Field Of Music Research Articles

Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott (review)

Reviewed by: Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott Ned Quist Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott. By Michael Ann Williams. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. [xiv, 221 p. ISBN-10 0-252-03102-4; ISBN-13: 978-0-252-03102-1. $60.] Bibliographic references, index. Staging Tradition tells two stories of two very different and little-known figures in traditional American music. Both came from Kentucky, and neither were musicians [End Page 83] but they left a lasting legacy in the field of traditional American music. John Lair created Renfro Valley, and Sarah Gertrude Knott established the National Folk Festival. Respectively, they devoted their lives to these institutions, which survive today still promoting traditional American music, although using somewhat different approaches. John Lair began his music career in the army during World War I, where he became involved in the production staff of an army musical. But it was his work in Chicago for radio station WLS where Lair began his career as a talent scout and artist's manager, finding talent on his home turf in Rockcastle County, Kentucky. The most famous of these finds was probably Clyde "Red" Foley, but also included, Lily Mae Ledford, Myrtle Cooper (aka Lulu Belle), and Linda Parker. Lair began working with WLS part-time while continuing to work for a large insurance company. In 1935, WLS finally hired Lair as their music librarian, a position from which he was able publish several songbooks and carry out his own research on the origins of many traditional songs, although his ability to find talent and then frame it within the context of a radio show was clearly part of his job description. Lair's greatest legacy, though, was "Renfro Valley," initially only used by Lair as a semi-mythical scenario for the WLS radio shows "Mountain Memories," "Coon Creek Social," and the nationally broadcast "Pine Mountain Social." Lair left WLS in 1936 to freelance for radio station WLW in Cincinnati where he began the broadcasts of the "Renfro Valley Barn Dance" during a fortuitous time when WLW was, temporarily at least, the most powerful radio station in the country. It was during his time there that Lair began construction of his real Renfro Valley complex off U.S. Route 25, south of Berea, Kentucky. With the creation of Renfro Valley, including a barn, tourist lodge, restaurant, tourist cabins, and trading post, Lair moved his operations and substantial stable of performers to the new complex from which he began a series of broadcasts including the "Renfro Valley Barn Dance," "Monday Night in Renfro Valley," and the "Sunday Morning Gathering." By the early 1950s Lair's failure to capitalize on the market for recordings caused much of his talent to drift away. Although Lair had a brief fling with a television show sponsored by Pillsbury Foods in 1956, it lasted for only fourteen shows (a brief clip from one can be seen in the Anne Johnson film Lily Mae Ledford [Appalshop Films, 1988]). Further competition from Nashville's increasing hegemony over the country music field and Lair's failure to market his traditionalist approach to the urban folk revival caused further financial deterioration until Lair finally sold the complex including his music collection and radio station WRVK to Hal Smith in 1967. Lair, who lived next door to the complex, remained involved as its manager, finally arranging to repurchase the complex in the late 1970s. After Lair's death in 1985, his daughters ran Renfro Valley until they sold it in 1989. Like Lair, Sarah Gertrude Knott began in the world of the theater, although in her case, theater was part of her education at Chowan College where she worked with Frederick Koch (creator of the Carolina Playmakers) and the playwright, Paul Green. After moving to St. Louis in 1929 she continued her theatrical work by promoting amateur drama. Although it is not entirely clear how and why she moved from theater to festivals of traditional music and dance, she enlisted the aid of Green, folklorist/ novelist Zora Neale Hurston, and scholars George Pullen Jackson and Benjamin Botkin to put on the first National Folk Festival in...

The forgotten decade

This article revisits the popular music of the 1970s, reassessing its importance as a body of work and for the development of popular music in subsequent decades. The article begins by considering why much of the popular music of the 1970s has been virtually ignored by popular music theorists. Attention then focuses on several distinctive music genres of the 1970s—glam, hard rock and the emergent electronic music scene—and the connections between them and with punk (a music genre whose 1970s origins have been much more fully documented in academic work). Finally, it is argued that even rock, a staple of popular music scholarship during the 1970s and since, has been largely misrepresented—‘rock’ in the 1970s actually being an umbrella term for a highly experimental and eclectic musical field.

