The story is told of the eleven-year-old Richard Rodney Bennett, brilliant but sheltered music student circa 1947 waiting between trains at London's Victoria Station to return to school, picking up a music magazine and discovering there an article all about an up-and-coming composer who had written a piece based on some decadent poetry by Rimbaud and cast in the progressive musical language of 12-tone, or serial, technique. The aggressive nature of the piece, "Ō Saisons, Ō Chateaux, Op. 13" composed with an equally eccentric instrumental ensemble behind the vocalist – harp, guitar, mandolin, strings – caught the boy's attention. This was a new experience for him; his first real close-hand and personal brush with modernism. And one additional astonishment about the whole discovery: the composer was a woman, Elisabeth Lutyens, trailblazer, forerunner – and also rebellious, dismissive, cantankerous, entertainingly foul-mouthed.
Born in 1906, Lutyens was forty-years-old when young Richard Bennett heard of her and not yet famed or even much-respected for her careful avant garde composing; thus, she hardly knew how to respond to recognition such as that article represented or flattery such as this naïve student was about to confer on her. Which self would "crazy Liz" present to a young fan like him: the driven sage (she eventually composed nearly 2,000 works) or the impish rebel (she once showed up to a formal cocktail party dressed as Peter Pan); half crusader (dispenser of insults and curses when she felt things were unfair); half victim (burdened by her own habits, chain-smoking dozens of cigarettes and downing a bottle of brandy per day in self-defense against, what?).
But the boy Richard knew none of that. He just envied her daring and her skill with the difficult grammar of serialism. He fired off a fan letter to her, bought and studied some of her piano scores and was abashed when she answered him by return post. "It was as if a door had opened", he said later. Up until then, at school, he'd been writing music more like Vaughan-Williams or Delius; British pastorale stuff, or pseudo-Debussy. But this woman – a woman, mind you – was writing with far more vision and bravery. "This, I knew, was the kind of music I wanted to know about." After the fan letter, he tracked her down by phone and she actually picked-up the line and spoke with him, showing great and simple respect. "She was very nice – thrilled that such a young person wanted to know her." And Bennett did indeed launch into a similarly aggressive composing career, writing serial music much influenced by the Lutyens examples. If a woman could dare these self-assertive compositions and make the rest of the world listen, (well, they would hear her eventually) why couldn't a kid? At fourteen, Bennett sent her some of his own compositions and she invited him to visit. And although all of this coincided with a difficult period in her own life – separating from her husband, still substance abusing – she graciously allowed the boy to come by her flat for casual lessons and for chat. "She was wonderful... Liz had that wonderful glamor; a kind of magic... she was kind, patient and oddly (for such a bohemian) very motherly... Her influence was immense." And that influence included telling him about the way she was currently earning a precarious living: writing music for films.
Lutyens probably saw the film composing as just another bohemian indulgence, not worthy of full honors – and yet, while she worked at it, she absolutely devoted her full energies there so that much of the movie scoring she did do is at least the equal of (if not in form and formality) her concert works, just in a different dialect. It is anti-serial music. In fact, in character and grammar, Elisabeth Lutyens's film work tried to be as far from serialism as possible. She knowingly surrendered her personal language to score her very first movie and it sounds rather like a society-party piano rhapsody. Some few purists, she knew, would hold it against her and consider her willingness to do film work (which apparently was OK for male composers like William Walton or Arthur Bliss) just another example of her much-maligned "unladylike behavior" but she didn't care – she had enough other pressures to worry about and her family had learned to put up with her "antics". Anyway, while she was growing up, her father had been distracted with his successful architecture business; her mother was swept up in the abstract world of ancient Theosophy mysticism. All five of the Lutyens children made their own way; Lizzie into music through the Paris Conservatoire and then the Royal Academy. She fell in and out of one marriage, then settled in with the struggling conductor Edward Clarke who was eighteen years her senior and who would prove as vulnerable to substance abuse as she was becoming. Her reputation in progressive music circles, though, did begin to grow, but that one thing was still clear: movie scoring jobs would have to pay the bills, at least for a while. The fact that she found the movie work somehow to her liking, interesting and challenging, felt like a gift.
