The other half....

As an artist it is necessary to ask oneself: What kind of art do I want to make? For whom? What do I want to contribute? What is important? How do I want to use my voice? From my position as director of the UIB Choir, I think it is important to get involved and make a difference through the repertoires chosen.

Careers are developed by doing, you do a project and as a result of that project another one arises, you study a score that leaves an imprint and a training in your brain and so, little by little, during your professional life, the training that you started as a student is completed. Your DNA is being created.

The repertoire that is worked on during the student period is usually a more or less standard repertoire that has been defined over the centuries. Who and what is considered important within this system depends on the aesthetics, tastes and political and economic convictions of each period and often on specific people with an important influence such as critics, great masters or patrons in the field of music and art in general.

But this standard repertoire does not represent all groups equally, mainly because many have not been allowed to participate and therefore others have been forced to create their own languages. In the first case, we see the art and artists lost to the Nazi-coined term entartete Kunst und Musik (degenerate art and music), and in the second, the role of racism in the development of popular music originating among African-Americans, such as Jazz or Gospel. Although we have to be grateful for their existence, we have probably missed out on a lot of other things as well...

A similar thing happens with the issue of women composers. Because of social conventions, we have lost many potential female composers and the work of many women composers throughout history has passed us by. Even those who did write were generally not taken seriously and either could not make their work known, or had to do so through the men around them, as in the case of Mendelssohn's sister Fanny Hensel. If more publishers, performers and teachers of different periods had known their works and had considered it important to include them in their editions, at their concerts or to integrate them into their curricula, this lack of knowledge would have been avoided and other women would have been encouraged to compose.

There are also cases such as the Simone Doll, who was doubly handicapped by the fact that she was a woman and an African-American. Her dream was to become the first black female classical concert pianist. And the materialisation of that dream was to give a recital at Carneggie Hall. Even though she was already a renowned artist, in 1964 none of the New York promoters wanted to support the project and she finally had to rent and pay for the hall herself. She could not play Bach but jazz because her career had developed piece by piece, concert by concert, in the direction of jazz, since this was the music that a black woman was allowed to play at the time.

Now we are living a flourishing period because somehow we realise that we have to redress this grievance. The next programme of the UIB Choir will deal precisely with the subject of women composers. Working on this programme has made me even more aware that the known and disseminated choral repertoire is practically exclusively male, except for the musical panorama from the second half of the 20th century onwards. It is very difficult to find works by women, even in the choral compilation books published lately. In the last few years, compilation books have begun to be published with works "by women" exclusively. There are even publishing houses dedicated solely to the work of women composers, such as Furore Verlag, or initiatives such as Multitude of Voyces, which aims to support under-represented, vulnerable and marginalised groups through music and words. In my opinion, these compilations and actions are absolutely necessary but at the same time they point out that the normalisation of this repertoire is still far away, because... aren't we doing a kind of segregation as it was done by separating the toilets for blacks and whites? If music is an abstract and universal language, is there female or male music? I don't think so.

I have certain objections to devising a programme exclusively with works by women composers because, in a way, it supports this idea of segregation, but there is such an inequality that, unfortunately, it is still necessary. It's not that there is no music written by women, it's that there is a lack of dissemination. The normality for me would be that, in the compilation books of choral music and concert programmes, works by women and men would appear indistinctly. That their music, their music would also be published and that both musicians and the public would know their names? The normality would be, above all, that we should not even have to think that there could be differences between the representation of men and women. That all voices would be equally important and equally heard, regardless of race, beliefs or, in this particular case, gender.

I believe that musicians, artists and programmers have a responsibility to showcase the work of everyone and to commit ourselves to disseminating and presenting the work of these under-represented groups in an attractive way to the audiences who attend our concerts. This summer you can enjoy the voices of the other half with the UIB Choir.