East Meets West in the Concert Hall: Asians and Classical Music in the Century of Imperialism, Post-Colonialism, and Multiculturalism

The classical music field is experiencing dramatic changes wrought by the social, political, and economic trends of the postmodern age. Even as critics in the West express doubt over the continuing vitality of classical music in the face of shrinking orchestra budgets, aging and dwindling audiences, and sinking record sales, Asians and Asian Americans have invaded the conservatory and the concert hall in numbers that are impossible to ignore.' In September 2002, two Asians, 28-year-old Xia Zhang from Beijing and 31-year-old Bundit Ungrangsee from Bangkok, shared the honor of winning the top prize in the inaugural contest of the Maazel/Vilar Conductors' Competition. The young Chinese pianist Lang Lang is the latest of a string of Asian child prodigy sensations-following violinists Midori and Sarah Chang-to grace the classical music stage. A recent New York Times article about the Chinese bass Hao Jiang Tian, then playing Timur in Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera, noted: classical music is conserved and revitalized by a new generation of Asian performers and composers (Lipsyte and Morris 2002). Yet even as the roster of prominent Asian musicians steadily grows, sociopolitical factors conspire to maintain universalist, i.e., Europeanist, discourses of classical music, thus rendering Asian participation in this cultural practice unnatural or less than salutary. Writers on other creative endeavors have been examining analogous intersections of Eastern and Western power and culture for some time now. In such influential texts as Orientalism and Culture and

Sonic Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification and the Aural Public Sphere in Latin America

This paper explores how practices of sonic recontextualization enacted by both folklorists and the music industry during the first half of the twentieth century have been crucial to the constitution of an aural modernity in Latin America. This is mediated simultaneously by the contradictory practices of epistemologies of purification—which seek to provincialize sounds in order to ascribe them a place in the modern ecumene and epistemologies of transculturation—which either enact or disrupt such practices of purification. Through this I wish to argue that the aural has been a sphere of crucial constitution of Latin America's highly unequal modernity, one that is significant not only in the contemporary sonic turn but that also played a role in defining the very idea of a Latin American lettered modernity. I also explore the relation of this to the construction of epistemologies of traditional and popular musics in Latin America and their role in the constitution of musical ‘knowledges otherwise’. I particularly explore the politics of knowledge of some of the early twentieth cenutry folklorists and their implications for thinking about the structure of knowledge in musical disciplinary fields in a globalized, postcolonial context at a moment in which the sonic is mediating crucial fields of experience and knowledge.

JANE F. FULCHER. The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France 1914-1940. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 473. $74.00

Although it seems to be the most apolitical of all arts, music has ever been an instrument of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic power.” The ideological function of music was especially emphasized in France during the Third Republic. In the wake of growing competition with Germany, music was nationalized and came to represent national culture and identity. This process reached its peak during World War I, when music was assigned the patriotic task of unifying the national community. The musical canon itself was at stake: French music was to be promoted and the German influence in France, especially that of Richard Wagner, to be combated. How did composers react to these ideological constraints? Far from retreating into an ivory tower, French composers responded by committing themselves as intellectuals. The material and symbolic benefits they could obtain by endorsing the public role the state assigned them were important: promotion of French composers in programs, public commands, financial support for institutions. As Jane F. Fulcher puts it, “the dominance now being exercised by the state was powerful precisely because, in the interests of ideological hegemony, it played upon deeply rooted professional concerns” (p. 34). But, as she demonstrates in this very thorough and comprehensive inquiry, the response was never direct. Using concepts such as ideology, cultural hegemony, and symbolic domination as well as Bourdieu's theory of cultural fields, she shows that the political constraints were refracted or mediated through the specific issues and stakes of the French musical field. This relational (anti-essentialist) approach allows her to analyze the ideological struggles between the right and the left for appropriating the most legitimate references of the canon such as Ludwig van Beethoven, described either as revolutionary or as religious, while excluding contemporary composers like Wagner, Arnold Schoenberg, or Darius Milhaud as representative of German romanticism as opposed to French classicism, modern as opposed to classical style, foreign (Jewish) as opposed to French.

