One thing I love about being a guitar teacher is seeing girls play the guitar. What I love even more is that the boys think it is perfectly natural to see a girl with a guitar. The truth is that the music industry has been pretty misogynistic since before the days of Bach.
In my music history classes, I don’t recall hearing much about women. Hildegard von Bingen and Clara Schumann, sure. Anyone else? Even they get downplayed.
Hildegard was a Nun who wrote music for church worship, not purely for performance, and Clara was just filling in for her husband, the guy who thought he could exercise his weakest finger by building his own finger bowflex. He permanently handicapped his fingers, and Clara had to perform all of his compositions for him. Sure, she became respected eventually, but if it hadn’t been for her husband, I’m not so sure she would have made it into the history books.
Even in our Modern Era, women are sadly missing from music history. It’s been 13 years since the first “Lilith Fair,” yet I still don’t think the guys at the Guitar Center believe I really play. It was really pretty common, when I was growing up, to only see guys with guitars. All of that is changing now. I see girls playing guitar all over the place. No one would ever dream of calling a girl unusual for playing the guitar these days. (Thank you Kathleen Hanna, Joan Jett, and Ani Difranco, just to name a few.) However. Every 10 -15 years, it seems to become noticeable to the pioneers that their work is being taken for granted.
All the baby boomer feminists teaching my college classes just couldn’t understand how we could take our freedoms for granted the way we did. I see younger female musicians now, and I also start to pick out the things that they are doing wrong. The thing that bothers me more than anything is advertising musical mistakes. When I see a new female musician on stage, it is almost guaranteed that at some point in the performance she will giggle and apologize for forgetting a chord, when really, no one in the room noticed. This is the fastest way to look like an amateur. Most likely, you are teaching your students to NOT do this, however, when they are out with their friends or perhaps performing at a coffeehouse, they may feel the pressure to cave, and it is up to us to teach them confidence.
Confidence is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL for a girl musician. When I see a girl make a mistake on stage and laugh at herself, I just cringe inside. I cringe for all those times I sat on a stage and tried to ignore the heckler in the back of the room and just play it tough like I didn’t care. I feel embarrassed for the time that jerky clarinet player sitting next to me in Music History class told me that guys just understand music better than girls. For the time my teacher revealed the most sacred of all performance secrets: “Just keep going and never let on that you messed up. They don’t know if you don’t tell them!”
Let’s make teaching confidence to girls a priority, especially the girls who are playing in the more male-dominated music styles like Rock and Roll and Jazz. I don’t believe we should shy away from the truth either. They need to know that there was once a time when they would not have even been allowed to perform to Mozart-sized audiences. Girls need to know that the pressure is greater on them, because there is a general assumption out there that girls don’t play the guitar as well as guys. I will leave you with a video of the band Heart that you can share with your girls. When this song first came out, everyone heard it on the radio and just assumed that a guy was playing the incredible guitar solo. How surprised were they during that first live appearance to see one of the Heart sisters jump onstage and go “crazy on her guitar.”
Thanks for sticking in there and showing that women have just as much place in music as men and sometimes more so. There’s a fantastic bass guitarist named Tal Wilkenfeld who plays with Jeff Beck, among many others. She made an album which to my mind is better than any bass player’s I’ve heard. She wrote the music – it’s sort of jazz fusion/hard to pigeonhole and it’s really fine. I think “Table for One” is a work of genius. The CD is called “Transformation” and if you like serious electric bass you couldn’t do better, in my opinion.
Don’t let anyone downplay Clara (Wieck) Schumann, either! She was a brilliant piano player with a career as a soloist that dwarfed that of her famous (and wonderful) husband. She was a far better pianist. She was the niece of Franz Liszt, a pianist who just scared the life out of other performers. Her career kind of put Robert in the position of “second fiddle” – I believe it was actually a problem for him. But he was completely in love with her and she inspired him to write many of his timeless songs. Though I believe he’s one of the greatest geniuses ever in classical music, his wife was his equal as a musician and I think he had to recognize that.
Then, too, don’t forget about Wolfgang Mozart’s sister “Nannerl” as the family called her. She was a brilliant pianist who played before Europe’s Kings and Queens with Wolfgang as a child. The times were punishingly hard on musicians then, and even Wolfgang barely made a career for himself – it wouldn’t have been imaginable for a woman to have had an instrumental career. That changed a little by the time of Clara Schumann but not much – and of course it’s still much harder for women to have non-singing careers. But there have been more and more women in classical music. Alicia de la Rocha the pianist, Nadia Boulanger the legendary Paris musician, Marilyn Ziffrin the composer and dozens of brilliant pianists from Europe, Asia and the Americas. In the modern musical world, Joni Mitchell is like a god to me as a singer and as a songwriter. It’s silly to argue that women are only great as singers, but in my mind the best singers in the history of the world have been women and the human voice is arguably the most beautiful instrument.
My own favorite musician and teacher was Jane Cowan, a Scottish classical cello master whose genius towers over that of any musician I have met. As a teacher she was so good that I can never explain it to anyone right. You had to be in the room with her to understand. All I can say is that she was passionate about every composer whose music she taught, and though there weren’t women among her personal favorite composers, I believe that Jane was able to teach people how to play classical music so magically precisely because she was on the exact same wavelength as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Purcell, Handel and all of those awesome musicians. In fact I came to love classical music through studying with her in a way that I couldn’t have imagined before. If the music she taught wasn’t as inspiring as any experience in life or death, she wasn’t interested. “BORING!” she would yell if any classical musician didn’t play Beethoven without passion. She believed that the only reason the entire world didn’t love her beloved composers was that classical musicians didn’t play it like they were honest to god ON FIRE.
Jane was like a pure genius (if there really is such a thing) whose teaching was a spiritual experience. No one who knew her would have cared to get in her way, and I can tell you that no one who knew her considered himself or herself even in Jane’s league. You were just amazed at your good luck in knowing her. It may be true that she was very opinionated, and as her student Steven Isserlis, a famous classical cellist, once said, “not for everyone.” But Jane’s music teaching, and she taught not just cello but the whole range of classical music, was a world of its own, and you improved as a musician just being in her house. Her husband and children were (are) amazing musicians too!
Now, you might think I am overstating the case, and maybe I am in a way, but in other ways I am probably not stating it strongly enough! Find someone who studied music with Jane Cowan and her family and I dare them to say differently.
So that’s what I think a woman can be in music, and I really don’t know if any man could do it or not.
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