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MUSIC: Beethoven's 5th Symphony in C Minor

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Traditionally, the story of Western classical music

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is told as one great male genius after another.

Across the centuries, many composers have been inspired by female singers

to write dazzling roles for women.

But what about works written by a female composer?

That's a different matter altogether.

I can count on the fingers of one hand

the ones that I've performed in.

I'm an opera singer who's studied and performed all over the world.

OPERATIC SINGING

And only now am I seeing female composers taken seriously.

Because the truth is that women,

despite facing all kinds of challenges, have always composed.

They've produced great works, like this one by Florence Price.

It's just that time has not been kind, or even

fair, in preserving their legacy.

So why is that?

From all the female composers over the past millennium, I've picked

five exceptional ones who helped shape Western musical history.

Women who had to fight to fulfil their ambitions

and overcome the obstacles that society placed in their way.

Through incredible talent...

By the time she was 20 years old she was a superstar.

..and dogged determination.

This was her piano and she would say occasionally

she would find herself like this, asleep on the keys.

It's a story that will take us

from the creative powerhouse of the medieval convent,

to the beauty and brutality of Florence's Medici court.

From conflicted sexual politics in the 19th century,

to blatant discrimination in the 20th.

Each of my composers found fame in her lifetime,

but then disappeared into obscurity.

Only some have gained recognition again.

All of them have stories that deserve to be told

and music that deserves to be heard.

In 1934, at London's Royal Albert Hall,

a birthday concert celebrated Dame Ethel Smyth,

one of the first women who had her music performed at the Proms.

Smyth, whose work is largely forgotten now,

once wrote, "The whole English attitude towards

"women in fields of art is ludicrous and uncivilised.

"How you compose is what matters."

Smyth was a passionate suffragette during the time

when women were campaigning for the right to vote.

She even wrote the movement's anthem, The March of the Women,

a song so well known that at a rally here at the Albert Hall in 1911,

the crowd burst into a spontaneous rendition of it.

# March, march, swing you along

# Wide blows our banner and hope is waking. #

So this is where Ethel Smyth conducted her rousing chorus,

March of the Women.

Yes, back in 1911, this hall would have been filled with people

supporting the suffragette and suffragist movement.

She had written the music. You can hear their voices now.

She was handed her baton by Emmeline Pankhurst, no less.

"I feel I must fight for my music", Smyth once said.

At every stage in a young girl's live,

there were barriers put in her way and the really sad thing is,

we don't know of the 99% of women who were silenced

early on in their careers, who had the talent,

had exceptional ability, but simply did not have access to

education, support and even when they do succeed

in writing music, then they don't have access to the

spaces for that music to be performed.

The composers who managed to surmount the numerous barriers -

how did they manage it?

There is a T-shirt that says something like, you know,

"Well-behaved women rarely make history."

So determination, I think, is the key quality of every woman

who continued to pursue her compositional career.

I think, also, a kind of sheer love of creation, of making that music.

All that is found in the story of Hildegard, who lived

here in the German town of Bingen in the 12th century,

and revolutionised her era's main musical form, religious song.

And her story shows how a composer's work

can disappear for centuries before attracting a new audience.

Hildegard is the very first composer in the history of Western music,

male or female, who we really know about. And what a composer she was.

For me, her music is genuinely spine-tingling,

and way ahead of its time.

Hildegard's soaring compositions anticipated polyphony,

the combination of melodies

in a single verse that became the foundation of Western music.

What's even more remarkable is that she achieved

all of this in an era when the church stuck rigidly to

St Paul's doctrine that women should remain silent in churches.

They weren't even allowed to join in with the singing.

They had to mime along.

BARITONE CLASSICAL SINGING

In a male-dominated society based on the Bible, Eve's role in the fall

from grace cast women as seductresses,

whose voices led men astray.

Instead of an arranged marriage,

Hildegard was placed in a convent by her parents when she was eight.

Ironically, nuns had more musical freedom than most other women.

You put them in a convent, they can sing as much as they like.

And, my God, there is some fabulous music.

They're safe, they're sequestered

and their music can take you to the divine.

Hildegard ended up running the convent and her own music was

inspired by a remarkable series of visions in 1141.

Can you tell us a little bit about these visions?

She says, "There, in my 43rd year, there was coming very

"brilliant, fury light out of heaven.

