Joshua Kronengold

Having poured praise over Caroline Shaw in my last post, I want to say a little about women composers in general. Last week, Joshua Kosman (bottom part of this post) reported on a performance of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel's only string quartet, which he found "phenomenal ... ingenious, hearty and often ravishingly beautiful."

Maybe he heard a particularly good performance, because I've heard this work and found it an OK composition, creative enough and particularly delightful for its scherzo, but it's sometimes rote and a little thin on the development side, certainly not, as some YouTube commenters on its recording have claimed, a match for the quartets by her brother Felix.

Hensel is one of a number of women composers of the past whose work has been resurrected and promoted specifically because they're important composers who have been neglected up until recently. I've heard a lot of this stuff, and I can say that, of the pre-20th century composers (I'll get to the 20th and 21st ones later), that many of them are perfectly good second-level composers, but with the exception of Hildegard of Bingen, none are a match for the best male composers of their time.

Why is that? Is it because, as is sometimes stated, "men are better composers than women"? Of course not. You can't classify an entire sex that way. Most men can't compose worth a jot, and mediocre male 18th century composers are heard every day on KDFC radio. It might be more accurate to say that the best composers of the pre-20C period are men, but again, why is that?

It isn't because the best women lack genius. I'll demonstrate their talent later. It's lack of opportunity. The kind of musical training, and even more the chance to put it to use and develop your talent, was only spottily available in pre-modern times. It was hard enough for men to get it, and it's luck as well as an eagerness to learn that was responsible for its landing on as many male geniuses as it did. For women it was even tougher, and it's a tragedy that no female genius of those days got the opportunity to show her talent. Because they must have been there, somewhere. Mute inglorious Miltons, the lot of them.

Even the ones who did get training were somehow stifled. My understanding is that both Hensel's brother and her husband encouraged her to compose, but she wrote very little. Not only did this deprive us of much to judge her talent by, but it also robbed her of the job of working at her art and developing it to become a better composer.

An even clearer case is that of Clara Schumann. Her best work that I've heard is a Piano Trio in G Minor that she wrote in her mid-20s, and that is up to the quality of comparable works by her husband Robert. But she never followed up on it: no more chamber ensemble pieces followed from her pen. Earlier on, she had written a piano concerto, but that was in her early teens, and the best that can be said of it is that you admire the composer's talent but hope that she grows up fast. It's not surprising that such a young composer's work is immature; even Mozart wasn't writing immortal masterpieces at that age. (Clara Schumann did embark on a second piano concerto in her late 20s; she didn't get very far, but the movement she completed is much better than its predecessor.) Being the mother of many children and the wife of a difficult man may have had its effects, and when she was older and freer she might have felt herself just out of practice. Whatever the cause, it's a shame; she was the best of them.

Turning to American composers, a lot of attention has been focused recently on Amy Beach. She wrote some good music, especially in her later years - her string quartet is particularly fine - but much of the music she's known for strikes me as dull and rather routine. She's no better, albeit also no worse, than her male compatriots in the Second New England School, and she doesn't deserve to be feted while the men are mostly ignored, just because she's a woman.

After Beach, chronologically, come Rebecca Clarke and Ruth Crawford, whom I find it hard to judge because I don't much care for their idiom, but they appear to be somewhat better.

But to my mind the first great American woman composer is Florence Price, the Black woman who flourished in Chicago in the 1930s. Compared to the flurry of white male American composers who were coming to prominence at the same time - most of whom were a decade or more younger than she - she wasn't as brilliant as Copland or Barber, but she was every bit the equal of the rest of them - Cowell, Piston, Sessions, Harris, Hanson, Thomson and Thompson (yes, there were two of them, just like in Tintin). These are all (well, except Sessions) composers I like a lot, and Price's symphonies, concertos, and chamber music are just as appealing.

And since then, the list of great women composers has only grown. Can there be any doubt that it's greater opportunities for them to be trained and get performed and learn thereby that has been responsible? When I list the great composers of today, more than half of them are women. Caroline Shaw, Anna Clyne, Jennifer Higdon, Gabriela Lena Frank, Lera Auerbach, Jessie Montgomery, Missy Mazzoli, and more; even lesser-knwon ones like Belinda Reynolds and Stefania de Kenessey, not to mention deceased 20C composers like Price and Grazyna Bacewicz, Galina Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidulina. Women's talent is out there, and always was; it just didn't get the chance to express itself. Blame the more virulent sexism of the past, not any lack of female genius.

My new credit card came yesterday. This was slightly unexpected because the old one doesn't expire for two months. It was also noteworthy, because this is the card I use for all my online transactions, including recurring charges. That meant I had to go online and update them all, with the new expiration date and (where they stored it) the 3-digit thingie that supplements the card number for verification. (While the card number stays the same, the 3-digit thingie - I forget what it's called - changes with each reissue, but fortunately my new one is memorizable.)

And that proved a bit of a challenge. I don't keep a list of the recurring charges, but since they are recurring I can find them on my bill. First stop was my web and e-mail hosting service; that was pretty easy. The next one was unrelated to it, but I found it had somehow picked the change up from the web service.

After that, however, came a bunch where I was dashed if I could find the page to make a credit card change on. If I did eventually stumble on the page of links that included it, it was easily identifiable, but stumbling upon that page was a doozy. At one site I typed in a help search box "how do I update my credit card" and it instructed me to find the link on a particular page, but it didn't say how to find that page. Typing a query on how to find that page produced no useful results.

Then there was my gym membership, which I don't use any more. I was just going to let it run out with the credit card, but I decided to try to contact them online or by phone. Ha-ha, you can't do that, though the online instructions say you can. The phone number, which the online system assures you can reach membership services, asks for your member number, confirms this, and then says goodbye and hangs up. It says elsewhere you can visit your local club. Well, ha-ha, my local club has been closed - news to me, but I told you I didn't use it any more. My membership was only good there, so I doubt I can get anything done at some other outlet. Maybe I'll just let it run out with the credit card - assuming it hasn't picked up the update, but I don't have an online account there, so I can't check.