Women and Music: Literature
Held by UB Libraries
Classical Music and Music History
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Women and Music: a History
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Women & Music now features even more women composers, performers, and patrons, even more musical contexts, and an expanded view of women in music outside Europe and North America. A popular university textbook, Women & Music is enlightening for scholars, a good source of programming ideas for performers, and a pleasure for other music lovers.
Call Number: ML82 .W6 2001ISBN: 9780253338198Publication Date: 2000-12-31 -
Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music
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The hidden history of the women who dared to write music in a man's world. 'Lucid, engaging and exuberant... [Sounds and Sweet Airs] is terrifically enjoyable and accessible, and leaves one hankering for a second volume.' The Sunday Times Francesca Caccini. Barbara Strozzi. Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. Marianna Martines. Fanny Hensel. Clara Schumann. Lili Boulanger. Elizabeth Maconchy. Since the birth of classical music, women who dared compose have faced a bitter struggle to be heard. In spite of this, female composers continued to create, inspire and challenge. Yet even today so much of their work languishes unheard. Anna Beer reveals the highs and lows experienced by eight composers across the centuries, from Renaissance Florence to twentieth-century London, restoring to their rightful place exceptional women whom history has forgotten.
Call Number: ML82 .S686 2016ISBN: 9781780748566Publication Date: 2016-04-07 -
International Encyclopedia of Women Composers
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Call Number: ML105 .C7 1987ISBN: 0961748524Publication Date: 1987-01-01 -
Clara Schumann: the Artist and the Woman
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This absorbing and award-winning biography tells the story of the tragedies and triumphs of Clara Wieck Schumann (1819-1896), a musician of remarkable achievements. At once artist, composer, editor, teacher, wife, and mother of eight children, she was an important force in the musical world of her time. To show how Schumann surmounted the obstacles facing female artists in the nineteenth century, Nancy B. Reich has drawn on previously unexplored primary sources: unpublished diaries, letters, and family papers, as well as concert programs. Going beyond the familiar legends of the Schumann literature, she applies the tools of musicological scholarship and the insights of psychology to provide a new, full-scale portrait.The book is divided into two parts. In Part One, Reich follows Clara Schumann's life from her early years as a child prodigy through her marriage to Robert Schumann and into the forty years after his death, when she established and maintained an extraordinary European career while supporting and supervising a household and seven children. Part Two covers four major themes in Schumann's life: her relationship with Johannes Brahms and other friends and contemporaries; her creative work; her life on the concert stage; and her success as a teacher.Throughout, excerpts from diaries and letters in Reich's own translations clear up misconceptions about her life and achievements and her partnership with Robert Schumann. Highlighting aspects of Clara Schumann's personality and character that have been neglected by earlier biographers, this candid and eminently readable account adds appreciably to our understanding of a fascinating artist and woman.For this revised edition, Reich has added several photographs and updated the text to include recent discoveries. She has also prepared a Catalogue of Works that includes all of Clara Schumann's known published and unpublished compositions and works she edited, as well as descriptions of the autographs, the first editions, the modern editions, and recent literature on each piece. The Catalogue also notes Schumann's performances of her own music and provides pertinent quotations from letters, diaries, and contemporary reviews.
Call Number: ML417 .S4 R4 2001ISBN: 9780801437403Publication Date: 2001-07-15 -
Woman Composers: a Biographical Handbook of Woman's Work in Music
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Print reproduction
Call Number: ML105 .E17 1913Publication Date: 1902 -
The Remarkable Mrs. Beach, American Composer
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Amy Marcy Cheney Beach achieved prominence performing widely and composing prolifically at the turn of the century. This account by Walter Jenkins, a composer in his own right, is based on archival research, a review of her correspondence, and on personal interviews with Mrs. Beach while both were in residence at the MacDowell Colony.
Call Number: ML410 .B36 J46ISBN: 0899900690Publication Date: 1994-11-01
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Women in Music: an Encyclopedic Bibliography
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The first edition (1975) was called "...a useful aid in locating biographical information on a specific female... musician..." by the Music Educator's Journal. More than 4,000 entries were included. This new two-volume edition is over five times the size of the original Women in Music Including many new titles that have been published since the first editon that deal specifically with women musicians, this edition elaborates on the expanding role of women music. Like the 1975 edition, it serves as an index to the biographies of women musicians of all periods and countries, as found in a representative selection of significant music, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. This update also includes non-musical sources, such as general biographical sets, as well as references to obituaries from significant newspapers and trade publications, notably the New York Times , Times (London), and Variety. The designation 'musician' is considered broadly, encompassing such ancillary disciplines as music therapists, folklorists, librettists, etc.
Call Number: ML105 .H6 1993ISBN: 0810827697Publication Date: 1993-11-01 -
Maria Callas: Sacred Monster
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Music scholar, opera critic and, toward the end of Callas's life, close friend and confidante, Galatopoulos has written both a careful assessment of her daring and tumultuous career -- recognizing her as defining vocal art for an age, admitting also her faults and premature decline, recounting her stormy lives in public and private. Correcting the many misguided books which have appeared since her death in 1977, revealing Callas's thoughts about her family, her controlling husband, her feuds with rivals, conductors and directors, and her feelings for Aristotle Onassis, whose close friendship survived his marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy. One hundred pages of photographs, many never published, show the great singer in a visual documentary of her entire career. Also included is a complete survey of Callas's recordings and performances.
Call Number: ML420 .C18 G25 1998ISBN: 9780684859859Publication Date: 1999-04-02 -
Women's Voices Across Musical Worlds
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An exploration of the musical activities and expressions of women from a thematic perspective, this collection of essays provides a cross-cultural and cross-historical view of the roles women have played as creators and performers, and the representation of women in world, popular and art music.
