CMP Review 2025-05-29

May 29, 2025

In 1957, Ruth Gipps stepped up to the podium of the Royal Festival Hall. It was a momentous occasion, for she would be the first woman to conduct an orchestra at this renowned venue. Would the world applaud her courage? Would it celebrate the musicality of this gifted woman?

The program began innocently enough. But then as the evening progressed, reviewers were shocked to find themselves listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Perhaps it was as the chorus began to sing the glorious fourth movement that a critic found himself seething that Gipps had the audacity to approach “one of the Everests of music.” “A woman is no more expected to conduct it,” he wrote, “than build a Great Boulder Dam.”

Emma Cifrino writes of a phenomenon called “false categorizing,” where the works of certain composers are “pigeonholed into genres or classifications that are seen as less serious or less valuable in order to deny their artistic value.” These works then miss being “canonized”; they are passed over by listeners at all levels, and even by home educators who are employing composer study to help their children develop an ear for beauty.

“In Gipps’s case,” writes Cifrino, “because her music was largely tonal in a culture that privileged atonal and serialist styles, it was categorized as ‘light classical’ and subsequently dismissed.”

There is an irony to this tragedy. In a century that celebrated atonality, one composer had the courage to champion beauty. Her works were labeled, pigeonholed, and dismissed. But it is not too late. In my homeschool we will listen to the wondrous music of Ruth Gipps. How about in yours?

@artmiddlekauff