Bending opera’s gender bias
For too long, composers like Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn, Lili and Nadia Boulanger, Florence Price, Cecile Chaminade, and Pauline Viardot were more likely to be encountered in textbooks rather than on concert playbills. As perceptions in the classical music world begin to shift, their works have increasingly been programmed. Such an embrace of a long-neglected history rebalances the so-called canon, a process now gradually being extended to contemporary creation with composers like Missy Mazzoli, Laura Kaminsky, and Jennifer Higdon gaining a more regular presence on classical, opera and dance stages.
Change, however, comes slowly. For instance, when Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin was presented at Metropolitan Opera in 2016, it was the first female-penned opera presented there since Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald in 1903.
Various initiatives have been organized to hasten change and encourage greater diversity in opera. Discovery Grants through Opera America invite proposals and offer up to $15,000 for female and female-identifying composers. As well as supporting the creation of new work, grant recipients have the opportunity to network through meetings, conferences, and connections to leaders in the field. This year’s recipients (seven in total) treat a variety of subjects and inspirations; one is based on the life and work of Mexican icon Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a 17th-century nun and poet, while another is inspired by the letters and archives of American painter Morris Graves. The Luna Composition Lab, run by the Kaufman Music Center in New York City, is a one-year program providing mentorship and performance opportunities to female-identifying, non-binary, and gender non-conforming composers, noting on its website that female composers “continue to make up the small minority of professional composers who are consistently performed, recorded and celebrated. We experience
