Ode To Discrimination

The author of a disturbing article in the Sept. 1 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is identified as follows:

The soprano Eileen Strempel is an assistant professor of fine arts in the College of Arts and Sciences and assistant to the dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. Her recent compact disc, Love Lies Bleeding (Centaur Records, 2003), was prepared with the composer Libby Larsen.

Soprano/Prof./Dean Strempel identifies what she thinks is a serious problem.

If classical music during the 20th and 21st centuries has become increasingly invisible, as reflected in such depressing tomes as Joseph Horowitz’s Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (Norton, 2005), then surely the contributions of female composers are so puny as to be nearly undetectable.

Discussions with her students revealed that they knew almost no contemporary female composers of classical music. And this, she notes, is not surprising.

According to data compiled by the National Association of Schools of Music, in 29 institutions reporting, 14 out of 73 composition doctoral students graduating in 2003-4 were women

Fortunately, Soprano/Prof./Dean Strempel has also identified a solution: universities should commission more works by women.

…. A lack of visible role models leads to a lack of students leads to a lack of future role models. Visibility implies viability. In the absence of anything near gender parity on current faculties — and with statistics pointing toward the same for the foreseeable future — we need to find other means to awaken and nurture women’s compositional talents.

Commissioning new work is one way to do that, and colleges and universities are well positioned to be the patrons, but that will require a shift in emphasis. Academe has traditionally served as cultural protector and presenter, not institutional consumer. To commission a work is a powerful gesture, an act of faith and support that encourages the creative life of the composer….

Well, yes. As I mentioned only yesterday, in another context, if you subsidize something you tend to get more of it.

Interestingly, Soprano/Prof./Dean Strempel’s solution to her problem is in essence a variation on a theme sung so well by Prof. Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady:

Why can’t a woman be more like a man?

….

Why can’t a woman be like me?

What Soprano/Prof./Dean Strempel is saying, in short, is that universities should give money to people more like me (or rather, her).

I can see some merit in this idea. Surely, for example, the intellectual life of the nation would be improved if some institution (a college or university would do nicely) decided to nurture the compositional talents of at least one or two aging redneck puppy-owning Southern Jews writing about discrimination….