Call Number: ML82 .W697 2004ISBN: 1555535895Publication Date: 2003-10-30 -
Women Writing Music in Late Eighteenth-Century England
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Combining new musicology trends, formal musical analysis, and literary feminist recovery work, Leslie Ritchie examines rare poetic, didactic, fictional, and musical texts written by women in late eighteenth-century Britain. She finds instances of and resistance to contemporary perceptions of music as a form of social control in works by Maria Barthélemon, Harriett Abrams, Mary Worgan, Susanna Rowson, Hannah Cowley, and Amelia Opie, among others. Relating women's musical compositions and writings about music to theories of music's function in the formation of female subjectivities during the latter half of the eighteenth century, Ritchie draws on the work of cultural theorists and cultural historians, as well as feminist scholars who have explored the connection between femininity and performance. Whether crafting works consonant with societal ideals of charitable, natural, and national order, or re-imagining their participation in these musical aids to social harmony, women contributed significantly to the formation of British cultural identity. Ritchie's interdisciplinary book will interest scholars working in a range of fields, including gender studies, musicology, eighteenth-century British literature, and cultural studies.
Call Number: ML82 .R57 2008ISBN: 9780754663331Publication Date: 2008-07-18
Popular Music
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Electric Ladyland: Women and Rock Culture
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With the explosion of rock music in the mid-1960s, women arrived--as performers, critics, and fans. While operating in radically different ways within rock culture, female musicians, journalists, and groupies rewrote women's roles on and off the stage in the 1960s and 1970s. Electric Ladyland is a social and cultural history of this formative era in rock and roll, examining how the changing roles of women were intertwined with the evolution of the music. Articles and reviews from Rolling Stone and the Village Voice provide a window on a time when female musicians such as Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, and Joni Mitchell battled sexism from concert promoters and mainly male reviewers. Feminist rock journalists, however, were coming into their own. In particular, Ellen Willis, music critic for the New Yorker, and Lillian Roxon, author of the influential Rock Encyclopedia, transformed the way society perceived sometimes marginalized female performers. The groupie was born at the same time, and Rhodes devotes considerable attention to the rise of this phenomenon. Through journalistic accounts as well as personal interviews with groupies of the 1960s and 1970s, she explores these women's dual legacy of self-assertion and promiscuous behavior that resonates to this day through the popularity of such films as Almost Famous. Deeply informed by critical media studies and drawing on diverse and rich sources, Electric Ladyland assesses the lasting effects of cultural representations on female sexuality and gender roles.
Call Number: ML82 .R54 2005ISBN: 9780812238402Publication Date: 2005-03-08 -
Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity
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Women and Popular Music explores the changing role of women musicians and the ways in which their songs resonate in popular culture. Sheila Whiteley begins by examining the counter-culture's reactionary attitudes to women through the lyrics of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. She explores the ways in which artists like Joplin and Joni Mitchell confronted issues of sexuality and freedom, redefining women's participation in the industry, and assesses the personal cost of their achievements. She considers how stars such as Annie Lennox, Madonna and k.d. lang have confronted issues of gender stereotyping and sexuality, through pop videos for 'Justify My Love' and 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)', and looks at the enduring importance of the singer-songwriter through artists such as Tracey Chapman. Lastly, she assesses the contribution of contemporary artists including Tori Amos, P.J. Harvey and Courtney Love, and asks whether the Spice Girls are just a 'cartoon feminist pop group' or if they provide positive role models for teenage girls.
Call Number: ML82 .W48 2000ISBN: 9780415211901Publication Date: 2000-07-06 -
Women and Music in America since 1900: an Encylopedia
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The 20th century heard a rich sound coming from America: women making music. Other works may be strictly biographical or cover only one type of musician. This two volume, A-to-Z encyclopedia represents the first major effort to describe the role of women in all forms of music in the U.S. since 1900. Entries cover such material as, important individuals, biographical overviews, gender issues, education, music genres, honors and awards, organizations, and professions. The significance of an individual's contribution, rather than their popularity, determined who was featured in this collection. Included individuals must also have been born in, been a resident of, or made most of her contributions in the U.S. Each entry concludes with a short list of further readings. Photos accompany nearly 100 entries. A preface, an introductory historical overview, a chronology, a guide to related topics, a list of contributors, a general bibliography, and an index help to present the full spectrum of American women who changed the face of music in the 1900s.
Call Number: ML82 .W625 2002ISBN: 9781573562676Publication Date: 2002-12-30 -
First Lady of Song: Ella Fitzgerald for the Record
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"The name alone conjures images of the Savoy Ballroom, the Chick Webb, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie bands, hot jazz, sweet ballads, and a genuinely unique presence. Ella Fitzgerald, an artist who has been called a national treasure - and no one has disputed the laudation - has captivated an international audience for more than fifty years. Her inimitable voice has been heard in intimate clubs, in concerts, on radio and television, and on countless recordings." "First Lady of Song is a celebration of her life and work. In these pages are revived memories of duets with Frank Sinatra, harmonizing with Dinah Shore, and solo triumphs at Carnegie Hall."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Call Number: ML419 .F52 F5ISBN: 9781559722407Publication Date: 1994-09-01 -
Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective
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This volume offers an introduction to the field of women, music, and culture, examining the implications of gender upon music performance. The presentation focuses on women from many different countries, cultures and historical periods--from the professional musician to the village preserver of traditional music and culture, from the young woman of the 19th century of hymnody tradition of the U.S. to the female tayu or chanter in the male dominated Gidayu narrative tradition of Japan.
Call Number: ML82 .W63ISBN: 9780313243141Publication Date: 1987-11-13 -
Nina Simone: the Biography
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'I will die at 70 because afterwards there is nothing but pain.' And sure enough Nina Simone was 70 years old when she died in the South of France after a lifetime's quest for serenity, which forever eluded her. Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in North Carolina at the tail-end of the Great Depression, she was a precocious child with dreams of becoming the first black classical soloist, but was rejected by an elite New York conservatoire − she always believed it was because of the colour of her skin. She began performing jazz, blues and classical songs in a bar to fund her studies, taking the stage name Nina Simone in 1954 to prevent her mother finding out she was playing 'the devil's music'. In 1958 her rendition of the Gershwin standard 'I Loves You Porgy' became her only US Top 40 hit, and her subsequent debut album Little Girl Blue was a success. Her passionate belief in racial equality and civil rights saw her become increasingly radicalised in the 1960s, addressing the issue on record and on stage in songs such as 'Mississippi Goddam' and her version of 'Strange Fruit'. She went into self-imposed exile from America in 1970, settling in Barbados and then France. Nina Simone recorded over 40 albums, wrote some of the best-known popular songs in the canon and gave concerts described as quasi-religious experiences. This is the first biography to tell her whole extraordinary story. David Brun-Lambert is a highly regarded French writer and broadcaster.
