Colloquium - Presenters

ABSTRACT

Throughout history and into modern day, musical artists, genres, and even instruments have been and
continue to be divided by gender. Music created and performed by women, or enjoyed by a largely female
audience is often taken less seriously than traditionally “masculine” music. The Western classical music
canon seriously lacks representation of music composed by women throughout the ages, leading to
modern classical musicians having little exposure to this music through education and concert
programming. The perception of music created by women as being simple, unimpactful, and emotional in
a negative way has contributed to this absence in the Western art music canon, as it is the reception that
leads to canonicity (Citron, 1993). In regard to music being written today, if we look at film scores and
musical theatre as the modern equivalents to the orchestral, opera, and art song genres of Western
classical music (through ensembles, instrumentation, and venues), women in composition still remain
vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts–and not only that, largely unknown amongst the modern
canon of household names.

Through discourse theory and historiography, this paper examines the language used to describe female
composers and their music, and analyzes the biases towards “feminine” music. By drawing on Citron’s
and De Graaf’s critique of the canon and research on reception theory regarding women in composition in
both Western classical music and more recently in the 20th-21st centuries, the reception this music and its
respective historic and recent composers received will be evaluated through a comparative analysis.

 

KEYWORDS
Feminist musicology, Composers, Musical theatre, Classical music, Comparative analysis

 

BIO

Naomi Sehn is a Mexican-Canadian composer influenced by her background in voice and musical theatre,
with her creativity ultimately being driven by storytelling. Her compositional range spans from original
works to arrangements, and includes pieces for choir, orchestra, wind symphony, chamber ensembles,
theatre, and digital tracks. Through her passion for theatre, Naomi has collaborated with the University of
Victoria’s Phoenix Theatre on two occasions, in 2022 as the composer for their original applied theatre
piece “Homecoming: A Queer Journey”, and in 2023 as the musical arranger for their production of
“Vinegar Tom''. She is a recipient of the Southam Prize (2021), an award given to a deserving woman
studying composition in BC, and has represented UVic twice as a moderator at the West Coast Student
Composers Symposium. She holds a BMus in Composition and Music Theory from UVic, and is
currently pursuing a Master’s degree in composition at York University.