1. Ethel Smyth
In their first episode, Alice and Shahid learn about lesbian composer Ethel Smyth, who smashed glass ceilings, the patriarchy, and men’s windows. They also discuss bi erasure, representation, the audacity of straight men, the difference between baby gay boys and baby lesbians, and more!
Pieces Discussed (all by Ethel Smyth):
The March of the Women
Mass in D
Der Wald
Concerto for Violin and Horn
Intro Music: The March of the Women
Background Music: Serenade in D
Sources:
Impressions That Remained by Ethel Smyth
Wikipedia
British Library
British Music Collection
Qnotes
Mental Floss
History Channel
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Classical Queeros is a podcast that aims to spotlight queer composers and make classical music more accessible. Follow us on Instagram @classicalqueeros and Twitter at @classicalqueero! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/classical-queeros/support
"I have said I was subject to 'passions' as I called them, and about this time drew up a list of over a hundred girls and women to whom, had I been a man, I should have proposed."
"At this stage of existence" - again, around 12-ish, "I stood in great awe of my father, but adored my mother, and remember her dazzling apparitions at our beside when she would come to kiss us goodnight before starting for an evening party. I often lay sleepless and weeping at the thought of her one day growing old and less beautiful."
"Besides this, wild passions for girls and women a great deal older than myself made up a large part of my emotional life. And it was my habit to increase the anguish of my love by fancifying its object was prey to some terrible disease that would shortly snatch her from me."
"I have said that the whole course of my life was determined, little as she realized it, by one of our governesses. When I was twelve, a new victim arrived who had studied music at the Leipzig Conservatorium, then in the hey-day of its reputation in England; for the first time I heard classical music and a new world opened up before me. Shortly after, a friend having given me Beethoven’s Sonatas, I began studying, the easier of these and walked into the new world on my own feet. Thus was my true bent suddenly revealed to me, and I then and there conceived the plan, carried out seven years later, of study at Leipzig and giving up my life to music."
“It had always been an axiom in the family that from the earliest years Mary had been drawn by me into tomboyish ways that really were foreign to her nature. I think this is probably true; anyhow, as time went on, boys who began by being attracted by my independence and proficiency in games always ended by forsaking me in order to minister to Mary’s more feminine helplessness - buckling on her skates for her, or in response to a piteous “Help me! I’m giddy!” flying to her rescue among the higher branches of the old cherry tree. I remember various incidents connected with faithless boy lovers of mine, but think that in all this I was playing a part, doing what I knew was the correct thing. Now and again a very real feeling of mortification may have swept over me as I saw my admirers succumbing to the charms of Mary, but from the first my most ardent sentiments were bestowed on members of my own sex, and the love-affairs with boys were but imitative and trashy, I fear.”
A: So like, she knew, you know? And I imagine for her, not having any role models who were queer, you know. Even though she felt like being in love with women wasn't necessarily a bad thing, what could she do about it? Which is probably why she had these flings for a while. But like, what she said here, "my most ardent sentiments were bestowed on members of my own sex." The first time I ever had feelings for a girl, I was like "W H O A." Like I had crushes on so many boys (who, by the way, are all gay now), and I was like, ready to get married at age 6, but then I fell in love with a friend of mine, and I was like "Oh.....OH.......oh my god........" So yeah, I get it. That's probably what she felt.
A: She had....Victorian England, they had balls, ballroom dancing, ballroom culture. She liked to go to these events because she liked to dance, but everyone else went to like, pick up people, you know? And flirt, and find a husband or a wife. And she said that it sucked, because she just wanted to dance, and she said about this: "Then too there was the humiliating infuriating idea that if I was 'nice' to a man he would think I wanted to marry him!" And honestly, that HASN'T CHANGED.
S: No, men have not changed.
A: Oh my god. The number of times - especially after I got to college and was very open about being gay - the number of times that I would be very loud about this and still guys would be like "hey ;) so uh, can I have your number?"
S: Abolish all men.
A: "ABOLISH ALL MEN"!
