exaggeration to note that the majority of successful productions in London included at least one Academy-trained voice.
Over 2022, we will be celebrating many of these women. All Composers of the Month were trained at the Academy; we will also have a cornucopia of recordings of works by other composers. Even the books will be by ex-students of the Academy, starting with one by a well-known pianist. We look forward to sharing these with you. Please continue visiting us throughout the year for more!