Chris Swithinbank

Last year for In­ter­na­tional Women’s Day, I took a look at the or­ches­tras of Man­ches­ter and how women were rep­re­sented in their ac­tiv­i­ties. Since then I have moved to Paris and see­ing as I am study­ing at IRCAM, it seemed apt to in­ves­ti­gate how well fe­male com­posers are rep­re­sented at this in­sti­tu­tion. Ini­tially, my cu­rios­ity was sparked by a par­tic­u­lar dec­o­ra­tive fea­ture in the stair­case of IRCAM’s main build­ing: the walls are hung with shad­owy por­traits of com­posers who have worked here in one ca­pac­ity or an­other. I counted the por­traits; there are forty run­ning all the way up four flights of stairs, but save for the pho­tographs of Flo­rence Baschet, Kaija Saari­aho and Ce­cile Le Prado, they are all of men.

With that rather un­sci­en­tific mea­sure in mind, let’s look at the course on which I’m study­ing at the mo­ment. This year’s class con­tains 6 women and 9 men, which while not per­fectly equal ranks as quite bal­anced con­sid­er­ing I have pre­vi­ously been on courses where fe­male par­tic­i­pa­tion was less than 10%. There is an on­line archive of the com­posers who have stud­ied on Cur­sus 1 since 2004, so I put to­gether this table to see how the de­mo­graph­ics de­velop over time:

Over nine years, the mean fe­male par­tic­i­pa­tion is 27%, once drop­ping as low as 10% (in 2006/07) and only twice hit­ting its peak of 40%.

As a way of see­ing how this is re­flected in IRCAM’s pub­lic-fac­ing pro­gram­ming, I counted up the com­posers being per­formed in IRCAM’s 2011/12 Paris sea­son (with­out count­ing the Cur­sus 1 con­certs at the end of this month). This pro­gram­ming is highly var­ied and in­cludes young com­posers in­volved with Cur­sus 2 or the Trem­plin pro­ject with En­sem­ble in­ter­con­tem­po­rain, as well as per­for­mances by var­i­ous in­vited groups and com­posers in res­i­dence. Of 36 com­posers per­formed, 4 were women — 11%.

There are deep-rooted and com­plex rea­sons be­hind these dis­ap­point­ing fig­ures, and I don’t wish to pin the blame solely on IRCAM for the im­bal­ances — the ap­par­ent fil­ter­ing out of women cer­tainly be­gins much ear­lier in their ca­reer paths — but I do think it is im­por­tant to raise aware­ness of these is­sues. The con­tin­ued cel­e­bra­tion of any cul­tural role — such as that of the com­poser, but an even more ex­treme case is that of the or­ches­tral con­duc­tor — which ap­pears to be sys­tem­i­cally male-dom­i­nated is in need of scrutiny. I would be very in­ter­ested to hear thoughts on how best these in­equal­i­ties might be adressed or why the num­bers look like they do.

In the mean­time, In­ter­na­tional Women’s Day is about cel­e­brat­ing women’s achieve­ments, so get lis­ten­ing to some of my tal­ented col­leagues Ta­tiana Catan­zaro, Elvira Gar­ifzyanova, Heera Kim, Diana Soh, Lisa Stre­ich and Ying Wang, or if you have Spo­tify, plug your­self into Tim Ruther­ford-John­son’s IWD-themed playlist.

Up­date, 10/03: Two peo­ple have sug­gested that per­haps fe­male rep­re­sen­ta­tion on Cur­sus 1 might cor­re­late with the pres­ence of women on the ju­ries that se­lect stu­dents. This seemed slightly du­bi­ous to me, but the archives also list jury mem­bers, so I was able to do some fur­ther analy­sis (PDF, 76kb). It shows no clear re­la­tion­ship be­tween the two, but it does allow us to note that over the last nine years just 11% of the Cur­sus 1 jury mem­bers have been fe­male.