No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2024
Four substantial volumes dedicated to women in music, all published within the past couple of years, give welcome indication of the continuing growth of this area of study.1 Following some general background, I first survey the books, then consider each individually. That I select chapters to discuss in detail does not mean that others would not deserve comparable attention. I can give only a glimpse of the riches these books contain.
1 For a classic source of critical thinking with special reference to the twentieth-century development of women’s studies in music, see Higgins, Paula, ‘Women in Music, Feminist Criticism, and Guerrilla Musicology’, 19th-Century Music, 17 (1993), 174–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Green, Lucy, Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Halstead, Jill, The Woman Composer: Creativity and the Gendered Politics of Musical Composition (Ashgate, 1997)Google Scholar.
3 Representing a ‘highly diverse cross-section’ (Halstead, The Woman Composer, ix), these were Avril Coleridge-Taylor, Grace Williams, Elizabeth Maconchy, Minna Keal, Ruth Gipps, Antoinette Kirkwood, Enid Luff, Judith Bailey, and Bryony Jagger.
4 Green, Music, Gender, Education, 2.
5 Ibid., 12.
6 See, inter alia, Citron, Marcia J., Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; McClary, Susan, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Pendle, Karin, Women & Music: A History (Indiana University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.
7 Green, Music, Gender, Education, 143.
8 Halstead, The Woman Composer, 147. Marcia Citron recalled the vicious circle whereby ‘your colleagues had never heard of your figure, so how important could she be?’ Citron, Marcia J., ‘A Bicentennial Reflection: Twenty-five Years with Fanny Hensel’, special issue, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 4/2 (2007), 7–20 (p. 15)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Halstead, The Woman Composer, x.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 150.
12 Ibid., x.
13 The resistance their efforts met in some quarters is beyond the scope of this review to consider; the negation and satirical response it typically featured confirmed the need for continued action towards the project.
14 Mathias, Rhiannon, Lutyens, Maconchy, Williams and Twentieth-Century British Music: A Blest Trio of Sirens (Ashgate, 2012)Google Scholar.
15 Halliwell, Ruth, The Mozart Family: Four Lives in a Social Context (Clarendon Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Grant, Hester, The Good Sharps: The Eighteenth-Century Family that Changed Britain (Vintage, 2021)Google Scholar.
16 For A Century of Composition these were ‘Women in the Creative Arts’ (School of Music, Australian National University, 2017), and ‘Gender Diversity in Music-Making’ (Sir Zelman Cowan School of Music, Monash University, 2018). Women and Music in Ireland grew from a three-part series under that title held at Maynooth University, the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM), and the Music Department of St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra (now part of Dublin City University), between 2010 and 2014.
17 Broad, Quartet, 395.
18 Parts I (‘The Classical Tradition’) and II (‘Women in Popular Music’) each have six chapters; Parts III (‘Women and Music Technology’) and IV (‘Women’s Wider Work in Music’) each have two chapters.
19 Margaret Schedel and Flannery Cunningham, ‘The Star-Eaters: A 2019 Survey of Female and Gender-Non-Conforming Individuals Using Electronics for Music’, CCWM, 213–27 (p. 213); Appendix, 291–95.
20 CCWM, 213.
21 Ibid., 214.
22 Ibid., 164.
23 Ibid., 167, with echoes in a recent case (2023) on the women’s football scene. Words in square brackets are mine.
24 Ibid., 168.
25 Ibid. See also Chapter 15, ‘Women and Music: Pedagogues, Curricula, and Role Models’, 237–53 (p. 246), where Robert Legg traces the patterns of inequality revealed by Green’s research.
26 CCWM, 95, quoting from Cusick, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), xxiv.
27 CCWM, 95.
28 Ibid., 98–99.
29 Citron, Marcia J., Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, Chapter 4 (‘Music as Gendered Discourse’), ‘Coda’, 159–64.
