Phew… what a semester. It has surely been a whirlwind. There is so much that I have learned in this class, but one theme tended to permeate particularly two of my favorite writing assignments: gender.
I thoroughly enjoyed writing my paper about Marcelle Meyer, a brilliant French pianist. The more and more I couldn’t find, the more and more fascinated I became with her and her career. It is simply a fact that she was a renowned pianist in the 1920s and beyond, but finding details about this fact came with many obstacles, and ultimately, holes. The more I couldn’t find, the more I realized that this has been a trend for decades: a lack of scholarship pertaining to important women musicians, patrons, and performers. These women that we studied like Boulanger and Polignac were collaborators at heart, fully invested in their social and musical networks. These women knew how to get involved in many different spheres, yet used settings like the salon to introduce and feature various works. They did not mess around, and Meyer was the same way. Yet, these powerhouses were still referred to as for example a “musical midwife”3 and “social housekeepers”2… I mean, come on! Even modern-day scholars can’t stay away from the whole domestic stereotypes of women at that time. Though Will Robin argued that Boulanger was more than a teacher, I argue that he still, like other scholars, did not do her justice. Researching Marcelle Meyer made me realize that we may never know the true significance of these women because of lack of scholarship or mis/under-representation.
My third paper about Germaine Tailleferre had me reflecting on the same themes, particularly when it came to being singled out based on her sex. She was a bit easier to study, but I found it very hard to find articles and sections of books that didn’t attribute her success to either Les Six or other composers and patrons. Our class discussion on her really shed light on my paper about her Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano. When looking into the actuality of her career in the early 1920s, it was hard to pull apart the bias from the actual fact when it came to her being a woman in a male-dominated music world. This quote appropriately reveals this struggle:
“Her talent is frail, certain charm and cleverness in what she writes that is feminine, inclusion in the group must be attributed to a fine enthusiasm for the sex on the part of the 5 male members”1
Though she was cited a lot more than a Marcelle Meyer, she was still more often than not clumped with Les Six as the “token woman.” It is a sad lens to view the marvelous Germaine Taillferre, but it is a reality that I learned over the course of the semester that we must learn to accept and properly analyze.
From nationalism to gender and sexuality, we touched on numerous aspects of music in 1920s Paris. But, specifically in my first and third papers, I had a lot of time to dig deep and reflect on the theme of gender. This theme reveals the raw truth of what it was like being a woman musician in 1920s France. These women ignited the way in a time when it was, in many ways, harder to be fully acknowledged as both a woman and musician. It was empowering to research these amazing musicians, and I only wish I had the chance to talk to them face to face, asking what it really was like being a woman and musician in 1920s Paris.
Bibliography:
1 Kiri Heel, “Germaine Tailleferre Beyond Les Six: Gynocentrism and Le Marchand d’Oiseaux and the Six Chansons Françaises,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 2011, pp. 74-85
2 Ralph Locke and Cyrilla Barr, “Introduction: Music Patronage as a ‘Female-Centered Cultural Process,” in Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860, ed. Ralph Locke and Cyrilla Barr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1-15.
3 Will Robin, “She Was Music’s Greatest Teacher, And Much More,” New York Times, July 30, 2021