Wild woking

 

Post on Slipped Disc:

https://slippedisc.com/2026/07/a-label-for-women-composers/

"For centuries, women have composed ambitious, innovative and influential works, yet their music remains dramatically under-represented in today’s concert programming."

What an odd sentence. The organisers of this recording project know about these 'ambitious, innovative and influential works', although they are unknown. How can these works be influential if they were and still are unknown? I don't know any trace of important influences by female classical music. I don't believe at all that there have been many composing women in the past as compared to composing men, simply because (this is something we really do know) it was 'not done', it was not expected from women and most women followed conventions of their time. But it was different from painting and performing music which was OK for women.

The unbearable kitsch impression from the fragments in the video does suggest the worst - mediocre pieces being celebrated for their makers' gender, providing happy feelings for the participants of being virtuous.

It is clear that any music which may be deserving our attention should be performed with indifference to the gender of its makers. But wanting to redress the balance for an entirely speculative suppression of so many brilliant female composers in the white male feudal past by digging-out mediocrities is simply inverted discrimination. Also it may damage the chances of contemporary female composers because when all these historically-suppressed geniusses get pushed through audiences' throats, 'female composer' gets a bad name. It is politicising composer's gender, the music gets instrumentalised for political woke aims, and people no longer listen to the music but to the stories around it.

The more the classical music world gets woked, the less the music will play a role and discussions will only be political, not musical.

There are more and more now forgotten composers dug-out from the historic archives, mostly male, and that is a good thing - even if it is only to complete the historical record. Youtube is great in sharing these obscure works. But I never heard any piece that did not somehow 'justify' it being forgotten. In contrary, you get a better idea about the cause of the 'staying power' of the music that still forms the core of the classical repertoire.

Increasing awareness of unfair discrimination - that is, not discrimination because of quality flaws but on factors that have nothing to do with music - is a good thing but this should lead to awareness of such discrimination in our own time, and not exclusively on the basis of gender and ethnicity but in general, for instance the discrimination of music during the last century due to modernist totalitarian claims (hardly ever explored). Again, the best instrument to realise this ideal is the music itself.

'Wokism' appears to be a form of cultural marxism, by the ultra left who have seen the evaporation of communism and thus, have been looking for other injustices to fight. And as so often with insufficiently considered idealism, it results in its own forms of suppression and policing - like the jacobins in the french revolution killing everybody suspected of not quite believing in the beautiful ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood.

 

Proof: readers that got this far with reading this comment and concluding it being a dropping of conservative, feudally-suppressing white-male protests against the beautiful, liberating forces of justice and equality, look into the woke mirror, which congratulates them with their invented virtues - confirming their woke credentials.