An Interview with Chloe Knibbs
On feminism, Clara Schumann, and composing today
A couple of months ago I put up a post on Twitter for a chapter I’m writing, asking composers to share their work that they considered “feminist”. And the response was overwhelming. Composers shared pieces from operas to solo instrumental works, in a whole range of styles, tackling a whole host of different feminist issues.
One of the composers who got in contact was Chloe Knibbs, whose feminist compositions include Clara, a work for choir and harp ‘exploring the professional life of pianist and composer Clara Schumann’, and Ruins II, on ‘the relationship between women composers’ work, its perceived value and the factors that lead to it being eroded from our cultural memory.’ We spoke about her music, her relationship with historical women composers, and why she thinks it is important to create “feminist” work.
How do you feel about commissions to explore “women composers” — do you think of yourself as a woman composer?
I think I’ve changed my mind over the years. Sometimes you are aware that maybe, by being called a woman composer, you’re being placed in something that’s not assumed to be the mainstream. If you take that label on it’s almost as though you’re opting for that yourself as well. But there is something about it that seems to draw me. I think that’s because the way I have experienced it, people don’t really seem to acknowledge that women were active composers in the history of classical music. In a way I feel a desire to take on that term for myself, and then use that as a way of connecting with other women composers. I’ve heard it in so many musical contexts; the idea that women were actively musically creative is still a strange thing for some people. They can accept performing, they can accept teaching, but the idea of composition still seems to be really difficult.
Do you think there’s still resistance or prejudice towards women composers today?
I think it is still part of things, but maybe in a different way to historically. For me, there’s something about going to study and only ever being given examples of music by men. Obviously it’s problematic in a load of ways, because these men were often white and middle-class, so there are other issues of representation as well. The way I experienced it in relation to my music, was as people saying “you should write a bit like this male composer or that male composer”. I think that probably does impact on your thoughts about yourself more than you realise.
So had you not been introduced to women as historical role models or precedents at all?
I remember from my first year of university we were told that there were issues around why we didn’t talk about women composers, but that was as far as it went! I was lucky because when I was eighteen I went to Dartington and studied with Betsy Jolas for the week, who was an amazing composer who had been around in the thick of it. I felt quite bolstered by that, knowing that there were women from the past. But I hadn’t done any modules or courses with women in. That must impact how you think about your work. It has to.
When I went to the Birmingham Conservatoire to do my Masters, there were quite a few women coming to talk about their work. I liked it because I could finally choose who I resonated with, rather than just being excited to see any woman as a role model. Instead, I could think “I don’t resonate so much with her music, perhaps I resonate more with hers”, and it was nice to be able to make that differentiation.
How do you feel about women composer concerts?
I’ve just been part of Illuminate Women’s Music concert series last autumn, and there’s a strength in that. There’s a narrative about historical women that says there aren’t enough to fill concerts — but of course there are enough. There are thousands of concerts that have never happened that could have happened. So it’s quite bolstering as a woman composer to be in an all-woman environment, making concerts happen. But I think you need both women composer concerts and integration at the same time.
One thing that troubles me is the way we celebrate anniversaries of women composers. An anniversary for a male composer functions in a completely different way to an anniversary for a woman. Beethoven doesn’t need an anniversary to become better-known. But in Clara Schumann’s 200th anniversary year she got so much coverage; and then even though she’s one of the better-known names, interest died down after that year passed. It feels like there’s a pattern of behaviour where after their anniversary passes, that’s it. I wish that urgency and desire that we have around anniversaries was there all the time, and not just on Women’s Day. It feels like there’s only openness to women’s music in these moments.
Why drew you to Clara Schumann?
I was paired with the Ex Urbe choir through Adopt a Composer, a scheme where you’re paired with an amateur, or leisure-time, music group. They approached me, and said they’d really like to explore women composers in some way. I was only just out of my Masters at this point, and I had been thinking a lot about how women composers hadn’t really featured, and how I felt like there was something missing from my own practice and my own knowledge. So I was really up for it and thought it was a good pairing. I put together a playlist of ten women composers — quite a random mix — trying to give this choir a sense of the scope of women composers. They listened to the playlist and Clara was one of the composers they resonated well with. We found out about the Clara 200 anniversary, and thought it would be a good thing to explore.
What does Clara’s music mean to you?
To me it was interesting because she’d always been portrayed to me as a pianist, and as Robert’s wife. I had a vague understanding that she was interested in composition, and I knew that the roles of composer and performer were different in her lifetime. But I didn’t know much about her music until this project. Me making sense of her for the choir was how I discovered her music. I found it really interesting because I thought “This really is a composer here.” I was reading what she’d written about herself, and how she thought about things, and you can really hear that this is a composer trying to make sense of things around her but can’t quite get the emotional support to pursue it — whether that’s from herself or from her around her.
What was it like working so collaboratively — it sounds like a very hands-on process?
Some of it definitely was! My mentor Colin Riley came along to one of the workshops and said it was like I had brought a living museum of Clara to the choir. I brought pictures and diary entries and letters and we looked through them all as a group and picked what we resonated with. I think I was a bit biased in the process because I was quite keen to explore her professional life, because I’d so often heard things about her being a mother or a pianist or supporting her family, or even being the supposed lover of Brahms. That seemed to come up quite a lot when I talked about this work with other people. They were surprised I didn’t include any references to Brahms or Robert Schumann — but that was an active choice to center her rather than make those connections. There seems to be a desire to carry on including Robert as a big character in Clara’s narrative. But I got the sense that there was a part of Clara’s musical life that was completely Robert-free. I know she was obviously committed to him and his legacy, but there were moments, particularly when she was younger, that felt like when she was talking about composing, it was her space. Or, at least, I wanted to think about it that way, rather than her being dominated by Robert. It seems odd that he should have so much of her narrative.
