Promising progress?

A birds-eye view on women at the BBC Proms

What would a classical music summer be without a healthy dose of commentary about the BBC Proms programme? With a festival of this size, it’s impossible to please everybody. This year’s smorgasbord serves up over 80 concerts, featuring an impressive range of artists and composers. And yet we’ve still had the usual complaints that the programming is unambitious because ‘every politically correct box is safely ticked’ (a red-flag phrase if ever I heard one), and that the inclusion of pop music has exposed the BBC as being intent on ‘ruining the Proms’ (!) and sidelining ‘its remit as the nation’s custodian of high culture’ (!!!).

Unsurprisingly, I disagree with all of these — surely more diverse programming signals an increase in ambition, not a lack of it? The Proms have somehow limped on despite the inclusion of poisonous “pop” songs ever since the first season in 1895, so the lone Radio 1 Prom probably isn’t quite the vial of cyanide it’s made out to be. And doubling down on the decades-old, deeply problematic idea that classical music represents some pinnacle of culture that should be lauded above all others makes me want to weep.

A flagship festival like this carries a real burden of responsibility, which is why it prompts such debate every year. It has the potential to be a leader for national programming, not just a barometer of current opinion. And this makes scheduling impossibly difficult, because programmers have to juggle so many competing concerns. Of course there are always things that can be improved, tweaked, innovated, changed. So I’m not going to add another complaint about this year’s programme, because when I look at one of the metrics I care about — namely the representation of women composers — the Proms sound much more like I want it to than it did 20 years ago. In 2002 only 4 women had work performed. This year, there are nearly 30 women composers listed on the programme, ranging from Ethel Smyth and Florence Price to Missy Mazzoli and Aretha Franklin. Not only is there ample opportunity to hear new works by living composers, but the inclusion of historical women allows us to hear little-performed masterpieces, showing how much richer our musical life can be when we prioritise diverse programming.

BUT. But but but. When we put the 2022 Proms in historical perspective, the programme is less impressive than it first seems. Because another time the Proms included over 30 works by women was…1921. Let that sink in a moment. A century ago, the Proms included nearly the same number of works by women as they do today. In 2002, the Proms had significantly worse representation of women that it did in a year before TV, penicillin, microwaves, the NHS and minimum wage. Nor was 1921 a particularly unusual year. Precise numbers fluctuated, but women were a constant presence in the Proms season throughout the 1910s and 1920s.

You cannot be serious

I am. “Progress” on women’s representation has been far from linear. But the devil’s in the detail, so let’s jump into the specifics. Because we don’t just care about numbers. There are a couple of ways in which the 2022 programme represents significant progress on the 1920s. The playing time devoted to women in 2022 is radically higher than historical levels. For a start, there are entire Proms dedicated to women composers — Aretha Franklin gets her own Prom this year, as does Ethel Smyth with a performance of her opera The Wreckers. That kind of visibility matters, putting women at the centre of programming rather than throwing them in as an afterthought. And the representation of women of colour has also improved. The BBC lists Errollyn Wallen as the first Black woman to have her work performed at the Proms, in 1998. On this front 2022’s season might not be perfect or go far enough, but with the inclusion of composers such as Valerie Coleman, Eleanor Alberga, and Florence Price, it is at least crawling in the right direction.

So what was historical programming like? For a start, women composers have been included at the Proms since the very first season. In 1895, audiences would have been treated to a selection of pieces by composers whose names are very little-known now, including Ethel Barns, Liza Lehmann, Hope Temple (great name), and Maude Valérie White. But genre is also important here — nearly all of these pieces were songs. The early Proms blended warhorses of the classical repertoire with modern works and popular songs, and it was in the capacity of songwriters that women were usually included. So the cigar-smoking, velvet-clad audience of 1895 would have heard songs such as ‘The Devout Lover’ by White, and Lehmann’s ‘Irish Love Song’. Only Barns appeared as an instrumental composer, with a violin Mazurka.

Women appearing primarily as song composers was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allowed women to make a living as musicians. Lehmann and White were among the most successful song-writers of the Victorian period, to the extent that they both penned memoirs about their triumphs and travails as singers and composers. They were the unchallenged queens of the Proms for around thirty years, with their songs performed relatively continuously. But this kind of programming also perpetuated the belief that women were only capable of writing small-scale works, and were not “serious” composers — not helped by the fact that these songs often had such whimsical titles as ‘There are fairies at the bottom of our garden’, ‘Prince Charming’ and ‘Daddy’s Sweetheart’.

