Women Musicians Research Articles

Courtesans, Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Courtesans, Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy

The “Missing Muscle”: Attitudes to Women Working in Cinema and Music 1910–1930

In the 1900s as Edwardian women musicians moved from music teaching into public performance, cinemas offered a safe place: out of the spotlight and in the relative anonymity of the darkened auditorium. The rapid growth in cinemas from the 1910s also meant that women were needed to fill the demand for ensembles, pianists, and vocalists, a demand that greatly increased during World War I however, women faced successive waves of backlashes and debates about their abilities played out in the music and popular press, in trade and fan magazines, and in the Musicians’ Union. Evidence of women’s experience can also be gleaned from personal testimony, diaries, and autobiography, but this is piecemeal and represents only a fraction of what was a considerable occupation for women. Focusing on cinema musicianship, this article will examine the battles for women entering the profession between 1900 and 1930.

Rocking against patriarchy: Single-sex solutions for female musicians

Abstract Opinions on the merits of single sex education are divided, but it is acknowledged that this context for learning offers certain benefits for female musicians. This is particularly true for female rock guitarists and drummers, who are under-represented and rarely achieve virtuoso status. The scarcity of women musicians in rock and heavy metal is noted by various feminist scholars, but solutions to the problem of under-representation are elusive. In order to perform rock music professionally, women must develop initial musicianship skills. However, many girls and younger women report being intimidated, marginalized or excluded in rock bands, making it harder for them to gain experience. This article draws attention to two recent developments – female rock tributes and rock camps for women and girls – presenting them as offering a feminist solution for women who would like to perform metal and rock music with confidence.

Music Policy in the Early Joseon Dynasty and a Consolidation of Neo-Confucian Domination — Focus on the Publishing of Akhak gwebeom(樂學軌範) and Woman Musician Matter

Music Policy in the Early Joseon Dynasty and a Consolidation of Neo-Confucian Domination — Focus on the Publishing of Akhak gwebeom(樂學軌範) and Woman Musician Matter

Laurie Stas, ed. She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whitness, Femininity, Adolescence, and Class in 1960s Music

Laurie Stras, ed. 2010. She's So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music. Surrey, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. Laurie Stras's edited volume She's So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music is a welcome addition to the recent scholarship on music by female musicians of the 1960s that attends to the complexity of the women and girls who performed and listened to this music in the United States and the United Kingdom. So unexplored is this area of inquiry from a musicological standpoint that, in her introduction, Stras appropriately envisions She's So Fine to be the beginning of a re-evaluation--with emphasis on value--of the very premises of 1950s and 1960s (23). By extension, Stras's ambitions for the book not only necessitate an interrogation of the merits of the popular music canon, but also call for a reconsideration of the standard criteria for assigning and naturalizing value wherever it calcifies. The pop music of women musicians in the 1960s has, critically and in general popular thought, been denigrated for its polish and mass appeal. Celebrated volumes on rock history such as The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, (2001) or Robert Palmer's Rock and Roll: An Unruly History (1995) have participated in the dismissal of groups by crediting their success to the complex labor force of producers and song-writers the musicians. Stras observes that Pop and its attendant girl-space, with their alleged emphasis on conformity and concomitant lack of authenticity, have been noted as a phenomenon, but one that always seems to operate as a foil to prove rock's ultimate superior cultural worth (22). The most troubling problem posed by these gendered constructions of genres is not so much that popular music is consistently gendered female--for as Stras observes, pop music was indeed a space dominated by teenage girls who represented the target audience (21)--but that this feminization simultaneously becomes a marker of conformity, lack, or devaluation. Clearly, the diminished social status of adolescent girls in Western culture is one explanation for the motivations behind this discursive and political suppression of pop and the heterogeneity of the singers in question. She's So Fine, therefore, is a valuable feminist work because it resonates as the unequivocal rejoinder to all of the pejorative connotations that justify the reduction and dismissal of the category of girl from androcentric histories of popular culture. This collection is divided into three main sections that are organized into a loose chronological fashion, drawing from a broad range of disciplines that include cultural studies, historical musicology, performance studies, and media studies. It uses a wide array of primary source materials that include recordings, television broadcasts, interviews (both published and personal), biographies, autobiographies, images, journalism, rock criticism, and fan-created artifacts. Its methodological and theoretical approaches to 1960s pop are so diverse that each reader can map a different trajectory through their arguments, but always with the sense that the essays are in conversation with each other. Stras charts a course that does not quite resemble a conventional recovery project, whose purpose might be to make extraordinary, otherwise forgotten music more available, mostly because accessibility and public exposure have never been a significant problem for the uniquely situated status of 1960s groups. As Stras mentions in her introduction, pop presently exists in an abundance of forms within popular culture, entertainment, and media (7)--so much so that the '60s singer is both a standard, camp figure. The academic and critical devaluation of singers, then, has little to do with our failure to acknowledge pop and everything to do with a deliberate disempowerment of the teenage girls involved with its creation and reception. …

