Anyhoo, I have noticed something very peculiar. There are very few women composers out there who have gained popularity these days, Rachel Portman, Sherly Walker, Anne Dudly come to mind.

Another interesting thing is that there are just a few of the female species here regularly on this board.

Why is that. Are women not that interested in film music, either collecting or composing. It almost seems that the percentage of women on this board is the same as female composers out there.

Any comments?

No, seriously! Contrary to popular belief I am not a woman. I used to think that we had a bunch of women on this board! But it turns out that all the people that were women in my eyes, were actually men! To name a few; Gae, Robin... Jeron and I got a kick, when we found out Gae was actually a guy. No disrespect to Gae(actual name is Gaetano) He is an awesome friend and we are buddies!

All the ladies show yourselves! At least we have Jennie(JulietDean). Any others?

And frankly, neither do I. The first score I ever bought was THE ROCK. I had noticed music in films for years, but THE ROCK was the first one where I walked out saying to myself, "I have to have that music." As my interest in scores began to grow, I started revisiting past films I had seen, noticing just how good the music was, and going out to get the soundtrack.

I have no idea what it is that attracts me to film scores. I just am.

Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Betsy Bach, Henrietta Handel,
Matilda Mozart, or Bonita Beethoven? Neither have I unless they
were married to these great composers. I think in the future you will
see more female composers because of current and future opportunities;
however, previous cultures never afforded women creative outlets. Their
main jobs were to be good wives, mothers, and keepers of the hearth. Most
compositions, even musicals and operas, were written by men and provided
their economic livelihood. A few women like the Brontes edged their way
into writing, a predominately male vocation. George Elliot didn’t reveal her
real name when writing. And musical composition remained a man’s realm.

Then along came the 20th century and RIDE SALLY RIDE!
Women’s lib, the economic need for two incomes, the PILL which afforded
women the right to have or have not, and all the rest of the cultural changes
in the past 40 years have shifted the music world a little but not a lot. We see
a proliferation of women novelists, essayists, poets, etc., but we still don’t have
many women involved in music. As in literature, I do believe that we will
create more women composers but only if we expose more of our
daughters to music. As a child, my parents had me take music lessons in
several instruments, and I think this turned me on to music. I still see most
parents giving their girls more dancing than musical instrument lesson. Look
at your high school and college marching, pep, concert bands.
Note: I’m not trying to stereotype;
there are many exceptions to any of the next generalities. Most bands I’ve seen are
about 75% male. Four out of five players are guys in percussions, brass, guitar,
and it seems it is about 50/50 in strings, woodwinds, etc. Now those nifty flag
carrier who DON’T play an instrument are about 99% girls. (One guy in my town
does and is cruelly teased by crowds.) I truly believe that involving children in some type
of music as a child will lead to more music appreciation and
possible composition. We’re doing it for girls in athletics, but we haven’t done
a great job with girls in music except in voice lessons and dance.

Look at your rock bands through the ages. Most guitarist, drummers, and lead
singers are male. (Yep, there are lots of exceptions. Spice Girls DON’T count.)
Lead female singers “tend” to have mostly male bands.

Perhaps these are some of the reasons so few women are engaged in filmscores.
I seem to be the only woman who ever browses the soundtrack sections
in stores. From the time I was a small child, I “heard” the great themes of Rozsa,
Bernstein, and Goldsmith in movies, and if I could live my life all over, I’d
study music and see if I had any talent in composing. I also think that if you looked
at the subscribers to Sound Track or FSM, you’d find about 80% or more are male.
I hope this changes in the future because women don’t know what they are missing.

Now I have a question for you. I love the excitement of Poledouris, Goldsmith, Young,
and so many more male composers. These guys have rhythm. So why is it when out on
the dance floors whether in junior highs, high schools, colleges, night clubs, etc., when a
fast dance some on, so many guys are so “rhythmically challenged?” Exceptions noted.

NP Conan the Barbarian *****/*****

Oops, one other thought. You know, loving soundtracks may be predominantly a male "thang", but I think football attracts more guys than soundtracks. So for me, that is what makes all of you guys on this Board so unique and so wonderfully special and why we seek each other out. We're like that movie..The Rare Breed and darn proud of it.

[This message has been edited by joan hue (edited 21 March 2000).]

