Tue 11 May 2021 02.00 EDT
Questions thunder down on anyone who writes about music. How to describe abstract sounds in words is the first hurdle. Once every synonym for loud, soft, fast, slow has been exhausted, where next? While the story of a composerâs life is a helpful way in for most of us, others bang their spoons for hermeneutics. Until well into this century, volumes described as âa history of musicâ habitually began with the births of Bach and Handel in 1685 and petered out around Stravinskyâs
Rite of Spring (1913), thus bookending the music most audiences expected to hear in concerts. As for female composers, apart from Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, they did not exist.