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3 - Composing Women’s History

Beyond Suppression and Separate Spheres

from Part I - Themes in Studying Women Composers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2024

By
Matthew Head
Edited by
Matthew Head  and
Susan Wollenberg
Matthew Head
Affiliation:
King's College London
Susan Wollenberg
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

In her lecture ‘The public voice of women’, Mary Beard begins with Homer’s Odyssey and the ‘first recorded example of a man telling a woman to “shut up”’. Penelope, patient wife of adventuring Odysseus, requests that a bard sing happier tunes; her son, Telemachus, is not impressed. ‘“Mother”, he says, “go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household”’.1 With this moment, Beard highlights continuity between antiquity and the present, revealing the importance of female silencing to male identity. Telemachus, she observes, becomes a man by confining Penelope, setting her out of sight and hearing. Her silence amplifies his voice.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers , pp. 50 - 62
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Beard, Mary. Women and Power: A Manifesto (London: Profile Books, 2017).Google Scholar
Citron, Marcia J. ‘Feminist Approaches to Musicology’, in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, ed. Cook, Susan C. and Tsou, Judy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 15–34.Google Scholar
Cusick, Suzanne. ‘Gender, Musicology, and Feminism’, in Rethinking Music, ed. Cook, N. and Everist, M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 471–98.Google Scholar
McClary, Susan. ‘Foreword: Ode to Cecilia’, in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, ed. Cook, Susan C. and Tsou, Judy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), ix–xii.Google Scholar
Reich, Nancy B. ‘Women as Musicians: A Question of Class’, in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Solie, R. A. (Berkeley: California University Press, 1993), 125–46.Google Scholar

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