By Janelle Gelfand / The Cincinnati Enquirer

The Amernet String Quartet (from left) Misha Vitenson, Marcia Littley, Michael Klotz and Javier Arias will perform a string quartet by Germaine Tailleferre Sunday at Northern Kentucky University's Greaves Hall. | ZOOM |

This is the last in a four-part series on blending Western classical music with other cultures.

She was considered an oddity.

When Leopold Stokowski conducted Germaine Tailleferre's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Carnegie Hall in 1925, critics dwelled more on her pretty face than on her music. Tailleferre was the only woman in a group known as Les Six. But - a woman composer?

"One thing is certain, after beholding Mlle. Tailleferre last night and remembering the portraits of the Six, whatever the talents of the others, she is decidedly the best looking," wrote American composer and critic Deems Taylor in the New York World.

Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Strauss, Bartok, Shostakovich, Mahler, Stravinsky, Verdi, Puccini, John Adams, Aaron Copland - these are some composers heard frequently on programs in America today. Are there good women composers, too?

Javier Arias, cellist in the Amernet Quartet, thinks so.

"One of the things I like about (Tailleferre's) writing is the economy of the way she uses sounds," he says. "It sounds very French. It's to the point, concise, well written, light and charming. Each movement has a defined, beautiful character. It's a work that, in my opinion, should be added to the repertoire that quartets play."

The Amernet String Quartet will perform Tailleferre's String Quartet, 3 p.m. Sunday in Greaves Concert Hall at Northern Kentucky University.

The average musician could probably name 19th-century composers Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn or Amy Beach. Although women have composed throughout history, only recently has their work has been recognized. The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers (W.W. Norton & Co.; $45) lists 875 women composers of Western classical music - from the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen to Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

That's a small representation. The actual number never may be known. Until recently, women were left out of music history textbooks, off concert programs and out of record bins.

"We have a catalog of 2,500 composers, and I'm hard-pressed to find anything by other than a European white male," says Rebecca Davis, publicity and promotions manager for Naxos, an independent classical record label. "It's a world that's very closed to women. I don't know that it's a problem of the record companies. I don't think women are encouraged to be composers, as much as men. You have women who play the violin and flute and piano, but you never see women as composers and conductors."

IF YOU GO

What: Amernet String Quartet; Paul Kreider, baritone When: 3 p.m. Sunday Where: Greaves Concert Hall, Northern Kentucky University The program: Turina, La Oracion del Torero; Germaine Tailleferre, String Quartet; Samuel Barber, Dover Beach for voice and string quartet; Mendelssohn, Quartet in D Major, Op. 44 No. 1. Admission: Free. (859) 572-6399

Women, of course, have been composing all along.

In May, Naxos will release a disc of orchestral music by American composer Mrs. Beach, performed by the Nashville Symphony. Also coming are discs of music by Clara Rogers (1844-1931) and Wisconsin native Gloria Coates, 64.

In fact, many women are recognized as the best composers writing music today. Joan Tower's 1987 Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, for example, has been played by more than 200 ensembles. Other composers of note are the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ms. Zwilich and Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who just won the University of Louisville's prestigious Grawemeyer Award for her exquisite opera, L'amour de loin.

It's difficult to hear live performances of works composed by women, and it's getting worse, says Libby Larsen, 52, one of America's most prolific and most performed composers and one of the few who gets regular commissions.

"The mark of a successful composer is that they can stay alive through commissions," says Catherine Roma, director of MUSE, Cincinnati Women's Choir. Ms. Roma made it her mission to commission women, from her first concert as a music student in 1974.

Why isn't it being programmed by symphony orchestras, chamber music societies and opera companies?

"This is an age-old question; not only in terms of women composers; but women film directors, artists (and others),"says American conductor Marin Alsop, 46, newly appointed music director of the Bournemouth (England) Symphony Orchestra. "Unfortunately, I think the ultra-conservative nature of the symphonic music industry contributes greatly to the lack of women being played in the concert hall. Generally women's music is ghettoized as well - somewhat like the music of black composers - and relegated to an all-woman festival."

Music by women does turn up occasionally. In 2000, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performed the Violin Concerto and Millennium Fantasy by Ms. Zwilich, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in music. In Dayton, Neal Gittleman, music director of the Dayton Philharmonic, champions music by women.

"Libby Larsen, Meira Warschauer, Lili Boulanger and Stefania de Kenessey are a few names that come to mind immediately," says Mr. Gittleman. He has pieces by Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, 71, and American Janike Vandervelde, 47,"in the pipeline" for future performances.