The musical field

This article examines musical taste, as revealed by the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion survey. It shows that musical taste is highly divided and contentious, with large numbers of people intensely disliking certain genres of music. It shows the existence of two distinctive musical taste communities, one linking taste for rock, electronic, urban, world and heavy metal music, and the other linking classical music and jazz. Tastes for specific musical works do not easily map onto musical genres, and are less closely correlated with each other. Using logistic regression, it is shown that age and ethnicity in particular, and gender, educational qualifications and occupational class, strongly condition taste for both musical genres and works.

Borderland Pop: Arab Jewish Musicians and the Politics of Performance

This article deals with the emergence of a popular musical field as an Arab Jewish borderland on the margins of the Middle East conflict. This borderland has crystallized as a site of empowerment for some Arab Jews, mostly Yemenites, and has simultaneously encompassed multiple ethnic conflicts. The conflicts have emerged between the borderland itself and the dominant Israeli musical style and concurrently through the inner struggles between different Arab Jewish styles competing for cultural supremacy. This study demonstrates the paradoxical nature of the Arab Jewish musical borderland, in which frequent crossings of musical borders not only fail to breach national boundaries but also serve to sustain them.

Organizational design for institutional change: the case of MPB festivals, 1960 to 1968

A central concern in neo-institutional research is the genesis of new organizational fields. This article explores the emergence of the MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) field in tandem with the organization of music festivals in the sixties. The festivals were instrumental in combining musicians, critics and the audience in a forum relatively buffered from the music industry influence. This interaction supported the introduction and diffusion of new influences in the popular music field, and at the same time, it consecrated the category MPB as a high-brow art form. The festivals' design provoked two unintended consequences: the conflict between musicians and the audience, and between musicians and the jury. While several musicians strived to conquer autonomy for their creative activity, the audience claimed its supremacy. As a result, musicians exerted pressure on the jury to buffer the aesthetical criteria from the audience. It concludes with a critical appraisal of the role of festivals in the evolution of the MPB field.

Gabriel Yared's The English Patient : A Film Score Guide, and: Elmer Bernstein's Film Music Notebook: A Complete Collection of the Quarterly Journal, 1974-1978 (review)

Gabriel Yared's The English Patient: A Film Score Guide. By Heather Laing. (Scarecrow Film Score Guides, no. 1.) Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2004. [xix, 195 p. ISBN 0-8108-4965-8. $34.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index. Elmer Bernstein's Film Music Notebook: A Complete Collection of the Quarterly Journal, 1974-1978. Sherman Oaks, CA: The Film Music Society, 2004. [xi, 579 p. ISBN 1-892050-01-3. $40.00.] Index. How good it is to see these two volumes, a positive sign of the state of film music studies. With the Laing volume, Scarecrow Press has taken up where Greenwood Press left off-by continuing this important series on film music monographs, still under the leadership of Kate Daubney. In her admirable series preface, she elucidates the wide-angle vision of the series, to draw together a variety of different analytical practices and ideological approaches in film musicology for the study of individual scores (p. xiii). The English Patient (1996), winner of 9 Academy Awards, is a worthy candidate for study. Its recent vintage allowed author Heather Laing to consult with Gabriel Yared, the film's composer, in order to view the score, and obtain intimate knowledge of his musical credo and working methods. Her resulting examination provides an example of contemporary practices in film scoring. Additionally, given the composer's nationality (Lebanese), training and place of dwelling (Paris), we are afforded an opportunity to view the working methods of someone who is not a product of American training and whose livelihood has been chiefly outside the Hollywood environment. Laing attempts a dual track for approaching the work at hand, first dealing with preliminary musical issues, followed by a discussion of the film's narrative, and concluding with a synthesis of the two as embodied in the film's score. The first chapter provides a brief biography of Yared, emphasizing his musical and philosophical beliefs. These beliefs provide explanations for some of his career choices. Born in Beirut in 1949 and having received his early musical education there, Yared arrived in Paris at age 20 and studied with Maurice Ghana and Henri Dutilleux. Though the latter urged him to learn traditional music theory and composition, Yared chose instead to become involved in the more lucrative popular music field, eventually becoming a record producer. After almost ten years in the pop music field, he received his first film assignment in 1980 (for Jean Luc Godard's Sauve qui peut [la vie]), and has been working in the field ever since. Laing goes on to discuss Yared's film scoring technique in the following chapter, citing films such as Jean-Jacques Beineix's 37.2 Ie matin (1986; known as Betty Blue in the U.S.), as well as his IP5, l'ile aux pachydermes (1992), and Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). For the third chapter, Laing leaves off musical discussion to focus on the narrative structure of The English Patient, often referring to the issues that faced Michael Ondaatje in transforming his novel into a screenplay. While the novel chose to interweave several narrative threads by avoiding emphasis on particular characters, director Anthony Minghella (in conjunction with Ondaatje), chose to elevate the romance between Count Laszlo de Almasy and the married Katherine Clifton, making it serve as the film's principal story. With subplots involving other who occasionally view events differently from the protagonists, as well as continuous narratives running in at least two different time periods, the movie presents its audience with an extremely complex mise-en-scene that offers many, often contradictory angles on its central story and several different interpretations of the actions and reactions of its characters (p. 57). Laing deftly summarizes the bibliography of the film, and incorporates her own nuanced view of the intricately constructed narrative structure. (I was fascinated by her description of unusual plot anomalies, a result of vestigial situations from the novel that had not been entirely expurgated in the screenplay. …

