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As promised, this week we’ll share snapshots of three women who did achieve musical fame in a male-dominated history of famous composers, in honor of Women’s History Month and Music in Our Schools Month. Today, we bring you Dame Ethel Smyth.

Dame Ethel Smyth – Ethel was not without adversity from a young age; when her father began to think that Ethel’s passion for the piano was “too intense,” he prohibited her from taking lessons. Ethel refused to leave her room, attend meals, church, school or social functions until her father allowed her to study composition at Leipzig Conservatory. As a student, Ethel studied alongside Dvořák, Grieg and Tchaikovsky. By 1893, she’d gained some recognition in England with the performance of her Mass in D for chorus and orchestra in 1893. Still, she struggled to get her operas performed. In 1910, Ethel briefly halted her composing, and devoted herself to the Women’s Suffrage Movement where she rallied with Emmeline Pankhurst. In 1911, she wrote and conducted Laggard Dawn and The March of the Women at London’s Albert Hall, endowing the women’s movement with its immortal and prolific composer. Her character was represented in the fiction of battle cry.

Throughout her life, Ethel was publicly regarded as an outspoken suffragist and prolific composer. Her character was represented in the fiction of battle cry. Throughout her life, Ethel was publicly regarded as an outspoken suffragist and prolific composer. She was represented in E. F. Benson’s Dodo books (1893–1921), essays by Virginia Woolf, with whom she became close, and in radio plays by Henry Reed.
Listen to March of the Women here, or Cello Sonata No. 2 .

March is Music in Our Schools Month and Women’s History Month, but when was the last time your child came home from school rattling high praise for his or her favorite female composer? Perhaps we should speak for ourselves, but our repertoire of  “favorite female composers” seems a bit slim when we consider how long our list of favorite male composers is.
As Virginia Woolf wrote, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
We think women need those things, sure – but to become musicians, or any other creative profession, women need education.
Since the dawn of the first musical instrument, a reed flute from 67,000 years ago, women are phantoms of musical history. There are exceptions, of course, but from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century, women learned basic musicianship chiefly so they could entertain and appear well mannered. Or, like the German abbess, St. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1176 C.E.), they became nuns, where study was unlimited but public performance was.

At the height of the Romantic Era, women like Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, though prodigal and deserving, rose to fame primarily due to their brothers (Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn).
Robert Schumann openly admired his older sister, who became one of the most distinguished pianists of the era—one of the first to perform from memory. She was also the breadwinner for the Schumann family. It was her talents, and her perseverance, that supported the family long after her brother’s early death.

Fanny Mendelssohn was also prolific, composing over 460 musical pieces in her lifetime. Still, in one letter, she wrote:

I have been composing a good deal lately, and have called my piano pieces after the names of my favourite haunts, partly because they really came into my mind at these spots, partly because our pleasant excursions were in my mind while I was writing them. They will form a delightful souvenir, a kind of second diary. But do not imagine that I give these names when playing them in society, they are for home use entirely.

And in 1820, Fanny Mendelssohn’s father wrote, “”Music will perhaps become Felix’s profession, while for you (Fanny) it can and must be only an ornament. ”
The spread of women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century stimulated enough social and economic empowerment to spawn the swath of female musicians we know today: Amy Beach, Nadia Boulanger, Cecile Cheminade, Teresa Careño, Charlotte Church, Vivian Fine – to name a few.
We’ll take a look at some of these women of note next week. Stay tuned! And in the meantime, who are some of your favorite female musicians?

Thanks to the National Association for Music Education’s celebration of March is National Music in Our Schools Month, we’ve been reminded of these three facts, proving the indispensable child development benefits of music:

• Academic. Among SAT takers, the College Board found that students with 4+ years of music education scored 23 points above average in math, and 31 points above average in writing. See Table 18 here.
• Literacy. Combined research from 30 studies show that music education, integrated with reading, performance, movement, and traditional academic disciplines, excelerates early literacy.
• Social. From Dr. Kyle Pruett, clinical professor of child psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and practicing musician: “The development of language over time tends to enhance parts of the brain that help process music. Language competence is at the root of social competence. Musical experience strengthens the capacity to be verbally competent.”

A big thank you to all of our educators who continue to make the world a better place for children. And to the children who make the world a better place for us adults! Follow @NAfME and #MIOSM for National Music in Our Schools Month updates.

Recently, treehugger.com published an article by mother Meaghan O’Neill called “How I Forced My 5 Year Old to Become an Environmentalist, or, an Interview with Philippe Cousteau.”

This article is worth reading for a few reasons. First, we can all probably understand Meaghan’s guilt towards being her family’s own environmental role model– ordering take out, driving daily, and buying too many toys. But more importantly, Meaghan’s active role in the environmental community has created some amazing opportunities for her family to meet leading environmental authors, scientists, and speakers. Not only does Meaghan work with her son at home to instill environmental values– telling him to protect “his island” where they live, pick up trash on the beach and learn about the many species sharing their habitat– she continues to grow herself by attending attending national environmental conferences and staying engaged in the forefront of the movement.
Meaghan was lucky enough to arrange for her son to talk to Philippe Cousteau, founder of Earth Echo International, a non-profit dedicated to empowering youth on water issues. Cousteau’s newest book, Make a Splash, a children’s guide to helping oceans, rivers, and wetlands by taking action– going outside, exploring, researching, and being “political” by reminding their parents, teachers, and friends about water issues. It focuses on execution of these ideals by helping them keep a log of their project plan and activities.

We agree with Meaghan that hiding children from the world’s harsh truths is not beneficial; rather, parents should focus on explaining these issues early on in terms their children can understand. Make a Splash examines oil spills, climate change, and extinction without being cutesy or too “gloom and doom.” If you like the book, you can also check out the video game, “Rescue Reef,” Philippe developed.

Being an environmentalist is a dynamic, changing role. Learning is an environmentalist’s chief responsibility– then teaching. As parents, we should check our own instinct to teach teach teach, making sure that the information is new and improved by the ever-changing scope of scientific research.