Courage & Sincerity & Art

What follows is a brief extract from the beginning and end of my recently accepted dissertation, which is actually mostly about women at London’s Royal College of Music in the 20s and 30s, if you can believe that. But I like this thread, so I thought I’d publish it here. Email me if you want to read the whole thing, or search my name on ProQuest.

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The two things women needed in the world to-day were courage and sincerity, and it seemed to her that co-education had a contribution to make towards that co-operation without which we should go on making a mess of things, but with which we may instead some day make the world of our dreams.

- “Some Impressions of Coeducation,” Hampshire Telegraph, 1 July 1938

On a Monday afternoon in late June of 1938, a meeting of the Petersfield Society of Women Citizens filled the small hall on the first floor of the Town Hall in Petersfield, Hampshire. Both the featured speaker and the moderator were women; given that the meeting fell during the workday, it seems likely that the audience was also mostly women. Mrs. Meier, the lecturer, was there to present “Some Impressions of Co-Education.” She was qualified to give these “impressions,” reported the Hampshire Telegraph, because she was the wife of F. A. Meier, the headmaster of the Bedales School. Bedales, founded in 1893 by John Haden Badley and his wife Amy Garrett Badley, became the first coeducational boarding school in England in 1898. The Badleys ran the school for over four decades; Haden Badley officially retired as headmaster in 1935.

Despite her comparatively short tenure at Bedales, Mrs. Meier “had lived all her life in the educational sphere,” wrote the paper’s anonymous reporter, and was equipped to present “an objective point of view” on the Bedales system of educating boys and girls together. Also present at the meeting was Amy Garrett Badley, who also shared “some interesting experiences and memories of the early days of Bedales.” Neither Mr. Badley nor Mr. Meier attended Mrs. Meier’s lecture. Following a brief summary of student life at Bedales, where “the two sexes do eat, work and play together,” Mrs. Meier offered her opinion that co-education could lead women to develop necessary “courage and sincerity.”

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Before I started thinking about this project nearly a decade ago, I struggled to see myself as anything but a skilled performer, a translator of notation to sound. One of the stickiest things anyone has ever said to me was “you’re an excellent mimic.” For years I wondered if that was a compliment or a criticism, and more often than not felt it was the latter. If I was just “an excellent mimic,” was I an artist? To be an artist is to create something new, surely. Teachers and coaches told me that my technique was great, but I should try to sound more like “me.” What I was missing, apparently, was courage and sincerity.

It took me until my thirties to understand that this entire way of thinking is and was completely absurd. Nothing I do, in my everyday life or as a musician, is free of external influence. Everything is derivative. When I play the viola, listeners hear me; and I am made up of thousands of hours of listening to my teachers, my peers, my father, and that one crackly CD transfer of Lillian Fuchs performing the Bach cello suites someone gave me in 2005. Perhaps this is why my hackles are so raised by discussions of originality and authenticity in music. Criticism of art so often hinges on these qualities. If art is original and authentic, then it is good. If it is not, it is lacking. Again, this construction strikes me as absurd, and its prevalence has pushed me to adopt the somewhat belligerent position that “is it good” is the wrong question to ask about any kind of art.

In 2021 I gave a paper on the 1934 death of composer Kalitha Dorothy Fox (1894– 1934) at Bangor University’s Women’s Work in Music Conference. At the end of my presentation, which focused on the intersection of the rising anti-noise movement and press coverage of Fox’s suicide, one attendee asked me a question I should have anticipated: “is her music any good?” I was totally unprepared to answer. “I like it,” I said. My memory of the rest of my response is a little muddled, but I think I also told the audience that Fox’s music sounds a bit like Rebecca Clarke’s (1886–1979), and that I thought Fox’s viola sonata would be a good preparatory piece for students who wanted to perform the more technically challenging Clarke sonata. And what would it have meant to the person asking the question if I said Fox’s music was “good”? If “good” to them implied “original,” then saying Fox’s music is “good” would be misleading. But maybe they meant “pleasant” – a subjective quality, certainly, but one I could pretty confidently affirm. Fox’s music is pleasant: mostly tonal, melodic, and adheres to familiar formal procedures. I do not think that most classically-trained musicians would say that Fox’s viola sonata is “good.” They might call it pleasant, or tuneful, or even worse, “charming.”

Those familiar with Clarke’s sonata might notice the similarities and compare them, likely to Fox’s detriment. To me this is especially ironic because the Clarke sonata is what led me to research Fox – and ultimately to this dissertation project. Violists love to talk about how we almost “lost” the Clarke sonata. Composed in 1919, it was rediscovered in the late seventies. At the time, Clarke was an elderly widow living in New York City; she had not published a composition in decades. A classical music radio host, planning a program to honor pianist Myra Hess (1890–1965), was informed that Clarke had played with Hess back in England before the second World War. He interviewed Clarke and discovered in the course of their conversation that Clarke was a composer. Just months later Clarke’s viola sonata was performed on the same radio program, igniting a “mini-revival” of her music.

When I first heard this story as an undergraduate I was enthralled. There must be more lost music out there, I reasoned; Clarke’s rediscovery was too coincidental. We could not rely on that kind of chance to uncover other lost music – we had to figure out why it had been forgotten, and where to find it. So I went looking, starting with the royal schools of music in the early twentieth century; the milieu that had produced Clarke. For my M.Mus thesis I analyzed a 1945 viola sonata by RAM-educated composer Pamela Harrison (1915–1990), and in my D.M.A. document I wrote about viola works by Ruth Gipps (1921–1999) and Kalitha Fox. Both projects feel in retrospect like the “compensatory history” that Gerda Lerner warned against forty years ago. Essentially, I was arguing that Harrison, Gipps, and Fox were important, and that the specific pieces I was championing should become part of the repertory canon because they are good.

I am not arguing any such thing about May Gilson, Helen Glatz, Grace Kirby, Agnes Arkell, or Shanti Seldon. Instead, I am simply acknowledging that these five women were composers. Even if I have no specific evidence of compositions by Gilson, Arkell, or Seldon, and limited examples of music by Glatz and Kirby, the Scholar Register tells me that at some point each one of them told the College Registrar “I am a composer.”