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Nettie Arthur Brown’s The Red Fan (1896) was typical of the humorous spoken-word compositions in twentieth-century America. Due to female elocutionists’ performance traditions, women became the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, including a few modernist composers, such as Ruth Crawford Seeger and Marion Bauer. More typically, comic “musical readings” satirized gender expectations. Courtship, marriage, and domesticity were portayed as less than ideal. Performers sometimes adopted a rebellious boy persona, allowing for women’s further expression of gendered satire. Some compositions depicted grandmothers, and moral and religious works continued and modified nineteenth-century ideals. Piano accompaniments humorously quote well-known compositions and feature closing gestures that punctuate the narratives’ climactic “punch lines.” Ultimately, female composers feminized melodrama, creating genres to speak for and to women.

The collection’s introductory chapter situates the eight composers featured in this volume and their music in the twentieth-century environment of the female composer. The authors contrast the proliferation of compositional activity by contemporary women with the low representation of their music in creative and scholarly forums, arguing that a rich and varied repertoire remains to be discovered by scholars, performers, and listeners. Exploration of the links among the eight composers leads to consideration of the controversial question of whether there can be a distinctively female compositional voice. The chapter concludes with an invitation to scholars to contribute to a new phase of analytical discourse in which the compositions of women are regularly and proportionately included, and the label “woman composer” becomes obsolete.

Women’s clubs networks supported the careers of composer-performers Frieda Peycke (1884–1964) and Phyllis Fergus (1887–1964). Both women presented herself not as an elocutionist, but as a composer of a musical art form and publicized the spoken word genres in which she performed with a unique label: Fergus’s “story poems,” and Peycke’s “musically-illustrated readings.” Fergus appeared before women’s music clubs in Chicago, groups that had readers as members into the 1940s, and gradual assumed leadership positions. Peycke’s performances in private homes suggests an ongoing women’s salon culture that supported spoken word performance. Never released, Peycke’s recordings, as well as her published articles, were unable to create a lasting audience for her compositions, though she performed successfully in Los Angeles for fifty years.

This chapter focuses on Marga Richter's compositions during the 1970s, including orchestral, chamber music, and piano pieces. Richter's music in the 1970s is her response to the beauty she found in nature, as well as intimacy. She also became increasingly aware of the need to promote her own music. Her orchestral works drew the interest of prominent conductors such as Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Gregory Millar, Kenneth Schermerhorn, Harold Farberman, and Sheldon Morgenstern. The backdrop to these performances and more was the second-wave feminism that had swept the nation. This chapter first discusses Richter's relationship to the feminist movement of the period and how feminism contributed to the growth of support for women composers, and particularly to Richter's success. It then examines Richter's Landscapes series—Landscapes of the Mind I, Landscapes of the Mind II, and Landscapes of the Mind III—as well as her shorter works and piano works. It also analyzes Richter's thirteen-minute symphonic poem Blackberry Vines and Winter Fruit, which reflects a touch of American transcendentalism, and concludes with an assessment of her musical aesthetics.

This chapter looks into the life of Baroness Maria Bach (1896–1978), her promising professional future, and her lifelong struggle to attract renown and respect as a “serious” woman composer. Born into Austria's late-nineteenth-century privileged “aristocracy”—the affluent upper middle class—the Viennese composer and pianist prided herself on her intellectual and artistic heritage. Her birth in 1896 set her solidly within the imperial capital's golden age—that brilliant constellation of the arts known as Viennese modernism. From the last decade of the nineteenth century to World War I, fin-de-siècle Vienna was a cultural mecca unequaled anywhere else in central Europe.

This chapter explores Woolf’s relationships with two important French women composers: Germaine Tailleferre and Nadia Boulanger. The former is singled out by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own as emblematic of the professional bias facing women composers. Boulanger and Woolf met in 1936, at a lunch with Ethel Smyth and Winaretta Singer (Princesse Edmond de Polignac). As her correspondence confirms, Boulanger and Woolf stayed in touch for some years and Woolf repeatedly referred to Boulanger’s example when reflecting on the misogyny and obstacles facing contemporary women artists, whether composers, painters or writers. Consideration of Woolf’s relationships with these women is placed in the larger context of their reception in the French and British press, exploring the role that their gender played in the critical reception of their work and aesthetic innovations.

Women confirmed their own more highly cultured positions through recitation of African American dialect, particularly the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, or “child dialect,” sometimes with musical accompaniment. Many women incorporated Dunbar’s dialect poems into their repertoires, texts that also inspired settings for speaker and piano by women composers. However white women’s imitations of African American dialect perpetuated racial stereotypes such as that of the Mammy, even while their musical settings negated the text’s origins. Child dialect allowed child imitators to express comedic and rebellious sentiments without transgressing feminine social boundaries. The child-like persona cultivated by diseuse Kitty Cheatham facilitated her eclectic programming of children’s songs, nursery rhymes, and European art music alongside spirituals and African-American dialect texts.