"And this light was flooding my mind."

And then she hears a heavenly voice and this voice commands,

"Tell and write down what you see and hear."

So contrary to our commonly held beliefs that people are very

restricted in the convent life,

Hildegard suddenly had an almost divine freedom to compose.

In every aspect, she was creating her own universe. A visionary.

A visionary universe. She is doing strange things in her monastery.

Nuns are standing in the choir,

they have open hair,

they wear golden crowns.

They have silk garments on.

She must have been aware that she was ahead of her time.

Yes, because you can easily hear and detect something, this is Hildegard.

Because she has a very, so to say, ecstatic language.

SOPRANO CLASSICAL SINGING

Over the next decade, Hildegard composed 77 musical pieces

sung by her nuns at religious ceremonies and, fortunately,

they were collected, along with her other writings, in illuminated

manuscripts like this one, dating from around 1150.

Until the Middle Ages, music was an oral tradition.

It was in monasteries

and convents like Hildegard's that scribes first wrote it down.

This is the only surviving volume of Hildegard's collected works

that she was directly involved in putting together.

It looks like a treasure trove.

These are individual sheets of music that were used to

sing from in Hildegard's abbey.

You can see here stains on the music.

Stitches, even, in the parchment.

Quite familiar to people who really get a lot of wear

and tear out of their music, like I do.

What a piece of history.

SOPRANO CLASSICAL SINGING

Translated from the Latin, Hildegard's language is not

what I'd expected from a woman closeted behind convent walls.

It's overflowing with exuberance and even sensual imagery.

Greenness and gardens, growth and fire.

And purity and womanhood.

BELL TOLLS

This Benedictine abbey near Bingen

is still run in Hildegard's name,

and the sisters here still sing

Hildegard's revolutionary compositions.

Back then, the musical rules - laid down by men, of course -

stressed simplicity and austerity.

But in Hildegard's far more expansive pieces, words and melodies

flow and work together, so I've come for a lesson in how to sing one.

# Caritas. #

That's all you need. It's not so easy. No, it is not.

I'm looking at what you're reading here and it looks very

different to the music I've grown up reading my whole life.

How can you describe what this is?

The most important thing is that you have sort of meditated the text.

We have in this music a very near connection between the text

and the melody. This connection gives

what you have to do with the melody.

Also, the accent of the word is important.

CA-ritas. CA-ritas.

And not Carit-AS. Of course. It's the accent from the Latin word.

# Ca-a-a-a... #

And then you have the flow from the first accent of this word.

And we have to consider here,

when you have two notes on the same level, you have to sing both.

You have to...

# Aa-aa-aa... # OK.

That's also important for the flow of the melody. OK.

# Caritas. #

Caritas means love. Yes.

And you will find in the Bible, "God is love."

And this is the image of God for Hildegard.

Abundat in omnia.

Which means flowing in everything. In everything. That's right.

MUSIC: Caritas by Hildegard von Bingen

Hildegard created a kind of republic of women within her

convent walls, united by shared musical experience.

We all know the emotional power of singing.

And we all know the emotional power of hearing other

voices around you and becoming part of a whole.

And you were singing music of the beauty at which Hildegard was

composing it, then you were part, in all senses, of something bigger.

Hildegard died in 1179 at the grand old age of 81.

Her remains are contained in a gold casket here at the parish

church of St Hildegard.

During her lifetime, Hildegard was something of a celebrity in Germany.

But over the centuries,

two male French monks called Adam of St Victor and Leonine

have been credited as the earliest identifiable composers.

The first mention in a reference book of Hildegard's music

only came in the late 20th century.

Then in 1983, a CD called A Feather on the Breath of God

brought her compositions to a much wider audience.

Albums of very early music didn't exactly fly off the shelves.

And so there was very little expectation for commercial success.

In fact, even the sound engineer had said, "Lovely music.

"Shame no-one will buy it." But boy, was he wrong!

Hildegard's music struck a chord with audiences

and that album sold over half a million copies.

Nearly 1,000 years since Hildegard composed it,

her music has been receiving the attention it deserves.

And I think she would have liked

some of the surprising ways it's been reinvented.

PERCUSSIVE AND METALLIC SOUNDS

Like this 2012 ambient album produced by Guy Sigsworth,

whose clients include Madonna and Bjork.

I didn't want this to be a kind of hair shirt, difficult, purist

classical record that would kind of scare people off.

