Yup. Like some of us have asked - does it matter?

Males and females are currently composing music and doing just about everything else in the creative arts. Whether one is "better" than the other can only be an opinion. There are enough male composers whom convention and orthodoxy claim are "better" than other male composers, but that's all it is: convention, fashion; and only partially concerns competence. So what use claiming that, because tradition hasn't favoured creative females at all well, that they make inferior composers compared with men?

Pointless.

Artemis

You say:
One has only to Google something like "Differences between men and womens brains" to see that there is a lot of material on this broad subject. I confess that I haven't bothered studying any of it but I don't think it's ridiculous to suggest that men and women (in general) do have comparative advantages in certain activities.

Reply:
I agree entirely and my original post said just that.
I had hoped this would lead to open discussion but instead it drew vitriolic attacks. Proof that the Brains are different exists but not all scientists agree on what this leads to, it is still being researched, As far as I know investigation that, music composition may be one of these differences has not been made so I can not give proof,


You say:
Andante seems to be suggesting that there is such evidence but he hasn't identified it, despite repeated requests to do so.
Reply:
Again, I have not made this claim, I have suggested (that composition may be one of them)


You say:
This suggests that Andante is aware of research which has identified differences between mens' and womens' capabilities in certain areas, but that he is merely adding his personal opinion that some aspects of classical music is one example, even though there is no specific research to support that view.
Reply:
Exactly, at last, why is it so difficult for others to grasp the meaning
So: there are some things that either sex is just plain better at doing compared to their opposites, I feel that composition may be one of them.

I am happy to discuss this rationally but I am not prepared to get any further into a personal slanging exchange with any one.

Well done 99, Now, a nice cuppa, two sugars, chop chop.
Regards A.......

I merely tried to clarify your original comments which made sense to me, and I have watched with amazement the comments from one or two others who seem to want to turn this issue into a confrontation involving an indepth bio-medical review of all pertinent issues, when clearly this Forum is not suitable for that purpose.

Andante, you sensitive flower, it's not a 'vitriolic attack' to ask someone to source the evidence behind a controversial truth-claim. It's the meat and drink of rational debate. Stop being such a drama queen.

I'm having trouble with your sentence construction, but are you now saying there's been no scientific investigation into alleged male-female brain difference leading to composing and conducting incompetence in women? If so, that explains why you can't produce any evidence: it doesn't exist.

Moving swiftly on.... one area where women have moved into the conducting field is in the role of concertmaster - directing from the violin. An exponent is Rachel Podger, interviewed here. I've heard Simon Standage, Jaap Schroder and Sigiswald Kuijken fulfill the same role and La Podger does it just as well as them, if not better.

So, whatever brain scientists may or may not eventually come up with, it seems pretty clear already that female type humans can be just as good at both conducting and composing as male type humans. That is, there are already talented, successful women working in both fields, people who are respected and admired and enjoyed as much as any of their male colleagues.

Whether or not the playing field is level is a sociological question, and whether brain science ever has anything to say about that is an open question. (As it were!)

I sought one, tiny, solitary, itsy-bitsy url to a source - which Andante claimed exists - showing a possible link between alleged female musical incompetence, compared to men, traceable to the constitution of the female brain. Dear old Andante wriggled like ferret in a sack, moaned about 'vitriolic attacks', back-pedaled, erupted into blue ink and size 5 font, and laid down a smokescreen like the Battleship Potemkin; all because he didn't possess such a link, only prejudice, and was too stubborn to admit it.

That's not my fault, and I'm surprised you're amazed. What could be more normal than asking someone to source a controversial claim, made on a bulletin board devoted to online discussion? It would be ‘amazing’ if no one had done so.

Yes I realise this and was merely trying to show my appreciation, thank you.

In order to accept this statement, we have to avert our eyes from the giants in the collective living room of Classical Music. These giants have names, too- e.g.: Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Brahms... etc. The reality that no woman of parallel esteem has emerged is something we ought not ignore. Now, the original poster asked: "Has anybody wondered why there are few females in composing and conducting?" At this point, we form our decision tree. We can:

1) Reject the premise of the question- (saying something like "nonsense, boo-boo! There are all kinds of successful women who have emerged in both fields!")

2) Accept the premise of the question (I'd rather not tip-toe around those giants, myself). From this point, we have (roughly speaking) 4 options...
a) say that it's strictly sociological grounds that account* for the discrepency,
b) say that sociology and biology are both in play, but that sociological phenomema predominate.
c) acknowledge the role that sociology and biology play, but conclude that biology plays the greater role. (My position.)
d) assert that it's strictly biological grounds that are responsible for the state of affairs.