S: We're done. We're done with men. We're sending them to Mars, they can stay there. They can figure it out. Send All Men To Mars And Have Them Figure It Out Over There.
A: So as-
S: I'm sorry, I'm still cringing. I'm still just...a girl just wants to dance!
A: She's like "Do you want to dance?" And he's like "Yes, and will you marry me!" And she's like, "No! This is a dancing floor! It's for dancing!" Although, you know what Dr. Stoffel would say. Dancing leads to courting, and courting leads to mating.
S: Shoutout to Dr. Stoffel.
A: So as a lesbian, I have quotes and some notes about her adventures as a gay woman. So, yeah I mentioned earlier she got nervous when she talked to girls she liked, and she said, "when in the presence of one of my “passions,” I was liable, under the stress of emotion, to extraordinary contortions; such as standing on the outside of my feet, swaying to and fro, brushing the palm of one hand violently against the other in mid-air, as if one were flint and the other steel.”
S: I love it!
A: Can you imagine? I mean, I don't have to imagine because I've done some pretty equally embarrassing things while talking to a girl. There was a girl I once tried to talk to, and I was trying to like, make a conversation with her. And she was like, "I study astrobiology." And I was like "Oh! Okay!" And what I was trying to say was "What is that?" But what I said instead was "So, uh, what is that, like, what, what is, like what, um, like, uh" and I just did that for like, two entire minutes! And she just stood there and let me!! I have no idea where she is now. So, yeah. Ethel, I Get It. Ethel Smyth. One and the same. Some of the people she fell in love with were Virginia Woolf -
S: Oooooo!
A: - who did not reciprocate the feelings. Ethel was, at the time, in her 70s, and Virginia was in her 50s, maybe late 40s. And Virginia wasn't into it romantically, but they were friends. Did you watch the movie The Greatest Showman?
S: I.....oh I did not, no.
A: Okay. I do like that movie. It's a straight movie, but I like it, I think the music is fun. So that's the one with Hugh Jackman. So he's the circus guy, and at some point he befriends this opera singer named Jenny Lind, and he starts taking her on tour around like America or whatever, and then she falls in love with him and he's like, I dunno whatever. The point is that she is a real person, and Ethel Smyth was in love with her and got to work with her too!
S: Oh, wow!
A: Yeah! So That was really cool to find out.
S: Real world connections! Love to see it.
A: So the next bit is really cool, I think. In googling Ethel Smyth, I found an article about somebody else named Mary Benson. Mary was the wife of an archbishop in England, and the article was about how their fam - pretty much their whole family was gay, and the archbishop was like, ".......eh" you know? The husband was like, okay with all of her affairs with women- EXCEPT for one person, named Ethel.
S: Oh my gosh.
A: This is from the History Channel. "The only time one of Mary’s companions caused major upheaval in the Benson household came in 1889, when Mary fell for a younger composer named Ethel Smyth. 'The reasons for which I love you are unshakeable,' Smyth wrote Mary in a letter, 'here are some of them: your truth, your fire, your intensity, your power of sustained effort, your extraordinary grip over other souls, your intellect, and above all, in the words of a prayer I like, your "unconquerable heart."'"
S: Oh my god. Whipped!
A: I know!!! Sounds like some, uh, texts that I sent to Sam when we first started dating.
S: AWWWWWW
A: Side note, we would sent texts like that to each other, and then one of us would interrupt and say "that was super gay" Anyway: "Edward," the archbishop, the husband, "disliked Smyth, who had come to Mary after another married woman’s family had banished her. But the real problem came when Smyth fell in love with another Benson: Nellie, Mary’s daughter. And Nellie was besotted back."
S: Oh....what???
A: Drama!! Lesbian drama! Right?? "The two were much closer in age: at the time, Nellie was 26, Smyth was 31, and Mary was 48. Even though, from a philosophical standpoint, Mary saw the sense in accommodating their relationship, she was clearly chagrined. 'I feel now that I must stand aside in the matter and leave you two alone,' she wrote Smyth."
S: Wooowww!!! What!! That's insane!!!
A: I know!!!
