Welcome to the new Salon Without Boundaries website! There are several new sections for you to explore, with more coming soon.
It is a common misconception, that women composers of earlier times were as unheard and unprogrammed as they are now. This isn’t true. While they have never had the same recognition and authority of their male counterparts, many were heard on stage and platform, with works often being favourably reviewed and – crucially, as any contemporary composer will tell you – heard multiple times. What does tend to happen, however, is that this recognition and success dies with the woman herself. This is also the case for performers, especially those who graced the stage before the advent of recording. How do we accord creative authority to someone whose output doesn’t seem to exist any more, when we tend to see authority as residing in a permanent artifact (i.e. a published score)?
With the current recognition of the essential nature of diversification in programming, there is a real need to make both information and scores readily available. One purpose of the Salon is to shine a spotlight on what’s out there, to help make it accessible. And we are well past the time of performing a work without understanding where it’s come from, who it has mattered to, how it speaks to us now. We aim to offer context, both musical and non-musical, as well as the musical objects themselves. With this in mind, we will be exploring not just new compositions, writings and performances, but also old ones, some very easily found online, if you know how to search past the dominant algorithms. We have a long way to go to make historical women’s outputs as accessible as their male counterparts’, but it’s worth highlighting the unceasing efforts of so many people to start addressing the imbalance.
We’ll be starting with these sections:
Composer of the Month: An introduction to historical women composers who are lesser-known, and often never programmed. We will be first concentrating on women active in the UK, Ireland and Germany (my areas of research), particularly women from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Poem of the Day: Poetry was once seen as indistinguishable from music. Here you can get a daily dose of Lieder ohne Musik.
In My Headphones: Not so much reviews, as reflections on recordings old and new – not just CDs, but recordings you can find online, e.g. on YouTube, of composers and of past performers. Sometimes this will be related to the Composer of the Month.
From My Bookshelf: Explorations of books by women and about women. We will be ranging from eighteenth-century publications to new releases.
The Salon Blog: Thoughts, reflections, ideas, discussions on anything and everything around creativity, including the links between the arts and the every day, and what it’s like to be women living that. We’ll also be exploring those previously-mentioned ideas around creative authority.
You will also be able to find scores, recording links, poems, pictures and more, all being uploaded regularly. More exciting sections will be following soon.