Because to me, Hildegard's music has a kind of generosity,

a sort of ravishing luxury to it.

STRINGS RESONATE

And so I wanted to make sure that we were true to that.

# Caritas. #

Therefore, I wanted to find colours that you could complement

these beautiful rhapsodic melodies.

You're not taking liberties with the music.

You're discovering the liberties that are in the music.

And that's what I was trying to do with Hildegard.

My next composer lived here in the Italian

city of Florence in the 17th century.

Like Hildegard before her, Francesca Caccini lived in an era where

young women's choices were incredibly restricted.

If they don't get put into convents, then they will have to be married.

Because they cannot be respectable and autonomous if they're not.

Once they're married, that means becoming a breeding

cow for children. And there's no room for them

to have any kind of professional engagement in the world.

STRING MUSIC PLAYS

Yet Francesca Caccini managed to become one of her generation's

most successful composers. So how did she do it?

Hard work, determination,

incredible talent, of course,

played their part.

But Caccini was born lucky, too.

VIOLIN MUSIC PLAYS

In the 17th century,

a beautiful singing voice was much prized in Italian music

with composer Claudio Monteverdi in Venice

pioneering the new art form of opera.

And since the late 1500s,

Italian courts had allowed female servants to become paid singers.

Some of them began to compose, too.

RENAISSANCE CHORAL MUSIC

The Florentine court was ruled over

by the all-powerful Medici clan.

During the Renaissance, the Medicis were generous patrons of the arts.

But they governed Florence with an iron fist.

It was full of creativity and full of beauty.

But it was equally, I think, full of corruption and brutality.

You know, they may look civilised,

They may look cultured,

but if your daughter-in-law or your brother-in-law

causes trouble, there is a dungeon.

There is a prison.

RENAISSANCE CHORAL MUSIC

In 1607, 20-year-old Caccini found a place with the Medicis, whose

main residence was here at the Pitti Palace.

She was basically a servant, but a servant whose job was to sing

and compose music.

So here we are in the main palace of the Medicis.

So how did their court help the careers of female

artists like Caccini?

Well, first of all, we have to remember that Florence at that

time was one of the most important,

if not the most important city, in Italy, and perhaps in the world.

So this was like being in Hollywood.

How successful was Francesca Caccini as a singer and a composer?

She was probably the first diva in history.

She was a very talented girl.

She made her grand debut when she was 13-years-old and

by the time she was 20-years-old, she was a superstar here at court.

So what was working life like, day-to-day, for Francesca Caccini?

She was the main teacher in the palace.

And also she had to compose music on demand, you know.

She was commissioned music with very short notice.

Something like,

"Hey, hey, Francesca, we need a new piece for next week."

Caccini was incredibly prolific,

yet her music is not well known today.

To me, her songs feel very modern,

soulful and even bluesy.

I wanted to try singing one.

First sight reading but... We try. We try.

SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

Caccini, like all woman of her era,

lived under strict guidelines for virtuous behaviour.

"Her own singing voice..."

a contemporary Christopher Bronzini wrote,

"..had such stunning effects

"on her listeners that she changed them from what they had been."

A great compliment, but hazardous, too.

Florence's courtesans were notorious for singing that lured men into sin.

So song would be connected with Eve and the temptress.

RENAISSANCE SOPRANO SINGING

Perhaps this is why Bronzini was at pains to stress that

Caccini wasn't favoured by the gifts of nature.

In other words, she wasn't attractive.

Because women who had the whole package

were just way too threatening.

RESONANT STRING MUSIC

But Caccini thrived both as a singer and composer of

vocal and theatrical works.

The Medicis, who owned the rights to her music,

even paid for some of them to be published.

I've come to Florence's National Central Library to examine

an edition of Caccini's songs from 1618, when she was 31.

There are only three of these that survived

and this one I'm holding here is the best preserved of them.

The first thing that's so interesting about this is

that the biggest thing in the title

is the name of the Cardinale de Medici.

So you can see immediately, Francesca Caccini, you know,

had to play by the rules of the game.

But the songs can feel slightly subversive.

Like the piece I sang earlier.

This is a lament

that talks about...

..a burning desire.

SHE SINGS IN ITALIAN

There's a b natural.

Now, this note, this b natural,

is not a part of this key.