That first film score was a shock, though, to her friends and colleagues who found the idea of writing movie music so unlike her and yet, in another way, they could see how it was also a Lizzie-move, as shrewd as ever. The film, Penny and the Pownall Case (1948), told a pulp fiction story of a young British fashion model who assumes the role of amateur detective to track down a smuggling ring securing passage for former Nazis out of Europe. Lutyens conceived her Pownall score as a kind of tonal and tuneful piano concertino, often resorting to conventional suspense cliches with the scoring; familiar gestures like tremolo strings for political intrigue, brass announcements for official declarations, a quasi-tango as Penny's search takes her to Spain, even a carefree waltz to somewhat remind us of the fact that women characters are running the show this time. It is conventional music all the way, then; a far cry from the composer's personal serial style, undertaken partly out of desperation needing to become the breadwinner for her growing family and disastrous marriage, but also partly (as I have already observed) finding that the storytelling/scene-setting aspects of this strange side-craft of film composing were actually quite fun.
Being involved with the movies brought her out of the severe enclave of academia – also out of bankruptcy. She wanted more of it and she also enjoyed the rebellious aspect of being the only woman so engaged. It is a measure of her inexperience with soundtrack scoring, however, that in this first film so many of her music cues just keep playing in the background of scenes behind dialogue, making their musical statement in competition with, even to the detriment of, hearing what the characters are saying. Thus, while the director is trying to tell his story on screen, Lutyens the composer often seems oblivious, making music in her own world. She would learn fast, though, and end up being a valuable collaborator with many films to come. By the 1950s and 1960s, the very dissonance and atonality of her so-called art music, her personal sound, was being viewed as a great asset to the new genre of campy horror films coming out of studios like Hammer and Amicus. 1965's The Skull was one example, introduced by atonal unison brass declarations followed by a stalking meter and blurry chords for winds and strings suggesting a mood of menace, then ear-splitting cries from high brass as the skull itself shrieks. She saw those soundtracks not as musical atmosphere but as blatant illustration.
A better example of Lutyens's talent for supporting such low-brow entertainments while making them seem like genuine thrillers is the 1964 sci-fi matinee classic Earth Dies Screaming about invaders from another planet. The experienced British studio music director Philip Martel conducted and perhaps guided Lutyens through this very specific score. It begins with nervous lurking strings rising by chromatic steps through a growing sense of urgency – each step a question mark, exploiting the special Lutyens way with atonality not tied to any serial row but taking great advantage of the unanchored, unresolved tones of thriller scoring. Unpredictable music, certainly, but wedded to the action on screen and, musically, all-of-a-piece. And this is only the Main Title introduction.
Elsewhere, brass are used for the official military response to the invaders and familiar orchestral gestures create suspense. But here in the relatively new sci-fi genre, the soundtrack begins to experiment, to mix-in the sound of electronic instruments: signals supposedly emanating from radio antennae aimed at detecting the invading spacemen who (awkwardly) stalk the village, threatening to take over the streets. Like a counterpoint, synthesized sounds and radar beeps become part of the narrative orchestral music to create a particularly creepy soundtrack appropriate to that era's space paranoia. What is clear is that Lutyens is taking this whole soundtrack scoring thing seriously and her commitment is what is engaging. Women who had already been working within the film industry as arrangers and conducting assistants began to wonder from now on; what about taking-on a whole original score next time? What about composing? Before long, subsequent Lutyens scores for those cheap thriller films like Theater of Death or Dr. Terror's House of Horrors brought her the unofficial title of Queen of Horror and she took pride in that eccentric accolade ever after – hers was no more "unladylike" a reputation, she would say, than that of Lady Macbeth or Mary Shelly!