The Impact of Professional Music Diplomas on Women Music Teachers in Early Twentieth-Century New Zealand

At the end of the nineteenth century, music was an accomplishment that many women were encouraged to pursue. For some, this was merely an additional “ornament” to enhance marriage prospects, but a growing number took the opportunity to turn musical ability into a career option. A small group of musically educated women in New Zealand at the start of the twentieth century is studied. At this time, two British examining bodies, Trinity College, London, and the Associated Board, introduced professional diplomas as the culmination of their graded music exams. In their first five years, forty-five women were successful in these “higher examinations” and gained either an Associate from Trinity College (ATCL), or a Licentiate from the Associated Board (LAB). Armed with a prestigious qualification that granted the right to add “letters” after their name, some then followed a career as a teacher of music. Biographical details of each woman are explored and compared to see if any reasons can be found to explain why some continued with music while others didn’t. Similarities as to family and social background are revealed, while the main reason for not continuing with a musical career appears to be the intervention of marriage and family commitments.

Women Music Teachers as Military Band Directors during World War II

The purpose of this study was to determine how women music teachers became the United States’ first female military band directors. Interviews with seventy-nine World War II military bandswomen revealed that seven of the ten chosen female directors were music teachers prior to their enlistment in the Army, Coast Guard, or Marines—band and orchestra teachers, music supervisors, and a college professor. Six of those seven directors are included in this study. Research questions pertained to their childhood music education, formal schooling, music-teacher employment, why they quit teaching to enlist, military education, military leadership and performance experiences, how they continued music making after the war, and the meaning of this experience for their lives. Corroboration of interview responses with primary and secondary sources—census data, school records, city directories, social security index, newspaper articles, photographs, diaries, military documents, military and WWII books—revealed that these music educators had accurate memories, outstanding music education and performance backgrounds, substantial leadership experiences, and diverse musical backgrounds that made them good choices for leading military bands and ensembles. All were part of significant firsts for women in the military. Near the end of their lives, they believed that their service as a military band director and musician had substantial impact on their lives and in some cases valued as “the most important” experience of their lives.

Mana Wahine: Māori Women in Music

Moana Maniapoto and Hinewehi Mohi are famous for having pioneered a distinctively Māori form of popular and political music in the 1990s, and they continue to produce remarkable contemporary waiata for audiences in Aotearoa and overseas. Their successes have inspired other artists, and more importantly, they have both made significant contributions to the empowerment and strengthening of te reo Māori and mātaranga Māori. Recognising what has happened since the 1990s, this paper takes a constructive look at the current state of Māori music and considers how to produce a new wave of creativity for the 21st century for new generations of Māori and Indigenous composers, audiences and performers. How does popular music performance make a powerful contribution to the revitalisation of te reo Māori and mātauranga Māori? Maree Sheehan will lead a conversation with Moana Maniapoto and Hinewehi Mohi to discuss the lasting significance of their work for Māori music and culture, twenty-five years later.

Women musicians of Uzbekistan: from courtyard to conservatory

Fascinated by women's distinct influence on Uzbekistan's music, Tanya Merchant ventures into Tashkent's post-Soviet music scene to place women musicians within the nation's evolving artistic and political arenas. Drawing on fieldwork and music study carried out between 2001 and 2014, Merchant challenges the Western idea of Central Asian women as sequestered and oppressed. Instead, she notes, Uzbekistan's women stand at the forefront of four prominent genres: maqom, folk music, Western art music, and popular music. Merchant's recounting of the women's experiences, stories, and memories underscores the complex role that these musicians and vocalists play in educational institutions and concert halls, street kiosks and the culturally essential sphere of wedding music. Throughout the book, Merchant ties nationalism and femininity to performances and reveals how the music of these women is linked to a burgeoning national identity. Important and revelatory, Women Musicians of Uzbekistan looks into music's part in constructing gendered national identity and the complicated role of femininity in a former Soviet republic's national project.

