The Breaking the Bias Concert by the RDSO to highlight Female Composers

When the Red Deer Symphony Orchestra performs its Breaking the Bias event on March 4, the skills of two female composers and one female local performer will be highlighted.

As the orchestra performs Ethel Smyth's groundbreaking Suite for Strings in honour of International Women's Day, she will be given the credit she deserves.

At the Red Deer Polytechnic Art Centre, the acclaimed harmonics of Canadian composer Jocelyn Morlock's composition, Solace, will also be audible.

In addition, local violinist Holly Parker, 17, who took first place in the 2001 Festival of the Performing Arts, will perform as a guest soloist in Violin Concerto No. 4 in D Minor, Op. 31 by Henri Vieuxtemps.

The fact that seven out of the 13 regular players in the RDSO are female shows how much talent female musicians possess, according to music director Claude Lapalme.

But where are all the famous female composers from the past? Few come to mind, with the exception of Clara Schumann.

Lapalme attributes the problem to historical social restrictions, which called on women to devote themselves to raising their children. He noticed that after the former child prodigy married fellow composer Robert Schumann and gave birth to eight children, even Clara Schumann's artistic productivity decreased.

Young girls who studied music were urged to perform for guests in their own parlours. Yet Lapalme asserted that their performance in front of the public would have been scandalous.

Women composers nevertheless struggled to be recognised seriously in a highly male-dominated field, despite the fact that these constraints started to ease by the middle of the 1800s.

Ethel Smyth, however, came marching out of the Victoria Age. She was not only a trailblazing female composer but also a devoted suffragette who refused to be constrained by her gender or her middle-class background.

"Ethel was a real spark plug. She had a tonne of energy and did not tolerate idiots well, according to Lapalme.

Smyth stayed in her room as an adolescent and didn't eat anything until her father agreed to pay for her to attend the Leipzig Conservatory to study composition.

Smyth was enrolled in the conservatory after her patriarch gave in and she made an impression on Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Clara Schumann, and Johannes Brahms.

She gave the promise of a serious and skilled career, the Russian composer praised in his Violin Sonata.

The Smyth Suite for Strings, Op. 1A, will be performed by the RDSO. Lapalme described it as a melodic and technically proficient string orchestra work. The string players will be able to really get into this one, thus it's worth performing.

Morlock, who was born in Winnipeg in 1969, benefited from being born towards the tail end of the 20th century, but it took composers like Smyth to break down barriers in the music industry.

Morlock's music has won numerous awards at the local, national, and international levels, including a Juno Award for classical composition and a Top 10 ranking on the 2002 International Rostrum of Composers.

According to Lapalme, the well-known work Solace uses harmonic notes in the high and low registers to produce a sustained pitch that has the effect of transporting listeners into a state of peace.

The Rosedale Valley Strings' concertmaster Holly Parker, a gifted local violinist who performs with the Calgary Youth Orchestra, will play as the soloist for Henri Vieuxtemps' Violin Concerto No. 4.

According to Lapalme, the Belgian work is as accomplished as many more well-known violin concertos and should be performed more frequently. It begins sombre and develops into "a lovely bacchanal."