| Popis: |
While women have long been acknowledged as great interpreters of music, the field of composition has been traditionally dominated by men. Through a conspiracy of silence on the part of music historians,1 coupled with the gender-biased writings of philosophers and music critics of the past2 and of psychologists both past and present, the age-old myth has been perpetuated that the gift of musical creativity is granted only to males. Yet, despite their invisibility, women have been active as composers throughout the entire history of Western art music, frequently producing works of lasting significance. This article examines the various theories put forth by psychologists to explain the "historically poor showing" of women composers and discusses the challenge that such theories present to music education. Havelock Ellis was the first psychologist to attempt a "scientific" explanation for the dearth of important female composers. In Man and Woman, first published in 1894, he wrote: "Music is at once the most emotional and the most severely abstract of the arts. There is no art to which women have been more widely attracted and there is no art in which they have shown themselves more helpless."3 According to Ellis, genius was less often manifested in females than in males, and this accounted for woman's relative lack of success in composition. Ellis further claimed that the unequal distribution of genius between the sexes was biologically based. He explained: "Genius is more common among men by virtue of the same general tendency by which idiocy is more common among men. The two facts are but two aspects of a larger zoological fact-the larger variational range of the male.... This is an organic tendency which no higher education can eradicate. 4 Although Ellis and his followers called their theory the variability hypothesis, it is hardly surprising that some writers have dubbed it "the mediocrity of women hypothesis." Recent evaluations of the relevant data have yielded little support for the hypothesis.5 Nonetheless, the idea that males are both more clever and more stupid than females persists.6 |
