The Siren ‘Greatness’
In encouraging women into music, Alice Mary Smith thought promises of ‘greatness’ counterproductive.
1883
In encouraging women into music, Alice Mary Smith thought promises of ‘greatness’ counterproductive.
1883
‘Why are there no great female composers?’ asked the Victorians. But Alice Meadows White, née Smith (1839-1884), never afraid to voice a challenging opinion, believed that the excited demand for a ‘great’ female composer was actually discouraging a potential host of good ones.
‘YOU have the privilege’ the chairman of the Royal Musical Association told Frederick Meadows White at a meeting in May 1883, ‘of being married to a very clever woman.’
Frederick, an eminent QC, knew that quite well. Alice, a pupil of William Sterndale Bennett and George Macfarren, had composed her first symphony at twenty-four. Chamber music and songs had followed, with another symphony, overtures, choral works and a clarinet concerto. Sir George Grove praised her music as ‘full of tune and poetry’; Stephen Stratton of the Birmingham Post hinted excitedly at ‘greatness’.*
Yet Frederick also knew that Alice blamed the musical establishment’s preoccupation with finding a ‘great’ female composer for discouraging the merely good ones.* It was embarrassing, too, to be singled out in front of Ann Mounsey, and Macfarren’s student Oliveria Prescott.** So Frederick assured the meeting that Alice was no Mozart or Handel, simply a good mother to their two daughters, and a loving wife.
Alice could not have briefed more tactful Counsel.
Sir George Grove was the founder of the famous multi-volume ‘Grove’s Dictionary of Music’.
‘All I would maintain’ said a correspondent writing in ‘The Monthly Musical Record’ in 1877 under the pen-name ‘Artiste’, ‘is that many a woman’s talent is wasted by her undecided, vacillating spirit, and that were she only to aspire humbly but earnestly to a higher form of art, there is every cause to believe that she might work out a path of distinction for herself.’ Biographer and musicologist Ian Graham-Jones believed these were Alice’s own words: see ‘Signature’, Volume II, Number 3 (Autumn 2008).
Ann Mounsey (1811-1891) was the wife of William Bartholomew (who wrote the words for Mendelssohn’s ‘Hear my Prayer’) and a composer in her own right; Oliveria Prescott (1843-1919) was a lecturer in Music at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Sir George Macfarren’s amanuensis, as Macfarren had become blind in 1860.
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Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What did Frederick’s ‘clever wife’ do for a living?
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Victorian critics praised Alice’s music. Few people have heard of her today.