Now at this juncture in the narrative, someone should be howling for me to produce evidence for my conclusion. Again, I (like Andante) am not engaging in (to borrow one of Glenn Gould's felicitous turns-of-phrase) in "anything so grand as a THEORY, more like a speculative premise." Still, I'll offer my viewpoint, which is-- based on observation and sense experience-- the numerical disparities between men and women in the Art-music creation field are too great to be accounted for exclusively or even primarily on sociological grounds (e.g.: sexism, infertile environments for development, et al.)

Before I step away, I want to pre-emptively dispense with a "straw man." (Ol' Andante has had to deal with the "straw topiary." I guess by now, he knows what the authors of The Bell Curve must have felt like.)

I am not saying that women are incapable of composing good or even great music, and I'm not saying that women should be discouraged from pursuing composition. (I also believe that Judit Polgar should "keep on keeping on" in Chess, too.).

*Did I mention I love "Preview Post?" I discovered that, when I typed this word the first time, I used one too many "o"s. Well, I thought, better one too many than one too few. That would have been really bad.

This is a perfect thread. Each main political viewpoint is now represented:

Left-wing >>> Society is to blame!

Fence-sitting liberal >>> It's a mix of nature and nurture.

Right-wing >>> Bundle the laydeez back in the kitchen: it's their natural role!

Further to Chitown's interesting reaction 2 posts above, I think that "someguy" is saying that, after the removal of social constraints against female composers and conductors in recent times, women have shown that they can perform on a par with men in these activities. Hence, by inference, if these constraints had been removed centuries earlier, the classical music world may not have been dominated by male personnel in the manner referred to by Chitown.

I would say that undoubtedly there were strong social constraints conspiring against women composers and conductors in times gone by, despite the odd exception like Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn. Undoubtedly, too, there are probably many successful females active in these roles in present day. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that there would have been female challengers to match the mega-huge talent of the likes of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and several others, were it not for the social constraints of the time preventing the rise of women in the composing activity. In the absence of these constraints, maybe there would be have more good female composers, but whether they might have matched the greatness of the afore-mentioned composers is unclear.

I have no strong opinion on the relative importance of social or biological factors, and I would not wish to speculate either way. All I would say, however, is that even if it were true that there is some general biological advantage in favour of men in terms of classical music composition, it doesn’t rule out the possible emergence of a few rare cases of female supreme genius such as to match the quality of Beethoven et al, had there been no concurrent social constraints against this activity at the time. One will never know.

It is very reassuring that we are now getting some sensible posts.

For any one that is genuinely interested in the Male/Female Brain research this is a light hearted, simple, non technical article (6-8-06) based on the work of Louann Brizendine, A specialist in the neurobiology of male and female brains.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NG3HKAMVO1.DTL

There are many such articles and whereas Scientists do all agree 100% in the fact that there are many differences, the implications of these differences are still the subject of research.

Just for example a bit of Thursday night humour: A husband looking through the paper came upon a study that said women use more words than men.
Excited to prove to his wife that he had been right all along when he accused her of talking too much, he showed her the study results. It read "Men use about 15,000 words per day, but women use 30,000".
The wife thought for a while, then finally she said to her husband "It's because we have to repeat everything we say."
The husband said "What?"

What about male homosexuals? Tchaikovsky Bernstein etc. they pretty much had female brains...

What about female homosexuals?

Ahem.

One of the claims in the book which got the Brizendine much publicity - the old chesnut that women talk more than men - turned out:

(a) to be stolen from a self-help guru who

(b) had plucked the figure from the air and

(c) was provably wrong and

(d) Brizendine, with bright red face, was forced to withdraw the claim from subsequent editions of her book.

Hi , Chi_town/Philly
very interesting post (69), things have not changed much in that any one that dares put an opinion that goes slightly against the status quo or, today the PC brigade, faces the same reaction as poor old Galileo and heliocentrism.

Re The Bell Curve, I must admit I have not read it, perhaps the time has come. It is probably less acceptable now than it was in 1994?

The 20th centaury has produced quite a few composers that are well known and liked by the majority of music lovers here is a short list that comes to mind it is not complete by any means and I apologise for any that I have missed:
Arvo Pärt B 1935
John Taverner B 1944.
John Cage 1912-1992
Richard Strauss 1864-1949
Jean Sibelius 1865-1957
Maurice Ravel 1875-1937
Bela Bartok 1881-1945
Igor Stravinsky 1882-1971
Alban Berg 1883-1945
Aaron Copland 1900-1990
Dmitri Shostakovich 1906-1975
Benjamin Britten 1913-1976
Olivier Messiaen 1908-1992


The Female composers that I am aware of [but have no recordings of] that could be added but are not as well known or as popular are:

Alma Mahler (1879–1964)
Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979)
Avril Coleridge-Taylor (born 1903)
Gillian Whitehead (born 1941)
The fact that Female composers are not similarly represented is not in question, however the question remains, Why.