Call Number: ML420 .S5635 B713 2009ISBN: 9781845134303Publication Date: 2009-07-01 -
Aretha Franklin: the Queen of Soul
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A frank examination of Aretha Franklin, Mark Bego's definitive biography traces her career accomplishments from her beginnings as a twelve-year-old member of a church choir in the early 1950s, to recording her first album at the age of fourteen and signing a major recording contract at eighteen, right up through her headline-grabbing 2010 health scare. Originally positioned to become a gospel star in her father's Detroit church, Aretha had a privileged urban upbringing--stars such as Mahalia Jackson, Dinah Washington, and Sam Cooke regularly visited her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin. It wasn't long before she was creating a string of hits, from "Respect" to "Freeway of Love," and becoming one of the most beloved singers of the twentieth century. This New York Times bestselling author's detailed research includes in-person interviews with record producers Jerry Wexler, Clyde Otis, and Clive Davis, Aretha's first husband, several of her singing star contemporaries, and a rare one-on-one session with Aretha herself. Every album, every accolade, and every heart-breaking personal drama is examined with clarity and neutrality, allowing Franklin's colorful story to unfold on its own. With two teenage pregnancies and an abusive first marriage, drinking problems, battles with her weight, the murder of her father, and tabloid wars, Aretha's life has been a roller coaster. This freshly updated and expanded biography will give readers a clear understanding of what made Aretha Franklin the "Queen of Soul."
Call Number: ML420 .F778 B4 2012ISBN: 9781616085810Publication Date: 2012-04-01 -
Swing Shift: "All-Girl" Bands of the 1940s
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The forgotten history of the "all-girl" big bands of the World War II era takes center stage in Sherrie Tucker's Swing Shift. American demand for swing skyrocketed with the onslaught of war as millions--isolated from loved ones--sought diversion, comfort, and social contact through music and dance. Although all-female jazz and dance bands had existed since the 1920s, now hundreds of such groups, both African American and white, barnstormed ballrooms, theaters, dance halls, military installations, and makeshift USO stages on the home front and abroad. Filled with firsthand accounts of more than a hundred women who performed during this era and complemented by thorough--and eye-opening--archival research, Swing Shift not only offers a history of this significant aspect of American society and culture but also examines how and why whole bands of dedicated and talented women musicians were dropped from--or never inducted into--our national memory. Tucker's nuanced presentation reveals who these remarkable women were, where and when they began to play music, and how they navigated a sometimes wild and bumpy road--including their experiences with gas and rubber rationing, travel restrictions designed to prioritize transportation for military needs, and Jim Crow laws and other prejudices. She explains how the expanded opportunities brought by the war, along with sudden increased publicity, created the illusion that all female musicians--no matter how experienced or talented--were "Swing Shift Maisies," 1940s slang for the substitutes for the "real" workers (or musicians) who were away in combat. Comparing the working conditions and public representations of women musicians with figures such as Rosie the Riveter, WACs, USO hostesses, pin-ups, and movie stars, Tucker chronicles the careers of such bands as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Phil Spitalny's Hours of Charm, The Darlings of Rhythm, and the Sharon Rogers All-Girl Band.
Call Number: ML82 .T83 2000ISBN: 9780822324850Publication Date: 2000-06-06 -
Women's Bands in America: Performing Music and Gender
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Women's Bands in America is the first comprehensive exploration of women's bands across the three centuries in American history. Contributors trace women's emerging roles in society as seen through women's bands--concert and marching--spanning three centuries of American history. Authors explore town, immigrant,industry, family, school, suffrage, military, jazz, and rock bands, adopting a variety of methodologies and theoretical lenses in order to assemble and interrogate their findings within the context of women's roles in American society over time. Contributors bring together a series of disciplines in this unique work, including music education, musicology, American history, women's studies, and history of education. They also draw on numerous primary sources: diaries, film, military records, newspaper articles, oral-history interviews, personal letters, photographs, published ephemera, radio broadcasts, and recordings. Thoroughly, contributors engage in archival historical research, biography, case study, content analysis, iconographic study, oral history, and qualitative research to bring their topics to life. This ambitious collection will be of use not only to students and scholars of instrumental music education, music history and ethnomusicology, but also gender studies and American social history. Contributions by: Vilka E. Castillo Silva, Dawn Farmer, Danelle Larson, Brian Meyers, Sarah Minette, Gayle Murchison, Jeananne Nichols, David Rickels, Joanna Ross Hersey, Sarah Schmalenberger, Amy Spears, and Sondra Wieland Howe.
Call Number: ML1311 .W66 2017ISBN: 9781442254404Publication Date: 2016-12-12 -
The Baddest Bitch in the Room
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The first Asian woman in hip-hop, Sophia Chang shares the inspiring story of her career in the music business, working with such acts as The Wu-Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest, her path to becoming an entrepreneur, and her candid accounts of marriage, motherhood, aging, desire, marginalization, and martial arts. Fearless and unpredictable, Sophia Chang prevailed in a male-dominated music industry to manage the biggest names in hip-hop and R&B. The daughter of Korean immigrants in predominantly white suburban Vancouver, Chang left for New York City, and soon became a powerful voice in music boardrooms at such record companies as Atlantic, Jive, and Universal Music Group. As an A&R rep, Chang met a Staten Island rapper named Prince Rakeem, now known as the RZA, founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, the most revered and influential rap group in hip-hop history. That union would send her on a transformational odyssey, leading her to a Shaolin monk who would become her partner, an enduring kung fu practice, two children, and a reckoning with what type woman she ultimately wanted to be. For decades, Chang helped remarkably talented men tell their stories. Now, with The Baddest Bitch In The Room, she is ready to tell her own story of marriage, motherhood, aging, desire, marginalization, and martial arts. This is an inspirational debut memoir by a woman of color who has had the audacity to be bold in the pursuit of her passions, despite what anyone--family, society, the dominant culture--have prescribed.
