Page 211 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

few years so we can feel how impossible that opening solo must have seemed to the first

performers.”

Two other things have changed beyond recognition. When Weir started there was tremendous
pressure for young composers to write in a certain style if they wanted serious commissions.

That style was the modernist serialism pioneered by Schoenberg and Webern and intensified by

Boulez and Stockhausen. Bravely, and without much support, Weir resisted from the start. Even

in those student years she never went along with the modernist crowd.

“Yes, in those days you had to bow to serialism, no matter who you were,” she says. “Even

Britten and Stravinsky did to an extent. I think people were puzzled by me. Very early on I

wrote a suite based on Yugoslav folk music. People said: ‘What on earth is this thing?’
Nowadays it’s the opposite. The genres have exploded. The difficulty for young composers

today is deciding which of a multitude of styles they want to write in.”

And the other big change? Successful female composers. You now count them by the dozen.

When Weir started she had pioneers to emulate — Thea Musgrave, Elizabeth Maconchy, Ruth

Gipps and the like — but it was vanishingly rare to encounter their music in concert halls.

“And because women composers were so rare, people felt there was something a bit odd about

them,” Weir recalls. “There was almost an uneasiness around their work. For a long time if I

was asked to serve on a panel I was nearly always the ‘token woman’.”

Perhaps because her music was so attractive — and because she’s always had a nose for an

intriguing story, usually wrapped in a mysterious mythic aura — Weir had a lot of early success

in the opera house. She says her gloriously quirky 1987 romp A Night at the Chinese Opera isn’t
done much these days because of concerns about non-Asian singers portraying Asian characters

(“Though if an all-Chinese cast could be organised I would be fine with that,” she adds wryly).