A university lecturer has criticised the lack of works by women composers in the Leaving Certificate music curriculum.
Laura Watson, of Maynooth University in Kildare, said the syllabus has an inherent sexist bias and failed to recognise women’s participation in the musical traditions it emphasised.
“One of the main faults of the senior-cycle music syllabus is that it distorts the truth of western music history — its silencing of women’s compositional voices is intellectually dishonest,” Dr Watson wrote in an article in The Journal of Music.
“Since the explosion of feminist musicology in the 1980s, researchers have rediscovered and documented the extensive past of women’s vital contributions to the evolution of western music . . . there is no justification for their continued exclusion from the curriculum,” she said.
No female composers are featured in the works which form an obligatory part of the syllabus at either ordinary or higher level. Two groups alternate every three years and include pieces from classical composers including Bach, Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Berlioz, as well as more modern composers such as Gerald Barry, Raymond Deane, John Lennon and Paul McCartney and Freddie Mercury and Queen.
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“No woman features in this roll-call of musicians — not from the centuries-long classical tradition, nor the current Irish scene, nor the world of twentieth-century popular music,” Dr Watson said.
Dr Watson said women fared slightly better in the “listening” strand of the exam relating to Irish traditional music and aural skills, where the work of artists including Máire Breathnach, Siobhán Breathnach, Sharon Shannon, Altan and Clannad were featured.
However, she criticised the fact that there were only two female-authored songs — by Enya and María Grever — “buried” in six pages of classical, traditional and popular material recommended to develop students’ aural skills.
Dr Watson acknowledged that many female composers, such as Hildegard of Bingen, Francesca Caccini, Fanny Mendelssohn and Rebecca Clarke, might not be familiar to casual listeners but stressed that their role had been recognised by academics for over 30 years.
She said she accepted that there might have been some basis for the paucity of female Irish composers on the curriculum when it was first designed in the mid-1990s, but said there was no excuse for not having any now, citing Jane O’Leary, Gráinne Mulvey, Jennifer Walshe, Elaine Agnew, Linda Buckley and Anne-Marie O’Farrell as composers with a profile and output to warrant inclusion. Many of these artists had their work featured regularly on Lyric FM and in performances at the National Concert Hall, she said.
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She argued that the worst omission of female musicians occurred in popular music, saying that artists such as Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Patti Smith and Kate Bush were eminently suitable for a place on the syllabus. She described the gendered misrepresentation of Irish composers as “especially egregious” given that twice as many female students sat the Leaving Certificate music exam as their male counterparts.
The Department of Education redesigned the music syllabus in the mid-1990s to address the low participation rate of boys.
“Regardless of these intentions, music remains a subject predominantly studied by female students who deserve better than the wholesale, wholly inaccurate erasure of their sex,” Dr Watson said.
She expressed concern that music students would be unlikely to discover female composers as role models without the explicit will to ensure their presence on the syllabus by educational authorities.
“Further revision of the ‘listening’ strand of the Leaving Certificate music syllabus is long overdue. Its white, male paradigm of western art music — and even popular music! — suffers from a troubling lack of gender and race diversity that must be addressed,” she said.
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In Britain, Jessy McCabe, 17, recently launched an online petition to increase the representation of women on the A-level music syllabus. The student said she was motivated to address the lack of female representation on the syllabus when she realised all of its 63 works were written by male composers.
“How can we expect girls to aspire to be composers and musicians if they don’t have the opportunity to learn of any role models,” she argued.
The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, which advises the minister for education on the curriculum for state exams in Ireland, was unable to provide a spokesperson to comment on the issues raised by Dr Watson. A spokesperson for Jan O’Sullivan, the minister for education, was unavailable for comment.