Call Number: ML429 .C448 A3 2020ISBN: 9781646220816Publication Date: 2021-09-21 -
Queen Bey
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FEATURED IN: The New York Times Book Review ("New and Noteworthy") * Essence * Newsweek * People * Bustle * PopSugar * Refinery 29 * HelloGiggles' * PureWow * Newsday * AMNewYork The Ultimate Beyoncé Collectible "Beyoncé fans will eat it up." --People "You don't need to be in the Beyhive to appreciate Queen Bey...Voices including culture critic Luvvie Ajayi and actress and producer Lena Waithe give us a fresh take on Beyoncé, who's arguably the biggest pop star of our time." --Essence Beyoncé. Her name conjures more than music, it has come to be synonymous with beauty, glamour, power, creativity, love, and romance. Her performances are legendary, her album releases events. She is not even forty but she has already rewritten the Beyoncé playbook more than half a dozen times. She is consistently provocative, political and surprising. As a solo artist, she has sold more than 100 million records. She has won 22 Grammys and is the most-nominated woman artist in the history of Grammy awards. Her 2018 performance at Coachella wowed the world. The New York Times wrote: "There's not likely to be a more meaningful, absorbing, forceful and radical performance by an American musician this year or any year soon." Artist, business woman, mother, daughter, sister, wife, black feminist, Queen Bey is endlessly fascinating. Queen Bey features a diverse range of voices, from star academics to outspoken cultural critics to Hollywood and music stars. Essays include: "What Might a Black Girl Be in This World," an introduction by Veronica Chambers "Beychella is Proof That Beyoncé is the Greatest Performer Alive. I'm Not Arguing." by Luvvie Ajayi "On the Journey Together," by Lena Waithe "What Beyoncé Means to Everyone," by Meredith Broussard with visualizations by Andrew Harvard and Juan Carlos Mora "Jay-Z's Apology to Beyoncé Isn't Just Celebrity Gossip -- It's a Political Act" by Brittney Cooper "All Her Single Ladies" by Kid Fury "The Elevator" by Ylonda Gault "The Art of Being Beyoncé" by Maria Brito "Getting, Giving and Leaving" by Melissa Harris Perry and Mankaprr Conteh "Beyoncé the Brave" by Reshma Saujani "Living into the Lemonade: Redefining Black Women's Spirituality in the Age of Beyoncé" by Candice Benbow "Beyoncé's Radical Ways" by Carmen Perez "Finding la Reina in Queen Bey" by Isabel Gonzalez Whitaker "Beyoncé, Influencer" by Elodie Maillet Storm "The King of Pop and the Queen of Everything" by Michael Eric Dyson "Style So Sacred" by Edward Enninful "The Beauty of Beyoncé" by Fatima Robinson "Because Beyoncé." by Ebro Darden "King Bey" by Treva B. Lindsey "Meridonial: Beyoncé's Southern Roots and References" by Robin M. Boylorn "B & V: A Love Letter" by Caroline Clarke
Call Number: ML420 .K675 Q4 2019ISBN: 9781250200525Publication Date: 2019-03-05 -
She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and th Woman Who Lived Her Songs
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In this Time Top 100 Book of the Year, the National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Heartland "analyzes how Dolly Parton's songs--and success--have embodied feminism for working-class women" (People). Growing up amid Kansas wheat fields and airplane factories, Sarah Smarsh witnessed firsthand the particular vulnerabilities--and strengths--of women in working poverty. Meanwhile, country songs by female artists played in the background, telling powerful stories about life, men, hard times, and surviving. In her family, she writes, "country music was foremost a language among women. It's how we talked to each other in a place where feelings aren't discussed." And no one provided that language better than Dolly Parton. In this "tribute to the woman who continues to demonstrate that feminism comes in coats of many colors," Smarsh tells readers how Parton's songs have validated women who go unheard: the poor woman, the pregnant teenager, the struggling mother disparaged as "trailer trash." Parton's broader career--from singing on the front porch of her family's cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains to achieving stardom in Nashville and Hollywood, from "girl singer" managed by powerful men to self-made mogul of business and philanthropy--offers a springboard to examining the intersections of gender, class, and culture. Infused with Smarsh's trademark insight, intelligence, and humanity, this is "an ambitious book" (The New Republic) about the icon Dolly Parton and an "in-depth examination into gender and class and what it means to be a woman and a working-class hero that feels particularly important right now" (Refinery29).
Call Number: ML420 .P28 S63 2021ISBN: 9781982157296Publication Date: 2021-09-07
Contemporary Composers
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Women of Influence in Contemporary Music: Nine American Composers
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In Women of Influence in Contemporary Music: Nine American Composers, Michael K. Slayton has collected essays, which focus on women who have made significant contributions to American music: Elizabeth Austin, Susan Botti, Gabriela Lena Frank, Jennifer Higdon, Libby Larsen, Tania León, Cindy McTee, Marga Richter, and Judith Shatin. While these composers have much in common, not least of all dedication to their art, their individual stories reveal different impulses in American music. Their works reflect the shifting societal landscapes in the United States over the last seven decades, as well as different stylistic approaches to writing music. Each chapter includes a biography of the composer, an interview, and a detailed analysis of one major composition. The composers openly reflect on their individual journeys, in which they have discovered respective musical languages and have found success during different times in history. Because few music books focus solely on female composers, Women of Influence in Contemporary Music offers a rare glimpse into the styles and attitudes of gifted women and their work.
Call Number: ML82 .W676 2011ISBN: 9780810877429Publication Date: 2010-12-23 -
Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States
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Featuring analytical discussions or descriptions of about 150 different pieces of electroacoustic music by women composers in the United States, this book is the most definitive attempt to date to discuss the achievements of women as composers of experimental and avant-garde music from the 1930s to the present day. Using a wealth of primary material such as interviews and personal correspondence, Women Composers and Music Technology also explores currently relevant issues in gender and technology. Drawing out the relationships between composers and their working environments, and between teachers and students, Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner discusses the contribution of women composers to electroacoustic music. Complete with a bibliography and discography covering the work of 90 composers, the book is a valuable resource for those wishing to learn more about particular composers and their works. Further volumes are planned which will cover composers from continental Europe, the United Kingdom, Mexico, South America and Australasia.