S: I feel like this is something you hear about on like, drama TV shows, like, that's like real life Jerry, you know?
A: I know. This happened in real life to my past life. I don't know that much about like, other lesbians because I didn't really know many until I met Sam. I didn't like, date and experience. But from what I understand, lesbians are super happy to date much older lesbians. Case in point, you know, what's her name, the actress, Sarah Paulson? Her girlfriend, who is also an actor, is like....30 years older than she is? They're super happy! I'm just thinking about that. This isn't that out of left field! This is just what lesbians do!
S: I know, but the family thing!
A: I don't think I could do that.
S: That's insane. I've like, definitely dated people who've definitely checked out my parents in front of me. I brought some guy home, and he's a bisexual, and he came to my house and checked out both of my parents and then told me after, he was like "oh your parents look really good" and I was like "excuse me???"
A: What!!!! Oh my god!!
S: And I was like "excuse me!" I was like. Wow.
A: Oh my god that's so funny. I'm here for bisexuality, as always. HOWEVER. If you're on a date with somebody, you shouldnt' be checking out other people, much less their parents. Oh my Jesus. Okay.
A: Oh, I also wanted to read this one quote from that article from the History Channel about Mary Benson. At the top, it said...so it's saying that gay people weren't that uncommon in Victorian times like we were led to believe. So he says, "This isn't to say that acting on same-sex desire was safe in Victorian times. The punishment for sex between men was death until 1861, when it was downgraded to a minimum of 10 years of prison labor."
S: Oh my gosh.
A: I know. Awful. "Sex between women was not punishable by law, but that was because such intimacies were largely invisible to those in charge. Close female friendships appeared prevalent, but lesbianism was not yet a definable concept."
S: I....that's hilarious to me.
A: Yeah.
S: It's just like...I think it's so funny because that just, it just like, proves that men can't hold it in their pants.
[laughter]
S: It's like, "oh my god, they're on the STREET, DOIN IT like all over the place! We can see it! Y'all are gonna die." But like, women are like, "We're gonna hide it, we'll be like, 'we're best friends.'" I love it!
A: Well, to be fair, there is a history of people just, like, refusing to, like, accept that lesbians exist. You know? Okay, think about.....homophobes' problems with men is that they're fem--with gay men, is that they're feminine, and that they have sex in ways that they think are, weird?
S: Yeah. Of course.
A: Yeah. And homophobes' problems with lesbians is that they're not interested in men.
S: Right.
A: You know?
S: That's exactly it.
A: Right. So, like...and I've been thinking about this a lot, like...in patriarchal societies like this, the biggest crime is to be a woman. Like, if we just ignore race for a second! The biggest crime is to be a woman. So if a man acts like a woman, that's bad. If a woman acts like a man, less bad because we all should be men, right?
S: Right. Yeah, I totally get it. Yeah.
A: Yeah, so it's easier for women to get away with that stuff because it's just like, "wow, she's weird and we don't like her, but like...I kind of like it?" you know?
S: Yeah, of course. and it's like, so true, even the LGBT community. Like how gay people that can fit into the binary, like, you know, cisgender gay men and women, often have much easier time than people that are like, non-binary, they don't conform to a gender identity, or they're transgender. That's so awful that we--not "we" necessarily--the people in our community will like, see them and be like, "oh it sucks. Like, we can fit in with the straighties. Heteronormativity. But you can't." And they like turn, like--they turn their eyes, you know, like, they turn their head around. They pretend they don't exist.
A: Yeah. Man. Sometimes we suck!
S: Yeah. It's so terrible. You know what else this reminds me of though? Is that I feel like--okay, at least in my...my secondary lived experience with like, queer women that I know. Like, their relationship with their sexuality has always come through, like, best friends--finding like, really best friends in their, like...growing up and being like, "Oh, damn, this is not a friend." All of my like lesbian friends have always been like, "Oh s**t!"
