As the world marks Women's History Month, Emily Abrams Ansari feels it's a fitting time to bring attention to women who've made significant-and largely unrecognized- contributions to music history.
"There are so many stories of women in music history that remain untold," said Ansari, a professor of music history in the music and research composition (MRC) department and assistant dean of the Don Wright Faculty of Music.
She and her colleagues, professors Norma Coates and Catherine Nolan, are working to change that, through their respective studies on Canadian composer Ann Southam, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell and poet Hildegard Jone, whose lyrical works inspired the music of Austrian composer Anton Webern.
Ansari said this research is especially noteworthy "during these tumultuous times," when women's rights and gender equity issues are facing serious political backlash in Canada and abroad.
"At this moment, when EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) is under attack, it's significant the three full-time women faculty in this department are studying the impact these three important women have made on music history in the West," Ansari said.
Western News invited Ansari, Coates and Nolan to share insights into the lives and work of the women inspiring their research.
Emily Abrams Ansari
Composer Ann Southam (1937-2010)
Although now considered one of Canada's first prominent women composers, Ann Southam came of age in the 1960s; a time when it was uncommon for women to be recognized in the field of music composition. Southam was also the great-great-granddaughter of Southam newspaper baron William Southam. A member of the Order of Canada, she supported many causes promoting women and girls, and gender equality. Upon her death in 2010, she bequeathed $14 million to the Canadian Women's Foundation.
Western News: What drew you to Southam's work?
Emily Abrams Ansari (Christopher Kindratsky/Western Communications)
Emily Abrams Ansari: I was first inspired by a wonderful doctoral thesis by a former graduate student, Amelia Yates (DMA'22), who studied Southam. It left me with a lot of questions and wanting to explore Southam's idea of incorporating feminist thinking and a more minimalist style into her music. She became preoccupied with that approach after coming out as a lesbian in her 30s.
How did that approach play out in her compositions?
EAA: She wanted to make classical music more ordinary, more 'every day.' Like "making dinner," was how she put it.
Early in her career she wrote a lot of electronic music, which was wonderful, but where she articulates these feminist ideas is in music for the piano. She seemed to really have enjoyed the writing for this one instrument, which also had this domestic element to it. She also could play it on her own, in her own space.
The music she wrote for piano is intricate, lively and elegant, and absolutely beautiful.
It's also unashamedly feminine, with "women's work," as she calls it, a source of inspiration for this minimalist style of music she adopted. It involves a lot of repetition, imitating the processes of spinning and weaving and activities women have traditionally been involved with.
That's interesting, given she had an abundance of wealth and could have seemingly been far removed from such household tasks.
EAA: It's also interesting for the time in which she was writing this music, in the second wave of feminism.
Second-wave feminists were all about getting women out of the kitchen and into the boardroom, so I found it intriguing that Southam chose to celebrate things happening in domestic spaces.
When we look back in history, where women were excluded and didn't have access to the same opportunities as men, we tend to think the things they were doing were boring or unimportant. I think Southam's saying that quilts, hand-sewn clothing and gardens-those little places and objects women had control over were a mechanism for self-expression.
Today, we might not give something like a quilt the same level of artistic value as a symphony, but we should respect those artistic outputs and celebrate that expression of women's experience.
In what other ways did Southam work to elevate women?
EAA: As an heiress to a publishing empire, Southam was a very wealthy woman. She used her money to create organizations for women composers and collaborated with a lot of female performers, including pianist Eve Egoyan. She also gave a massive amount of money to charities that support women and girls.
If people are interested in exploring Ann Southam's music, where should they start?
EAA: One of my favourite pieces is Glass Houses. That would be a lovely introduction to her music.
What's one thing you'd like people to think about when considering the legacy of Ann Southam?
EA: One reason she is not well known is because of the "triple-curse" of being Canadian, a woman and a lesbian. I think that's an important message in the context of Women's History Month. Although some would like us to believe equity, diversity and inclusion are no longer needed because that work is done, there are still so many stories to be told about really interesting and remarkable women.
Norma Coates
Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (1943- )
Born Roberta Joan Anderson, Joni Mitchell rose to fame as a folk singer in the 1960s and '70s. Her legendary album Blue, released in 1971, was her first million-selling record. In 1974, Court and Spark became her best-selling album. Mitchell is now considered influential among 21st-century musicians, yet, as Norma Coates, an expert in gender in popular music, notes, Mitchell was treated "terribly by the music industry for years and years," and is only now being appreciated for her vast contributions.
Norma Coates (Christopher Kindratsky/Western Communications)
What drew you to study Joni Mitchell?
Norma Coates: I've been a fan of her music since I was 18. As a researcher, I'm interested in how she was mistreated by the music industry. She was a pretty singer-songwriter who was also very independent, and that was an issue (against her).
I love to show my students the first advertisements Warner Brothers put out for her records, back in 1967, using lines like, "Joni Mitchell is 90 per cent virgin," or "Joni Mitchell puts out."
In 1971, Rolling Stone dubbed her "Old Lady of the Year." At that point, she had released three albums and was about to release her masterpiece, Blue. They also published a diagram of her supposed lovers, showing broken hearts with a pair of lips and a caption "kiss, kiss," by all the guys she had allegedly slept with. They were essentially 'slut-shaming' her at a time when men rock stars were expected to be these hyper-sexual, straight guys.
She became very bitter and understandably so.
"Joni Mitchell is almost like a man. She's got a strange sense of rhythm that's all her own, and she lives on that timetable." - Bob Dylan in Rolling Stone, July 26, 1979
Didn't some critics even suggest it was naïve for her to write Both Sides Now as an "ingenue?"
NC: By the time she wrote that song, she'd already had polio, given a child up for adoption, moved away from her family and was living in Toronto in poverty. They never asked John Lennon or Mick Jagger how they could write certain songs.