30 CCWM, 231.
31 Ibid.
32 Kouvaras (A Century of Composition, 5), identifies this, ‘in the year 2021’, as ‘Fourth Wave’ feminism or ‘even the contentious postfeminism’. Part I (‘Creative Work–Then and Now’) contains Chapters 2–10, Part II (‘The State of Industry in the Present Day’) Chapters 11–17, and Part III (‘Creating; Collaborating: Composer and Performer Reflections’) Chapters 18–22.
33 Chapter 2, ‘Synaesthetic Associations and Gendered Nature Imagery: Female Agency in the Piano Music of Amy Beach’, 27–51; and Chapter 10, ‘Is the Category of the “Woman” Artist Still Helpful?’, 191–205.
34 Chapter 11, ‘“Dear Women Composers in Australia (and Beyond)”: (A Letter from a Music Critic)’, 209–23.
35 Chapter 17, ‘Working towards Gender Equality and Empowerment in Australian Music Culture’, 307–23.
36 Chapter 3, ‘Australian Bush Songs as Multimodal Discourse: The Remarkable Collaboration of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite, Annie Rentoul, and Georgette Peterson’, 53–77.
37 ‘Australian Bush Songs as Multimodal Discourse’, 54.
38 Ibid. The songbook’s subtitle is Music for Young and Old.
39 Scott Messing, Marching to the Canon: The Life of Schubert’s Marche militaire (University of Rochester Press and Boydell & Brewer, 2014 (Eastman Studies in Music).
40 ‘Australian Bush Songs as Multimodal Discourse’, 66 (the song’s title caught out the typesetter occasionally). In Figure 3.5, bar 9: LH upper part, note 3 should probably have a natural sign.
41 Ibid., 59, quoting from Nodelman, Perry, Words about Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Picture Books (University of Georgia Press, 1990)Google Scholar.
42 ‘Of Broken Trees and Elephant Ivories: The Revivification of the Colonial Piano Manifested Through a New Work by Catherine Milliken’, 143–56.
43 Ibid., 150.
44 ‘Of Broken Trees and Elephant Ivories’, 151.
45 It is also discussed in CCWM, 57–58; further on Walshe see Women and Music in Ireland, passim, esp. 192 n. 6, 194, and 196 n. 23.
46 WMI, xvii. The book’s editors specify that while women’s studies in music ‘had been established elsewhere in anglophone musicology by the mid-1990s, this volume is the first book to appraise the field as it pertains to Ireland’ (‘Introduction’, 2).
47 Ibid., ‘Introduction’, 1.
48 Ibid., 4.
49 They are: Part I: ‘Establishing a Place for Women Musicians in Irish Society of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’ (Chapters 1–4); Part II: ‘Women and Practice in Irish Traditional Music’ (Chapters 5–7); Part III: ‘Gaps and Gender Politics in the History of Twentieth-Century Women Composers and Performers’ (Chapters 8–11); and Part IV: ‘Situating Discourses of Women, Gender and Music in the Twenty-first Century’ (Chapters 12–15).
50 ‘Introduction’, 9.
51 Karol Mullaney-Dignam, ‘“No Accomplishment So Great for a Lady”: Women and Music in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Elite Irish Household’, WMI, 29–39; Mary Louise O’Donnell, ‘Family, Filial Bonds and Forging Careers as Female Musicians in the Nineteenth Century: The Story of the Glover Sisters’, WMI, 54–67.
52 ‘Daughters of Hibernia: Seen and Not Heard?’, WMI, 13–28 (p. 18).
53 Chapter 3, ‘The Development of the Female Musician in Nineteenth-Century Dublin’, WMI, 40–53 (p. 45).
54 See their Reclaiming the Muse: A Select Bibliography of English Language Writing on Women and Music (Music Department, King’s College London: published and printed by Nicola LeFanu and Sophie Fuller, 1991).
55 ‘Women and Composition: Fifty Years of Progress?’, 175–81.
56 ‘We Buried the Heteropatriarchy and Danced on its Grave: Towards a Liberation Movement for Irish Traditional Music’, 206–19.
57 Ibid., 218.