Women Musicians Research Articles

Reflections on Women in Music

Four substantial volumes dedicated to women in music, all published within the past couple of years, give welcome indication of the continuing growth of this area of study.1 Following some general background, I first survey the books, then consider each individually. That I select chapters to discuss in detail does not mean that others would not deserve comparable attention. I can give only a glimpse of the riches these books contain.

Off the Beats and Track: Finding Historical Lesbian and Queer Women’s Feminist Spaces through Musicians’ Tour Schedules, Concert Flyers, and Correspondence

This article explores historical research methods used to locate lesbians and queer women, especially within American and Canadian contexts from the 1960s onward. It begins by discussing methods such as analyzing women’s and lesbian travel guides, directories, maps, periodicals, newsletters, newspapers, websites, oral histories, social media, archival fonds and collections. In particular, this article explores how utilizing lesbian and queer women musicians’ tour schedules, calendars, correspondence, and contracts for shows and appearances can be a valuable historical research method, especially for locating impermanent historical lesbian and queer women’s spaces off the beaten track. The article focuses on the Alix Dobkin Papers as a case study to explore aspects of historical lesbian and queer women’s spaces and demonstrate the utility of this historical research method beyond Dobkin. The papers of Alix Dobkin include business correspondence, fan mail, fliers and programs from concerts, subject files, t-shirts, photographs, and memorabilia. As Dobkin played an important role in the women’s music movement and toured regularly, her papers provide useful insight into historical debates about lesbian anti-racist politics, ethical consumption, community organizing, and transgender inclusion and exclusion.

Delphine von Schauroth, Corinna-Sister

Despite her current marginal position, the nineteenth-century pianist and composer Delphine von Schauroth (1813–1887) once ranked among the most prominent virtuosos of the nineteenth century and had connections with Fanny Hensel, Ferdinand Hiller, Josephine Lang, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and others. Drawing on large body of music criticism, as well as compositions, letters, images and literary works, this article presents a portrait of Schauroth as an artist, with an emphasis on the role of improvisation and the improvisatory in her pianism. In particular, the article fleshes out Robert Schumann's characterization of Schauroth as a ‘Corinna-sister’, a reference to the improvising poetess of Madame de Stäel's novel Corinne, or Italy. The article suggests that Schumann's comparison highlights key facets of Schauroth's status and character as a pianist and composer. Firstly, like Corinne, Schauroth was widely renowned as an eminent performer and was celebrated as a genius by critics, which was particularly notable for a woman musician in the early nineteenth century. Secondly, Schauroth was received as a creator, not only for her compositions, but also for her performances: in the late 1820s and early 1830s, in particular, critics responded to these performances with images of magical creation and an emphasis on the newness of her performance over the composer's work. Thirdly, Schauroth displayed a varied practice of improvisation, and her compositions were understood as having an improvisatory character.

“No longer alone”: The Union des femmes artistes musiciennes (UFAM), a laboratory for new forms of professional socialisation for women musicians in the early 20th century?

“No longer alone”: The Union des femmes artistes musiciennes (UFAM), a laboratory for new forms of professional socialisation for women musicians in the early 20th century?

Babe Egan and the Hollywood Redheads: Women Musicians in the Jazz Age by Jeannie Gayle Pool (review)

Babe Egan and the Hollywood Redheads: Women Musicians in the Jazz Age by Jeannie Gayle Pool (review)

“I Am Not a Church Person!” Gendered Cultural Politics in the Portrayal of Fungisai Zvakavapano-Mashavave on Social Media in Zimbabwe

Women musicians in Zimbabwe continue to be subjugated because there are residual patriarchal attitudes driven by religion and cultural norms and values. This article discusses the nexus between culture, religion, and patriarchy as gauged by the portrayal of women musicians. The study looks at how Fungisai Zvakavapano-Mashavave was bullied on social media after collaborating with a Zimdancehall artist in the song “Vanondibatirana.” The study aims to ensure gender parity in a context where women are still being objectified despite Zimbabwe being a signatory to United Nations gender equity statutes. The African feminist concept of equality between females and males provides the theoretical framework for this qualitative study. The song’s message is explored using textual analysis. The findings show that traditional views on women’s roles continue to hinder women artists’ identity and self-esteem. Objectification of women is noted as a result of the way colonialism, religion, and culture influence some members of society to judge women musicians. The findings also show that women are denigrated and relegated to the subaltern, and recommendations advocate that women musicians reclaim equality alongside men in the musical performing arts.