[This message has been edited by joan hue (edited 21 March 2000).]

But the thing is...I have maybe one or two friends who slightly enjoy moviemusic...and they're both girls. I don't know ANY guys...except the guys on this board of course...that like film scores, which is kinda contradicting the topic...but anyway...
the 2 girls are also musically talented so that might be another reason for their small interest. I also play musical instruments so I dunno...

This topic is hard to answer...but I agree with joan hue in that women have been the inferior sex. We've been the typical housewife, child-carer, homemaker, etc. So, women have not had the vast opportunities that men have had. Although there have been GREAT female figures in history and the arts...they are still far less known and revered as the famous male figures.
I mean...c'mon...who do you know better? John Steinbeck? or Zora Neale Hurston? Steinbeck's OF MICE AND MEN came out the same year as Hurston's THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD. Whose novel was more acclaimed? Steinbeck of course. Well, now...Hurston's novel is considered one of the greatest works, but it hadn't been discovered until like 40 years later by Alice Walker, another female writer.

It's really sad and frustrating...yet true. Hopefully in the future, women will have become equal with men.

Gosh....I have no clue why more guys like film scores than girls...I'm just sitting here...staring at the stupid screen...watching myself type these stupid lame comments...and dragging this thing on and on...oops sorry.

And so...the question of why more guys like film scores than girls do...remains one of the greatest mysteries of the world...just like WHY we are all attracted to film music.

Argh...can ANYONE answer this? Why more males than females???? It's driving me insane...(not that I wasn't already before...) But seriously...I have no clue as to why this is? Does anybody?
Maybe a light bulb will light up in my head later on...(I doubt it)...but maybe...JUST maybe...

women composers have been around at least as long as men. Just look at the revered work of Hildegard von Bingen, a nun who wrote chant close to 1,000 years ago! maybe not that long, but still...

She can tell when I've liked a movie's music when I sit all the way through the end credits. That's when she notices the music.

She won't go out and buy soundtracks, she leaves that to me. But she does demand that half the slots on the CD changer in the mommy-mobile consist of soundtrack CDs.

The parts she doesn't like are the action cues. The music is designed to make you nervous and anxious. She doesn't like that. But she loves the thematic parts.

Almost all the girlfriends I had before I met my wife liked film music when I played it for them. A made a couple of them some mix tapes with their favorite parts. But they never liked it enough to buy their own copies, prefering to spend their cash on pop music.

Yet, women have made tremendous advances in all major professional fields including animation which used to be an all male environment. Now we have female writers, producers, directors and lead animators in that field.

Yet in film composition, women are still way behind. Again the question, why do they not seem as attracted to this as men are?

Scott

Also, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for a long time refused to take any women, except for the harp player. And she was usually missing on photographs of the orchestra. Last year they've been forced to accept women, too, but I don't know if there actually are already some in the orchestra by now.

There actually some great female conductors.

In the band realm we have Mallory Thompson(Northwestern University). Also a major author on how to conduct and actually one of the better conductors back in the time was Elizabeth A. H. Green.

As for Film Scores the only one I know of is Shirley Walker. From what I hear she is a great conductor!

Aaron Collins

Scott, I’m not sure why more women are not attracted to
composing. Maybe they are, and we’ll see more. I just found
this quotation in FSM, November l999. “Shirley Walker tells an
anecdote where she was up for a blockbuster action movie
until a studio executive finally confessed, ‘I’m sorry, but I just
can’t imagine a woman scoring this movie.’” That could dampen
one’s spirit a wee bit. I have no idea if a glass ceiling exists in
compositional colleges or in the film industry, and only time will
change this. At least some women are starting to direct movies.

Maybe it is nature vs. nurture or heredity and environment. Give
a little girl a doll and tinkering music box and give a little boy GI
Joes and trucks. Soundtrack scores tend to have a lot of muscular,
rousing, loud, strong action cues, and unlike myself, I don’t see many
women attracted to those scores. Or maybe my X and Y
chromosomes are scrambled.

