Zoom back to the 1780s and the musical landscape was astonishingly diverse, with composers across the globe writing bucketloads of music not only for the church, but for theatres, salons, concerts and performance at home. And, contrary to what we seem meant to believe, none of this music was auditioned by a panel of experts with the \u201cbest of the best\u201d selected for our moral betterment.<\/p>\n
But what we have access to today from the classical era is the tiniest fraction of what was composed then. And of that fraction, we hear a still smaller subset, dominated by just three composers: Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven \u2013 as classical music website Bachtrack\u2019s 2025 statistics<\/a> attest. <\/p>\n Many significant composers haven\u2019t survived as part of the modern classical canon. Take Marianna Martines<\/a> (1744\u20131812), for example. She was an extremely popular Viennese composer, singer and keyboardist whose prolific compositional output was so highly rated in her own time that she was the first woman to be inducted into the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna<\/a> as a \u201cmaster\u201d composer.<\/p>\n Performing regularly for Austria\u2019s empress Maria Theresa and sharing the keyboard with Mozart for four-hand duets at her own popular musical salons, she was at the heart of a booming Viennese musical culture.<\/p>\n Talent flourishes with investment, and Martines had it all: money, time, geography, social networks and an elite education. In fact, court poet and famed opera librettist Pietro Metastasio<\/a> personally oversaw her education from childhood.<\/p>\n Martines\u2019 compositional catalogue is substantial, including \u2013 strikingly \u2013 several large-scale choral-orchestral works such as the impressive Dixit Dominus<\/a> (1774), 12 keyboard concerti (four of which survive), and 31 keyboard sonatas (three of which survive). Her music isn\u2019t just fine \u2013 it is exceptionally good. Just listen for yourself<\/a>. So why do we not hear her music today? <\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t that she lacked contemporary advocates, and it wasn\u2019t even that she was immediately forgotten after her death. Indeed, she was significant enough to have active detractors who worked to discredit her authority, as music scholar Judith Valerie Engel details in her research<\/a>.<\/p>\n The problem, then, was not absence of talent, nor even absence of recognition, but the failure of later institutions to keep investing in the conditions that ensure music like Martines\u2019 is heard.<\/p>\n Ensemble music \u2013 particularly larger forms such as choral and orchestral music \u2013 requires a rather different type of investment. We\u2019re not able to access it without the complex and expensive assembly of notated scores, instruments, large spaces and dozens of people with specialist skills who know how to transform those dots on the page into musical sounds.<\/p>\n At the root of this are repetition and publication, both in text and in sound. Text, for the obvious reason that without access to printed materials \u2013 and I mean well-edited printed materials \u2013 the music cannot be played and therefore endure.<\/p>\n Music publishers have long been gatekeepers of musical taste, providing editorial credibility and a supply of materials to the market. This curatorial role was usurped by record producers, who determine what gets recorded and circulated \u2013 the new modern legitimising \u201ctext\u201d of a musical work, as it were.<\/p>\n Repetition is absolutely essential. This crazy process of putting dots of ink on paper to communicate complex sonic and emotional ideas means that musical works rarely reveal their secrets the first time they are played.<\/p>\n In re-performance and re-recording, musical problems are solved and the infinite dimensions of the possible sound worlds are explored. This dialogue between performers does two crucial things in the establishment of a work within the canon. First, it refines the quality of performance and, with that, enhances the evaluation of the work itself. Second, the frequency of performance or recording generates familiarity \u2013 a significant driver of musical preference.<\/p>\n My heart genuinely aches when I think about how different my own life would have been had I grown up listening to Marianna Martines\u2019 music alongside that of her contemporaries. So many limiting myths about women\u2019s inherent musical \u2013 and therefore artistic and intellectual \u2013 abilities might never have taken root in my subconscious. <\/p>\n While in general the ability to produce knowledge and exert influence is increasingly moving away from historical centres of power, public reclamation of received music history still lags far behind, despite the herculean efforts<\/a> of numerous musicians, musicologists and advocates.<\/p>\n The good news is that listeners have more ability than ever to discover the music that moves them. The intellectual shackles imposed by commercial and academic institutions when it comes to deciding what constitutes \u201cgood\u201d music are slowly losing their potency. There is no doubt though, we are now facing a new era of curatorial power in the form of AI algorithms that shape the discovery of music and much else besides. <\/p>\nWhere is her music today?<\/h2>\n
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