To me, sort of expresses, like, a spur of colour.

A spur of desire.

And in fact, the text that she chose to make this note

appear on is, "You can well see in my face my torment."

And, you know, I look at this text

and we've got a woman here who is

constrained by the rules of court life.

The phrase starts to expand as well,

to reflect this desire to reach out.

But, of course, she has to turn back...

..to her key, to her constraints.

LIVELY VIOLIN MUSIC

In 1621, the death of Grand Duke Cosimo II allowed

Caccini to write what is said to

be the first surviving opera by a woman.

Cosimo's son was only 11 and until he came of age, his mother,

the formidable Maria Maddalena, ruled the Medici court as regent.

You did get occasionally very powerful women.

We had Queen Elizabeth I in England.

In fact, at this time,

the Florentine court was entirely run by women.

And a lot of the opera really is justifying the fact that

women can rule.

LUTE MUSIC

Of course, this was done while being suitably pious and virtuous.

Though other operas written at the time featured remarkable women,

36-year-old Caccini's stands out for its celebration of female strength.

Melissa, a good sorceress, rescues Ruggiero,

a knight, from the clutches of an evil sorceress.

LUTE MUSIC CONTINUES

The real superhero of the story is Melissa.

And Melissa may well have been based on the character

of the archduchess herself, Maria Maddalena.

RENAISSANCE MUSIC PLAYS

The premiere of The Liberation of Ruggiero took place here,

at Maddalena's Villa di Poggio Imperiale.

Imagine the scene.

It's February 3rd 1625, the day of the Villa's grand opening,

and all the great and the good in Florentine society

are arriving in the carriages up a beautiful wide avenue.

The high point of the celebrations is the premiere of Caccini's

proto-opera.

It took place not inside, but in a loggia, an outside covered gallery.

ITALIAN OPERATIC SINGING

It's a major piece of music.

It's not just a little interesting piece because it's by a woman.

In the four centuries since,

performances of Caccini's opera have been rare.

This version, set in Edwardian Brighton,

is one of the first times it's been staged in Britain.

THEY SING IN ITALIAN

She was brought up singing concerted music for female voices.

That's the real characteristic of this opera that makes it glorious.

THEY SING IN ITALIAN

The whole moral of the story, at the end, which is

the final chorus, really, is that it's all right.

Women can rule, but men can still be men and women can still be women.

THEY SING IN ITALIAN

And I have heard rumours of other performances that might be mounted,

so if we've started something like that, then I'm totally thrilled.

APPLAUSE

SOFT STRING MUSIC

Not long after Caccini's death, around 1641,

the Age of Enlightenment began in Europe.

You might have thought this championing of reason

and liberty over dogma and tradition would help

transform the lives of women like my next composer, Clara Schumann.

But instead, their very ability to be creative was questioned.

The 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had

proclaimed, "Women in general possess

"no artistic sensibility nor genius.

"Their creations are as cold and pretty as women.

"They have an abundance of spirit but lack soul."

In Clara Schumann's time, there are plenty of men

and women who still believe that.

SOFT PIANO PLAYING

Clara was born Clara Weick here in Leipzig in 1819.

Piano works by German composers like Johann Sebastian Bach

and Ludwig van Beethoven were all the rage.

And Clara, like many middle and upper-class girls,

learned to play the piano.

Most just played for family and friends at home,

but Clara was a prodigy.

And her father Friedrich was what today we might call a Tiger Dad.

Mozart's piano concerts as a child half a century before had

left the public hungry for more -

even if the performer was a girl.

There was good money to be made, too,

as long as the stage image was suitably demure.

She needed to appear slightly melancholy,

the girl with the sad eyes.

A certain innocence tying in with that.

And it was cultivated really ruthlessly by the family,

whereas behind the scenes, Clara was actually quite feisty.

But women of this era were expected to keep feistiness under wraps.

In the 19th century, the piano was one of the very few

instruments considered acceptable for a woman to play.

And the reasoning for this has to do with the male

perception of the female body.

To start with, I'm sitting down,

so this would preserve my modesty, apparently.

Also, there are no rapid, unladylike movements.

Unlike the violin, which was considered very unsuitable,

all that head bending and rapid arm movements,

not to mention the frisson from the feminine-like curves

of the instrument itself.

And the cello?

Don't even go there.

Clara gave her first solo concert aged 11.

