Women in the Hall of Music

Had the history of music been written in pink ink, delicately scented with almonds, its pages would rustle not with scores but with lace. Librarians would be running in panic, frantically shifting volumes from the “Symphonies” shelf to “Home Economics,” and then hiding them behind cookbooks—somewhere between “How to Serve Herring with Orchestration” and “The Secrets of Harmonious Jam.” Of course, no self-respecting musician or music critic today would agree to divide music into “masculine” and “feminine”—in our age, gender has become a far more fluid concept.

And yet (and yet!) Avner Biron, the music director of the marvelous (I could repeat that word a hundred times, and then a hundred more) Israel Camerata Jerusalem, has titled the orchestra’s October program Women in the Temple of Music. Naturally, there’s a nod to the soloist, the enchanting violist Leikie Glick, but Biron was mainly referring to three other heroines: Louise Farrenc, Alice Mary Smith, and Ayala Asherov—composers whose scores spent decades quietly lingering on those proverbial library shelves, waiting for a conductor’s hand to bring them to life.

                          Leikie Glick. Photo by Gal Casirer

Well, not quite: Ayala is, after all, our contemporary—young and very much alive—but the first two invite the imagination to wander. One can almost picture their elegant manuscripts lying patiently on lower shelves, squeezed between cookbooks and sewing manuals, waiting for someone to open the door to the music archive and let in a breath of air.

In reality, of course, the scores of these “ladies” slumbered in music libraries, without any “feminine frivolity.” Their music flowed like an underground river while, above ground, the brass blared, aesthetic cathedrals were erected, critics and conductors debated—all unaware of the hidden aquifer beneath their feet. Occasionally this river would surface: in a stray publication, a rare performance, or an unsent handwritten letter. More often it ran silently below, adding its subtle polyphony to the story.

If you listen closely, you can hear the voices calling to one another in that river. One of them belongs to Louise Farrenc (1804–1875, née Jeanne-Louise Dumont)—a brilliant mademoiselle-composer of the 19th century, professor at the Paris Conservatoire, who wrote symphonies with such authority that even the metronome seemed to snap to attention.

Her orchestral textures are supple and refined, brimming with an inner freedom the musical world of her day wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge. Born in Paris to the sculptor Jacques-Edme Dumont, Louise studied piano and theory with Ignaz Moscheles, Anton Reicha and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, a first-rate musical education for anyone, let alone a woman at the time.

Female composers were, officially, “not really a thing” (though of course they existed, mostly in the shadows). But from the 1830s on, Farrenc’s works were published, firmly establishing her as a composer. Today she’s still better known for her chamber music than for her orchestral works. The Nonet in E-flat major, which the Israel Camerata will perform, harks back to the classical string quartet structure of the Haydn school. Written in 1849—around seven years after she became the first woman to hold a professorship at the Paris Conservatoire—it’s elegant and beautifully crafted. Farrenc was fortunate, too, in her marriage: her husband, the flautist Aristide Farrenc, believed in her talent and even founded the publishing house that brought all her music into print.

Further downstream we meet Alice Mary Smith (1839–1884). Victorian England: starched collars, imposing facades—and suddenly, cutting through all that rigidity, a clear, free, almost springlike voice. Smith composed without waiting for ovations or grand triumphs, but left behind music untouched by submission. She didn’t smash walls; she wrote behind them, and the walls eventually began to crack on their own.

She was the first woman in Victorian England to compose large-scale chamber, choral, and orchestral works, and the first woman to write a symphony—which, remarkably, was publicly performed in the same year it was written: 1863. This very symphony will be performed in the Camerata’s upcoming concerts.

Alice Mary was born in London to a wealthy lace merchant—not exactly a background that screamed “composer.” But her parents did ensure she studied piano and composition with private tutors. In 1861, the Musical Society of London performed her first piano quartet. Marriage and motherhood briefly slowed her creative output, but by 1879 she had returned to composing with remarkable intensity, producing cantatas and overtures inspired by poetry and mythology. She died of typhoid at 45, but not before becoming an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music and—unusually for a woman of her time—earning a necrology in The New York Times.

                             Ayala Asherov. Photo by מנחה נופה

And then, close to the river’s surface, we meet Ayala Asherov—a voice of the present. Her music doesn’t flow underground; it carves out new channels on the surface, bold and precise. Born in Tel Aviv in 1968, she studied at Rimon, Berklee College of Music, and the University of North Carolina, specializing in composition and film music. Her best-known work is the chamber opera David in Love, based on a play by Yehoshua Sobol.

Her Cello Concerto “Yizkor”, adapted from a solo work for cellist Diane Chaplin and the Jewish Community Orchestra of Portland, was performed on the eve of the second anniversary of October 7. Ayala spent years in the U.S., working in educational television, theatre, and dance, and later returned to Israel to teach at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. She is also a radio host on Kan Kol HaMusica, and her song By the Length of the Sea, sung by Ofra Haza, has entered the canon of Hebrew song.

The Camerata will perform her “Cycles of the Moon” for Viola and Strings—a piece whose movements alone read like poetry: Full Moon / Crescent / Moon Dance / Twilight / Last Moon. Ayala explains:

“I wrote Cycles of the Moon in the spring of 2010 at an artists’ colony in the Appalachian Mountains. I was deeply inspired by the free spirit of the local Native peoples, who had learned to live in harmony with the river’s flow and the blossoming of spring. Each of the five movements filled with the sense of nights bathed in lunar light, and with reverence for the unwritten laws by which people once lived. These sensations take on special meaning in the era of emotionally detached artificial intelligence—a force that threatens to sever humanity’s spiritual ties with nature. As a tribute to those tribes, past and present, who lived by the breath of the earth and the rhythm of the moon—and to the lone individual who still dares to stand in luminous dissonance against time—I wrote this piece.”

And since gender today is, after all, a relative notion, the program closes with Schubert’s Fifth Symphony. We even asked an AI what was “feminine” about Schubert. Its answer: lightness, grace, lyricism, transparency—and the fact that the symphony was written at 19, “an age of heightened romantic sensitivity, including the ideals of femininity.” The work is modest in orchestration—no clarinets, trumpets, or timpani—and was first performed by an amateur orchestra in which Schubert himself played the violin. Perhaps, then, its timbral palette does indeed hover closer to a female voice.

The concerts will be conducted by Mikhail Mering, a wonderful conductor and clarinetist who long ago found the keys to the Temple of Music. Let us follow him through the door.

Israel Camerata Jerusalem
Women in the Hall of Music
Mikhail Mering, conductor
Leikie Glick, viola

Louise Farrenc / Nonetto in E-flat major, Op. 38
Ayala Asherov / Cycles of the Moon, for viola and strings
Alice Mary Smith / Symphony No. 1 in C minor (excerpts)
Franz Schubert / Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, D. 485

24–27 October 2025
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Weizmann Institute Rehovot, Elma Arts Center Zichron Yaakov, YMCA Jerusalem

Tickets