What she may not have noticed in her final years (she died in 1983) was that even as her example as a serialist willing to tame her own personal voice to the mainstream media – to come as an outsider into the movies – was inspiring the young Richard Rodney Bennett to indulge a similar career and not feel bad about it, so also she was inspiring other women -- outsiders in a man's world -- to open the studio doors and make their voices known in the cinema – gender be damned.
For some other female composers like British composer Doreen Carwithen, born 1922, the path into film scoring was more direct than it had been for Lutyens. Carwithen's marriage to established screen composer William Alwyn (Odd Man Out; The Fallen Idol) was her obvious introduction into the field. And yet it was mainly the working catalogue of Elisabeth Lutyens that truly gave her the confidence to enter the fray. Her reputation today is more for her being the first full-time female composer in British movies than for any kind of musical or cinematic innovation such as Lutyens could boast – there is not much progressive or distinctive orchestration in the Carwithen file: most of the thirty films she accompanied during her limited career were conventionally scored. She had begun as a copyist and graduated to writing transitional passages in other people's scores at the Dunham Studios before launching her own career transition into original scoring – titles like Mantrap and Boys in Brown. Her list spans from 1948 to 1963 winning not only steady commissions but lasting respect within the industry and succeeding in making colleagues out of male rivals.
Given that growing acceptance of gender equality, her contemporary Angela Morley would prove both more prolific and more compositionally ambitious as she would move from arranging and orchestrating soundtracks for others to composing her own. Interestingly, Morley's professional path as a female composer for films would prove to be a lot easier than her personal evolution as a woman. For what history records is that Angela Morley, six-time Emmy-nominated, three-time Emmy winning composer, born in 1924, once upon a time was known as the British orchestrator and conductor, Wally Stott. He was once a successful light music arranger in the 1950s and did a certain amount of orchestration for films and, like Carwithen, provided transitional scoring passages for others. Twice happily married with two children, suddenly at about the age of fifty, he seemed to disappear from both the music scene and from film credits only to reappear after several months as Angela Morley, transgendered. And a more successful metamorphosis could not be imagined for her whose whole family supported the decision and the several stages required for the transformation. Happily, there seemed to be very little trauma to mark the end of Wally Stott and very little career disruption before establishing the career of Angela Morley in his place, as it were.
This personal saga coincided with the gradual acceptance of women into film composing we have been summarizing here, so Morley's timing was fortunate. Right away, two important film jobs came along for her; musical films that wanted not only arranging and orchestrating other people's songs for each film (a Cinderella story, The Slipper and the Rose, 1976; and the French fable The Little Prince, 1974). Morley was to create the orchestral settings for these songs as well as create a semi-narrative dramatic score to tie each whole film together. It was multi-leveled projects like these that put Hollywood on notice that here was a formidable and dependable soundtrack scorer who now could be given some composing responsibilities of her own. That would come circa 1978 in the form of the major full-length animated feature, Watership Down, story of a rabbit family threatened by the encroaching human civilization and rapidly degrading natural environment around them, searching for safety (in no small symbolism) across a landscape of increasing peril. As a scoring assignment, along with the delight of finally being able to compose completely original material, Morley's task would include the extra burden that scoring cartoons requires: hyper-active music that needs to capture every action on screen with an exaggerated attentiveness – a technical challenge; a physical marathon. Elder composer Malcolm Williamson had originally been signed to do the score but ill-health had forced him to step down and here came Angela Morley to take over, incorporating Williamson's opening music into her own scoring and establishing her own authority over the drama -- this rather dark fable that can't seem to make up its mind whether to be a cultural bell-weather with environmental warnings or a heroic adventure in praise of the little people (or rabbits) who flee oppression. On screen, the animal characters are simply, clearly, and effectively drawn while the backdrops – the woods and fields and blackening skies – are rendered as complex atmospheric paintings. Similarly contrasted, the big active music score from Angela Morley is by turns playful and atmospheric, ominous, and warm while also plainly, even methodically, illustrative of nearly every action on screen. It seems perfectly suited to its film.
