Monday, May 29, 2017

What It's Like to Be a Female Composer

Powerful articles in New Music Box from composers Sarah Kirkland Snider and Emily Doolittle.

  • Candy Floss and Merry-Go-Rounds: Female Composers, Gendered Language, and Emotion, by Sarah Kirkland Snider. Read it and weep, and know also that men say this kind of garbage to women in all fields. Women have to put up with this in the sciences, in literature, in tech, in the arts, basically everywhere, from teachers, peers, and people who might commission a new work from you, buy your new novel, and so on. And you can bet that Eric Whitacre never hears this kind of thing these days (I own that it's possible his musical language has gotten criticism).
  • Composing and Motherhood, by Emily Doolittle. How you get treated, how the structure of academic music works against mothers, what might be done to level the field more. 

2 comments:

Elaine Fine said...

Thanks for linking to these, Lisa. The struggle continues, but I find it particularly disheartening to read about the experiences of these young women. I really thought that one day we would rise towards equality. Yeah. Right.

Lisa Hirsch said...

It is incredibly depressing.