This volume, the second to be published in a four-volume series, examines compositions by eight composers from the twelfth to nineteenth centuries. The introductory chapter outlines the organization of the volume and the goals of the project—to celebrate outstanding music composed by women by according it the same scholarly attention devoted to music by men; to create a critical mass of scholarship that will stimulate new analytical research and bring it into the mainstream of music theoretical discourse; and to bring to readers’ attention “new” repertoire that is rewarding to performer, listener, and scholar. Distinctions are noted between the composers, particularly in terms of the sociohistorical contexts in which they created their music. Questions of genre and scale are also discussed.

This chapter unpacks the socio-cultural world buried in Amy Woodforde-Finden’s ‘Kashmiri Song’ (1902), and its century-long cultural projections. The fervour it generated stemmed from delight in ‘Kashmiri romance’ dating back to Lalla Rookh, its erotic, interracial implications and their resonance with Richard Burton’s ‘Indo-Persian’ translations (Kama Sutra) and contemporary Anglo-Indian/women’s fiction, and, crucially, rumours surrounding its creation by a woman composer and a woman poet (the pseudonymous ‘Laurence Hope’), who each ‘knew’ India ‘intimately’. The singer’s ambiguous subject position (widely heard as autobiographical) is shown to allow for transgressive explorations of imperial fantasies (fuelled by its companion, ‘Less than the Dust’) at the Raj’s height and beyond. Ultimately, the changing resonance of ‘Kashmiri Song’, culminating in a postcolonial re-voicing by Agha Shahid Ali, opens up Indo-British history to its internal others (Muslims, exiles, women, lesbians), illuminating its significance for understanding the continuing reverberations of colonialism.

This chapter is a collaborative exploration of Nadia Boulanger’s work in collaborative composition. Newly released documents provide unprecedented insights into Boulanger’s musical and personal relationship with Raoul Pugno. Reading these against the music of their opera La ville morte illuminates both Boulanger’s creative aspirations and the personal and societal obstacles to achieving them. This chapter provides a new reading of the genesis and content of La ville morte and explores how gender discourses affected Boulanger’s development and output as a woman composer in early twentieth-century France.

This chapter describes the tribulations that marked the dissemination of an extraordinary work, La ville morte, from its genesis in 1910 through to its recent rebirth. Nadia Boulanger and Raoul Pugno composed the opera in partnership on a text by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who created the libretto based on his own play. The work is the fruit of an enthusiastic collaboration between three great artists, inspired by a powerful drama and drawing upon exceptional creative force. The promise of a premiere on the stage of the Paris Opéra-Comique in 1914 offered a brilliant future for La ville morte. But this was marred by dramatic circumstances: death, war, oblivion. The chapter also provides a census of sources for the work and their locations.

This chapter focuses on Harry T. Burleigh's mentoring of younger musicians, especially singers and composers. Among the singers Burleigh mentored are some of the most distinguished African American recital and musical theater performers of the early to mid-twentieth century. In 1934 a black newspaper commented that Burleigh “was always ready to show a helping hand by way of advice to some struggling artist” such as Abbie Mitchell. Burleigh's support and encouragement of younger musicians enabled their careers in very practical ways. He also collaborated with instrumentalists, and although his standards of excellence were high, he was generous in his support of musicians whose talent and professionalism he respected. Aside from Mitchell, Burleigh's early protégés include black singers Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, and Paul Robeson as well as women composers such as Undine Smith Moore, Florence Price, and Margaret Bonds.

This chapter presents an interview with composer, author, and vocalist Liu Sola, who has blended the musical traditions of China with jazz, blues, and improvisation. Since the 1980s, Liu Sola has scored many Chinese and international film sound tracks, as well as TV and drama productions. She has composed music for orchestra, ensemble, opera, modern theater, modern dance, and art exhibitions. This chapter presents an interview with composer, author, and vocalist Liu Sola, who has blended the musical traditions of China with jazz, blues, and improvisation. Since the 1980s, Liu Sola has scored many Chinese and international film sound tracks, as well as TV and drama productions. She has composed music for orchestra, ensemble, opera, modern theater, modern dance, and art exhibitions. Her range of musical styles includes classical music, jazz, early music, rock, traditional, and contemporary music. She is the founder of Liu Sola Music Studio, located in the Songzhuang art colony, a Beijing artist district. Liu Sola designed and built a music space for her ensemble to rehearse and record.