Child_Composers

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children s compositions. In fact the problem has sometimes been overlooked
even when the marginalization of minorities is being specifically addressed. In
one study Leo Treitler discusses dualities in music, and repeatedly returns to
the fashionable dualities of race, ethnicity, and gender without once mention-
ing the child/adult duality. This is so despite the fact that he quotes several
passages that refer implicitly or explicitly to this duality for example, a de-
scription of Old Roman Chant as differing from Gregorian Chant in being
naive, youthfully fresh, blossom-like. 40 Similar neglect of children is evident
in the following passage by Marcia Citron:
Anthologies have stressed Western art music and generally ignored other
idioms, such as folk music, popular music, and world music. Music by
women and other minorities in Western culture has also been over-
looked, and this shows the biases in gender, class, and race that are inherent
in the seemingly comprehensive label Western art music. 41
Citron refers here to women and implicitly to lower classes and non-European
races. Yet she conspicuously avoids any hint that age has been used as a barrier
to recognition. She may have done so because to draw attention to children s
compositions would somewhat undermine her case for promoting music writ-
ten by women, since it would highlight a much stronger case of discrimination.
More likely, however, she simply failed to notice that children s compositions
were being neglected both by herself and by the writers she was criticizing.
This seems a classic case of unthinking prejudice in which the writer seems
unaware that preconceptions are impeding a balanced assessment of children s
music in general or of individual works. Equally revealing is a comment by
Greg Vitercik: It simply goes against the critical grain to devote serious effort
to the explication of the works of a sixteen-year-old composer, no matter how
fine those works might be. 42 In the prejudiced world described here, one does
not even need to draw attention to alleged failings in children s compositions:
any assessment of them is pointless because it is simply against the critical
grain. Mozart and Mendelssohn are curiously and somewhat arbitrarily ex-
empted by Vitercik in this strange, anti-child world, but otherwise, we are told,
The juvenilia of no other composer . . . shows [sic] more than very occasional
evidence of youthful spontaneity.43 What musical features would qualify as
evidence of youthful spontaneity, and how far Vitercik has looked through the
works of the one hundred or more composers named in the Checklist to sup-
port his view, remain unclear; but his claim clearly does not withstand scrutiny.
Girls, too, are seemingly exempted from discrimination in some recent stud-
ies, where, as mentioned earlier, they are included unthinkingly in books and
anthologies purportedly devoted to women composers.
The Marginalization of Children s Compositions of the Past 41
Altogether, there are numerous ways in which past children s composi-
tions have been marginalized in literature on the history of music, and they
can be summarized as follows:
" disproportionate loss of sources compared with composers later works
" some composers deliberate destruction of their early works; other com-
posers withdrawal of early works, or refusal to acknowledge them
" rarity of publication, so that critical comment on privately owned
works is almost impossible
" composers reworking of their earlier ideas, which are then regarded as
having been superseded
" a general assumption that a composer s output always advances, and
therefore presumably is improving, implying that the earliest works
can be disregarded
" a modern taste for complexity (rarely found in children s works) as a
measure of aesthetic quality
" unthinking use of pejorative terminology; separation of early works
from the main body in lists of composers works and collected editions
" total disregard of childhood works in commentaries on or lists of a
composer s output
" omission of such works from the canon of those worthy of study, es-
pecially when progressive works are being prioritized
" misguided criticism that does not stand up to scrutiny
" skepticism about the authenticity of the best child compositions
" a disregard of works of lesser quality, no matter what they might reveal
" a widespread blindness to the fact that this kind of marginalization is
taking place
Thus the ways in which children s compositions have been discriminated
against are extremely diverse, and operate in all sorts of different manners, but
their cumulative effect is massive. Some of these types of discrimination also
operated against women s compositions until relatively recently, for in both [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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