Thinking on similar lines to my post the other day, a friend of mine wrote a post on her blog about the gender divide in film. A Curious Girl: Male bias in movies - why?
A friend and I spent a while last night trying to evaluate musicals using the same test. Quite a few passed (Wicked, The King and I, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins to name the ones I can remember) but many others didn't. What really struck me, however, is that we couldn't think of a single musical written or composed by a woman. Not one.
That made me think. In literature, there are many examples of female writers before the 20th century, from seventeenth-century poets and playwrites to nineteenth century novellists and social commentators. But there are far fewer female artists, and I couldn't even think of one female composer. Probably this had something to do with patronage- institutions for art and music wouldn't have allowed women members, and therefore it would have been harder for women to become known and attract patronage. But you would have thought there would be one or two.
Maybe I just don't have a good enough knowledge. Maybe there are some out there. Anyone know of any female classical composers (pre 1920's)? Or can anyone think of a musical written by a woman?
Not one? No, no, not one!
ReplyDeleteWinnie Holtzman wrote the Wicked lib.
Liza Lehmann wrote the score for two musicals, one called "Sergeant Brue" and the other called "The Vicar of Wakefield".
Marguerite Monnot wrote the score for "Irma La Douce", and others. (She also wrote a lot of the songs sung by Edith Piaf)
Lynn Ahrens is a lyricist, and did several musicals including Seussical the Musical.
Dee Shipman and Petula Clark (of Downtown fame!) wrote "Someone like you"
And the most known one I've found is Jeanine Tesori who composed songs for "Thoroughly Modern Millie", as well as composing "Violet", and "Shrek the Musical" (I didn't even know there was a musical!)
Courtesy of Wikipedia - although I did know about Winnie Holtzman already because I was so impressed at the roles in Wicked for women!
We've so got to write a musical. I'll get down to it.
You doing the music or the lib? :) I'll look forward to seing it!
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting, glad there are some. Thanks for the research! Still intersting that pretty much all the famous ones are by men, though.