A: You're just like, hanging out, bein' gal pals, and you're like, "Uh oh"
S: Yeah exactly, yeah! Which like, did not happen to me at all because I never fit in with like the boys really. So like, guys I had crushes on, I didn't even know them, you know, per se. So it's like, I think it's funny that that's like a similar thread that I've had with all of my lesbian friends. It's always like their best friend, and then they're like, "Oh, s**t!"
A: Yeah, best friends and then "Oh, s**t!" Yeah, I mean, women are trained to-- or like, girls are trained to embrace their emotions, and and boys are not, so maybe that's part of it--is like, the friendships between boys growing up--if you're like gushy and emotionally close, then it's kind of like, "Ew, you're a girl."
S: Yeah.
A: Yeah. So maybe that's part of it. I'm sorry you didn't get to experience that!
S: No, no! I mean...I don't know. I feel like, having like been the the gay friend helping my lesbian friends come out, like, "Yes, sweetie, that means you're gay" and they're like, "No, no! But I think this guy is cute!" And I'm like, "Do you?" And they're like, "....No." I know you don't.
A: "I know you don't"! Oh my god. You know this, but I came out to myself at 16 as "not straight." And then a year later, I was like, "Okay, so I guess I'm bi?" And then I was 17, 18 when I was like, "Okay, I'm bi" and then when I was 19, I was like, "Oh, oh. I'm not bi. I'm gay." Which I feel kind of bad about, because a lot of people don't believe in bisexuality, you know, and they're just like, "Oh, it's just a stop on the way to being gay, or to being straight, or whatever."
S: Yeah.
A: Which I feel bad that I, like, a little bit contributed to that incorrect myth, but--
S: Yeah, I don't think you're to blame, though. I feel like it's partially the way our society pushes us to believe that we're like, "Oh, we have to like men somehow," right? Even though I feel certainly a different way for each of them. So I totally get it, I don't think you're to blame for that.
A: Okay thank you!
S: But it's like, also yeah. I don't know. I mean, I hate the bi erasure thing that's always happening, because I know so many bi, bisexual people that are like, you know, they don't like fit into the stereotypes that people like to put out, which is really annoying."
A: Yeah! And so like, because people have these stereotypes, someone is like, "Hi, I'm bi" they're like, "No you're not. You don't look like what I think you're supposed to be."
S: Right. People are like, "Oh, you're bi when you have a couple of drinks with your best friends that are girls" or something like that. It's like, no, that's not what...no, I'm like, truly bi!
A: Yeah, and like, bisexual erasure is so real. Sam actually recently decided that she was bi--not decided, but like, realized and accepted, and it's been something that's like, kind of been in the back of her mind for a long time.
S: You know what, that's so interesting. Because I feel like also there's push just like you were talking about with being half Korean, half white thing. Cause like, you don't fit into a certain place, and then I feel like a lot of people who are bi feel like a pushback from both sexualities as well, like gay and straight, "You don't fit in with us. You don't get it with us."
A: Yeah, it sucks that even the gays are like, "Bi people don't exist." And I hate that.
S: Abolish the gays.
A: "ABOLISH THE GAYS"! Except for you and me. And our partners.
S: And all our Queeros!
A: Yes, and our Queeros! Um, yeah. But yeah. It took her so long to be like, you know, "This is what I am. I'm not gonna, like, push any part of myself away." You know what part of it did it, like, really solidified it for her, was--do you watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine?
S: I watched a couple of episodes because you told me.
A: Oh yeah.
S: I remember I started watching it a little bit, yeah.
A: It's so good. Anyway--one of the characters, Rosa Diaz, is the one that all the women are like...in real life, the people watching the show, all the women are in love with her.
S: Uh-huh.
A: She's just badass, like, she doesn't take anybody's s**t, and she's beautiful. And in season--I want to say, five? Yeah, season five--she comes out as bi! And like, they say the word "bisexual" on tv. On like, network tv, multiple times, which is amazing. And she has a real experience. She comes out to her parents, and they don't accept her, but all her friends are like, you know, "We got you."
S: Right.
A: And just like, seeing her be super confident, and have relationships with men and women, Sam was like, "Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah."
S: I love that.
A: Yeah. Representation matters!