Call Number: ML1380 .H56 2006ISBN: 9780754604617Publication Date: 2006-02-23
Digital Resources
Classical Music and Music History
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The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word
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Emerging in the 1850s, elocutionists recited poetry or drama with music to create a new type of performance. The genre--dominated by women--achieved remarkable popularity. Yet the elocutionists and their art fell into total obscurity during the twentieth century. Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.
ISBN: 9780252099151Publication Date: 2017-01-19 -
Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music, 1900-1960
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Through musical analysis of compositions written in the first half of the twentieth century, Analytic Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music, 1900-1960 celebrates the achievements of eight composers: Alma Mahler-Werfel (1879-1964), Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979), Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), Ruth Crawford (1901-53), Florence B. Price (1887-1953), Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006), J. M. Beyer (1888-1944), and Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-90). Written by outstanding music theorists and musicologists, the essays provide thought-provoking in-depth explorations of representative compositions, often linking analytical observations with questions of meaning and sociohistorical context. Each essay is introduced by a brief biographical sketch of the composer by editors Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft. This collection - Volume 2 in an unprecedented four-volume series of analytical studies on music by women composers - is designed to challenge and stimulate a wide range of readers. For academics, these thoughtful analytical essays can open new paths into unexplored research areas in the fields of music theory and musicology. Post-secondary instructors may be inspired by the insights offered in these essays to include new works in music theory and history courses at both graduate and upper-level undergraduate levels, or in courses on women and music. Finally, for soloists, ensembles, conductors, and music broadcasters, these detailed analyses can offer enriched understandings of this repertoire and suggest fresh, new programming possibilities to share with listeners.
ISBN: 9780190236984Publication Date: 2022-08-30 -
Women in Music: a Research and Information Guide
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Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography emerging from more than twenty-five years of feminist scholarship on music. This book testifies to the great variety of subjects and approaches represented in over two decades of published writings on women, their work, and the important roles that feminist outlooks have played in formerly male-oriented academic scholarship or journalistic musings on women and music.
ISBN: 1283533006Publication Date: 2012-01-01 -
Nadia and Lili Boulanger
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Pioneers in their fields and two of the best-known women in music in the twentieth century, Nadia and Lili Boulanger have previously been considered in isolation from one another. Yet, as Caroline Potter's new book demonstrates, their careers were closely linked during Lili Boulanger's short life (1893-1918) and there are several intriguing connections between their musical works. This biography also provides the first full analysis of the Boulanger sisters' musical styles, placing them within the context of French musical history. Their lives are also a case study in the issues of gender which surround music making even to the present day. Despite an unusually privileged upbringing, Nadia and Lili Boulanger exemplify the struggle women experienced when attempting to enter the professional music world. Lili became the first woman to win the Prix de Rome in 1913, and Nadia gained second place in 1908. Yet in spite of this initial success, Nadia Boulanger was to give up composing in her thirties and devoted the remainder of her long life to teaching. Her pupils included several of the great composers of the century, including Aaron Copland and Elliott Carter. This book, focusing on their musical careers, is essential reading for anyone interested in French music of the twentieth century.
ISBN: 1317090780Publication Date: 2016-04-29 -
Women and Music in the Age of Austen
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Women and Music in the Age of Austen highlights the central role women played in musical performance, composition, reception, and representation, and analyzes its formative and lasting effect on Georgian culture. This interdisciplinary collection of essays from musicology, literary studies, and gender studies challenges the conventional historical categories that marginalize women's experience from Austen's time. Contesting the distinctions between professional and amateur musicians, public and domestic sites of musical production, and performers and composers of music, the contributors reveal how women's widespread involvement in the Georgian musical scene allowed for self-expression, artistic influence, and access to communities that transcended the boundaries of gender, class, and nationality. This volume's breadth of focus advances our understanding of a period that witnessed a musical flourishing, much of it animated by female hands and voices. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
ISBN: 9781684485154Publication Date: 2023-12-15 -
Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South
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A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022 Hearing southern women in the pauses of history Southern women of all classes, races, and walks of life practiced music during and after the Civil War. Candace L. Bailey examines the history of southern women through the lens of these musical pursuits, uncovering the ways that music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory help us understand its meaning in the women's culture of the time. Bailey pays particular attention to the space between music as an ideal accomplishment--part of how people expected women to perform gentility--and a real practice--what women actually did. At the same time, her ethnographic reading of binder's volumes, letters and diaries, and a wealth of other archival material informs new and vital interpretations of women's place in southern culture. A fascinating collective portrait of women's artistic and personal lives, Unbinding Gentility challenges entrenched assumptions about nineteenth century music and the experiences of the southern women who made it.
ISBN: 9780252052651Publication Date: 2021-04-13 -
Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment
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A study of musical salons in Europe and North America between 1760 and 1800 and the salon hostesses who shaped their musical worlds. In eighteenth-century Europe and America, musical salons--and the women who hosted and made music in them--played a crucial role in shaping their cultural environments. Musical salons served as a testing ground for new styles, genres, and aesthetic ideals, and they acted as a mediating force, bringing together professional musicians and their audiences of patrons, listeners, and performers. For the salonnière, the musical salon offered a space between the public and private spheres that allowed her to exercise cultural agency. In this book, musicologist and historical keyboardist Rebecca Cypess offers a broad overview of musical salons between 1760 and 1800, placing the figure of the salonnière at its center. Cypess then presents a series of in-depth case studies that meet the salonnière on her own terms. Women such as Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy in Paris, Marianna Martines in Vienna, Sara Levy in Berlin, Angelica Kauffman in Rome, and Elizabeth Graeme in Philadelphia come to life in multidimensional ways. Crucially, Cypess uses performance as a tool for research, and her interpretations draw on her experience with the instruments and performance practices used in eighteenth-century salons. In this accessible, interdisciplinary book, Cypess explores women's agency and authorship, reason and sentiment, and the roles of performing, collecting, listening, and conversing in the formation of eighteenth-century musical life.
