Symbolic gestures are important to Liza Lim. As one of Australia’s most in-demand composers, Lim is on a mission to lift women’s participation in the creation of music. And it starts with ignoring assumptions and claiming the right to occupy space.
Which is why, at her behest, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music commissioned a sculpture bust of Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, the First Nations soprano, composer, actor and newly appointed professor at the University of Sydney’s music faculty. Cheetham Fraillon’s bust is the first of a woman, and joins those of Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Peter Sculthorpe and two of Ludwig van Beethoven, on the shelves in the conservatorium library. Soon the group will be joined by two more: 12th-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen, one of the most recorded composers of liturgical music today; and the singer, songwriter and civil rights activist Nina Simone.
It’s what Lim calls “gift activism”.
“Students see this as soon as they come into the library,” she says. “There’s not just Beethoven, there is a woman at the power centre of knowledge … it’s normalising the presence of women in that space.”
In 2014 research by the musicologist Sally Macarthur found that although women’s participation in music composition at a tertiary level was climbing, only 11% of new works performed in 2013 by a collective of ensembles known as the New Music Network were by female composers. Five years later the number of female composers, sound artists and improvising performers in Australia was about 26%. But still very few women were obtaining commissions by orchestras, despite the fact that arguably Australia’s most internationally recognised composers – Lim, Mary Finsterer and Elena Kats-Chernin – are all women.
Jump forward five more years to the present and exactly half of the composers commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for its flagship new music program, 50 Fanfares, are women. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra will premiere 17 new Australian works in its 2023 season. More than half have been composed by women. In comparison, just four of 15 new MSO commissions in 2013 were composed by women.
The long-overdue equal representation in the Australian repertoire of the country’s two oldest and largest symphonic ensembles is part of a wider global trend in the wake of #MeToo, and a trickledown effect from proactive programs such as the Composing Women program Lim founded at the Con in 2017.
“It’s about changing the conversation,” the composer says. “To start saying, you know it’s pretty weird when there are no women around, recognising that absence is not normal. Demanding women’s presence – I think that’s one of the things that is actually making the change.”
Change has been brought about by the program’s focus on mentorship, as it lobbies for commissions and partnerships with a range of classical music organisations. If demanding quotas is one way of attaining gender equity, then so be it, says Lim: “If a quota is about who has the right to occupy a space, then men clearly are getting way more space – six to 30 times more – while the other half the population is being squeezed into this tiny, tiny corner.”
‘Men were much more likely to see it as a meritocracy’
In a 2017 survey of 159 Australian composers by RMIT University, the majority of respondents argued that who was commissioned and who was performed should be solely based on merit – but the composers who believed the system was already a meritocracy were overwhelmingly male.
The report’s co-author, RMIT associate professor Catherine Strong, said the research pointed to a “fundamental mismatch” between the sexes on how they viewed their profession.
“Men were much more likely to see it as a meritocracy, where women see gender bias,” she says. “If only women are seeing the problem, then it makes it all the more hard to fix.”
In the survey, 50% of the female respondents believed their gender had had a negative impact on their career, while only 1% of male respondents believed this to be a factor in their career.
“Even [male] composers who are willing to acknowledge and discuss gender inequality issues in the industry find it somewhat difficult to reconcile their understanding of this with their own involvement and beliefs about equality,” the report found.
Stereotypes about the differences between male and female compositional styles were also identified in the study – expressed by both sexes. Gendered exclusion, particularly in the field of film composition, was frequently justified by the argument that women wrote more “emotional” music while men produced more “aggressive” music.
The stereotype, says Strong, has become a double-edge sword.
“On the one hand, the idea of women fundamentally doing things differently to men is problematic … and can be used to keep women locked down,” she says.
“But on the other hand, some of the women we spoke to had found a way into the industry by working with women film-makers. This idea that if a woman film-maker is approaching the world in a slightly different way, a female musical voice might then complement that. Those are opportunities these women might not have had otherwise.”
‘It can be very difficult for women to break in’
Essentially, Strong says, it comes down to networking. “Men will hire their mates and look after each other, and it can be very difficult for women to break into those networks,” she said. This is compounded by the gendered nature of domestic responsibilities such as childcare.
“If a lot of work is handed out and connections made to people in social spaces, and you are somebody who … can’t go out to those social activities , then often you just get left out.”
Strong’s research was commissioned by Australia’s copyright management and collective agency, Apra Amcos, which responded by forming a mentorship program for women the following year. In 2021 the agency sifted through 380 applications for just 19 places for the three-month program. Applications for this year close on 24 March.
One of the program’s previous beneficiaries is Chiara Costanza, who composed music for Netflix’s adaptation of Heartbreak High and wrote the soundtrack for the Australian short film All These Creatures, which won the Short Film Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes film festival.
Costanza began her composing career almost a decade ago working out of a Melbourne studio and writing for advertising. She was one of only two women in the studio.
“I was very scared, very inexperienced,” Costanza says. “I had no idea what to do. I just came up with a plan and I followed the plan. And I worked really hard. I made a lot of music.”
Until the mentorship program, Costanza said she had worked in virtual isolation.
“It really helped me just to see what another woman was experiencing in the industry,” she says. “It definitely gave me more confidence and more reassurance that it’s possible as a woman to have this career.”
She does not believe she is good at networking but talks about the importance of finding “the right fit” with co-creators – something she found instantly with the Heartbreak High director Gracie Otto after meeting her at Cannes.
“I’ve just been very lucky to have met people that have really appreciated my work, and I’ve done the same to them,” she says. “Things just happen. You can’t force it.”
