At the 92nd Academy Awards on February 9th, Hildur Guðnadóttir won the Oscar for Best Original Score for her work on “Joker,” after becoming the first solo female winner of the same category in the Golden Globes. She was the fourth woman to win in an Oscar scoring category, and the first since the scoring categories were compiled into Best Original Score in 2000. The last time a female composer won in any scoring category was in 1997, making her the first woman to win an Oscar for an original score in my lifetime.
Think about that for a second. I’m nineteen, turning twenty in June. It’s been more than twenty years since a female composer won an Oscar for an original score. TWENTY. YEARS.
As a female music major, specifically a female music composition major, I’m more than familiar with the gender discrepancy in the field of music, especially in composition. I’ve been playing instrumental music for thirteen years, and in that time I’ve only played two standard-rep classical pieces (i.e. not extremely simple twenty-second one-line introductory piano pieces) by women: Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio and Boulanger’s “D’un Matin de Printemps”.
Of course, female composers do exist, and I can name plenty of them: Amy Beach, Rebecca Clarke, Barbara Strozzi, Fanny Mendelssohn, Ethel Smyth, and so on. And there are female composers putting out work today, too: Jennifer Hidgon and Caroline Shaw both won Grammys this year. But their works aren’t performed nearly as often as works by more well-known male composers, no matter the size of the ensemble.
And women are underrepresented in other areas of music as well. Only five of the world’s 150 greatest conductors are women, and only 31% of elite orchestral players are female, with even greater discrepancies in brass and percussion instruments. No operas by female composers have ever been performed at the Met.
But Best Original Score is perhaps the most mainstream stage for modern composers, and most household names in the field of contemporary composition are score composers. John Williams, Alan Silvestri, Michael Giacchino, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, and so on; if you don’t know who these people are, you know the music they’ve made.
But even the four women to win these categories don’t get that kind of stardom, and while I can name plenty of men in the field, I can’t name a single woman off the top of my head. Even Google doesn’t give much in that regard; only one female composer, Rachel Portman, pops up in the list.
So what to do? Basically, we need to give existing female composers more recognition, and prop up emerging women in the field. It’s difficult for girls and women to imagine themselves as professional composers when they don’t see other women doing that work.
In this aspect, once again, anime remains supreme. 1998’s “Cowboy Bebop,” widely regarded as one of the best anime soundtracks of all time, was scored by Yoko Kanno. Other female names in the world of anime scoring include Yuki Kajiura (“Demon Slayer,” “Sword Art Online”), Asami Tachibana (“Haikyuu!!,” “Darling in the FranXX”), Masumi Ito (“Azumanga Daioh,” “Flip Flappers”), and Michiru Oshima (“Fullmetal Alchemist,” “Little Witch Academia”). In fact, when you Google “anime composers,” Kanno and Kajiura are the first names to pop up. There are still vastly more male composers in the field, but female composers are working on big-name projects and getting name recognition. The same is true for video games to an extent, with scores like “Kingdom Hearts,” “Final Fantasy XV,” and “God of War” all composed by women. (The first two are by Yoko Shimomura and the latter by Winifred Phillips.)
Another issue we’re trying to address in my Baroque and Classical Music History class is the fact that female composers in fact did exist during the time of Bach and Mozart. Even if only one in a hundred composers active at a given time was a woman, the textbook focuses on her, even if there were men who were more accomplished.
And in the classical world, more ensembles need to intentionally play works by women. This year marks Beethoven’s 250th birthday, and nothing fills concert hall seats quite like Beethoven, but classical performance needs to catch up to the modern world it’s performed in. Female composers do exist, and not recognizing their efforts is a disservice to everyone who buys a ticket.
And for that reason, it’s even more important for film executives to hire more female composers, because they’re out there and deserve to be heard. Composers like Williams and Zimmer get the recognition they do because they’ve been given tons of opportunities over the years and built a long and fruitful career off of them. Guðnadóttir and other composers like her deserve to have those opportunities as well, and I hope to see her and her contemporaries back at the Oscar stage again and again.