Joan Tower Contribution

Having just talked about Joan Tower and her contribution to music, to the let us now turn our attention to another woman who had a significant impact on the shaping of music as we know it today. Margaret Sutherland had a very stable childhood. Her mother was a singer, her father was a writer for a newspaper as well as a pianist. By the age of five Sutherland was improvising at the piano and she began writing her own pieces a year later. Music wasn’t really mainstream in Australia. Sutherland grew up in post-colonial Australia where the prevailing musical influences were a kind of English pastoralism mixed with Romanticism and French impressionism . It has been said that “she was one of the first to absorb the influences of neoclassicism, particularly the music of Bartók and Stravinsky, and went on to
Sutherland also had some very strong view when it came to the worlds perception of women and says “The world at large thinks a woman can’t be creative. A woman can contribute in a special way. I don’t think that women want to write the same type of thing as men, but their contribution is no less important. My musical life has been a frustration of half promises, then bad performances, followed by no more performances ”. There is definitely a lot to take in from Sutherlands words, but her point is this, women shouldn’t be compared to men when it comes standards of contributing to music. Saying that a women’s composition is any less than a man’s misses the point of validity based on ability and not gender. She uses her life as an example by references the experiences she’s had with people giving up on her and not allow her an opportunity to share her gift of composition simply because she is a woman. A prime example of this is Sutherlands’ sonata for violin and piano. Louis Dryer Published her sonata for violin and piano in 1935 which was the first for an Australian women composer. Important to note that this publication came ten years after the work was