Playing That Crystal Flute: Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives

Playing That Crystal Flute:Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives Kristin Moriah (bio) Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. By Daphne Brooks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 608 pages. $39.95 (hardcover). Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll. By Maureen Mahon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 408 pages. $29.95 (paperback). Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive. By Mark Anthony Neal. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 232 pages. $27.00 (paperback). Black women and Black musicians have a contentious relationship with archival practices and popular memory. Take Lizzo, for example, and the moment she played James Madison's previously untouched two-hundred-year-old flute at a concert in Washington, DC, in fall 2022. In that instance, she was, as the kids say, her ancestors' wildest dreams. She certainly seemed to be creating a full circle, reaching toward the eighteenth century and grasping hold of a powerful symbol of the Enlightenment cherished by a founding father whose most notorious achievements would be used to disenfranchise women like Lizzo for generations. Common wisdom tells us that she was not meant to touch it. The crystal flute's very status within the Library of Congress calls attention to its symbolic power and its distance from Black women's marginalized position in society. Can you be Lizzo, a Black musician, and play the flute? More specifically, can you be Lizzo and play that flute? In their recent books, Daphne Brooks, Maureen Mahon, and Mark Anthony Neal reckon with such questions raised by Black musicians and musical archives at a time when Black music and its influence on popular culture is both ubiquitous and contentious. They write from a cultural context in which the roots, nuances, and implications of Black musical life have often been obscured and whose continued existence, in the [End Page 395] case of Black musical archives, is often tenuous. Their scholarship represents a deep engagement with a diverse set of sonic archives and innovators. The need to theorize work so foundational to American popular culture, to mine sounds always seemingly present and in motion, arises from a sense of urgency spurred by the fascination with and furor over Black popular musicians. In Liner Notes for the Revolution, Daphne Brooks argues that "Black women of sound" have "a history unfolding on other frequencies while the world adores them and simultaneously devalues them" (1). Brooks takes "seriously the centrality of sound in Black women's lives as a foundation for developing and sustaining pivotal, profoundly meaningful world-making sociocultural networks and forms of intimacy with one another" (12). In doing so, she recalls the work of scholars like Jayna Brown when she argues that "what these Black women musicians offer, in short, is another way of hearing, reading, theorizing, making the modern. Black women of sound sign and sing themselves through their listening such that they reframe archaic philosophies of the 'Self' born out of high Enlightenment—thought that never had them in mind" (17). In Brooks's work, readers will also find echoes of Paul Gilroy, Sylvia Wynter, and Alexander Weheliye and their interrogations of Western Humanism and modernity. What is more, while rigorously engaging with critical theory from a range of fields, Liner Notes is structured like a vinyl record. Thus the text speaks to the influence of material culture on Black sound studies. Black media form part of the message. Side A of Liner Notes is "a meditation on the importance of intellectual labour and Black women's sonic cultures" (45). Side B is "an exploration of elusive Black women musicians and the critics and artists who have focused their attention on their legacies in a variety of ways" (45). Side B takes inspiration from the experimental nature of B sides and moves more fully into "the speculative terrain of revolutionary possibility" (45). Taken together, each side is a reminder that listening is a central critical practice. Liner Notes is a manifesto that offers a blueprint for the work that Black feminism can accomplish in the field of sound studies. While Brooks is interested in how theory and cultural criticism can...