And by her mid-teens,

she'd become one of Europe's great concert pianists.

Mostly she performed other people's work,

but the custom was that pianists would also play some of their own.

And composing was often a joy for Clara, who once wrote,

"There's nothing that surpasses the joy of creation."

Clara's father encouraged her to compose.

It might not have been for the best of reasons,

but they were good, hard-headed commercial reasons.

He could put his daughter up there as not only the virtuoso of

her generation, but as somebody who could just write

a piano concerto at 15.

For decades, pianist Lucy Parham has championed

Clara's piano works, including that precocious piano concerto.

It starts like that and the piano has this beautiful long solo,

which was really unusual at that time.

It's so lyrical but it's also... It's got quite a lot of depth.

I imagine her as being a woman,

or a child at that point, who was

kept very much at home, you know, under the tutelage of her father.

So, really, music was the only way

she could let out all these feelings.

It's very beautiful, but then we've had the Annee,

and then she goes into all these flying, tense double thirds

and she's like, "Look what I can do, I'm really clever."

Clara draws on the passionate, tempestuous

music of 19th-century Romanticism.

This was rather radical,

as women were supposed to compose gentle, undemanding pieces.

And that's the opening. Gosh.

But there was a critic who said that if the name of the composer were not

in the title, one would never have known it was written by a woman.

And they were right. Because it's so full of passion and strength.

She was a strong woman.

Clara's father worried what would happen to her composing

when she married.

At the time, a wife's only priority was supposed to be her husband

and children.

And Freidrich wasn't happy

when Clara fell for one of his own students, Robert Schumann.

Robert would become one of the 19th century's greatest composers.

And his relationship with Clara is

one of music's great love affairs,

encoded in their compositions.

Like this nocturne by Clara.

This piece is really significant because it has a little

motif in it that pervaded their whole relationship.

And it starts like this...

So this five note, which is the five letters of her name, for Clara.

This theme was used by Robert

in some of his most famous compositions.

I mean, the fantasy starts like...

So you have... # Doo-da-da-da... #

There it is.

And even the notes at the beginning, these are the five notes.

So they would send each other compositions

and this theme meant that they were thinking of one and other.

It was like saying, "I love you."

But it was in music. It's so romantic. It's so romantic.

And Robert Schumann described this as, "Like the buds before the wings

"of colour are exploded into open splendour."

And that would have meant so much to her

because she really lacked confidence

and when he said something

beautiful about her compositions, it gave her confidence to compose more.

But progressive as he was, Robert was also a creature of his time.

"Men stand higher than women", he wrote.

Robert, in the end, for all his grand words about compositional

collaboration, about how they were both going to

develop their art together, in the end, he wanted his tea on the table.

This is a reproduction of a book that Robert gave to Clara as

a Christmas present in 1839, the year before they married.

His initials are here. R.S.

He had a special cover made

and embossed with gold lettering saying,

"Meiner Hausfrau gewidmet",

which means, "Dedicated to my housewife."

This is a cookbook.

Clara herself had written to Robert earlier in the year, "I will

"do everything possible to set myself up so well

"that you're at peace."

But she'd also written, "Must I bury my art now?

"Love is all very beautiful but, but..."

After marriage, the couple lived in an apartment in this building here.

Clara refused to give up her concerts, but she seemed to

accept that her composing was not as important as his.

At public recitals, Clara performed new works by Robert.

Her own were only performed at home.

Add children into the mix - and Robert's developing mental

illness - and it's surprising she wrote music at all.

Yet in 1846, Clara composed a masterpiece - this piano trio.

The story of this piano trio is even more poignant

when you consider what Clara was dealing with at the time.

Not only did she have four young children,

but she was pregnant with a fifth, which then miscarried.

And as if that wasn't enough,

Robert also had a mental collapse during the same time.

Despite all of this,

Clara still found great satisfaction in writing her trio.

She said, "There is nothing better than composing something oneself,

"then hearing it played."

But when Robert wrote his own piano trio shortly after,

all of her self-doubt crept back in.

Of course her piece, she said,

"Remains the work of a woman."

SOFT PIANO MUSIC

It's only in the 21st century that interest has really

revived in the 50 or so piano works Clara Schumann left behind.

After Robert's death, Clara spent the next 40 years

focused on his legacy, rather than her own.

She stopped composing completely.

