Female Composers, Conductors, Performers: Musiciennes of Interwar France, 1919-1939

Laura Hamer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315451473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Drawing upon extensive archival research, interview material, and musical analysis, Female Composers, Conductors, Performers: Musiciennes of Interwar France, 1919–1939 presents an innovative study of women working as professional musicians in France between the two World Wars. Hamer positions the activities, achievements, and reception of women composers, conductors, and performers against a contemporary socio-political climate that was largely hostile to female professionalism. The musical styles and techniques of Marguerite Canal, Jeanne Leleu, Germaine Tailleferre, Yvonne Desportes, Elsa Barraine, and Claude Arrieu are discussed with reference to significant works dating from the interwar period. Hamer highlights the activities of Jane Evrard and her Orchestre féminin de Paris as well as the reception of the Orchestra of the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs de Musique, a contemporary pro-suffrage organisation that was dedicated to defending the collective interests of musiciennes and campaigning for their employment rights. Beyond women composers and conductors, Hamer also sheds light on female performers and their contribution to the interwar early music revival.

Part I
The contested boundaries of
interwar musiciennes

1 Conservative politics and domestic ideals

The social position of musiciennes in interwar France

The period directly following the First World War marked one of the most important steps forward in the history of women musicians. In contrast to the situation before the war – when women who wrote music had tended to concentrate on smaller musical genres, especially mélodies and piano miniatures, often aimed at the domestic market – female composers were able to benefit from greatly developed opportunities to write, to publish, and to have performed large-scale works. In France, the names of women composers, such as Germaine Tailleferre, Claude Arrieu, and Elsa Barraine, appeared on concert programmes with a greater frequency than ever before. Women performers, such as Marguerite Long, Yvonne Lefébure, and Ginette Neveu, were counted amongst the greatest international virtuosi artists of the age, and Jane Evrard and Nadia Boulanger both claimed their places upon the orchestral conductor’s podium. Despite these significant steps forward, however, a certain amount of gender inequality, particularly apparent in the biases which women composers continued to face from publishers and critics, remained.

The situation of musiciennes directly mirrors the wider gender struggles of interwar France; the 1920s and ’30s were decades marked by deep paradoxes and contradictions in the relationships between the sexes, which all had their origins in the pre-war years. Thus musiciennes functioned within a society in which gender roles were keenly contested. On the one hand, French women were expected to inhabit a narrowly confined social position, which was politically enforced by the government through a range of strategies intended to suppress their political rights, curb their public activities, and encourage them to embrace the traditional feminine roles of wife and mother. In addition to lack of suffrage, restrictive governmental policies towards women included their systematic exclusion from the workforce, and the prohibition of biological control – through the illegality of contraception and abortion – intended to compel them to have children. On the other hand, the birth rate remained low, many women remained in paid employment, and an increased number entered previously male-dominated professions such as medicine, law, and teaching. Although women were not able to vote, they could join political parties, be co-opted to positions as municipal councillors, and even become (non-elected) government ministers. In addition, women physically looked different after the First World War. Simplicity in dress, especially shorter skirts, had become normal during the conflict, due to the limited availability of fabrics, and this pattern did not reverse after the end of hostilities. Female hairstyles underwent a radical change, and short hair for women – known as the ‘bob’ – became popular. It also became socially acceptable for women to dye and curl their hair and to wear make-up in public.¹ The success that so many musiciennes achieved within interwar France provides further evidence that it was no more possible for the French government to turn the clock back to the pre-war era than it was for them to restore hemlines to their former length.

Contested boundaries: The legacy of the fin de siècle and the First World War

A strongly conservative trait in relation to women’s social and legal positions had marked French political life since the Revolution of 1789. Although universal suffrage had been granted to French men in the aftermath of the Revolution, the National Convention of Spring 1793 had declared that ‘children, the insane, minors, women, and prisoners, until their rehabilitation, will not be citizens’.² Thus, at a stroke, both suffrage and citizenship of the French Republic were denied to all women, who, even though adults, remained minors in the eyes of the law. Ironically, the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution actually led to upper-class French women being confined to a much more circumscribed space than that they had previously occupied. Under the Ancien régime, when any person’s status depended much more on social class and origins than on sex, aristocratic women of the nobility estate, especially the mistresses of the Bourbon kings (although few in number), had been able to wield significant political power and influence. Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), for example, played an active role in domestic affairs, court politics, and international diplomacy.³ The Revolution created a society in which all women equally lacked legal and political rights.