S: Yes! Yeah, that's true. I've like, and for like a weird reason, I've always had a lot of, uh...a lot of my romantic connections have always been with bisexual men, and a lot of them didn't find out until much later in their life and it's like the same. Like, how can you accept that, when you're married with children, and then you're like, "Oh, crap. There's a whole other side of my sexuality that I've never discovered."
A: Yeah.
S: So it's--yeah. It's really unfortunate that we don't, like...that's like, just starting to like be a thing even then.
A: Yeah, yeah.
S: Yeah. We got a lot of work to do, Queeros.
A: Yeah, Queeros! Is that what we're calling our people?
S: I think, if they would like to be called Queeros.
A: Yeah, exactly. We're not going to call anybody anything that they don't want to be called!
S: Exactly!
A: We're inclusive here. This is a safe space. I wanted to finish with a couple of quotes that I really liked from her book, that just, kind of, like, encapsulate for me what I feel like her character is. They're kind of silly, kind of just like, yeah. Okay so, they're all from her childhood. Here's one: "There--" sorry, British accent.
"There is one more memory, dateless but imperishable, because I was never allowed to hear the end of it--an occasion on which, all unconsciously, a life's philosophy was formulated. Once, grandmama helped me to some pudding and, seeing I did not touch it, exclaimed, 'Why, I thought that was your favorite pudding!' My answer was, 'Yes, but this is so little, I can't eat it!"
S: Wow!
A: I know, right! She's like, "I deserve more, so I'm gonna walk away from this pudding until I get what I deserve!"
S: That's totally...I feel that.
A: I feel like that's exactly who she was like in all of her stuff! She walked away from the Leipzig Conservatory because she's like, "Yes, I have this music education that I finally wanted, but it's not enough, so I'm gonna leave." You know?? Like, "I have the music like career that I finally wanted, but women don't have the vote, so I'm going to leave until I get that," you know?
S: Exactly!
A: Yeah! Exactly! She's such a queen.
S: I love that!
A: This reminds me--did you hear of the story of---there's a show called I May Destroy You that just came out on HBO.
S: Oh yeah! I haven't watched it.
A: I think I probably won't, because it seems pretty heavy. But the the actress/writer/creator of the show is named Michaela Coel, and she has a show on Netflix already, and she wrote the show, pitched it to Netflix, and Netflix was like, "All right. We're gonna give you a million dollars for this deal." And she was like "Okay yay!" And they're like, "But--you can't have any creative control over this ,you don't own the copyright to this anymore." And so she was like, "Oh, well, maybe I should." And her agents were like, "Yeah, maybe you should," because they were secretly going to get a cut that she wasn't going to get!
S: Uh-huh.
A: So they were like, "Yeah, you should do it" and she was like, "Maybe can I get like, five percent of the copyright? Can I get three percent?" And they were like, "No. We don't do that here." So she eventually was like, "No, I'm not gonna do this." She walked away from that million dollar deal, and then sold it to--uh, was it HBO? No, it was BBC! And she got the creative control that she deserved.
S: Wow. F***ing Netflix.
A: I know!
S: So annoying.
A: I know!! But anyway. So like, you know, women standing up for what they deserve and knowing what they're worth.
S: That's amazing!
A: I love to see it. Yeah. Yes. Okay, here's another quote. This is just silly.
"My father once wrote and pinned on the wall, 'If you have nothing pleasant to say, hold your tongue;' an adage which, though excellent as a receipt for getting on in society, was unpopular in a nursery such as ours, for words led to blows and we happen to love fighting."
A: I just think that's so funny.
S: That's amazing!
A: Yeah! Like, she would talk about how she fought with her siblings, like, for fun. With like, knives. Somehow they all ended up alive!
S: Disaster!
A: Okay, and then the last one, I just thought was kind of cute. She was talking about a magician (which they called a "conjurer") at like a party, and she said:
"For my part, as soon as I realized I should never guess how these tricks are done, conjuring rather exasperated me. My feelings then as now being, 'What's the fun of not understanding?'"