Music and traditions of the Arabian Peninsula: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar

1. Introduction PART I The Najd and Upper Gulf Region 2. Bedouin Arts 3. Bedouin Women's Music and Dance 4: Taggagat: Female Drumming Bands 5: Hadar Arts from the Najd: Songs with Drums 6: Hadar (Khammari) Arts in the Upper Gulf 7: Gulf Wedding Practices and Songs 8: Incoming Arts: African and Persian 9: Sea Music Traditions, and Saut PART 2 The Hijaz and Southwest Region 10. Hijazi Folk Traditions 11: Ta'if and Music 12: Art Music of the Hijazi Cities 13: Hijazi Women and Music Making 14: Distinguished Hijazi Artists 15: Introduction: Southwestern Arabia 16: Asir Genres and Traditions 17: Bisha and Baha Arts 18: Jizan Music and Dance 19: Musical Aspect of Najran Appendix: Comments on Contemporary Arts and 'Adani Glossary Bibliography Index

SMASHING THE SILENCE

A review of With Open Eyes - The First National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Contemporary Women's Music Festival

All the girls in town

This article will use the cultural and media materials produced around the death of Chrissy Amphlett as a way of interrogating the fact that surprisingly few resources exist that document or commemorate the contribution of women to the rock music scene in Australia. As Amphlett is unusual in being a woman who has, even before her death, claimed a place in the Australian rock canon, examining materials that are designed to construct her legacy upon her passing will provide examples of how women in Australian rock are discussed. It will be demonstrated that Amphlett’s gender is central to these discussions, and that she is used to both obscure the contributions of other women performers and to deny a need for women musicians to even be an object of discussion at all. These findings will be analysed using Aleida Assmann’s concepts of functional and storage memory, and it will be argued that the lack of information that we have about past female rockers makes it harder for women in Australia to see this field as one they can participate in, and also makes the retention of memories about currently successful women musicians less likely.

‘Life's Major Crossroads’: Study and Career Paths of Four Australian Women Composers at the Royal College of Music in the 1930s

Several Australian women composers were among the legions of women musicians who set out to ‘try their fortune’ in London in the 1930s only to have their study and career options curtailed by the rollercoaster of appeasement and then war. The most prominent of them—Miriam Hyde from Adelaide, Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Esther Rofe from Melbourne, and Dulcie Holland from Sydney—each found themselves in the grip of the twin pincers of family anxiety, on the one hand, and the prospect of bombing and hardship on the other. Despite successful studies and the networks and opportunities they gained in the avenues of composition for film, ballet and concerts, three of these women were obliged by family pressure to return home either before or at the outset of the war. Arguably, had they stayed their careers may have been circumscribed by events and they may have struggled, as Elisabeth Lutyens did, to earn a living. But the one who remained overseas was the one who spurned family entreaties, and what Carolyn Heilbrun calls the erotic or familial plot, to follow creative compulsion in the theatre and, later, in the United States, to become a prominent freelance composer and critic. Through reference to letters, diaries, memoirs and recollections, this paper examines how family, political turmoil, war and a sense of obligation impinged on the career trajectories of these women and how they each determined either to abide by convention or repudiate it.

Review of Eileen M. Hayes. 2010. Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Review of Eileen M. Hayes. 2010. Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

The Girls in the Band: College Version dir. by Judy Chaikin (review)