Soon, though, the new medium for cartoon and animation art would be computer generated and in the case of the Disney studio's first computer enhanced entertainment, Tron (1982), even the story being told on screen was going to be set in cyberspace: tale of a young computer whiz-kid who finds himself literally sucked into a video game and forced to survive in competition with all the other virtual characters and forces at play there: humankind versus A.I. With no apparent comparison on behalf of the industry so soon after Angela Morley's Watership Down animation music, another woman was chosen to do the complex music score for this new generation animation and, with no irony intended, she who was chosen was another case of transgender. In 1968, electronics expert and keyboard virtuoso Walter Carlos had produced a best-selling record album performing the multi-part fugues and preludes of J. S. Bach reprogrammed for the new Moog synthesizer. Carlos called it "Switched-on Bach" and it seemed to promise two things to that present era: the popularization of electronic modes of music-making (of which the Moog was only one promising brand) and the resurgence of Bach himself to a new generation, if only through this artificial resuscitation. Suddenly, though, like Wally Stott before him, Walter Carlos seemed to disappear from the music scene for a number of months even as "Switched-on Bach" was still on the charts – only to reappear an even more sophisticated, experienced, and aggressive advocate for electronic music, now venturing into the field of composing and the specialty of film composing, only now transformed into the woman Wendy Carlos.
Initially, the filmmakers of Tron who had requested her collaboration based on that "switched-on" fame were suggesting a music score made of collected familiar classical excerpts wanting Carlos to extract, "download", and adapt them to match the action on screen. For two films by director Stanley Kubrick in the 1970s and 1980s she had done just that. Kubrick was already known for courting controversy in this way: laying-in classical concert pieces as the whole soundtrack of his 1969 film 2001, A Space Odyssey. In 1971, he chose Wendy Carlos for his new film, A Clockwork Orange, to stitch together a soundtrack full of classical quotes but to utilize them there as absurdities – half satiric, half satanic, including some crazy synthesized manipulations of pieces like Rossini's "William Tell Overture" and "Thieving Magpie" all to be heard in the context of the film's depiction of a society where anarchy rules and acts of extreme violence are tolerated and enjoyed. Technically assisted by Rachel Elkind, Wendy Carlos understood Kubrick's intentions, creating a detached and stoic tone right from the opening use of Purcell's "Funeral March for Queen Mary" and then returning to the piece elsewhere in the harrowing story-to-come. Its quality as a funereal lament perhaps also privately endorses a message from Carlos herself about the sheer sadness of this nihilist movie, but we can't be sure to what degree Carlos separated from Kubrick's POV and wanted her own say. Along the way, the main character Alex also professes an admiration for the music of Beethoven and so that encourages one more uncomfortable (blasphemous?) link between noble art and ignoble human behavior of rape and greed that our hero Alex seems to celebrate. Rimsky-Korsakov and Elgar are other composers adapted by Carlos to color this clockwork world of the future. "Violence", Kubrick is supposed to have said somewhere to guide his chosen Music Director, "is turned into a dance".
1980 saw the other Carlos and Kubrick collaboration: The Shining about the horrible happenings to an apparently ordinary family staying at an isolated (and haunted?) hotel. Again, Kubrick said he wanted a soundtrack made-up of classical quotes, extracts and adaptations, this time from the progressive likes of Bartόk, Penderecki, and Ligeti.
