Hidden women on the public stage
Paris, Boston and Melbourne are just a few of the places New Zealand School of Music Associate Professor Dr Inge van Rij will visit as she embarks on the first stage of her Marsden Fund research on gender and culture in orchestras of the long 19th century.
Dr van Rij’s $614,000 Marsden Fund award will help make visible the women who challenged nineteenth century gender norms by playing in public orchestras. The long 19th century (1789–1914) began with the French Revolution and ended with the outbreak of World War I.
“The project was sparked by an 1889 photograph I came across unexpectedly at Toitū Otago Settlers Museum in which four women were playing in the orchestra. Having spent several years studying 19th-century orchestras, which were overwhelmingly dominated by men, the photograph really intrigued me. The Marsden grant will enable me to explore similar resources around the world, and I can’t wait to start uncovering the stories of the women who have so often been written out of music history,” says Dr van Rij.
Despite increasing scholarly interest in gender in music, the women who performed publicly in professional symphony orchestras in the formative period of the nineteenth century have paradoxically remained almost invisible.
While some orchestras in the Austro-German ‘centre’ of music have until recently continued to resist the inclusion of women, exceptional women have nevertheless long been infiltrating the overwhelmingly male orchestral ranks, she says.
Dr van Rij says these women present a subtle but intriguing challenge to the gendered aesthetics of symphonic repertoire, rendering the orchestra a conspicuously ‘social affair’. “By examining orchestras in the colonial ‘margins’ of New Zealand and Australia as well as those of Europe and the United States, I seek to make ‘visible’ the women who have so long remained hidden on the public stage,” she says.
Professor Sally Jane Norman, Director of the New Zealand School of Music—Te Kōkī, says the Marsden award gives impetus to Dr van Rij’s research on the role of women in 19th century symphony orchestras—“both at the European level, where her scholarship is renowned, and in colonial Australasia, where her work on gender and race is breaking new ground.”