Anne Grimes (1912-2004)

Anne Grimes, Ohio folk singer and scholar, died of natural causes at age ninety-one on January 14, 2004, at her Kendal residence in Oberlin, Ohio. Formerly of Columbus and Granville, Ohio, Grimes was a classically trained vocalist and an accomplished pianist. In the early 1950s, Grimes began to travel from her home in Upper Arlington throughout Ohio to collect hundreds of traditional songs, which she tape-recorded, researched, and sang in performance. She also became an expert in the lore and techniques of the plucked, lap or Appalachian dulcimer; the Anne Grimes Dulcimer Collection of these rare folk instruments at the Smithsonian Institution ranks among the nation's finest. In 1997, Grimes and her long-time friend Joe Hickerson, folklorist at the American Folklife Center, performed traditional songs in a presentation of her dulcimer collection at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Her 1957 Folkways recording of "Ohio State Ballads: History through Folk Songs: Anne Grimes, with Dulcimer" was reissued in 1991 on tape cassette by the Smithsonian. "Everybody thinks you find folk music in the hills; you don't_._._._it's in people's heads," Grimes told a reporter for the Columbus Citizen-Journal in 1971 before performing at Governor John Gilligan's inaugural gala at the Ohio Theater in Columbus. "In the folk music field, the technical term is 'informants'; I prefer to think of the people as contributors." The songs of her contributors—people from all walks of life, including Carl Sandburg, the poet—are preserved in her audiotape collection housed in the Ohio Historical Society and the Library of Congress. At the time of her death, Grimes was working on a book honoring both the songs and the people who sang them, many of whom became her close friends. Born May 17, 1912, in Columbus, Grimes attended North High School, graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University with both bachelor of arts and bachelor of music degrees, and did graduate work in music history at Ohio State University. From 1942 to 1946, she worked as the music and dance critic of the Columbus Citizen. She served as a judge from 1961 to 1993 at the national competition Dulcimer Days, in Roscoe, Ohio. Grimes served as president and editor of the Ohio Folklore Society, was a member of the advisory board of the National Folk Festival, and was an archivist of the National Federation of Music Clubs. Her awards included a Distinguished Career in Music Award presented in 1993 at the Ohio State University School of Music honors convocation; and the Alumni Awards Distinguished Achievement Citation in 1994 from Ohio Wesleyan University. She held honorary life memberships in the Ohio Historical Society; Delta Kappa Gamma, the educational honorary; and the Ohio Folklore Society. Her husband, James W. Grimes, chair of the art department at Denison University until his retirement in 1969, died in 1981. Anne Grimes is survived by five children: Stephen Grimes, Sara Grimes, Jennifer Grimes Kay, Mary Grimes, and Mindy Grimes; a grandson, Sean Kay; and three great-grandchildren, Cria Anne, Siobhan Mattie, and Alana Rose.

Human Supervision and Control in Engineering and Music: Similarities, Dissimilarities, and Their Implications

The human supervisory control model has been used successfully for decades and in numerous contexts to describe human interaction with complex technical systems. Recently, it has been argued that supervisory control modeling can also be applied in a musical context, to describe the interaction between a conductor and an orchestra. This paper reviews a range of applications of supervisory control modeling. Further, the authors attempt to identify similarities and dissimilarities between its use in technical and musical settings. The aim is to identify valuable knowledge and experience from the musical field. Such experience could be used to enrich the design of interaction between humans and complex technical systems. The key to successful knowledge transfer is the general applicability of human supervisory control modeling.