Certainly, anyone with Carlos's sophistication in so many eras of music should also be a formidable composer capable of original film scoring and Wendy Carlos's magnum opus in that regard must be her hybrid orchestral and synthesized music for Disney's Tron. Happily, an early plan for scoring this film with classical excerpts had been dropped and Carlos set to work creating an original dramatic/narrative score. This would be her first experience mixing the synthetic and the acoustic sound-worlds, here to represent the crisis of human against machine. And the Tron music is not just atmospheric or suspense scoring: it is scoring-on-a-mission, every bit as narrative and illustrative as the soundtrack that hugged so close to that hand-drawn animation of Watership Down only here electronically enhanced. It is not thematic scoring except for a five-note motif that recurs and sometimes a 7/8-meter pumps in behind but its main feature is the constant interaction between a traditional studio orchestra and a whole array of computer-generated instruments and atonal sounds: at once a blend and a battleground of the two world-views. This, of course, is Carlos's rendering of the central plot point: man versus microchip, the soul in cyberspace. Tron's score builds into an aggressive villain all its own with threatening brass and the introduction of electric bass guitar and a high shrieking rock guitar effectively driving us into a virtual frenzy. A clever cadre of unidentifiable computer sounds, taps, and tones, gets mixed-in with the musical score, reminding us of the virtual amusement park in which we're trapped. Without recognizable themes and conventional voicings, the Tron score was not much noticed in its day, but as a sample of Wendy Carlos's dramatic instincts and orchestrating skills, including her vast knowledge of computer-based instrumentations and equipment, it contains screen scoring that became seriously influential.
And all the while a new generation of women composers born after the war years was more freely entering the business of film scoring, often ghost-writing for male composers but then being offered the chance to produce their own original scores. More and more unique and effective storytelling music was what was wanted; less and less did a composing candidate's gender matter.
Shirley Walker born in 1945 first became the guiding orchestrator and musical mentor for young 1980s film composers like Danny Elfman (Edward Scissorhands; Batman) and Hans Zimmer (Rain Main; Day of the Dog), then went on to score in her own right (Memoirs of an Invisible Man; Batman: The Animated Series). Said journalist Jon Burlingame, "Her memorable military motifs (for TV's Space: Above and Beyond), powerful brass writing, and undeniable ability to musically convey the horror and tragedy of war made her the first choice (for many future TV projects)". It was also part of Shirley Walker's record that she had so successfully "saved" soundtrack crisis surrounding the otherwise lyrical and inspiring adventure movie The Black Stallion (1979) whose awkward, ill-conceived scoring by a number of ill-prepared composers had threatened to hobble the whole production. Walker's guiding, smoothing hand brought the music track in line with the gracefulness and strength that the director, Carroll Ballard, had wanted all along. At the same time and with a similar authority, Walker's scoring for the kids TV series The Flash used an adult-sized orchestra of 42 players and achieved a bigger, more compelling sound than the producers had ever hoped for. Where were the age-old doubts about the clout of women composers now? Walker was also unique for not only saving other people's films and composing powerfully on her own but for orchestrating and conducting all her own music tracks. In 2014, ASCAP (the most powerful composer-rights organization) established the Shirley Walker Award in her name.
In that same spirit, women began entering film music from all directions – classical and colloquial alike. Witness British-born Anne Dudley, classically trained, synth-savvy, and a virtuoso member of the high-tech rock band The Art of Noise. Her score for the comic romp, The Full Monty, won 1997's Academy Award for Best Score, using pop and mock-reggae to tease the stripper-club subculture comically depicted there. And yet she seemed at ease with all types of films, bringing dark black clouds over the sober story of skinhead gang warfare in American History X, then humanizing it through a few emotional piano lines – and using solo trumpet calls and suspense string lines to frame the saga of the Irish Republic Army war years in The Crying Game. Here was a composer who could not be labelled.
It was in 2014 that Emmy/Grammy winning composer Laura Karpman took up the cause of increasing visibility for women in film composing to the next level by co-founding the Alliance for Women Film Composers. By this time, she had scored a host of major films of her own from Paris Can Wait to The Cotton Club Encore and Black Nativity.
