Composeress

By the way, another Russian composer, or composeress, named Ella Adajewsky, has had a work of hers successfully produced at the Opéra Comique, Vienna.

Altogether, this set of songs will, no doubt, make for the composeress a good and endurable name among cultivated musicians.

The performance was given by members of the Leamington Opera Company, under the direction of Miss Lizzie St. Quinten and the author and composeress.

Can it be that the impassioned appeal of the Folk-tune Party has fallen on deaf ears, and that the intelligent public which reads these pages has never troubled to become acquainted with the music of the Composeresses of Milking Songs, Weaving Songs, Spinning Songs, Cradle Songs, of Lyke-wake Dirges, of laments for Heroes, of all the Love Songs addressed to the male sex? Or can it be that the Intelligent Public has taken for granted that these were composed by men?

For instance, through my hands there went a piece of music by one of the prominent “composeresses” in this part of the world and in the very first measure was a serious error in the simplest feature of musical construction, which a student in the first three months of musical study ought not to have made.

Well, he began by telling me that songs had as a rule a bad sale—but that no composeress had ever succeeded, barring Frau Schumann and Fraulein Mendelssohn, whose songs had been published together with those of their husband and brother respectively.

SIXTY years ago when the Society of Women Musicians was formed, composeresses had virtually no chance of being taken seriously, while lady instrumentalists were discriminated against in orchestras and in any case were largely restricted to playing violin and piano.

My favorite avant-garde composeress almost solved all questions about Beethoven, musicological and psychological, by summoning his disembodied spirit at a stance held in London on October 3, 1968.