The fact that she chose performance over composition, I think

speaks to that powerful idea that women are allowed on stage to

perform other people's works.

They are interpreters, they are muses.

She once wrote, "A woman must not desire to compose.

"There has never yet been one able to do it.

"Should I expect to be the one?"

It feels like a great loss.

For Clara, personally, and for all of us

who missed out on more works from this incredibly talented woman.

What could Clara Schumann have achieved today?

I think she would have achieved superstardom.

She would probably have had her pieces played at the Proms

and she would have, you know, been a real composer-pianist

in the tradition of all the great composer-pianists.

By the 1930s, the situation of women in Western music was improving.

Female musicians in Britain

and America now played in full-size symphony orchestras.

But performances of symphonies by female composers remained rare.

American composer Florence Price was especially aware

of the obstacles she faced with this piece, her Symphony Number One.

"I have two handicaps", she once wrote. "Those of sex and race.

"I'm a woman and I have negro blood in my veins."

But it was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933.

The premiere was a genuinely historic event.

The first performance by a major orchestra of a symphony

by an African-American woman.

And the perception was rapturous.

One critic wrote that it was a faultless work

worthy of a place in the regular repertoire.

So how did Price pull this off?

Price's story and music are grounded here, in America's Deep South.

She was born in 1887 in Arkansas.

Society remained segregated.

Slavery had only been abolished 20 years earlier.

Price's family was middle-class,

but like these African-American children,

she grew up immersed in gospel songs and spirituals.

Price studied music at college and began to create a unique

musical style, mixing romanticism with gospel.

And in 1912, she married and started a family.

But there was still racial violence by mobs

and groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

After a brutal lynching in Arkansas in 1927,

the family moved to Chicago.

Florence Price's story isn't one of those fairy tales where

she moves to the big city and everything works out fine.

In 1931, she made a difficult decision to divorce her

husband, who'd become abusive.

And she suddenly found herself raising two children on her own.

So she went out to work, making money by playing the organ to

accompany silent movie screenings

and composing radio jingles.

And somehow, she still carved out the time

to write her own compositions.

PIANO MUSIC

She wrote orchestral and chamber works, violin and piano concertos.

PIANO MUSIC CONTINUES

And arrangements of traditional spirituals,

one of which was sung in 1939 at a momentous concert in Washington DC.

NEWS ARCHIVE: The nation's most impressive Easter demonstration.

75,000 massed before Lincoln Memorial to hear

Marian Anderson, coloured contralto, make her capital

debut at the great emancipator's shrine.

Washington's Concert Hall refused to let a non-white artist

perform inside. Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, was furious

and the concert was moved outdoors.

This historic set closed with Price's

arrangement of My Soul's Been Anchored in the Lord.

# In the Lord, in the Lord

# My soul's been anchored in the Lord

# In the Lord, in the Lord

# My soul's been anchored in the Lord. #

Of course, singing styles have changed since the 1930s.

So how should a contemporary, classically-trained

singer like me approach My Soul's Been Anchored in the Lord?

# In the Lord... #

I went to meet Mica Paris, whose background is in gospel music.

The first thing I'm thinking about is I have to evoke enough emotion

so that the audience are totally taken by the message.

And think about how each lyric is going to pierce the person

listening. This first phrase, it's a short phrase, "In de Lord",

so how do you start to sing it? You're going to go...

# In the Lord... #

And you hear the church,

because that's why the church is so brilliant because that acoustic...

# In the Lord, in the Lord. #

And give it a bit of welly.

You see what happens.

You start to feel something. Shall we sing it together?

Yeah. Let's try.

# In the Lord. #

Nice. Good, right? It felt good. It feels good, right? Yeah.

I mean, when we were singing it together it felt really reflective,

like it could be something that is both happy and melancholy.

At the same time, yeah. If you remember, this comes from slavery.

And in those times of slavery,

it was the spiritual songs that got them through.

When they were on those cotton fields,

they were trying to keep motivated...

Keep going. ..keep going. And that's where gospel comes from.

Gospel comes from that time of that's all they had.

# In the Lord

# In the Lord

# My soul's been anchored in the Lord. #

That was dope. Am I allowed to say that? I can't believe it.

That was gorgeous.

By the early 1950s, Price's work was performed across the USA

and here in London, too.

The Royal Albert Hall, founded by Queen Victoria to promote

the arts, was now bringing music to the masses via the Proms.