ISBN: 0226817911Publication Date: 2022-05-20 -
Five Lives in Music: Women Performers, Composers, and Impresarios From the Baroque To the Present
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Representing a historical cross-section of performance and training in Western music since the seventeenth century, Five Lives in Music brings to light the private and performance lives of five remarkable women musicians and composers. Elegantly guiding readers through the Thirty Years War in central Europe, elite courts in Germany, urban salons in Paris, Nazi control of Germany and Austria, and American musical life today, as well as personal experiences of marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, Cecelia Hopkins Porter provides valuable insights into the culture in which each woman was active. Porter begins with the Duchess Sophie-Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lueneberg, a harpsichordist who also presided over seventeenth-century North German court music as an impresario. At the forefront of French Baroque composition, composer Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre bridged a widening cultural gap between the Versailles nobility and the urban bourgeoisie of Paris. A century later, Josephine Lang, a prodigiously talented pianist and dedicated composer, participated at various times in the German Romantic world of lieder through her important arts salon. Lastly, the twentieth century brought forth two exceptional women: Baroness Maria Bach, a composer and pianist of twentieth-century Vienna's upper bourgeoisie and its brilliant musical milieu in the era of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Erich Korngold; and Ann Schein, a brilliant and dauntless American piano prodigy whose career, ongoing today though only partially recognized, led her to study with the legendary virtuosos Arthur Rubinstein and Myra Hess. Mining musical autographs, unpublished letters and press reviews, interviews, and music archives in the United States and Europe, Porter probes each musician's social and economic status, her education and musical training, the cultural expectations within the traditions and restrictions of each woman's society, and other factors. Throughout the lively and focused portraits of these five women, Porter finds common threads, both personal and contextual, that extend to a larger discussion of the lives and careers of female composers and performers throughout centuries of music history.
ISBN: 9780252094132Publication Date: 2012-08-15 -
Women, the Recited Qur'an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia
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Women, the Recited Qur'an, and Islamic Music in Contemporary Indonesia takes readers to the heart of religious musical praxis in Indonesia, home to the largest Muslim population in the world. Anne K. Rasmussen explores a rich public soundscape, where women recite the divine texts of the Qur'an, and where an extraordinary diversity of Arab-influenced Islamic musical styles and genres, also performed by women, flourishes. Based on unique and revealing ethnographic research beginning at the end of Suharto's "New Order" and continuing into the era of "Reformation," the book considers the powerful role of music in the expression of religious nationalism. In particular, it focuses on musical style, women's roles, and the ideological and aesthetic issues raised by the Indonesian style of recitation.
ISBN: 9780520947429Publication Date: 2010-08-23
Popular Music
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Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls: Women's Country Music 1930-1960
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A PopMatters Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020 From the 1930s to the 1960s, the booming popularity of country music threw a spotlight on a new generation of innovative women artists. These individuals blazed trails as singers, musicians, and performers even as the industry hemmed in their potential popularity with labels like woman hillbilly, singing cowgirl, and honky-tonk angel. Stephanie Vander Wel looks at the careers of artists like Patsy Montana, Rose Maddox, and Kitty Wells against the backdrop of country music's golden age. Analyzing recordings and appearances on radio, film, and television, she connects performances to real and imagined places and examines how the music sparked new ways for women listeners to imagine the open range, the honky-tonk, and the home. The music also captured the tensions felt by women facing geographic disruption and economic uncertainty. While classic songs and heartfelt performances might ease anxieties, the subject matter underlined women's ambivalent relationships to industrialism, middle-class security, and established notions of femininity.
ISBN: 9780252051944Publication Date: 2020-03-23 -
Black Women's Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas
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Black Women's Liberation Movement Music argues that the Black Women's Liberation Movement of the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s was a unique combination of Black political feminism, Black literary feminism, and Black musical feminism, among other forms of Black feminism. This book critically explores the ways the soundtracks of the Black Women's Liberation Movement often overlapped with those of other 1960s and 1970s social, political, and cultural movements, such as the Black Power Movement, Women's Liberation Movement, and Sexual Revolution. The soul, funk, and disco music of the Black Women's Liberation Movement era is simultaneously interpreted as universalist, feminist (in a general sense), and Black female-focused. This music's incredible ability to be interpreted in so many different ways speaks to the importance and power of Black women's music and the fact that it has multiple-meanings for a multitude of people. Within the worlds of both Black popular movement studies and Black popular music studies there has been a longstanding tendency to almost exclusively associate Black women's music of the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s with the Black male-dominated Black Power Movement or the White female-dominated Women's Liberation Movement. However, this book reveals that much of the soul, funk, and disco performed by Black women was most often the very popular music of a very unpopular and unsung movement: the Black Women's Liberation Movement. Black Women's Liberation Movement Music is an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and researchers of Popular Music Studies, American Studies, African American Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender Studies, and Sexuality Studies.
ISBN: 9781032547459Publication Date: 2023-10-30 -
Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music
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Drawing on fieldwork conducted at eight women's music festivals, Eileen M. Hayes shows how studying these festivals--attended by predominately white lesbians--provides critical insight into the role of music and lesbian community formation. She argues that the women's music festival is a significant institutional site for the emergence of black feminist consciousness in the contemporary period. Hayes also offers sage perspectives on black women's involvement in the women's music festival scene, the ramifications of their performances as drag kings in those environments, and the challenges and joys of a black lesbian retreat based on the feminist festival model. With acuity and candor, longtime feminist activist Hayes elucidates why this music scene matters. Veteran vocalist, percussionist, producer, and cultural historian Linda Tillery provides a foreword.
ISBN: 9780252091490Publication Date: 2010-10-01 -
Girls Rock!: Fifty Years of Women Making Music
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With a foreword by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards Girls Rock! explores the many ways women have defined themselves as rock musicians in an industry once dominated and controlled by men. Integrating history, feminist analysis, and developmental theory, the authors describe how and why women have become rock musicians--what inspires them to play and perform, how they write, what their music means to them, and what they hope their music means to listeners. As these musicians tell their stories, topics emerge that illuminate broader trends in rock's history. From Wanda Jackson's revolutionary act of picking up a guitar to the current success of independent artists such as Ani DiFranco, Girls Rock! examines the shared threads of these performers' lives and the evolution of women's roles in rock music since its beginnings in the 1950s. This provocative investigation of women in rock is based on numerous interviews with a broad spectrum of women performers--those who have achieved fame and those just starting bands, those playing at local coffeehouses and those selling out huge arenas. Girls Rock! celebrates what female musicians have to teach about their experiences as women, artists, and rock musicians.
