There would be no more suitable way to begin a series centred on re-contextualising what is considered ‘classical’ music without the consultation of one of the most passionate academics the University of Cambridge has to offer.
Catherine Groom is the current Director of Music and is a Bye-Fellow in Music at Fitzwilliam College. She has cultivated an impressive resume of performances, including her West End run with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall/Bring Up The Bodies, a number of seasons with Shakespeare’s Globe, an amazing interfaith project in Morocco with Sufi musicians, TV work for BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, all alongside leading Goldsmiths’ access-to-university courses. Within academics, she is currently working on a PhD about psalm-tunes at convergences of Abrahamic faiths in 17th century Amsterdam and Constantinople.
"She has cultivated an impressive resume of performances"
My initial question for Catherine was based on an issue that many musicians see on a daily basis. The reliance that academics and concert programmers have on the canon . She was “interested in where one draws the historical line, with representation and concert planning.” She elaborated: “with contemporary music it’s obvious – at least as far as gender goes. If you’re programming Elizabethan anthems, it’s obviously a different kettle of fish. But where’s the line in between, at which decent gender representation in thematic concert programmes should be an expectation? The World Wars, perhaps?” Clearly, this issue does not have a simple solution, and we are left wondering if it truly is that difficult to find examples of music not written by white European men.
Catherine exasperatedly replied:
“But isn’t it embarrassing that we can’t seem to get beyond special pleading? Concerts of works by otherwise-unrelated ‘women composers’ are just as annoying as concerts of ‘men composers’, really. We’ve been having these for forty years, and it’s maddening when programmers of ‘generic women composer concerts’ are congratulated for being ‘pioneering’. A colleague recently raved about how exciting it was to have had the ‘chance’, in the last couple of years, to discover lots of female composers. Mate, they’ve been there all along. How embarrassing that you’ve only just been made to look. A composer who happens to be a woman appearing on a concert programme shouldn’t require any comment at all.”
“Likewise,” she said, “it gets me cross when choral establishments who are now opening their doors to female singers, having spotted that the writing’s finally on the wall, are applauded on social media for being ‘progressive’. It isn’t progressive at all – it’s overdue, and whilst I’m obviously pleased about it, I don’t think we should all leap about like dogs being thrown a bone. You know, I don’t give my five-year-old a chocolate when she tidies her room at the six hundredth time of asking, hours after she should have bloody well done it.”
Indeed, her comments ring true for many female musicians; I too feel the celebrations of musical ‘boy’s’ clubs simply consolidates the vice-like grip that patriarchal musical institutions feel they have. It almost appears as if we should be grateful that they permit us to be at their level, without any acknowledgement of the success many female singers and composers have made in spite of (and maybe even in order to spite) them.
"It isn’t progressive at all – it’s overdue"
Whilst we have focused largely on women in music so far, Catherine rightfully states “we must be careful not to lump matters of gender and race together, because there are very different, though sometimes overlapping, issues involved.” To detail this further she expounds:
“The issues are very different on the contemporary classical music scene partly because at grass-roots educational level we’ve got such desperate, appalling racial inequality in terms of who’s getting access to what types of artistic education. But on both scores what we can do easily as historians is think about the kind of sources we’re looking at, and how. If we predicate a musical history entirely on written sources, then yes, it looks rather as if medieval music was made by Parisian men. But if you consider the illustrations to the Cantigas de Santa Maria as being as important as the spots, then you’ll end up with a much better view of things.”
"We’ve got such desperate, appalling racial inequality in terms of who’s getting access to what types of artistic education"
I think there is evidence of significant academic neglect as a result of this apparent reliance on the written source, as we do not know for what reasons certain collections were preserved and, more importantly, who may have played benefactor to our current idea of canon. This is exactly why a reinterpretation of who we imagine when thinking of a ‘classical’ musician is desperately overdue. However, I think it is also fundamentally important that we do not view the current day as an example of significant progress, as whilst things have changed I second Catherine’s opinion that we should not rush to celebrate that which is long overdue.
Speaking recently to an incredibly talented female organ scholar, she revealed that the only reason she began to practice and develop her technique as an organist was because she recognised at a young age that she wouldn’t be able to perform at the top levels of the choral tradition as a female singer.
Thankfully, this domination of the white man in choral and classical music seems to be disappearing. As a champion of diverse works, not just as a result of tokenism, but as a standard practice, Catherine never fails to introduce anyone she works with to fresh and exciting modern works.
The current favourites of Catherine Groom include:
- Calliope Tsoupaki’s St. Luke Passion, Charavgi and Enite ton kyrion, which is soon to be performed by the Fitz Choir.
- Kerry Andrew’s Maranatha
- Kerensa Briggs Media vita in morte sumus
- Rosie Bergonzi’s Boubakiki – a handpan and saxophone duo.
It is wonderful to see academics such as Catherine Groom become more vocal about issues of gender and race, and it is this increasing critical frequency that places conscious pressure on these outdated institutions to re-evaluate the way that they navigate the current musical climate.
Catherine Groom can be found on Twitter (https://twitter.com/fontegara) and on the Faculty of Music website (https://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/directory/catherine-groom).