The queens of loud machines: Knitting and making music in West Berlin in the 1970s–1980s

“Those old eco-feminists knitted. But we were using a machine! That was a big difference indeed” (2020, personal interview with the author). That statement was made by musician and knitwear designer Gudrun Gut of the punk girl band Mania D./Malaria! and it cuts out what this article is about: Women knitting and making music on their machines in the subculture of West Berlin in the late 1970s and early 1980s. New and easily accessible technology, such as the Atari console, enabled new Do-It-Yourself strategies. At the same time—within fashion and knitting in particular—there was a shift in feminist generations: Loud, technical, noisy music, and machine-made knitwear signified aggressive, modern, and self-assured women. In West Berlin specifically, punk women musicians and designers looked back in time, and sought to reconnect with the hedonistic avant-garde and the “new women,” the divas, dadaists, and women modernists of Berlin in the 1910s–1930s.

TRANSCENDING THE SONIC AND THE TEXTUAL

Among Muslim women in predominantly Islamic societies, music-making remains a contested subject. At the core of these contestations are questions of boundaries, agency, taboos, resistance, and generalisations of the socio-musical experiences of Muslim women. This article explores the development of senwele music, a socio-religious music form of the Ilorin in northern Nigeria, from its origin as orin-kengbe (calabash music) to its transition into a translocal music form. Given influences of the Yoruba, Hausa-Fulani, and Islam, senwele music is examined as a compendium of history; one that is not only reflective of the Ilorin traditional music scene, but also the north-south dualism in Ilorin, tensions in music-making and Islam, and regio-political remapping in Nigeria. Based on fieldwork with a major exponent of senwele, Alhaja Iya Aladuke, and her music group in Ilorin, the article explores the practice, ambivalences, convivialities and sustainability of senwele music performance within its predominantly Islamic context. I argue that while established societal conventions, such as those in Ilorin, function as a standard for the acceptance of music, a woman musician such as Alhaja Iya Aladuke continues to thrive through a musician-community exchange that takes into cognisance the sensibilities of the people while retaining their patronage and her artistic autonomy. Beyond its sonic, textual, and entertainment prerogatives, the sustained practice of senwele music in Ilorin presents a continuum for interrogating and negotiating cross-cultural encounters, socio-religious binaries, gender boundaries, and the multiplicity in the socio-musical experiences of Muslim women.

Nocoastjazz

Nocoastjazz

Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South by Candace Bailey

Reviewed by: Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South by Candace Bailey Julia Nitz Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century South. By Candace Bailey. Music in American Life. (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. xx, 292. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 978-0-252-08574-1; cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04375-8.) This volume is admirable in its ambition to capture the role southern amateur women played in American musical history, or, as the author puts it, to tell the "history of women in the nineteenth-century U.S. South . . . through the medium of music" (p. 4). Candace Bailey critiques past studies that considered women's musical artifacts and practices "ephemera," a misplaced notion shared by musicologists and cultural historians alike, and she strives to overcome traditional, male-centric narratives "that prejudice composer and title over circulation and performance" (p. 2). Bailey's book "encompasses music's transmission, education, circulation, and repertory in order to understand music's meaning in women's culture of the South" (p. 3). Thus, she recharts southern musical traditions, putting special emphasis on the role of "scientific music" in women's cultural engagement across class and racial boundaries (p. 15). Key to Bailey's study is the location of "women's musical practices in the performance of gentility" (p. 5). She convincingly illustrates how musical practices during this era were intricately tied to social hierarchies and distinctions, showing how different strata of society used music as cultural capital. Tracing these developments from the antebellum period to Reconstruction, she explores the effect of the dissolution of the South's social hierarchy on music making. [End Page 761] The material consulted in this study is extensive, with a focus on music read from notation in over fifteen hundred binder's volumes. Bailey also examines "numerous nineteenth-century magazines and journals, newspapers, letters and diaries, official records, and many similar documents" (p. 2). She uses these materials to assemble ethnographic readings and microhistories that collectively reveal the kaleidoscopic, multifaceted southern music-scape of the mid-nineteenth century. Bailey proceeds chronologically in five sections: Parts 1, 2, and 3 cover the antebellum period, Part 4 explores the Civil War, and Part 5 turns to Reconstruction. Each part is divided into several chapters, and each chapter offers a distinct study. Parts 1, 2, and 3 provide an in-depth exploration of the plethora of antebellum musical performers. It illustrates the ubiquity of music in society and highlights how economic growth in the 1840s and 1850s opened new avenues to gentility for the middle and poorer classes. This broadening of the sphere of gentility is evidenced by a more widespread "literate music practice" than hitherto assumed (p. 15). Part 2 focuses on prominent genres of the period and the accompanying repertory used to signify gentility, including a chapter on operatic tunes. While Parts 1 and 2 mostly provide nuance to existing studies of antebellum women's music, Part 3 reframes repertory history. It deals with the role of a genre known as scientific music in women's musical education and practice. Bailey argues that its pervasiveness was an important marker of social status. Part 4, dealing with the Civil War years, focuses on social changes and how they triggered both retroactive and progressive musical practices. In these chapters especially, Bailey shows the importance of adding music to a reading of the parlor as a space for the construction of gender, class, and ethnicity. Part 5, on women musicians in the Reconstruction era, identifies the rise of women as professional performers and the changes in repertory toward classical music. Bailey convincingly illustrates how women musicians "redefined women's sphere and influence after the war by linking domestic competence and control with a public persona" (pp. 171–72). Bailey reconfigures traditional assumptions about the musical contributions of southern women by exploring the interrelation between music making and gentility in the U.S. South. Her approach is more inclusive than seen in previous studies, charting the musical practices of white women and women of color of all social classes. The representation of Black women in her study remains sketchy by necessity. As...

