Writing Women In
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31265/m6674j26Keywords:
Victorian England, nineteenth-century, women composers, professionalismAbstract
The English composer Clara Macirone (1821-1914) and her music have often been seen as the embodiment of Victorian gendered sensibility and this, alongside the dismissive attitudes towards what has been seen as her alma mater the Royal Academy of Music’s concentration on amateur music-making in the nineteenth century, has led to a misinterpretation of her place in her musical milieu. Forced from an early age to become the sole provider for her parents and siblings, Macirone’s clarity of thought and understanding of the means by which she was proscribed through her gender offers us a vivid contemporary account of women’s relationship with the musical world about them. This paper uses Macirone as a case study of ways that assumptions have either devalued women’s music-making as both composers and performers, or written them out of music history altogether.
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