{"id":22921,"date":"2017-03-23T15:56:54","date_gmt":"2017-03-23T15:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jomec.co.uk\/intercardiff\/?p=22921"},"modified":"2017-03-23T15:56:54","modified_gmt":"2017-03-23T15:56:54","slug":"cardiff-composers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cardiffjournalism.co.uk\/intercardiff\/business-culture\/cardiff-composers","title":{"rendered":"What challenges face Wales' international women of song?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Listen above and read along below.<\/h2>\n

Wales has been referred to \u201cthe land of song,\u201d and that tradition is still going strong. Composers and conductors from around the world are coming to Cardiff to collaborate with some of the greats, including the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Many of these pioneers of contemporary music – from opera to avant-garde – are women.
\nMusic may not be the first thing you\u2019d think of when it comes to issues of social justice, but for centuries, the field has been dominated by composers with privilege and not many of them have been women.
\n“<\/b>I guess to me the most important thing is that if someone has the urge and the drive to compose they should be able to be encouraged to do so regardless of gender, economic status, place in society. And thankfully there does seem to be more and more support of that,” says Carlijn Metsalaar, a composer from the Netherlands who is currently studying at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
\nFor Carlijn and other female composers, identifying their work with their gender doesn’t feel right. “I think most female composers that I know would not want to identify as a ‘female composer.’ They would just want to identify as a composer because there shouldn’t be a separate category ideally,” she says.
\n“There are more female composers reaching their audiences now than perhaps there were thirty, forty years ago and certainly more so than the nineteenth century,”\u00a0says John Hardy, the head of composition at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama.
\n“There have been changes in perception about the role of women in society because women have the confidence and the access to share their work and their ideas with more people more easily without the gatekeepers telling them that it\u2019s no good,” he says.
\n“<\/b>It just is a fairer reflection of the population. The population is more than fifty percent female in most countries therefore to have only five of ten percent of people making music being women that is unlikely to be a fair reflection of the population.”
\nThose gatekeepers may seem invisible, but their influence has been quite profound in terms of whose voices the public hears. Those voices, for a long time, have not included female composers.
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