Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World by Denise von Glahn (review)

Abstract

Music and Skillful Listener: American Women Compose Natural World. By Denise von Glahn. (Music, Nature, Place.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. [xiii, 397 p. ISBN 9780253006622 (hardcover), $40; ISBN 9780253007933 (ebook), $37.99.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Denise von Glahn's Music and Skillful Listener: American Women Compose Natural World offers evocative descriptions of compositions influenced or inspired by nature by nine North American women. It is a very readable book that is appropriate for and will likely appeal to undergraduates and general readers with music-reading skills. Von Glahn avoids using term ecomusicology (the burgeoning subdiscipline on whose coattails her book rides) and most of critical and theoretical aspects of ecocriticism, instead defining her purpose as examining the many processes individual composers engage in when they reflect nature's presence in (p. 2). She is upfront about limitations of her single, homogenous demographic of educated, white, middle-class women, which helps situate this book among other recent publications that engage with intersections of music and environment (p. 2). Although she writes in her introduction that she wanted to study [her] topic in depth, von Glahn more often provides brief and tantalizing glimpses of more in-depth studies possible for many of works she describes; I hope that her book serves as a springboard for scholars to create truly comprehensive analyses of many of pieces she includes (p. 3). Von Glahn devotes a chapter each to Amy Marcy Beach, Marion Bauer, Louise Talma, Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, Ellen Taafe Zwilich, Victoria Bond, Libby Larsen, and Emily Doolittle, exploring (greatly varying) extent to which their compositions owe a debt to composers' involvement with or response to nature. She divides into groups of threes; those who saw Nature as a Summer Home (Part 1); those who found Nature All Around Us (Part 2); and those who are working in a world Beyond EPA and Earth Day (Part 3). Von Glahn briefly provides some contextual background on writing about nature and visual art focused on nature by North American women, citing rapturous accounts by Transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller and paintings of Elizabeth Gilbert Jarrow. Von Glahn touches lightly on recent feminist ecocriticism such as that by Lorraine Anderson and asks several framing questions about nature of women 'nature composers,' their values, and reach of their works, before taking up topic of three composers who created musical works referring to nature while in residence at MacDowell Colony: Beach, Bauer, and Talma (p. 22). This first section and its search for historical roots among composers addressing nature is, however, weakest part of book. Von Glahn notes countless women's compositions that address nature prior to twentieth century, but does not sufficiently explain highly gendered conventions during this time that sanctioned such topics as appropriate for women. Nor does she address issue of privilege that both of that time and ours enjoy that assists them in their creative process. Her emphasis on MacDowell Colony as a singular place of inspiration to these composers is overstated: it was not only artists' colony her subjects attended, and von Glahn ignores fact that their reasons for attending had more to do with being able to escape mundane duties of everyday life in order to focus on their work than a desire to be close to nature. In addition, perhaps because of chronological distance from these composers, and because of vast amounts of archival material necessary to sift through in order to fully understand these composers' relationships with nature, these chapters lack accuracy and authority bestowed by still-living composers of later chapters. …