A: Yeah, which is like, that's so cute and funny, but also like, it's true! Like, what's the fun of participating in a world where you don't get to know what's going on?
S: Yeah!
A: You know, so she was like, "I'm gonna know what's going on. I'm gonna learn all this music, I'm gonna figure out how to get women the vote, I'm gonna-" you know?
S: Yeah!
A: "I'm gonna know what real love is with a woman." Yeah, that's so funny!
S: I've always felt that about magic shows too.
A: Really?
S: Yeah! I was like, I want to know what's going on, otherwise I'm bored, yeah.
A: I want to be the magician, I don't really want to watch the magician.
S: Yeah, I want to know what it's like. I really liked this show where they like, showed how to do all the magic tricks, but all the the magic shows, I was just like, "Oh this is boring." But when they show like, "Oh, this is how they do this," I'm like, "Oh!" And it's like, saucy. It's like, "Oh my god, what's going on now??"
A: Oh my god, yeah! But yeah, so, that's that's our Dame Ethel Smyth. She was given the damehood--is that how you say that?
S: Damehood?
A: Well, it's like knighthood. If you're a man, you get knighted and you are sir so-and-so, and if you're a woman you become a dame.
S: Oh, I did not even know that!
A: Yeah! So a dame is like, the the woman version of a knight in England. And she was bestowed the title of Dame Ethel Smyth for her contributions to music, which is super cool. I think she was the first woman to do so in music.
S: Wow! You learn something new every day.
A: Yeah. We learned so much today!
S: We did, yeah!
A: Ethel, if you're out there, or if you're like, in my past lives, I just want you to know that I love you, and I look up to you, and thank you.
S: Thank you.
A: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for doing everything you did, and for putting up with men's bulls**t. She lived until she was like 86.
S: Amazing.
A: Yeah for 86 years, you put up with men's bulls**t, and I like--I just want to thank you for that.
S: I'm like, inspired now. She was so amazing.
A: She was! She didn't take anybody--like, she was who she was, and I love her.
S: Yeah. That's amazing. I love it. A queen.
A: A queen, definitely. You and any listeners should look up her books and read them. Sometimes they're hard to get through because sometimes she's talking about stuff you don't care about, but then she's talking about, you know, the women that she fell in love with, and that kind of stuff. And it's just--it's so great. She's so unstuffy, like I said, and she was not shy about her--what did they say, "she was not shy about her non-conformist sexual identity." But yeah.
S: Do you have any recommended listenings for our listeners?
A: Oh, yeah! So she wrote a lot of good stuff. My--one of her things was a Mass In D. I don't know enough about masses and choral music to know if it was good, I'm sure it was great. There was one, like, man composer who was like--like, he heard that, and he was like, "This has forever abolished the idea in my mind that women can't do music." Like, from that point on he was like, "women can do music," which is like, you know, all right. I'll take it.
S: Yeah. That's awesome.
A: Yeah. So she wrote a Mass In D. She wrote several operas: some comic--I think some are comic, some are tragic. And my favorite piece that she wrote is a concerto for violin and horn. It's called Concerto for Violin and Horn. It's really pretty. And, you know, Sam, my partner, is a horn player, and I played part of it for her, and she was like, "Ooh, YES" so, you know it's good
S: Do I hear a Flute and Horn Concerto version coming out at some point?
A: I thought about it...I think it's a little too idiomatic for violin, but I might just do it anyway.
S: Just do it!
A: Yeah! And then, of course, there's her March of the Women, which, you can listen to that anywhere, it's one of her most famous pieces, because it was the theme song of the women's suffrage movement in England.
S: Right, and we played it.
A: Yeah, and we played it!
S: Yeah. And we KILLED it.
A: We did! Oh my god. So, uh...what are we supposed to say at the end of podcasts?......We have websites. aliceparkmusic.com and also
S: shahidflute.com.
A: Yeah! Listen to our podcast, and rate us as five stars because we're great...I hope. And-
S: Go throw a brick in a man's window.
A: Yeah! That's what we gotta do. Be like Ethel.
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