The activities of Lithuanian church organists in the USA in liturgical music fields

The activities of Lithuanian church organists in the USA in liturgical music fields

Social Canons Inherited from the Past: Women Players of Folk Music Instruments in Croatia

As documented in mainstream ethnographic texts and fieldwork records, and evidenced at folklore festivals, women in Croatia do not play folk music instruments. If someone mentions some exception, it is usually explained as the very latest practice, as an example of transformation of tradition into the contemporary. Therefore, this paper will describe a number of exceptions from the past, covering a range of historical periods, social contexts of music-making, music fields and genres, and types of instruments played by women. The reasons for woman players being either confirmed or kept silent by a particular discourse will be analyzed, as well as broader social footholds which supported (and/or restricted) their presence in public practice. They have appeared as a family member, a Croatian Woman, an emancipated woman, a custodian (savior and reviver) of local tradition, a member of "the fairer gender", a jocular replacement, a shameless female, and as a mannish woman.

An Approach to 3D Spacial Music Score

In this paper, we propose a spacial music score. Although many number of studies have been made on multimedia technology in the musical field over the past few decades, there is little attention to notation. The purpose of this paper is to construct more flexible and easily understandable visual music score for the music which is needed to be complicatedly controlled. The prototype system is developed for evalution, and it is confirmed that the user can make music easily by using the system.

A invenção do Brasil como terra do samba: os sambistas e sua afirmação social

Como numa corrida de obstáculos, o samba percorreu caminhos acidentados até ser reconhecido pelas instâncias de legitimação do Estado como símbolo nacional. Nesse processo os compositores e intérpretes do samba urbano carioca jogarão um papel decisivo. Este artigo busca aclarar alguns aspectos pouco estudados das marchas e contramarchas que assinalaram a história do samba e sua passagem da condição de artefato cultural marginal à de portador da singularidade brasileira no campo musical.

In and Along the Mississippi

In O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Mystery Train the Coen brothers and Jim Jarmusch choose the state of Mississippi and the city of Memphis, Tennessee as the settings of their heroes' peregrinations. Music permeates Joel Coen's and Jim Jarmusch's cinematic spaces, so much that it influences their narrative and stylistic perspectives and structures their works. The aim of this paper is to examine how the Coen brothers' and Jarmusch's choice of the musical field as a territory for their reconstructions of the South enables them to collate distinct artistic domains and genres in their representations of border incidents between stories, legends and history.

Perspectives of Musical Talent: A study of identification criteria and procedures

As the concept of intelligence and talent broadens to include the arts, there is a growing need for the development of effective procedures to identify students who show potential as well as demonstrated musical talent. This interview study gathered perspectives of musical talent and strategies for its recognition from specialists across gifted and music fields. The study's purpose was to synthesize findings from earlier analysis and quantitative findings with interviews to develop an identification framework of recommended criteria and procedures to guide musical talent identification in a variety of educational settings. In all 16 individuals (eight men and seven women), purposefully sampled, participated. Data were analyzed in accordance with the Constant Comparative Method (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Results of the study yielded basic talent criteria under categories of perceptual awareness and discrimination, creative interpretation, and commitment. Resulting identification procedures propose to expand identification beyond performance, seek nominations outside of school, and specify observation techniques for performance assessment. The study also raises questions concerning creativity, creative interpretation, and musical talent identification for future research consideration.

Defocalizing the organization: Richard A. Peterson's sociology of organizations

Peterson has made two important contributions to the sociology of organizations. First, through his work on the ‘production of culture’ model and on the fabrication of authenticity, Peterson has pioneered strategies for studying industries. Through his production of culture approach, Peterson brought the sociology of organizations into the study of culture. Peterson's analysis of the formation of the country music field is a significant addition to neo-institutional theory. Second, Peterson has focused on the levels of the industry or field and that of the individual agent in his research while defocalizing the level of the organization, a trend that is currently evident in neo-institutional approaches to the study of organizations. In this paper, I argue that these two features of Peterson's work both reflect and shape contemporary organizational sociology.