One other émigré from the rock band fellowship (previously profiled in mfiles) has been Jocelyn Pook whose range of creativity extends from pop and minimalism to the most formal classical and even liturgical musings. Her experience working to decipher the purposes and preferences of the aforementioned director, Stanley Kubrick, this time for a 1999 psychological poser-film, Eyes Wide Shut, was comparable to that of Shirley Walker: serving the filmmaker's muse before making musical sense. As with those previous Kubrick soundtracks, outsourced music cues were imported here which are not by Pook: an old waltz tune by Shostakovich, a two-note piano bit distilled from Ligeti, etc. Pook's ability to perform in the frankly oppressive universe of a Kubrick production is another example of her versatility while also able to flourish with so much more freedom in later film jobs like Bjōrn Runges's The Wife (2018), Sarah Gavron's 2007 Brick Lane, or the 2009 documentary The People v. Leo Frank.
Perhaps the most famous female film composer as of this writing is Rachel Portman, the first female to win the American Academy Award for Best Score in 1997 for her wise and attractive score to the film version of Jane Austin's novel, Emma. An interview with her appeared previously in mfiles.
By now, women of color are likewise increasingly well-represented in the annuls of film composing, often first as arrangers or through documentary work, then moving into scoring major feature films. Kathryn Bostic's literate work underscores several civil rights documentaries and biographies. As a classical pianist with a jazz sensibility, Bostic became known for her free hand in scoring both documentaries and television, often drawing from both musical styles at the same time as in the film Dear White People where electric keyboard plays a classical theme while a raucous jazz motif plays against scenes of a race riot, or where a high bluesy sax with a piano vamp and strings behind it helps narrate the bio-pic Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Some of her most intimate music was written for another biopic, Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir (2019): opening with a piano prelude based on jazz chords but developing into a more classical allegro drawing-in electric guitar and a few strings as Tan's own career as a writer would focus and mature.
The Bostic score was nominated for an Emmy. From 2016 to 2018 she was Vice President of the aforementioned Alliance for Women Film Composers. And what all these collaborations and personal accomplishments led to by the 2020s was, to a great extent, an open studio door for women, even multicultural women, being considered for each new film project whether it came out of a traditional movie studio, a web-based production entity, or some streaming-serviced indie filmmaker. Thus did Germaine Franco become the first Latina woman to be honored with an Oscar Award for her music to Encanto (2021) and Turkish-American Pinar Toprak become one of the first women to score a comic-book-based superhero movie, Captain Marvel (2019).
More striking yet was the debut season of Icelandic composer, singer, cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir in which she won an Emmy, two Golden Globes (from the Hollywood Foreign Press), a BAFTA, and a Best Score Oscar, for what some called an unorthodox cello concerto to 2019's Joker. Adapted from a graphic novel, the plot followed a down-and-out actor, Arthur Fleck, who descends into his own hellish role as a sad, broken and ultimately crazed and murderous clown crushed by a cold and hostile (Manhattan based) Gotham City. As her own instrument of choice, cello features almost exclusively in Guðnadóttir's scoring of the bleak urban setting – a night setting, mostly, and right in the middle of a city-wide garbage strike so that the gutters and alleys and even the parks are overflowing with refuse. And urban pollution seems to stand-in for modern corruption; it certainly contributes to the Joker's depression, desperation, and growing madness. The sound-world of the music score appears to come from a whole ensemble of celli and string basses – not soloing but establishing a kind of dead drone of low unison tones as if to say of the joker, This is how he feels. Any harmony is limited to elementary minor thirds and any variation from the drone sounds almost human, like a groan. "Is it just me or is it crazy out there" says the ailing, deteriorating joker and the cello score (still unison lines) takes up a mocking waltz while the drone under it never ends. Arthur is on seven different medications and has a demeaning job as a street busker but there is no emotional relief and the cello lines offer no anesthetic. The film's art director has created a cityscape of garish glamor, flashy without warmth, and the soundtrack continues without themes, apparently without sympathy. The film does reveal a more poignant side of the joker's character as we see him with his invalid mother but the music doesn't soften there; it tenses into one of its rare flurries of reaction, the strings glissing between octaves and a throbbing meter begins over the bass drone, then quickening and rising, reaching a shriek as the joker begins his stabbing killing rampage on a subway train and spilling into the streets. And much like Wendy Carlos's use of indeterminate computer sounds, part of the careful sound design of Guðnadóttir's Joker score involves sirens in the distance -- police, ambulance – distant and disembodied emergencies that are part of the soundtrack of any great fearsome city and which become so important to this hellish and mournful soundtrack. The only tonal memory we are likely to have of the Joker score is its two-note motif, backward, forward, a one-third span, eventually subsumed completely into the basal drone even as the joker is ultimately absorbed into Gotham.
