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Rarer than a Sumatran rhino: a woman composer
PARIS, Feb 18, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Camille Pepin is part of a very rare breed.
She is a female composer.
Women have conquered space, risen in the military ranks, but some
professions remain resolutely and bewilderingly masculine.
When Pepin turned up for her first day at the Paris Conservatoire — as
usual the only woman in a class of men — an official told her that her name
wasn’t on the list.
But when she insisted that she was and that he look again, he cried, “Ah,
you’re a woman!”
Camille is also a man’s name in France.
“I would never have thought,” he apologised. “There are so many men…”
With so few female composers in the classical music repertoire, it was an
easy mistake to make.
Pepin has never let everyday sexism get her down though, laughing it off
like water off a duck’s back.
“One male composer told me I was getting commissions because I was a woman
and not too bad looking,” said the 28-year-old, whose first album, “Chamber
Music”, is released later this month.
After a concert of one of her more combative pieces, “a man came to tell me
my music was ‘very fresh, flowery and sweet’,” she told AFP.
“I am a woman so clearly those three words” apply, she said wryly.
Pepin, whose music recalls both Claude Debussy and American minimalist
composers like John Adams, said sometimes the sexist stereotypes which
persist in the classical music world are hard to take.
– Only woman –
One “old school” music professor insisted she sit on his right at lunch
“because that was a woman’s place” and sent her off to make the coffee.
“I was the only woman in all my classes in the Conservatoire, and it was
fine,” said Pepin, who is now working on her first ballet score in her Paris
apartment which doubles as a studio.
Mostly the young composer, who made her breakthrough with the orchestral
piece “Vajrayana” in 2015, said she was treated exactly the same as her male
colleagues in classes with French contemporary composers like Guillaume
Connesson, Thierry Escaich and Marc-Andre Dalbavie.
Beyond the classroom, however, progress is slow in the conservative world
of classical music.
Pepin believes it will take generations for the forgotten work of female
composers to get just recognition.
Beyond the casual unthinking sexism, she said the biggest problem for young
female composers was “a lack of role models”.
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A few woman such as the American composer Meredith Monk, Kaija Saariaho of
Finland and Tansy Davies from Britain have managed to break the glass
ceiling.
– Written out of history –
But even Pepin admitted that when she was younger she didn’t know of a
single female composer.
“We never studied them,” she said.
Who has ever heard of Helene de Montgeroult (1764-1836), Louise Farrenc
(1804-1875) or Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847)?
Fanny was the older sister of the more famous Felix Mendelssohn, with many
at the time saying her work was more expressive.
But after she married she was limited to domestic duties and had to content
herself with being her brother’s chief editor and muse, which led him to call
her his “Minerva” of wisdom.
“Lots of female composers were crushed like Clara Schumann (the wife of
Robert Schumann),” despite being one of the most distinguished composers and
musicians of the Romantic era, said the pianist Celia Oneto Bensaid, who
often performs Pepin’s work.
“You play my music,” Schumann once bluntly told his wife, a star of concert
halls across Europe.
– Began at age 13 –
Born into a family in the northern French city of Amiens that wasn’t
particularly musical, Pepin began to write her own melodies at 13.
But even at the age of five in her ballet class, her eyes were more drawn
to the piano.
“I was so fascinated that I would forget to do my exercises,” she said.
Before settling on composing, Pepin thought about being a dancer. “I need
to feel the notes physically,” she said.
Her first ballet will be choreographed next year by Sylvain pad for
France’s Ballet du Nord.
Finally, she feels she is getting beyond the dreaded question — “But what
do you do for a living?” — when she tells people she’s a composer.
“They thought it was just something I did to chill on Sundays,” she
laughed.
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