And here is a bit of reality. In Schelle’s book THE SCORE, for me
the best interview was with Christopher Young. He had agonized
over taking a year from films to write concert pieces and felt he couldn’t
do this, letting possible great movies slip by to other competitors. He also
commented that he drove his wife nuts at times when he was so intense
on finding that first theme. He’d be up or gone for days. Now who is
keeping the home fires burning and the family in tact during these times?
H Rocco pointed out the Rachel Portman had to resign from Mulan
because of a pregnancy. In her role as wife and mother, how often
can she spend weeks intensely involved in her music while someone else
nurtures the home and family? I was a principal of a high school of l800 and
often had 90 hour weeks; yet, I still felt compelled to balance BOTH family
and home. Not easy. If women composers make it to the point where
they can financially command the salaries of a Horner or a Goldsmith,
maybe they can hire the help they need. (However, how does one hire a mother
or a wife or for that fact a father or a husband? Hmmm.) But any person,
male or female, should make it on the merit of the music, not his/her
gender. I hope Portman and Walker keep pushing and will sometime
score a rousing space movie, western, or a Sly/Arnie extravaganza.

I think Joan has made the most salient points about women and musical composition. But I'll point out that in Japan, that most absurdly allegedly "patriarchal" of nations (I could go into why this is nonsensical later), the same proportion of session musicians are female as they are male. They have great female instrumental soloists as well as vocal ones; increasingly, they have accomplished and respected female composers as well (Yoko Kanno is the one most people on the board might know, but some other women have made inroads into the extremely lucrative field of video game composition -- as far back as the earliest 1980s.)

At present, I'd say that the percentage of female composers roughly mirrors the percentage of female filmscore fans -- for good or for ill, that's not for me to say. It's really all about what we're exposed to, and when, as Joan also suggested. She told a story about one of her daughters having fallen in love with Joan's old copy of CONAN THE BARBARIAN, for example ... and my dad raised ME on a diet of the Beatles and Aerosmith ...

You are right when you mention that most women do work through their pregnancies, so
why not Portman during Mulan? I worked up until a week before my twins were born,
and they weighed six and half pounds EACH. (Howard, that still doesn’t mean that I look
like Jane Darwell nor a giant stretch mark. ) When the bell rang, my sweetheart
students used to say, “here comes Ms. Hue’s stomach; we still have two minutes to gossip
until she follows it around the bend.” But I didn’t have a history of infertility, diabetes,
nor miscarriages. If Portman had any of those or other issues, she wouldn’t work. And
regardless of wealth, hiring a housekeeper won’t keep a solidified family.
“Attention...attention must be paid.” (Death of a Salesman.) Consequently, women
may be pulled out of composing assignments more often than men because of family
issues. Sure would be interesting to know the ratio of men to women in composition
schools.

Here is another theory. If you look at engineering schools, only about 20 percent or less
of the students are women. It’s growing but slowly. Schools are finally starting to really
promote and encourage young girls to become involved in math and science. Music, as
most know, has a STRONG, symbiotic relationship to mathematics. Educators are
encouraging parents to enroll their children in music lessons because musical cognition
enhances mathematical expertise. I’d tentatively suggest that the shortage of women in
the scientific and mathematical vocations may also segue into the musical world. Just a
theory.

Go for it, "Lillian"!

I think that women are more realistic and practical than men. They don't go trainspotting. They don't collect things just to have them. They are less given to flights of fancy. Girls grow up and become women. Lots of men just stay little boys, playing with their train-sets and listening to film music.

I am a little boy.

Now I'll post this and then never be able to erase it. I'll post it anyway: it's Friday night here, and I've just made a few throwaway comments as one does on a Friday night!

And if they're not into it to start with, they're not going to want to work in the business.

This has been an ill-thought-out rant. Please don't hate me.

In my experiences, males I have talked to seem to notice film music more, and listening to it seems to cross their mind more... but when I play it for (most of) them they cannot stand it.

Females I have talked to, on the other hand, have never even thought about film music, certainly not listening to it. Yet, if I play it for them, they are much more open-minded about it and tend to enjoy it much more.

Of course, there are many exceptions to this... but this seems to be the majority of my experiences in trying to incite interest in film music among others.

I wonder if I'm just not more open to ALL types of music, more than anyone else I know. My BEST friend has turned me on to various punk and alternative bands, but beyond the occasional Masaru Sato score, I can't get him into film music at all. (I figured, if you loved YOJIMBO, surely you can get into 100 RIFLES -- apparently not.)