The Performing Arts in Colonial American Newspapers, 1690-1783. Text Data Base and Index

Performing Arts in Colonial American Newspapers, 1690-1783: Text Database and Index. By Mary Jane Corry, Kate Van Winkle Keller, and Robert M. Keller. New York: University Music Editions, 1997. UMEl0ICD. $99. CD-ROM for Windows or DOS. Requires 18 MB hard-disk space, VGA monitor. Writing in December 1953 issue of Notes about Oscar Sonneck, the young American musical Columbus who determined upon returning to United States after twenty-five years in Europe to lay foundation for correct and adequate historical presentation of music in early America by an exhaustive investigation of primary sources, Otto Kinkeldey pointed out that the American pioneer in this musical field had a decidedly harder task than his European forerunners (Notes 11 [1953]: 26). Municipal and church records, when locatable, were terse on matters musical; biographies of musicians were few; music journals, for colonial period, were nonexistent. Indeed, Sonneck found only one that covered any appreciable period of time--the ordinary weekly and later daily newspapers. Kinkeldey continued: These, in their advertising columns or among their news items, would occasionally--very occasionally--print... a brief reference to something musical--the notice of a concert or theatrical p erformance with music, a music teacher's announcement of a school, a music dealer or publisher advertising his wares. The harvesting of these scattered grains was no inconsiderable task, and Sonneck spent two years combing through all available American newspapers published to 1800 (ibid., 27). But results of that harvest were rich, and are still consulted today: A Bibliography of Early Secular American Music (1905), Early Concert-Life in America (1907), and Early Opera in America (1915). Returning many decades later to same regular source that Sonneck consulted--early American newspapers--a small army of dedicated researchers emerges not with a scholarly monograph such as Sonneck's but with a stunningly vast array of primary-source material that surely will serve as basis for many monographs to come. item under review is remarkable product of an equally remarkable project. Over a period of five years, Mary Jane Corry (project director), Kate Van Winkle Keller (director of technology), Robert M. Keller (computer consultant), and fourteen other people--Linda Bierling, Susan Cifaldi, John Cuthbert, David Hildebrand, Barbara Lambert, Rosamond McGuinness, Sharon McKinley, Geoffrey Miller, Zaide Pixley, Susan Pregger, Arthur F. Schrader, Marilyn Smiley, John Wagner, and Edythe Walmer--read every issue they could locate of every newspaper published in colonial America (50,719 issues and 4,523 supplements of 162 newspaper titles), searching for references to music, dance, and theat er. They found 54,411 reports, advertisements, stories, ... announcements ...; allusions, metaphors, song lyrics, and other representations of performing (I quote from a flyer for CD-ROM), which they copied with painstaking care. These transcriptions were then keyed into a database and exhaustively indexed, producing a general index file of 235,676 records and a first-line index of every poem and lyric collected, containing 12,061 records. Thanks to marvels of electronic technology, all of this information, and more, is available on a single CD-ROM, and it is a wondrous tool, absolutely indispensable for anyone doing any serious research in performing arts of America's colonial period. Here is an example of what one can find in this labyrinth of research possibilities. It has long been known that fiddle was a special instrument of black male slaves in early America. This CD-ROM makes clear extent of these slaves' involvement with instrument. A search of database for negro or mulatto near fiddle or fiddler or violin (near, in this case, means within twenty words' distance of any of transcribed items; this default setting can be changed to anywhere between ten and thirty words' distance) brings up names of hundreds of slaves--almost all of them runaways identified as fiddlers--as they appear in advertisements placed by their owners. …

Women Performing Music: Staging a Social Protest

Women's musical contributions have, throughout history, consistently been either downplayed or forgotten. The widespread cultural conviction that a woman's musical sensibility is inherently immoral became particularly problematic in late eighteenth-century France. The role ofmusic in Isabelle de Charrière's Caliste and Germaine de Staël's Corinne has been similarly downplayed. I foreground the textual evidence that these authors were aware that music, of all the arts, posed a particular problem for women. By creating the first musical and moral heroines in French literature, Charrière and Staël forge a positive role model for women who seek to enter musical fields. By downplaying the heroines' musical talents, we significantly detract from the efficacy of the authors' social critique.