She Sings Alone

I imagine she sings alone in her chambers, writing music with a peacock quill pen on fine parchment. She’d have to have means. I mean, a poor woman composer in the 18th century would be a bridge too far. She could rival Mozart, but for being woman born. 

I have to make a choice, is the husband good or bad? An empowerer, a tyrant, or a thief claiming her genius as his own. It depends on my general mood. My general feeling toward men on that day. Do I trust them? Generally no. My romantic notions of men have abandoned me in my late middle age. Once so dead set on their goodness, on the restorative power of their love, those notions seem foreign to me now.

These women existed but their names have been lost to lists of women composers by era, nothing that rolls off the tongue like Beethoven or Bach. Most of them daughters of men who composed, women who sang, most of them better known for performing other people’s work or forgotten for retiring upon marriage. 

I’m afraid to listen to any of it. I’m afraid it would not move me like Mozart or Brahms. When I think of music that makes me cry, it’s written by men. 

And what of the philosophers? The poets? The novelists? Is Jane Austen so ubiquitous for her rarity? 

My writing is interrupted by the laundry. A play within a play within a play. How many centuries of women’s creativity has been stifled by the need for dry sheets and clean underwear? The perfectly roast chicken, crisp skinned and succulent, or temporary shine of a freshly mopped floor? 

I imagine my composer, in her chambers, alone. Happy there, singing there. Her own words, not a man’s words. Her words. A woman’s words. I try to imagine the sound but all I can hear is what I know. Mozart, Puccini, Verdi. We’re taught what we know. I strain to hear something else.