How Female DJs and Producers Narrowed the Gender Gap in Electronic Dance Music: Strategies and Campaign that have been Successful in the Last Decade

A voice is missing from the electronic dance music (EDM) industry: whether in prominent festival line-ups like Tomorrowland and the Ultra Music Festival, or press that features achievements of top music stars, women are underrepresented. Indeed, the EDM industry has long been male-dominated and permeated with gender imbalance. Only until the last decade did the gender gap begin to close: since 2012, investigations examining gender ratio and female artist participation at music festivals have reported an ascending trend of female producers/DJs. Through analyses of past interviews with women musicians and other sources of documentation that shed light on their experiences, this research investigates the possible factors that contributed to the gender imbalance in the EDM industry, as well as the strategies that female producers/DJs developed to work against the gender disadvantages. Hopefully, through exploring the ways that women worked to overcome gender barriers, this research casts light on real solutions that address gender discrimination and sexism in the EDM industry, and thereby help to make other industries that have pronounced gender gap more diverse.

Women musicians from the Middle Ages to the present: The transformation of the image

The article characterizes the problem of transformation of the image of a woman in musical art from the Middle Ages to the present. The work uses both general scientific methods of research: analysis and synthesis, as well as historical methods. As a result, we consider the formation of women in musical art in the Middle Ages, the problems of salon music-making of the XVII-XVIII centuries, and the problem of transformation of the role of women in musical art at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries is characterized. As a result, it is noted that the music of the Middle Ages was defined by a cappella singing and unanimity. The most famous composer of that time was Hildegard of Bingen, who is considered the probable founder of opera. Women-troubadours - medieval poetesses, songwriters, and their performers - held a place of honor in the music of the time. The basic motifs of their songs were different: some sang the consolation of love, while others sang the suffering of one-sided love. Despite this, until the XX century, the attitude towards women musicians was biased, and the image of music was often used in literature to refer to the “new” woman, i.e., feminist.

Asian American Female Composers and Digital Memory

Asian American Female Composers and Digital Memory

Review: Why Marianne Faithfull Matters, by Tanya Pearson

Review: <i>Why Marianne Faithfull Matters</i>, by Tanya Pearson

Women in New Caledonia: music and identity

Located in the South Pacific, New Caledonia is one of Australia’s closest Francophone neighbours. New Caledonia has a rich and lively culture, including traditional and contemporary visual arts, music and performance. Being relatively isolated, however, artists on this French island are often faced with unique challenges to achieve significant exposure beyond their home base. This article explores the experiences of four contemporary women musicians in New Caledonia. In particular, it reviews some of the unique opportunities and challenges in making a living out of the music industry while remaining in Melanesia. To date, there is minimal literature which specifically deals with the experiences of women musicians in the Pacific islands. This study addresses a significant gap by offering an introduction to the lives of female musicians in New Caledonia.