It is certainly unusual for a themeless, monochrome score like this to generate such attention from multiple directions – international awards and a break-out season of fame that its composer had not achieved even with her previous history as a performing/recording artist. Something about the single-mindedness of her approach to the film (another composer's score could easily and justifiably have been flamboyant, even operatic) gave it an inverted power of its own and, thus, let us know how the joker felt from the inside. By the end, we do hear only a single cello as the rest of the low-strings have fled or, like sympathy in the city, have simply worn out.
The driver of all this urban commentary, born in 1982 and based in Berlin, Hildur Guðnadóttir debuted first as a singer and a cellist with a most eclectic repertoire but, like Pook and Portman, used the movies to expand her compositional skills and ambitions and has sought ever more challenging opportunities there. Not long after Joker, she was called into a Todd Field film about a troubled symphony conductor called Lydia Tár. Her contributions to the film called Tár would be limited, though, to a quasi-hip hop song that covers the end credits and a simple piano tune that Lydia is writing for the one steady person in her life, the child Petra (a tune that seems to me mimicking the old 1930s DeRose/Mitchell pop song, "Deep Purple").
On her career and on being a female composer, Guðnadóttir is quoted in Billboard magazine (11/19, 161) as saying "In the past, I definitely came across a kind of reluctance to trust me for projects. I always wondered if it's because I'm a woman and then I started talking to other female composers experiencing the same thing. In the last few years there has been so much awareness of this – people are starting to take the so-called risk of trusting women for these jobs and finding out that there's no reason we can't do it." Naturally. And maybe if Hildur G. had known more of the history we have been surveying here of women composers on active duty all these years, she'd be encouraged even more about the progress of her own career and the prospects of the female colleagues who may come after, mentored by her example.
So far have these daughters of Lutyens come from those early works by female film composers that it no longer seems relevant, if it ever was, to consider them in some separate category, except perhaps as part of some sociological study. There is nothing gender-specific about their music or the way they perceive the dramas on screen to be scored. The best of their music is full of individual personality which is unique to any artist, gender be damned.
Somewhere in the genetics of any serious composition it is possible to locate qualities that both genders, even transgenders, share. By now, it matters not at all that you are a woman composer scoring films. Elisabeth Lutyens succeeded by sheer talent and defiance; Angela Morley by applying a solid orchestral technique to, for instance, an animated epic; Rachel Portman by gaining acceptance for her very British-but-universal dramaturgy.
There are still occasional articles and panel discussions, lectures, and chapters in books that rehearse with some concern the limited history of women composers struggling to find work but with each new credential, the subject becomes less a category than a curiosity. And the young Richard Rodney Bennett would finally say of the female composer he had first read about in that train station, headed for school, "Elisabeth Lutyens was the first professional composer of any sort that I ever knew. She's certainly the English composer who influenced me the most." It was her quirky way with 12-tone music that made Sir Richard sit up and take notice. But it was her strength and originality, orneriness, and persistence, entering a supposedly masculine enclave – the movie studio scoring stage – that convinced now two generations of women composers that it was high time to even up the score.
John Caps has written on music for High Fidelity/Musical America and the New York City Opera; and on film music for Film Comment, Film International, National Public Radio, The Cue Sheet, and the University of Illinois Press's "Music in American Life" series.
The Composers
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