It takes a lot to get my dander up, but it’s up now. Why? Because of the lack of attention to the death of a really good composer, Ruth Schonthal.

Ruth’s death brings into relief everything I thought had gone away but hasn’t: The fact that music blogs, music sites, bulletin boards are the province predominantly of slick young men who know everything about the next ‘up-and-coming’ European-tapped composer ‘god’, about obscure indie bands trying to break in here in the US, about graduate students’ peculiar-eye-view of the world of music (and petulant take on music in higher ed) -- but much less about US composers of the recent past who have done DONE IT: Written truly GOOD work over many years: but who may not have swum in the style mainstream of the moment just prior to now. Especially, these guys pay little heed to good composers who are female.

The career path for a composer is pretty well unchartable. Despite that, though, there’s a border that has to be crossed : becoming a ‘Name’ . A new tactic to get there is to build composer ‘brand loyalty’ for oneself, using mass market mechanisms, some of them honorable, but some of them not. ~~ By all means, get talked about, even perhaps identified by your brand: uptown, downtown…. notown. ~~ This astounds me because I thought being a Name came only and exactly from writing terrific music. That’s what it used to mean; but more than ever today though, guys, it ain’t so!

Used to be that conductors, writers, critics got to know a fair percentage of a composer’s work so that when a new piece came along it wasn’t being evaluated in a void, but was understood to be the next step in a life of development. (This hit me first with a review of a recording of a piece by Joan Tower. The reviewer didn’t much care for the piece, but explained away his response by understanding this piece as a sideways investigation for her, something not part of the main trip her art is traveling.) Today, it’s a whole lot more glib, tempting composers to calcify styles pretty early, buying into the prevailing flavor. ( Pace all “Americanistas” ! ) What happened to music that touches you, that grips you? Whether it’s disscussable is pretty much beside the point.

Women get short shrift -- mostly because we don't actually know the music. Which reader here knows any piece by Ruth Schonthal? Some of Ruth's music is truly marvellous: emotional, pure in its unbending, gripping. What will happen, now, though, is she’ll be a name in *some* textbooks, and that’s it.

Why? Ruth (like many of us) paid almost no attention to cultivating a public reputation: she had no outrageous persona, no glamorous private life, no rich benefactor, little gossip. But she did have a family to raise, and heavy financial responsibilities. So for Ruth, music had to pay its way and pay in real dollars. That’s why she taught, that’s why she composed a fair number of (good) teaching pieces, why she took any/every gig that came her way. And at every step Ruth was incredibly generous to other composers, especially the up-and-coming ones.
( Remember Germaine Tailleferre's history: 2 disdainful husbands [= failed marriages], responsibilities to look after both a mother and a daughter virtually throughout her adult life. No wonder that at one point she supported herself by painting furniture.)

Because women don’t (usually) swoon for other women, Ruth's fan base was limited. (She fared better in Germany than in the US, especially in the last 15 years. ) In the US once women get to middle-age, they are invisible. In Ruth’s case, change that to ‘inaudible’. This is a shame, because she’s a GOOD composer.

The ONLY thing we should ask of a composer is that the individual write GOOD music -- music ticked to a level/echelon that intends to reach people (and to endure). The composer need NOT be a celebrity, or flamboyant public figure of any kind; the composer need not teach, need not perform, need not pronounce, need not pontificate. The way composers contribute to the profession is by writing music, and writing to the highest artistic standard. Period.