It is understandable for people to want to be remembered during their lives and beyond their deaths. For musical composers, their art can transcend their mortality, that is if their music continues to be performed and heard, or in other words, if their works make it into “the canon”. To Nancy Van de Vate (1930-2023), who during her lifetime was the “most recorded composer living”, an essential characteristic of canonization may have been to be male. In her own words, “Women just don’t make it into the canon.” As one of the most prolific and decorated composers of her time and for an organizer and leader of powerful women’s organizations, Van de Vate’s life is a testament to her insistence on being heard and remembered.
After becoming only the second women in the United States to receive a doctoral degree in music in 1968, Van de Vate was repeatedly denied even consideration for full-time faculty employment at the University of Tennessee (UT) though her credentials outshone the handful of men who were offered positions. She attributed this sustained dismissal to her being a woman in a heavily male-dominated field and university. Unwilling to go quietly, Van de Vate engaged in legal battles for multiple years against sex-based discriminatory hiring practices.
In deposition files contained in Box 12 of her collection at the American Heritage Center, predominantly unflattering characterizations of Van de Vate are provided by former colleagues and faculty who were responsible for hiring decisions at UT’s department of music. She is described as “extremely demanding”, “very direct”, and one staff member even went so far as to call her “a hard, cold woman.” The department head that dismissed her application testified, “She is the kind of person that in our estimation would like to be independent and assert herself…[and] we felt that the person we hired would have to be an individual who could cooperate.” These descriptions formed the basis of the University’s defense against the lawsuits. Van de Vates’ rebuttal, as recorded in the deposition files, was: “Overqualified women make men uncomfortable.” Though she saw little success in her legal battles, this period seems to have only flamed her fire for activism.
She went on to found a local chapter of the National Organization for Women and establish the International League of Women’s Composers, the first of three organizations that now make up the International Alliance for Women in Music. After holding a faculty position in Indonesia and moving to Vienna, she and her second husband, Clyde Smith, established Vienna Modern Masters, a recording label dedicated to new compositions with an emphasis on women composers. It was through this label that Van de Vate recorded an awesome amount of her own works. One of her most notable compositions, Chernobyl, was publicly and critically well received, leading to multiple prestigious nominations, awards, and performances.
There is a pattern of confidence and ambition in Van de Vate’s compositions. Her adaptation of Shakespeare’s, Hamlet, clearly demonstrates this. Though aware of a leading notion that the work was unadaptable, she was confident she knew better. She stated, “I don’t know how anyone can resist this text. The ghost is intoning to Hamlet, ‘Don’t forget me!’ and Hamlet cries back, ‘Oh yes poor ghost, I’ll remember thee.’ What could be better than that?” Aware of the possibility that her art would never reach a live audience, Van de Vate went to great lengths to have her Hamlet recorded. In the course of six years, she composed the opera in full score, organized and hired musicians, and oversaw the recording and production of the close to three hour opera.
In an article published by her alma mater, Wellesley College (in Box 20 of her papers), Van de Vate is described as the following:
She is assertive without being the least bit abrasive. However, one suspects she has no qualms about getting down and dirty when the need arises. Tall and poised, her short, salt-and-pepper hair immaculately coifed, her elegant exterior seems to hide a backbone of steel.
Elements of that description were once used to dismiss Van de Vate, but if anything, her tenacious personality brought her closer to what she may have desired most. To be remembered in a world that is inclined to forget her. Because “women just don’t make it into the canon.”
Post contributed University of Wyoming graduate student Cody Akin.