And in 1950, Marian Anderson also performed here...

..as I discovered in the archives.

And she does an amazing programme with many of the great composers.

Bach, Brahms, Donizetti, Britten and at the very end,

she saved for last, My Soul's Been Anchored in the Lord.

After Price's death in 1953,

her sweeping melodies fell out of favour,

replaced by the harder edged music of modernism.

But recently, interest in her has rekindled.

Especially since 2009,

when dozens of scores were found

in an abandoned house in Illinois

that Price used as a summer home.

They included two lost violin concertos

and an unheard fourth Symphony.

Dr Shirley Thompson, a British composer, selected one of these

newly-found works to be performed and recorded the very first time.

The piece she picked is Price's concert overture number two.

The power is in this depth of feeling, which is not,

I don't think it's an easy thing to achieve

but I think she just has that timing that can make it happen.

In the musical style that Price pioneered,

this concerto weaves together the themes from three spirituals,

including Let My People Go.

I love the way that she uses harmonic progression.

I love her confidence in that journey.

She doesn't rush there, she just takes her time.

I think her pacing is perfect.

I think it adds this soul to classical music and the repertoire.

I think it brings this majesty to, and dignity to, what has happened

in the cotton fields, to what those people, my forefathers, suffered.

For conductor Jane Glover, it's an opportunity to champion

the work of a forgotten composer who deserves a wider audience.

It's thrilling to play it,

knowing that it's been sitting in a box in a private

house on the south side of Chicago for decades.

And here we are doing it.

The only thing that matters is quality.

I think it certainly deserves a place in programmes from now on.

GENTLE VIOLIN MUSIC

In early 20th-century Britain, my last composer,

Elizabeth Maconchy, blazed a trail through institutional sexism

and the familiar challenges of family life.

By the time Maconchy moved to London from Ireland in 1923,

suffragette protests had helped many British women gain the vote.

But much of the musical establishment still refused

to take women seriously.

Maconchy arrived at the Royal College of Music at a time

when many of the tutors like the composer

Ralph Vaughan Williams were promoting

a British pastoral school of music.

But Maconchy preferred cutting-edge continental

composers like Bela Bartok.

Bartok was a big influence for her?

I think so, yes.

And most of the tutors and professors there were not

really involved in new music, so they would kind of go, "Oh!"

Like this if she played a chord that

instead of being that, was that.

But that's Bartok. It's not a wrong note.

And ingrained sexism reared its ugly head

when Maconchy applied for the prestigious Mendelssohn scholarship.

The head of the college came up to

me and congratulated me on getting the scholarship.

And I said, "But I didn't get it, you gave it to David Evans."

And he said, "Oh, they must have changed it after I'd left.

"Anyway, if we'd given to you'd only have got married

"and never written another note."

Well, I did get married but I did continue to write many notes.

Maconchy's husband,

William LeFanu, was a great supporter of his wife's composing.

And in 1930, some of Maconchy's many notes led to sudden success

when this piece, The Land, was accepted at the Proms.

Both Vaughan Williams and Holst were there at the Proms

and Holst went up to my father and said,

"Keep her at it, keep her at it."

He did know that he didn't need to keep her at it,

because my mother was absolutely so strong in her

vocation as a composer. Nothing would make her swerve from it.

Maconchy was just 23 when The Land was performed.

"Girl composer triumphs", wrote one newspaper.

That kind of attitude meant it took Maconchy nearly a decade to find

a publishing deal.

One found that there was a great prejudice against girls.

Publishers particularly, or concert promoters,

they only thought of them as able to write little things like

piano pieces and songs, not as serious composers.

And as for getting performances,

there was no way.

So, in 1931, a remarkable group of women got together and set

up their own London showcase for new composers,

including works by Maconchy.

This building behind me used to be the Mercury Theatre where

these ground-breaking performances took place.

But Maconchy's modernist-influenced music wasn't entirely to the

taste of the critics.

Some couldn't get past the fact that, oh, my goodness,

there are women composers composing pieces of, and I quote,

"Almost aggressive virility."

And the one lone man was producing somewhat effeminate little songs.

That's what you get when you do a concert based on women's music.

As modernist music became more mainstream in the 1940s and '50s,

Maconchy's career went from strength to strength.

These are programmes from premieres of Maconchy's

works at Royal Albert Hall.