About music, not gender

It takes research and knowledge to discover this unknown body of music, and to figure out what might work on a concert program. Mr. Gittleman comes to women's music from a unique perspective: He studied with Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), the esteemed French teacher of several generations of composers, including Aaron Copland, Philip Glass and Quincy Jones.

Even though most of her students were men, Ms. Boulanger told Mr. Gittleman that gender did not matter when it came to whether music was good or bad.

"You were a composer or not. You were a good composer or not," Mr. Gittleman says. "But I think she knew that gender politics were a part of the musical politics of her day."

The most common assumption among conductors, orchestra managers, music critics and others in the music industry is that women have not written good music. Not one woman composer is featured in David Dubal's 2001 The Essential Canon of Classical Music (North Point Press; $40).

"The answer is, how do you know there aren't any good pieces?" says Karin Pendle, 63, a professor at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. She was among the country's first to teach a course on women in music and is editor of Women & Music: A History (Indiana University Press, Second Edition; $24.95 paperback).

"How many have you listened to? How many scores have you looked at? The problem is that people think a work gets into the canon just because it's a very high quality. There are other things, a good many political, that account even for works by male composers that show up again and again and again on programs."

Ms. Larsen agrees that the orchestra, opera and chamber music business is "suffocating" in our country because of one glaring omission: "It has no research and development mentality."

Lately, in the increasingly difficult climate for classical recordings, it's harder to sell a woman composer to a high-profile, high-volume company such as EMI or RCA Victor.

Composer Nancy Van de Vate, 72, who found it easier to practice her art in Europe than in this country, founded her own recording company, Vienna Modern Masters. "I am my own agent, publisher and recording company. I have first to compose the opera, then have it copied, find the money to do it, then do the proof-reading, publish it, then arrange a fully professional recording of it - all on virtually no money," she says.

Her opera, All Quiet on the Western Front, will be mounted in New York City Opera's "Showcasing American Operas" series April 28-May 9.

Ms. Alsop has recorded music by Ms. Tower and Ms. Larsen on the smaller label Koch International. It is great music, the kind that leaves one changed in a substantive way, she says.

"I have done music by (living composers) Joan Tower, Libby Larsen, Kaija Saariaho, Jennifer Higdon, Victoria Bond and many others, but I am still searching for that woman composer that truly speaks to me, personally, and that I feel compelled to champion, as I do with the music of Christopher Rouse or James MacMillan," she says.

Indeed, champions - conductors, performers or patrons - are what women composers need most, says Ms. Larsen. English conductor John Eliot Gardiner, a prolific recording artist, is the latest advocate for the music of Lili Boulanger (1893-1918), the younger sister of Nadia and the first woman to win the Prix de Rome in 1913.

It was only recently that composition was recognized as an "acceptable" occupation for a woman. Nineteenth-century German composer Felix Mendelssohn discouraged his talented sister Fanny from publishing her own compositions - and published some of her songs under his own name. Much of what has survived by women composers is in the realm of song or chamber music, because salon music was acceptable. Some composers' music was kept alive through amateur music clubs and ladies societies.

Recent increase

In this country, women began to be noticed as serious composers about a century ago, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered Mrs. Beach's Gaelic Symphony in 1897.

Today, the numbers of women learning to be composers are still in the minority. Still, says Mara Helmuth, 45, associate professor of composition and director of the electronic music lab at CCM, there are more women in composition - especially electronic music - than a decade ago.

"When I started doing this in '87, there were probably a couple of women at the international computer music conference," she says.

A Chicago native who grew up playing the piano, Dr. Helmuth chose computer music - a male-oriented field - because she was enthralled by the possibilities. She had few female role models, but American composer Pauline Oliveros, 70, a maverick in computer and experimental music, inspired her.

"When I took electronic music, it just seemed like it opened up the world of music for me," she says.

Ms. Larsen, former resident composer of the Minnesota Orchestra, has been composing for 32 years: operas, major orchestral works, chamber pieces and much more - "in order to communicate something about what it is like to be alive," she says.

Women composers have something to say, she says.

"In our world of instrumental `classical' music, we are missing out on most of the vigorous, truthful and passionately talented voices of our time," she says. "In not performing music composed by women, we have missed out entirely on what half of our population has to say to us through music."

E-mail jgelfand@enquirer.com