Beyond Literature: Toni Morrison’s Musical and Visual Legacy For Black Women Artists

The aim of this article is to analyze Toni Morrison’s understudied influence on music and visual art. In 1994 she established the Atelier Program in Princeton University as an interdisciplinary arts program that supported and nurtured multifaceted collaborations between artists and students from different disciplines. Moreover, her oeuvre shows her craft in a number of literary and artistic spheres that include writing novels, short stories, children’s books, literary criticism, song cycles and the script for a musical and a play. Keeping in mind Morrison’s multidimensional engagement with literature and the other arts, the first half of the article delves into the contemporary musical responses to the writer, placing special emphasis on black women musicians such as rapper Akua Naru, neo-soul vocalist India Arie, and singer and songwriter Janelle Monáe. Morrison’s intersectional representations of gender and race relations across the history of the U.S. have similarly inspired visual artists. The second half of the article explores the visual creations by U.S. black women artists Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson and Amy Sherald. Morrison’s manifold articulations of blackness and womanhood similarly resonate on the other side of the Atlantic through the work of Lubaina Himid, the first black British artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize in 2017.

“A Man Is Practically the General Norm” – A Case Study of Gender Inequality and Whiteness in the Classical Music Scene in Finland

ABSTRACT In this article I show how generally accepted forms of performance practice and performances by generally idealized performance figures reveal gendered and racialized imaginaries that prevail in the Finnish classical music culture. The research material for this article was gathered through thematic in-depth interviews with fourteen white cis women professional Finnish classical pianists, violinists, violists, and cellists between the ages of 25 and 45. I ask how gendered and racialized constructions are conveyed in performance ideals maintained by widely acclaimed performers and traditionally accepted ways of performing musical works. Further, I ask how gendered and racialized constructions associated with idealized performers and performance ideals shape, intertwine in, and influence the embodied experience of Finnish women musicians. I argue that the performers that are widely seen as quintessential form a canon of performers, that have a crucial role in maintaining the oppressive status quo of classical music by reaffirming and maintaining the idealized aesthetics through the very fleshy act of performing Eurocentric, gendered and racialized social imaginaries. These social imaginaries partly shape musicians’ embodied subjectivity and affect their self-esteem as well as their understanding of gendered and racialized bodies, and their social value.

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

The Tambourine, Joseph Dale's Grand Sonata and Its Role in the Appearance of Women Musicians in the Salon

By the turn of the nineteenth century composers such as Daniel Steibelt and Muzio Clementi were writing keyboard pieces with tambourine (and, occasionally, triangle) parts that were clearly intended for private salon performances by girls and young women. These works were introduced to public and private European salons during the early nineteenth century. Steibelt performed such pieces, typically waltzes, bacchanals, rondos and divertissements whilst on tour with his English wife Catherine, daughter of the London-based music publisher and patent tambourine manufacturer Joseph Dale. She became a renowned tambourine virtuoso, even attracting the attention of the Bohemian musician and writer Václav Jan Tomášek, who described the great sensation caused by Catherine's performances.I analyse different types of works that were written for the tambourine around the year 1800. Examples of short waltzes (which were usually published in sets of 6 or 12) are plentiful – they were by far the most common pieces written for piano and tambourine – and in them the historical link between the tambourine and dance is most obvious. I argue that these waltzes may have served as a bridging point between dance-like, energetic, social activities and passive, recreational drawing-room music. Further support for this idea can be found in a Grand Sonata for pianoforte, tambourine, flute, violin and basso by Joseph Dale. The tambourine part contains numerous choreographic instructions as well as a wide variety of playing techniques such as thumb rolls, bass notes and harmonics, the likes of which did not become common practice in the orchestral or chamber repertory until the twentieth century. Dale's intention was clearly to provide an opportunity for women musicians to express themselves in ways that were contrary to contemporary expectations of female social etiquette.