Sometimes men still do it better

There was a very cheeky article published in The Spectator eight years ago entitled "There's a good reason why there are no great female composers." The author, Damian Thompson, was responding to a push to change the music syllabus to include female composers. He dared to suggest it is important to ask how good the music of female composers is compared to that of men. Here's a man prepared to stick his neck out, declaring the first movement of Lara Schumann's concerto is a dud - "The first phase is a platitude - nothing good can come of it and nothing does," and her G Minor Piano Sonata is "embarrassingly banal". He finds Fanny Mendelssohn's G Minor Piano Sonata "bloody awful" and describes Judith Weir's stark scores as sounding "as if crucial instrumental parts have gone missing." (Funny how we cringe at someone having the effrontery to attack women in this way but few people seem to mind when men's work is savaged.)

Thompson rightly points out that "if there are no great women composers, that's because creative geniuses are rare and, in the past so few women wrote music." But he concludes "we are stuck in a situation where the barriers to women becoming composers have been removed but they're still honoured for being women."

That's the real point. Must we continue to honour women composers simply for the novelty of them doing this work - dogs walking on hind legs?

To me this is all rather close to home because my partner is a double bass player in a community orchestra and one of the many thrills in our almost decade-long relationship has been to gain a real appreciation of classical music through attending their concerts.

At least that is what used to happen. But now the wonderful classical pieces are under threat of being frozen out of the programming, to be replaced by all manner of diversity offerings including digeridoo and smoking ceremonies. The wind section really struggled in the recent outdoor concert when trying to perform through that murky haze.

Then there are the many beaming female composers, delighting in having their undistinguished and indistinguishable pieces performed by a full orchestra. I can't help but wonder how many in that grey-haired audience are, like me, sitting there yearning for the great music of the past that used to provide such a thrill. I'm pushing for the orchestra to put together some Dead White Male concerts – celebrating the music of the great male composers whose music has delighted audiences for century after century.