Classical music has a gender problem. Pick almost any metric, and classical music’s gender statistics are dire. Only 7.
5 per cent of orchestral music played worldwide is written by women. A 2022 study by the Independent Society of Musicians found that 66 per cent of respondents experienced discrimination working in music — 78 per cent of which was levelled at women, and 58 per cent of which was sexual harassment. Only 10 per cent of the highest-grossing films of 2023 had scores written by women.
The list goes on. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Classical musicians today are dealing with centuries of sexism that has kept women on the margins.
When wrote in A Room of One’s Own about the prejudices against creative women in 1929, she argued that musicians were in the worst position of all. In music more than in any other field, she wrote, the idea that “nothing could be expected of women intellectually” was still “active and poisonous in the extreme”. Those women who persevered found that their careers were bound by “wretched sex-considerations”, which composer and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth described as the “fashioning factor” of her life.
Such considerations included women being barred from composition classes based on the belief that they were biologically incapable of composition, or being prevented from learning particular instruments, especially brass, because they were thought too physically feeble. Over a century on, and classical music still.