The first movement is about the internal conflict Clara experienced as a composer. How did you explore that musically?
I came up with this idea of an internal conversation — I split the choir to make a double choir. I gave them two contrasting bits of material, both musically and in terms of the content. So when Clara is saying how much she loved composition, at the very same time she is saying women must not compose, it’s not really what they’re meant to do. I was trying to get that sense of how some of her diaries felt, where she’s flitting from one thought to another. It felt like she couldn’t quite settle with it. Sometimes when you read things you think “this really sounds like somebody else’s words that have become part of your thinking” — some of the stuff she says about women feels like something that’s she’s heard and has recycled. I wanted to get this idea of a dialogue going, and not really resolve it, because this was an ongoing thing for her that she had at the back of her mind. I wanted the piece to be a space for more questions, and to shine a light on a different side of things. The way she talks about her professional life felt very emotional and colourful and passionate, but that’s not something I’d seen much of in discussions about her. She was the wonderful virtuoso or the resilient lady who experienced so much tragedy — not so much about the fact that she loved what she was doing. I suppose this piece has to be a celebration of her life really.
Ruins is a quite different work. Why did you choose Clémence de Grandval, Marie Jaëll, and Augusta Holmès to respond to for this piece?
I had this vision of women’s music being left to fall apart, and I was thinking about how to make that an experience people see, to see the waste of it. That’s led my practice in to more electro-acoustic sound art — and I’m not sure if I’ve pulled it off yet! For this piece I got funding from Jerwood Arts, and got in touch with Daffodil Perspective who I knew from Twitter. At the time she was building up her practice and now she’s doing loads of wonderful things and it’s really exciting for her. I asked if we could spend some time together, and we spent two days in London.
I needed to find a group of women composers who I related to, who were also really active in their time, but that I had never heard of. That was my brief. I knew it existed, I knew there would be women who were super successful and had done amazing things that I hadn’t ever heard of. I was interested in the idea of them all being around at a similar time because I thought that would make the piece stronger and clearer. I grew up loving Debussy and Ravel, so I have a taste for that style. When she showed me these French composers — Clémence de Grandval, Marie Jaëll, and Augusta Holmès — maybe it’s because I grew up playing Debussy and Ravel that there was a bit of me that wanted a woman composer with that feel! I just kept thinking how it would have felt if sixteen-year-old me had been given a piece of Marie Jaëll, what that would have meant at the time. I think that was why I resonated with these three.
How did this sense of decay impact on the structure and content of this piece?
I don’t think I quite pulled it off, but I almost wanted to make it sound as though the music was going mouldy. When people see music on the page, it’s potential. But if those notes fade away we can’t hear it any more, it looks like something disgusting. For the beginning of the piece, I picked my favourite works by these women, or the moments that I thought the composers would have been really proud of. , Holmès’s symphonic work — it’s such a huge thing that she’s pulled off here! Surely she would have been very proud of this. So I placed that thing she was really proud of into what I saw as a system in which it gets forgotten and left.
Where do these works sit in the rest of your output?
Sometimes it bothers me because I think I’ve got so obsessed with this path, does it mean that my work isn’t about me any more? I did worry about that. But one thing I’ve been thinking about a lot, is how all of this is about me. I hadn’t really realised that until recently. All of this is about me making sense of what we’ve inherited. As a woman composer now, as I see it, there’s a cultural inheritance that’s a huge problem. We’ve inherited these myths [about the lack of women composers], these things that aren’t true, and they’re still part of your experience and existence. So I think it’s quite a key part of what I will end up doing, even though sometimes I still feel like I should have something that is separate to this to demonstrate that I can still compose “just as a composer”, not as a woman composer exploring a legacy.
So there’s still a feeling of a divide, that “absolute” music is still high status?
I think so yes. The orchestral work that is just the orchestral work is still quite impressive, I suppose. It feels like that’s the thing that will make people think you know what you’re doing. But there’s something about these projects that feels like I’m still exploring myself more than I realised through what I’m doing here.
What, if anything, does “feminism” mean to you?
For me it’s not so much about representing one woman or dealing with one woman’s legacy, so much as dealing with the legacy of a belief that women haven’t been creative. That’s what bothers me. It’s like saying women in the past haven’t had anything to say. So for me, challenging that is hugely feminist — showing that they actually had loads to say, and here it is, and here’s me almost trying to have a conversation with them a couple of hundred years later.
I almost feel a sense of responsibility as well, perhaps, because of how I grew up. I’ve met so many women who have told me that they discovered women composers quite surprisingly late, or that they’re only just dipping in to it — and these are women that want to compose! So for me there’s a sense of responsibility to try and create something that shifts this norm, so future women don’t have so much of this repetition. When you look through history there’s a pattern of renaissance for women composers and thinking they’re great after all, and then enthusiasm dies down again. With the work I’m making, it feels like making something that challenges that idea, to stop us from falling in to these patterns of surprise, of being shocked that women created and wanted to make things.
I sometimes wonder what it did to women writing at the time, thinking that their work might disappear after their death. They must have had a sense. Marie Jaëll, had so much self-doubt in her twenties and thirties, which I really related to, but towards the end of her life she just wrote loads of things, saying “Now I am really just going to compose”. If you read it through the lens of being erased, it’s almost as though she was trying to make as much as she could, trying to post it through to the future, in the hope that some of it could get through.
You can listen to ‘Clara’ via Chloe’s website.