ISBN: 9780813150109Publication Date: 2014-07-11 -
Women Singers in Global Contexts: Music, Biography, Identity
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Exploring and celebrating individual lives in diverse situations, Women Singers in Global Contexts is a new departure in the study of women's worldwide music-making. Ten unique women constitute the heart of this volume: each one has engaged her singing voice as a central element in her life, experiencing various opportunities, tensions, and choices through her vocality. These biographical and poetic narratives demonstrate how the act of vocalizing embodies dynamics of representation, power, agency, activism, and risk-taking. Engaging with performance practice, politics, and constructions of gender through vocality and vocal aesthetics, this collection offers valuable insights into the experiences of specific women singers in a range of sociocultural contexts. Contributors trace themes and threads that include childhood, families, motherhood, migration, fame, training, transmission, technology, and the interface of private lives and public identities.
ISBN: 9780252094361Publication Date: 2013-02-05 -
The Women of Country Music
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Women have been pivotal in the country music scene since its inception, as Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson make clear in The Women of Country Music. Their groundbreaking volume presents the best current scholarship and writing on female country musicians. Beginning with the 1920s career of teenage guitar picker Roba Stanley, the contributors go on to discuss Polly Jenkins and Her Musical Plowboys, 50s honky-tonker Rose Lee Maphis, superstar Faith Hill, the relationship between Emmylou Harris and poet Bronwen Wallace, the Louisiana Hayride's Margaret Lewis Warwick, and more.
ISBN: 9780813157733Publication Date: 2014-10-17 -
The Routledge Companion to Women in Musical Leadership
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The Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership: The Nineteenth Century and Beyond provides a comprehensive exploration of women's participation in musical leadership from the nineteenth century to the present. Global in scope, with contributors from over thirty countries, this book reveals the wide range of ways in which women have taken leadership roles across musical genres and contexts, uncovers new histories, and considers the challenges that women continue to face. The volume addresses timely issues in the era of movements such as #MeToo, digital feminisms, and the resurgent global feminist movements. Its multidisciplinary chapters represent a wide range of methodologies, with historical musicology, models drawn from ethnomusicology, analysis, philosophy, cultural studies, and practice research all informing the book. Including almost fifty chapters written by both researchers and practitioners in the field, it covers themes including: Historical Perspectives Conductors and Impresarios Women's Practices in Music Education Performance and the Music Industries Faith and Spirituality: Worship and Sacred Musical Practices Advocacy: Collectives and Grass-Roots Activism The Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership: The Nineteenth Century and Beyond draws together both new perspectives from early career researchers and contributions from established world-leading scholars. It promotes academic-practitioner dialogue by bringing contributions from both fields together, represents alternative models of women in musical leadership, celebrates the work done by women leaders, and shows how women challenge accepted notions of gendered roles. Offering a comprehensive overview of the varied forms of women's musical leadership, this volume is a vital resource for all scholars of women in music, as well as professionals in the music industries and music education today.
ISBN: 0367456761Publication Date: 2024-07-01 -
Women in Jamaican Music
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As the ubiquitous Jamaican musician Bob Marley once famously sang, "half the story has never been told." This rings particularly true for the little-known women in Jamaican music who comprise significantly less than half of the Caribbean nation's musical landscape. This book covers the female contribution to Jamaican music and its subgenres through dozens of interviews with vocalists, instrumentalists, bandleaders, producers, deejays and supporters of the arts. Relegated to marginalized spaces, these pioneering women fought for their claim to the spotlight amid oppressive conditions to help create and shape Jamaica's musical heritage.
ISBN: 1476680957Publication Date: 2020-06-09 -
Hidden Harmonies: Women and Music in Popular Entertainment
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Contributions by Christina Baade, Candace Bailey, Paula J. Bishop, Maribeth Clark, Brittany Greening, Tammy Kernodle, Kendra Preston Leonard, April L. Prince, Travis D. Stimeling, and Kristen M. Turner For every star, there are hundreds of less-recognized women who contribute to musical communities, influencing their aesthetics and expanding opportunities available to women. Hidden Harmonies: Women and Music in Popular Entertainment focuses not on those whose names are best known nor most celebrated but on the women who had power in collective or subversive ways hidden from standard histories. Contributors to Hidden Harmonies reexamine primary sources using feminist and queer methodologies as well as critical race theory in order to overcome previous, biased readings. The scholarship that results from such reexaminations explores topics from songwriters to the music of the civil rights movement and from whistling schools to musical influencers. These wide-ranging essays create a diverse and novel view of women's contribution to music and its production. With intelligence and care, Hidden Harmonies uncovers the fascinating figures behind decades of popular music.
ISBN: 9781496845382Publication Date: 2023-05-18 -
Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives
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Full-tilt, hardcore, down-home, and groundbreaking, the women of country music speak volumes with every song. From Maybelle Carter to Dolly Parton, k.d. lang to Taylor Swift--these artists provided pivot points, truths, and doses of courage for women writers at every stage of their lives. Whether it's Rosanne Cash eulogizing June Carter Cash or a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift considering the golden glimmer of another precocious superstar, Brenda Lee, it's the humanity beneath the music that resonates. Here are deeply personal essays from award-winning writers on femme fatales, feminists, groundbreakers, and truth tellers. Acclaimed historian Holly George Warren captures the spark of the rockabilly sensation Wanda Jackson; Entertainment Weekly's Madison Vain considers Loretta Lynn's girl-power anthem "The Pill"; and rocker Grace Potter embraces Linda Ronstadt's unabashed visual and musical influence. Patty Griffin acts like a balm on a post-9/11 survivor on the run; Emmylou Harris offers a gateway through paralyzing grief; and Lucinda Williams proves that greatness is where you find it. Part history, part confessional, and part celebration of country, Americana, and bluegrass and the women who make them, Woman Walk the Line is a very personal collection of essays from some of America's most intriguing women writers. It speaks to the ways in which artists mark our lives at different ages and in various states of grace and imperfection--and ultimately how music transforms not just the person making it, but also the listener.
