New Historical Anthology of Music by Women, ed. James R. Briscoe. Plus Companion CDs. (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2004, $39.95. ISBN 0-253-21683-4, CDs: 0-253-34406-9.)

Abstract

Anything presented as a ‘new’ version of an existing publication invites comparison with the previous iteration, and a consideration of exactly how new it is. The New Historical Anthology of Music by Women and its companion compact discs appear seventeen years after the original collection, and arrive in a very different musicological landscape. Both Susan McClary, in her Foreword to the new edition, and the editor, James R. Briscoe, in his Preface, frame the volume in terms of the distance travelled in the intervening years, and throughout the volume one can see traces of these changes both in the wider research context and the musical world in which the original version was conceived. The new volume, like the old, consists of a chronologically ordered collection of pieces by women, each preceded by a short introduction that recounts the composer’s biography and discusses the pieces presented. The companion CDs include performances of all except one item in the anthology, although where multiple movements are presented in the anthology, the recordings often offer only a single movement. The introductions to each item are written by a range of contributors, from Ph.D. candidates to established scholars, and offer short bibliographies (and occasionally also discographies) for further study.