ent, which is apparent in her music as well. Critics have constantly been impressed by her strength as a musician naming her the 'first woman composer, "the most remarkable of her sex"' (Bowers and Tick, 304). However, the distinction between male and female remained. Ethyl herself alluded to this fact and the boundaries it sets saying, '"At every attempt to get my head above water it was firmly pressed under again, the two fatal words [woman composer] relegating me to the ranks of the negligible"' (Raitt, 4). Although the parameters involved with being a composer and a woman are important, what are the affects of being a composer, a woman, and homosexual? Are there specific techniques or inferences that can be found in these women's compositions that may reveal the secrets of their life which society does not allow them the luxury to reveal? This is the question which Elizabeth Wood explores through analysis of Smyth's texts and music. Wood is looking for where and how Smyth discretely expressed her sexual desires to the public. It was almost impossible for Smyth to openly declare her lesbianism. The attitude of the times prohibited this openness and most surely would have had a negative effect on her musical career. Wood says that Smyth uses "music in ways that simultaneously reveal and conceal lesbian experience; that her narrative invention, which inscribes a musically coded lesbian message, is derived from the craft as well as the metaphor of fugue and fugal counterpoint" (Solie, 165). She then refers to a quote by Smyth in which the composer parallels the construction of the fugue to the construction of human personality and the fact that we are actually under the constraints of a fugal bond. A fugue in simple terms is a musical round. It is constructed of two or more parallel, but shifted voices that produce harmonies when they come together. The main theme, expressed first in one voice and then another, composes the exposition w...