The earliest in 1942.

Maconchy in a line-up with Mendelssohn,

Brahms, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky.

That's a pretty good line-up.

Maconchy's favourite musical form was the string quartet.

She wrote 13.

She said the thrill of composing them

was like combining the intuition and skill of a poet with

the excitement of driving a four horse carriage.

In the early 1940s, Britain had endured

the traumas of German bombing during the Blitz.

And this unsettling piece,

Maconchy's string quartet number four, struck a chord.

Along with Benjamin Britten's Symphony Number One,

Maconchy's continued composing was seen as a sign of British pluck

and creativity in the face of adversity.

Her fourth quartet was recorded by the BBC, broadcast across Europe.

It was a symbol that the show would go on.

And people loved its intensity,

its drive, its seriousness.

And for a moment, they even forgot that it was a woman who composed it,

because there were greater things at stake.

Maconchy's personal favourite, the fifth quartet, followed in 1948.

It's played here by students from the Royal College of Music.

The group call themselves the Maconchy Quartet.

Nicola, the fifth string quartet was composed while both you

and your sister were ill. Yes. I think it's remarkable.

My sister had appendicitis, she was in Dublin.

My parents were in Ireland.

And then they had come back to England

because I was in Great Ormond Street because I'd had an adverse reaction

to a vaccination. So somehow, despite this, my mother found the

space, even at such a worrying time, to write this wonderful quartet.

Like Clara Schumann, Maconchy had to manage the competing

demands of motherhood and creativity.

She did so with her usual grit and determination.

I can remember her playing the piano. When I'd gone to bed

and my sister had gone to bed, and we'd hear the piano.

It sounds rather romantic but it wasn't, really,

it was because it was the only time in the day she had to compose.

And in a similar way to Schumann, Maconchy wrestled with

self-doubt and writers block.

She was a very severe self critic.

She used to write here at this piano,

and she'd have the manuscript paper up here,

and then she'd throw it on the floor.

I've always scrapped a great deal

and used a great deal of manuscript paper.

Because I think you either write the Mozart and Schubert way

with the music just running down your pen onto the paper,

or the Beethoven way, which is

the hard way, with awful heart searchings

and scrappings and so on.

And that's really the way I write.

In 1952, one of these painfully delivered pieces,

Proud Thames, won a competition to be London's Coronation overture.

Against all the odds, Maconchy was becoming a national treasure.

She went on to be appointed chair of the Composers Guild of Great Britain,

and was even made a Dame of the British Empire.

And yet, since Maconchy's death

she's become known as one of our finest lost composers.

Her works have become much harder to find in the repertoire than

those of her male contemporaries, like Vaughan Williams or Britten.

Is it that she writes this quite dense, cerebral music?

Then again, other people wrote music like that,

they just happened to be men.

And we still hear their music.

I don't like to accept the depressing truth that it

simply has to be the fact that she was a woman working in a world

that was, and to some extent still remains,

ruled by a set of values or a set of ideas about what makes

a great composer. And one of those things is to be born a man.

So how far have we actually come in the new millennium?

And how much is still left to do?

In 2013, Marin Alsop became the first woman to conduct

the Last Night of the Proms.

I'm incredibly honoured and proud to have this title.

But I have to say, I'm still quite shocked that it can be 2013

and there can be firsts for women.

Marin, what is it like to be a woman in classical music today?

Well, I think it's a much more positive outlook

and I think it's a moment of optimism and hope, but also

it's a moment where we can't let our guard down.

We have to continue to be vigilant about creating opportunities.

Particularly for female composers. Yes.

Do find the avenues opening up for them?

I think female composers would say that

there's certainly more opportunity now than there was.

And as a composer, you have to try things on the orchestra

and without those opportunities, really,

I don't think greatness can really exist.

And how important is it for the next generation of female composers

and conductors to know about the women who came before them,

and know these histories? This is critical.

Having a sense of history behind you, you know, and in front

of you, so that you feel supported is essential to feeling entitled.

Women need to know these stories.

They need to celebrate the stories.

Yet in 2016,

there were as many performances

of Shostakovich's string quartets in just one week,

as there have been of Maconchy's in the previous five years.

And the truth is, the female composers we've looked at represent

only a tiny sample of an estimated 6,000 whose work has been forgotten.

There's still a long way to go.