ISBN: 1477313915Publication Date: 2017-09-20 -
Women's Music for the Screen: Diverse Narratives in Sound
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Women's Music for the Screen: Diverse Narratives in Sound shines a long-overdue light on the works and lives of female-identifying screen composers. Bringing together composer profiles, exclusive interview excerpts, and industry case studies, this volume showcases their achievements and reflects on the systemic gender biases women have faced in an industry that has long excluded them. Across 16 essays, an international array of contributors present a wealth of research data, biographical content, and musical analysis of film, television, and video game scores to understand how the industry excludes women, the consequences of these deficits, and why such inequities persist - and to document women's rich contributions to screen music in diverse styles and genres. The chapters amplify the voices of women composers including Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, Wendy Carlos, Anne Dudley, Rachel Portman, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Mica Levi, Winifred Phillips, and more. From the mid-twentieth century to the present, and from classic Hollywood scores to pioneering electronic music, these are the stories and achievements of the women who have managed to forge successful careers in a male-dominated arena. Suitable for researchers, educators, and students alike, Women's Music for the Screen urges the screen music industry to consider these sounds and stories in a way it hasn't before: as voices that more accurately reflect the world we all share.
ISBN: 0429555474Publication Date: 2021-08-26 -
The Kaleidoscope of Women's Sounds in Music of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries
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"This book traces the development of music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries with regards to the work of six women composers: Sofia Gubaidulina, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Libby Larsen, Chen Yi, and Judith Weir. The study integrates cultural contexts with the composers' biographies, their diverse compositional styles, and provides in-depth analyses of their musical works. The Kaleidoscope of Women's Sounds in Music of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries offers a more detailed guide to not only these composers, but also their musical characters and styles, than previous studies on women's music. It discusses several aspects of these women's compositional perspectives and their personal experiences as they developed their music careers. The book also places emphasis on how these composers incorporated diverse musical styles and the idioms of others into the development of their own distinctly personal styles. The analytical approach adopted in this book is supplemented with illustrations of musical examples in order to provide a more complete understanding of the work of these composers."
ISBN: 1443876526Publication Date: 2015-06-15 -
You're History: The Twelve Strangest Women in Music
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Raucous, sensual and sublime: how twelve pioneering female artists rewrote the rules of pop. From Kate Bush to Nicki Minaj, from Janet Jackson to TLC and Taylor Swift, pop's greatest female pioneers are simply strange: smashing notions of taste and decorum, and replacing them with new ideals of pleasure. Instead of rehashing biographies, Lesley Chow dives deep into the music of these groundbreaking performers, identifying the ecstatic moments in their songs and finding out what makes them unique. You're History is a love letter to pop's most singular achievements, celebrating the innovations of women who are still critically underrated. It's a ride that includes tributes to Chaka Khan, Rihanna, Neneh Cherry, Sade, Shakespears Sister, Azealia Banks, and many more... "The slim, sharp book considers a range of female artists from Janet Jackson and Taylor Swift to TLC and Nicki Minaj, a group that the Australian cultural critic Chow views as 'outliers, marking moments where the culture might have swerved to incorporate their influence, but somehow contrived not to.'" -- New York Times summer reads
ISBN: 1913462358Publication Date: 2021-03-09 -
Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists Since 1860
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This wide-ranging collection brings together leading authorities on the social history of American art music to reveal the indispensable contribution that women have made to American musical life. Some chapters discuss collective endeavors, such as music clubs, Wagnerites, supporters of "modern music" in the 1920s, and activists in African American communities, while others focus on the work of a single, strikingly individual patron such as Isabella Stewart Gardner or Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Primary sources such as private letters and autobiographies are utilized, and documentary vignettes scattered throughout the book bring to life important events and reminiscences. Among these are an interview with Betty Freeman, noted patron of avant-garde music, and advice from Mildred Bliss to Nadia Boulanger. Extensive opening and closing chapters provide conceptual and factual background on music in America and draw out the larger implications of women's patronage in the past, present, and future.
ISBN: 0520083954Publication Date: 1997-12-08 -
Olivia on the Record: a Radical Experiment in Women's Music
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Foreword INDIES 2020 Silver Award Winner in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction Independent Press Awards 2021 Winner in LGBTQ nonfiction Golden Crown Literary Awards 2021 Nonfiction Winner The burgeoning lesbian and feminist movements of the '70s and '80s created an impetus to form more independent and equitable social and cultural institutions--bookstores, publishers, health clinics, and more--to support the unprecedented surge in women's arts of all kinds. Olivia Records was at the forefront of these models, not only recording and distributing women's music but also creating important new social spaces for previously isolated women and lesbians through concerts and festivals. Ginny Z. Berson, one of Olivia's founding members and visionaries, kept copious records during those heady days--days also fraught with contradictions, conflicts, and economic pitfalls. With great honesty, Berson offers her personal take on what those times were like, revisiting the excitement and the hardships of creating a fair and equitable lesbian-feminist business model--one that had no precedent. "In a time when lesbians' participation in mainstream culture and politics is often taken for granted, we need to recognize the miraculousness of what Olivia achieved. A few years after Stonewall, Olivia not only created the first women's record label, but in the face of pervasive bigotry and repression carved out a vibrant political space for lesbian freedom." --Barbara Smith, co-founder of the Combahee River Collective "The women's music movement was a revolution for rights and dignity, carving out a space where none existed before: for women to seize ownership of their own narrative, for lesbians who had never been reflected in popular music, for women to write love songs to other women. A small collective of idealistic women with absolutely no experience in the music business created a model that would change the landscape for all women, indeed, for all people." --Vicki Randle, musician "Ginny Berson's important memoir of building Olivia Records into a beloved lesbian institution is a timely narrative from a founding organizer. Ginny walks us through the politics, radical self-discovery, aching romantic tension, and quirky community organizing that characterized an era. In these chapters, we gain a front row seat to the collective "processing" that produced and distributed lesbian records, and meet the first generation of fans to experience women's music as lesbian liberation." --Bonnie J. Morris, PhD, author of Eden Built by Eves, The Disappearing L, and The Feminist Revolution
ISBN: 1951874013Publication Date: 2020-10-20