Throughout a century of political turbulence conservative attitudes towards women proved to be a rare constant, as women’s rights continued to be oppressed under the successive nineteenth-century regimes of the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte, the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, and into the Second Empire. Mid-nineteenth- century Republicans, again, firmly rejected the notion of citizenship for women. Repressive legislation on the press and women’s public meetings were finally eased in the 1860s.⁴ The 1860s and ’70s saw the emergence of the first women’s groups, including Léon Richer’s Ligue française pour le droit des femmes (hereafter LFDF) and Maria Deraimes’s Société pour l’amélioration du sort de la femme et la revendication de ses droits (hereafter Amélioration). Although the nineteenth-century suffrage movement was largely the concern of a relatively small number of women, concentrated in the Paris region, women’s groups published journals and, from 1878 onwards, organised national congresses.⁵ The development of the feminist press was aided considerably in 1897, when Marguerite Durand established a high quality, daily feminist newspaper, La Fronde.⁶ By 1914, feminist aims were clearly articulated: suffrage, access to education and careers, the abolition of paternal authority within marriage and the family, revision of the Civil Code to end the treatment of adult women as minors and allow them full civil rights, social legislation to ameliorate the situation of women (such as easier divorce and state childcare), and the elimination of the double standard of the criminal code.⁷

The development of feminism in fin-de-siècle France was complemented by the concurrent growth of the presence of women within the workforce. Before the First World War, women comprised almost one third of the French workforce, and their economic contribution to both their families and the state was essential. Amongst both industrial and agricultural working-class families it was common for all family members, including women and children, to work and to contribute to the family income. Large numbers of women were also employed in white-collar professions, especially teaching and secretarial work. Although the skill sets required to be hired as a secretary or factory worker differ dramatically to those required of a professional musician – which presumes a high level of musical talent, years of specialist Conservatoire-level training, and the ability to perform a wide variety of complex musical tasks in a pressured environment – the significant numbers of women in the workplace provides a wider employment backdrop to the activities of professional musiciennes and highlights the normality of working and professional women within fin-de-siècle French society. Indeed, as early as the 1890s contemporary commentators began to raise concerns about the emergence of a new type of woman (femme nouvelle), who was more independent and likely to embrace the new, simpler fashions and hairstyles, or, even, perhaps, the craze for cycling.⁸ Susan K. Foley has commented that the presence of these women in fin-de-siècle society ‘brought a strong reaction from all who feared the demise of the dependent and domestic woman’.⁹

Within the field of music, concerns about these new independent women (femmes nouvelles) were raised in 1912 by Emile Vuillermoz in an article mischievously titled ‘The Pink Peril’:

The development of feminism, predicted by sociologists as an economic necessity, continues with logic and method […] In a few years the face of the musical universe has been transformed. We see pretty attentive profiles leaning towards the music stands of our biggest orchestras, fine white hands tensing themselves on the fingerboards of violins and cellos […] After having slid one by one into the music desks of the ‘seconds’ at the Orchestre Colonne, they will soon monopolise everything and take the place of the principal violinist. More hard-working, more relentless than men, they will conquer in the examinations and the competitions. The Conservatoire, where they already have the majority, will become their personal property and the classes that we shall call ‘mixed’ will be those where we tolerate the presence of two or three moustache-wearers […] And in the director’s office […] Gabriel Fauré will have been chased from his armchair by Hélène Fleury or Nadia Boulanger …¹⁰

Although it is possible to determine a somewhat tongue-in- cheek literary style here, as Vuillermoz was, in fact, a known supporter of musiciennes, his comments highlight the significant inroads that women had made into the French musical profession before the First World War, whilst also hinting at some of the barriers that they continued to face. Vuillermoz’s remarks about women being admitted to the second desks of the violins and the cellos of the Orchestre Colonne are interesting. The majority of major, professional orchestras did not admit women into their ranks until during the Second World War, when the mandatory military conscription of men forced them to hire women to fill the empty desks. That one of Paris’s most prestigious orchestras accepted women instrumentalists by 1912 indicates that it was very progressive (in terms of opportunities for women) for the time. As so few professional orchestras would accept women players in the early twentieth century (the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, to take a notorious example, would not admit women players until 2003, nearly a century later!), gaining employment with this orchestra represented a very significant achievement for the individual women concerned. We also learn from Vuillermoz’s article, however, that these women were confined to the seconds. It would appear that although a limited number of female instrumentalists did gain employment with one of France’s premier orchestras, they had to content themselves with playing second fiddle to their male colleagues.

Vuillermoz’s prediction that women would soon overrun the Paris Conservatoire, meanwhile, highlights the well-developed educational opportunities that already existed for female music students before the First World War, whilst his references to women being ‘more hard-working’ than men and ‘conquering’ in the examinations and competitions intriguingly reflect more contemporary concerns about girls out-achieving boys. An investigation of the prizes awarded to candidates for the annual end-of- year examinations at the Paris Conservatoire in the years leading up to the First World War reveals that premier prix were regularly awarded to women in piano, harp, string instruments, singing, piano accompaniment, harmony, counterpoint, and fugue.¹¹ (It is worth recalling here that the prix awarded represented categories of award, rather than distinct prizes presented to particular individuals.) In his provocative assertion that Hélène Fleury or Nadia Boulanger would chase Gabriel Fauré out of the director’s office at the Paris Conservatoire, Vuillermoz was making direct reference to the fact that both women had recently been awarded a Deuxième Second Grand Prix de Rome: Fleury in 1904 and Boulanger in 1908. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of music examples
• Music examples: permissions
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• PART I The contested boundaries of interwar musiciennes
• PART II Women as composers
• PART III Women as performers
• Index