When Iris S. Levine was an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire at Durham, women’s choirs like the one she belonged to were not premier ensembles and got little attention from administrators or composers.
Women’s choirs have come a long way since then. They are now well recognized as a means to not only broaden students’ musical experience but to help keep them enrolled.
Ms. Levine, chairwoman of the music department at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, intends to help that trend continue in her new role, as the national repertoire and standards chair for women’s choruses for the American Choral Directors Association. She plans to be a strong advocate for women’s choirs, encouraging conductors to form such groups at their schools and colleges. She will also recommend new repertoire and commission new compositions that meet the choirs’ musical and emotional needs.
“When you’re working with a women’s chorus, you’re dealing with, sometime along the way, these women have not been treated at the same level. That’s a given,” she said.
The Floodgates Open
Ms. Levine earned a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1978, and after receiving a master’s from Temple University and a doctorate from the University of Southern California, she started teaching at Cal Poly in 1990. In the dozen years between her undergraduate studies and her college position, Ms. Levine hadn’t given much thought to women’s choirs.
But Polytechnic had a women’s choir, and with strong encouragement and some seed money from a director of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles, in 1997 she started a community women’s choir, called Vox Femina Los Angeles, a relatively small ensemble open only by audition.
For Allie Fukushima, a member of Vox Femina and a former student of Ms. Levine’s, the group provides a challenging musical environment and a supportive social atmosphere. “I miss men’s voices and the repertoire for [mixed] chorus, but I don’t miss the testosterone,” she said in an e-mail.
Directing Vox Femina forced the conductor to immerse herself in the genre of all-women’s choirs—a revelation, she said, since her own college instructors had taught her little on that subject.
“It was like the floodgates opening. I was learning how to research and find good choral music,” Ms. Levine said.
And the task was made more difficult by the fact that much of the music for women’s choirs was not originally written for such an ensemble but had been composed for other ensembles and adapted for female voices.
Thirteen years later, she says, there still isn’t the same volume of music for women’s choruses as there is for mixed choirs, but there is also a lot less “schlock” that a conductor has to wade through to find good repertoire. And Ms. Levine is doing her part to encourage even more original and well-written music for women’s choirs. Vox Femina has commissioned 22 new pieces.
Influence From the Top
Her new role at the choral-directors’ association gives her another opportunity to commission new works, with financial support from at least two dozen women’s choirs across the country. And while the quality of the music is important, it is the lyrics that form the foundation for a good composition, Ms. Levine said.
Her advice to composers is to “make sure that the text is appropriate for women. They want to be singing about something that concerns them and that they can relate to.”
Vox Femina’s repertoire, for example, is eclectic and includes “De Sancta Maria,” by the learned 12th-century mystic and Benedictine nun, Hildegard of Bingen; “On Children,” with lyrics by Kahlil Gibran and music by Ysaye M. Barnwell of the contemporary women’s ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock; and an arrangement of “The Way I Want to Touch You,” by Toni Tennille, who with her husband formed the 1970s duo Captain & Tennille.
The importance of Ms. Levine’s position is bolstered by the data. Women have long outnumbered men on most college campuses, sometimes necessitating the formation of a women’s choir to meet the demand for participation and to reflect the demographics of the student body.
At Luther College, this reporter’s alma mater, in Iowa, for example, nearly 30 percent of the more than 650 freshmen participate in a choir, so a mixed choir would be too large to manage, said Sandra Peter, who conducts the 100-member freshman women’s group, called Aurora. Another 90 first-year men sing in a men’s choir, called the Norsemen, and the college uses both ensembles for recruiting prospective students who visit the campus.
“Any college interested in retention knows that engaging students in a group helps,” Ms. Peter said.
In 1996, the college also added a women’s chorus for upper-class students, called Cantorei.
Women’s groups are also gaining prominence at the high-school level, where there are typically more women participating in choir than men. And because there is a larger talent pool, in many cases, the women’s groups may be of better quality than the mixed choirs at that level, Ms. Levine said. “If you take the highest-performing women and put them in the top group, the second-tier group is on par with the men,” she said.
Budget cuts eight years ago forced California Polytechnic to cut its women’s choir, Ms. Levine said. But she still takes her experience and advocacy back to the classroom, where she stresses high standards and a variety of ensemble experiences, including all-female choirs, so her conducting students will be well prepared when they go out into the schools and colleges to teach.
“I always want women’s choirs to be represented at the table. I want women’s choruses to always be heard from,” Ms. Levine said.