In what other ways was Mitchell treated differently, just because she was a woman?
NC: She came out with brilliant music for years and then decided to go off in the direction of jazz. She was crucified for it, especially for her album Mingus, which came out in 1979. And after that, she lost her fans.
Mitchell has never said, "I'm a feminist." And why should she? We expect our female pop artists, especially, to be feminist, whereas she is probably the most feminist artist of anyone I know just for being independent back then. She never got the recognition she deserved.
But recently, she's had a comeback and performed at the Grammys at 80-years-old.
NC: It's interesting that it took a brain aneurysm in 2015 for people to see she is a genius, and to realize, as Joni sang, 'You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.' It's too bad it took almost losing her for her to finally get the recognition she deserves, which also intrigues me as someone studying the response to women aging in popular music.
We weren't sure if we ever were going to see her perform again. But she's made this remarkable recovery through music.
What's it like for you, as a fan, to watch Mitchell's return and to see her gain new fans?
NC: I remember sitting at my computer working in 2022 and all this news started showing up about her surprise performance at the Newport Folk Festival with Brandi Carlile - her first in 20 years - and going on YouTube to see it.
I also remember my daughter, who's now 27, coming to me when she was 17 or 18, "Have you ever heard of the record Blue by Joni Mitchell?" I went downstairs and grabbed my worn-out copies of Blue and Hejira. And when Joni Mitchell announced a show at the Hollywood Bowl, I bought tickets for the two of us to go see her last October.
What was it like seeing Joni Mitchell perform after all these years and sharing that with your daughter?
NC: It was incredible. It was such a bonding moment and one of the best weekends of my life. It's hard to describe, and it's one of the interesting things about Mitchell's renaissance. She's playing with people half her age, if not younger. I thought it might have been 'the Brandi Carlisle show,' but it was definitely Joni Mitchell's show. She sang really deep cuts, some from her '80s albums, that are just brilliant.
Singling her last song, which was The Circle Game, with 17,000 other fans on a beautiful warm night in October at the Hollywood Bowl was just so special and a phenomenal experience.
Do you think Mitchell's finally getting the acclaim she deserves?
NC: Yes, but I think it says a lot about the music industry that they waited until she was almost dead. I'm just glad she got to see it and that she seems happy.
Catherine Nolan
Poet Hildegard Jone (1891-1963)
In his late vocal works, Austrian composer Anton Webern was inspired by the lyrical poetry of Hildegard Jone. While this fact is known among scholars of Webern's music, Catherine Nolan points out that Jone "remains marginalized in Western scholarship, with scant attention allocated to the extraordinary nature of Webern's commitment to her poetry and the impact it made on his creative output."
What drew you to study Hildegard Jone?
Catherine Nolan (Christopher Kindratsky/Western Communications)
Catherine Nolan: I was drawn to this research through my analytical work on the music of Webern, who was an iconic composer. When I learned all Webern's late vocal music, composed between 1933 and his death in 1945, consisted of settings of poetry written by a single poet, Hildegard Jone, I decided to study her poetry and the unique creative partnership between Jone and Webern, about which virtually nothing had been written.
I was deeply moved by the transcendent beauty of Jone's poetry and saddened by the realization that she belonged to the large number of important female artists who have been excluded from historical records.
Tell us more about this "transcendent beauty" of her work.
CN: Her poetry incorporates beautiful images of nature - flowers, trees, wind and bees. And she writes about cyclical processes, day and night, light and dark. She draws parallels between the change of seasons to the afterlife.
From up high plunges the freshness that makes us live:
the blood of the heart is the moisture lent to us.
The tear is the coolness given to us:
it flows wondrously back to the stream of grace.
Ah, I am permitted to exist where the sun also exists!
It loves me without reason,
I love it without end.
When we appear to each other in the evening to say farewell,
lingering warmth glows over the sky and the soul – Three Songs from "Viae inviae" by Hildegard Jone.
How did Webern first come to know of Jone's work?
CN: She was a painter, as well as a poet, and Webern first met her in 1926, at an exhibition of her paintings. After that, she sent him samples of her poetry and he became very interested in it.
How deeply did her creative work impact his career?
CN: Webern had composed a great deal of vocal music earlier in his career and had always set pre-existing poetry, as composers of art music generally have done. But Jone's poetry inspired Webern at a pivotal moment while he was adopting the new twelve-tone method of composing, and I believe features of her poetry resonated with this new approach to musical composition. The newness of the poetry and the newness of the method of composition complemented each other. However, her impact on the late career of this major composer and on musical modernism has remained unacknowledged.
It sounds like it was more the nature of the times, rather than Webern's nature, that left Jone's impact on his work unrecognized.
CN: Yes. He obviously respected her a great deal. They were very close friends. They were each married and had a spouse and were friends as couples. Jone and Webern wrote long letters, talking about art and music, and their friendship revolved around this. She trusted him, giving him complete access to her poetry, and he thought very highly of her.
What is something that stands out in your research?
CN: The human story behind the creative partnership of Hildegard Jone and Anton Webern is not only about the history and composition of music. It crosses disciplinary lines into cultural studies and gender studies. Hildegard Jone was a very creative artist who had such a profound impact on a major composer. Her contribution was unique, yet it is Werner who has been so revered.
What do you want people to know most about Hildegard Jone's contributions to the history of music?
CN: Students and scholars of Western art and music would undoubtedly agree the contributions of women composers have historically been poorly acknowledged. As we celebrate Women's History Month, I would like people to reflect on the unrecognized contributions not only of female composers, but of female figures such as Hildegard Jone and others whose more private contributions also had a powerful impact on the course of modernist music of the twentieth century.
Interviews were edited for brevity and clarity.