This explains why composers like Ethel Smyth were considered such a big deal. When she burst into the Proms in 1902, it was with an extract from her second opera, Der Wald. She happily bulldozed through the women-can’t-compose crowd with her ‘masculine and vigorous’ music, following up Der Wald with orchestral excerpts from her operas The Wreckers, The Boatswain’s Mate, Fête Galante and Entente Cordiale; her Concerto for Violin and Horn (first performed at the Proms in 1927); and her Mass, which was given its Proms premiere in 1930. And when Smyth began conducting her own works at the festival she became something of a celebrity guest, drawing crowds who came to see the famed composer take to the podium.

But Smyth wasn’t the only woman with substantial instrumental works at the Proms in the early 1900s. Ethel Barns’s Concertstück for Violin in D Minor Op. 20 was given its world premiere in 1907, with the composer herself playing the solo part. The London premieres of Cécile Chaminade’s Callirhoe suite and Concertino in D Major for Flute Op. 107 were in 1896 and 1906 respectively, and in 1926 even though the majority of works by women were songs, Smyth’s four (!) Proms appearances were complemented by Lamia by Dorothy Howell, Germaine Tailleferre’s Ballade, and Susan Spain-Dunk’s symphonic poem The Kentish Downs. And these are composers who all but disappeared from the Proms. Lamia was so popular at its 1919 premiere that it had to be repeated later in the season and became a perennial Proms favourite, but its last twentieth-century performance was in 1940, with brief resurrections in 2010 and 2019. The last time an orchestral work by Tailleferre was played at the Proms was 1937 (why?? I’m really baffled by this one because Tailleferre’s music is stunning, historically important, and much of it published; she seems like an obvious shoo-in for programmers looking to schedule more women), and Spain-Dunk’s last Proms outing was in 1927.

So what happened?

Statistically, the early twentieth century was something of a halcyon era for women composers at the Proms. This isn’t saying a great deal — the number of women included in a season usually hovered somewhere around 3-6%, and there were some years that were considerably worse than others. But they were at least present. If we turn to 1945 onwards, the numbers start to get very bleak indeed. Between 1945 and 1972, the highest number of women on a Proms programme was…two. Many years included no women composers at all. This didn’t change much between the 1970s and early 2000s. As Women in Music’s statistics show, it’s only since 2007 that any consistent progress has been made.

There are a number of coinciding factors that made the second half of the twentieth century so dire. The first was the demise of the popular song. As Proms programming changed throughout the century to become more focused on showcasing “great works” rather than providing an informal concert setting with programmes that blended classical, modern, and popular, the quantity of pieces by women rapidly decreased. Composers like White, Lehmann, and Teresa del Riego were phased out by the 1930s. In this respect the 2022 season looks much more like the Proms seasons of yesteryear, with several of the women represented being popular song composers. This could be interpreted as a return to harmful stereotypes about women’s composition, but from my perspective, women are and have been incredible songwriters — it has to be a good thing to celebrate that. It’s only problematic when women are presented as being limited exclusively to this genre.

The second factor is the aftermath of the Second World War. The World Wars were such seismic events with far-reaching consequences that it’s impossible to make quick generalisations about how they impacted on British society. This is as true for women’s rights as anything else. They brought improvements in some ways, but they also reinforced gender stereotypes and resulted in a post-war focus on raising the nation’s birth rate. Women hired during the war were often expected to give up their jobs when men returned from the Front, and in some cases they wanted to. Practically, the war also reduced resources, meaning that premieres of any kind were deprioritised. The 1940 world premiere of Howell’s Three Divertissements was cancelled due to bombing, for example, and was never rescheduled.

Then there’s also the rise of modernism. When we look at the composers programmed in the second half of the century, they all embraced modernism — Elizabeth Maconchy, Elisabeth Lutyens, Grace Williams, Phyllis Tate, and Thea Musgrave were among the very few who had works scheduled. Stylistically, this excluded many women composing orchestral works in the latter half of the century, such as Ruth Gipps, Avril Coleridge-Taylor, and Antoinette Kirkwood (of these three, only Gipps has ever had a work performed at the Proms). And it meant that a lot of works that had been popular in the early twentieth century became distinctly unfashionable. As a contemporary composer, Howell sounded fresh in the 1920s. But by the 1960s it was much harder for her style to find sympathetic ears among critics and programmers.

Nevertheless, while large societal trends like this tells us a great deal, they’re not the whole story. And it can displace responsibility from individuals. Something that stands out glaringly in the Proms data is that one individual can make a difference — good or bad. It matters who is at the helm. Henry Wood conducted the Proms from its first year until his death in 1944. Contrary to the prevailing attitudes of his day, Wood believed that musical talent was not gender-dependent. He kept an open mind, and while he hardly went for 50-50 gender balance, under his leadership the Proms gave a limited platform to both women composers and performers. Some of the most celebrated women performers of the day graced the Proms stage under Wood’s baton, and he was the first conductor to hire women into a professional British orchestra. He tried to commission an orchestral work from Rebecca Clarke and it was she who turned him down; likewise Howell rejected his offer to conduct her own works. Wood was a powerful gatekeeper who could have done much more to programme music by women — it’s not like women composers were amply represented during his years, particularly in the 1930s — but credit where it’s due.

After Wood died, women practically vanished from the Proms. And that’s a choice that no amount of broad cultural factors can excuse. You want modernist compositions? Women have written those. You want popular songs? Women have also written those. You want large-scale works of any style or time period? Guess what, women have also written those. But you have to choose to programme them.

Sexism was just as rife in the post-war period as it was in previous decades. Composers still had to deal with lamentable “criticism” that passed judgements like ‘there has always been an element of dryness about her music, and it doesn’t take an anti-feminist to suggest that it may have something to do with her sex’ (The Listener on Lutyens, 1966); that women’s music ‘has consistent weakness of inspiration that make certain psychological observations about the nature of female creativity inevitable’ (The Times, 1965); that ‘what persistently eludes [women] is the abstract creative ability to compose great music’ (The Daily Mail, 1971), or indeed that ‘the barriers to women becoming composers have been removed but they’re still celebrated for being women’ even when their music is ‘embarrassingly banal’, ‘bloody awful’ and ‘boring’ (The Spectator, 2015). And it shows in programmes. This is how expectations get set, barriers erected, and women excluded.

So my feelings about this year’s Proms programme are pretty mixed. Women composers are better represented now than they have ever been historically — but that’s only because Proms programming remained stagnant or went backwards, if anything, in the latter half of the twentieth century. It’s taken a century to improve mildly on where the festival was in the 1920s; can we really count this as proper progress? There are still concerts in the season with no works by women at all, they’re still being received as a ‘politically correct’ box-ticking exercise, and Ethel Smyth is still responsible for a large amount of the play time occupied by women as she has been, on and off, for the last century. I love Smyth, but come on, she’s not the only good composer out there. Having said that, she is a good composer — it shouldn’t have taken Glyndebourne producing The Wreckers for ‘the world’s greatest classical music festival’ to take notice of her. (Given that Smyth has only had a couple of works at the Proms since the 1950s and there’s no big anniversary, I can only assume that Glyndebourne’s production is at least partly responsible for the abundance of Smyth this year.) So I’m excited to see what the 2023 Proms will do to lead, not reflect, choosing to make real progress that puts women at the heart of programming with the proper representation they deserve.

My thanks to Ben Knowles for helping me to compile historical Proms data. If you want to hear music by women at the Proms this year, check out the concerts featuring Ethel Smyth (The Wreckers, Concerto, and Mass), Doreen Carwithen (Bishop Rock, String Quartet No. 2, and ODTAA), Errollyn Wallen (world premiere of Lady Super Spy Adventurer, with Smyth and Clarke), Kaija Saariaho (Vista and Vers toi qui es si loin), Caroline Shaw, Hannah Eisendle, Grace Williams, Valerie Coleman, Sally Beamish, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Jessica Curry, Judith Weir, Aretha Franklin, Jennifer Walshe, Nicole Lizée, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Missy Mazzoli, and Betsy Jolas; the Dream Prom, CBeebies Prom, Music for Royal Occasions, and Cynthia Erivo’s Prom.