The Girls in the Band: College Version. DVD. Directed by Judy Chaikin. With discussion guide and supplemental USB media device. Website with supplemental materials: http://thegirlsintheband.com/ [Studio City, CA]: Artist Tribe and One Step Productions, 2014. $99.00 (High schools and public libraries); $349.00 (College Version).The Girls in the Band is a step forward in filling a persistent gap in the standard narrative of jazz history. The role of women in jazz constitutes a parallel history largely unacknowledged by the commentators, historians, bandleaders, and record labels who had a role in deciding who and what was important in the genre. The film makes clear that women musicians of the highest caliber have been active in the entire history of jazz, even if conventional histories cast them in decorative or novelty roles, or have emphasized the glamour of singers to the exclusion of instrumentalists. The film's historic footage and oral histories provide a case study in the reality that history is only so objective, having been told through the lens of human perception by those who were chosen or allowed to tell the story.The discussion is framed by the observation of how few women were present in the historical photo, A Great Day in Harlem, which otherwise brought together a pantheon of legendary jazz musicians, and closes with a 2008 re-enactment which assembles several generations of women jazz musicians. The scope and pacing of the full-length film emphasizes the swing era, with earlier jazz primarily represented by Lil Hardin Armstrong. Artists active since the 1970s are also prominent, if presented in somewhat rapid-fire fashion toward the end of the film. The contrast in pacing is less apparent in the shorter classroom version (included as a separate DVD with the College Version), but the coverage between the 1950s and 1970 is noticeably lighter with both versions.The film records valuable oral histories before several interview subjects passed away, including Marian McPartland, Billy Taylor, and Peggy Gilbert. More information on circumstances of the interviews would be helpful to researchers; news articles which the film cites also invite further investigation, but were not included in bibliographical information.Ordinarily, packaging is of consequence to the quality of a film, but here, the cover art does an immense disservice, ironically demonstrating many of the skewed expectations for women musicians, and skewing expectations of the quality of the film. It features a Caucasian woman, in a tight-fitting, sleeveless little black dress with black lace reminiscent of lingerie, who is apparently pretending to play the alto saxophone in an unnatural-looking posture, and is therefore present for the sake of appearance rather than substance. A professional jazz saxophonist consulted by the reviewer noted: Left thumb not even on thumb rest, left fingers appear to be hanging on to the keys, preventing any movement. Right pinky is on a post . . . rather than the E-flat key (B. Bohnstengel, contacted August 4, 2014). These dismal appearances could deter other potential viewers and purchasers.The cover art presents an unintended teachable moment in its demonstration of many of the issues emphasized in the film, including gender steering of women to appropriate instruments (why not a baritone sax?), obnoxious costumes, and the premium of beauty to which women musicians were subjected without regard to talent. …

The Significance of Familial Home Support for Australian Female Musicians and Music Educators from 1890 to 1950: Three Case Studies

Introduction Balancing work and home duties can be a challenge for music educators, particularly women. As early as the nineteenth century, Clara Schumann (1819-96) gave support to her husband, the composer Robert Schumann, while at the same time she managed their household, bore eight children, and pursued her own successful composing and performing career. (1) Her rival female recital pianists had given up their careers when they married or found they could not keep up with the stresses of combining family and profession. (2) Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-53), a North American, gave up her composition work for many years once her children were born. (3) Her children believed their mother felt a conflict between her composing and her family. (4) Schumann and Seeger have not been alone in their work/home life challenges. As a sociological and historical issue, the challenge for women to balance professional music work and home duties, and the support required to underpin this balance, have not been analyzed in detail. There has been an enormous increase in the amount of literature and research related to women in music across the Western world since the 1970s. This began in 1975 with Donald Hixon and Don Hennessee's Women in Music: A Biobibliography, in 1981 with Aaron Cohen's International Encyclopaedia of Women Composers, and in 1987 with James Briscoe's Historical Anthology of Music by Women (5). This was followed by Diane Peacock Jezic's Women Composers: The Lost Tradition Found in 1988, among others. (6) It continued with publications such as Gene Claghorn's Women Composers and Songwriters of 1996, Derek Hyde's New Found Voices in 1998, and James Briscoe's Contemporary Anthology of Music by Women of 1997. (7) These types of substantial new biographies, ... dissertations on and musical of women composers were significant, but less has been published about women music teachers. (8) Well-known teachers such as the French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger and the American music educator Satis Coleman have been written about in detail, but women composers in general have received more attention than women music teachers. (9) A reasonable amount has been written about the experiences and achievements of early and current women musicians, but a comprehensive analysis of the home support that underpinned their success has not occurred. (10) Why is this so? A Lack of Focus on Home Support It could be argued that this deficiency is owing to the fact that the types of women who were able to be active in music in earlier periods were women like Sophie Drinker (1888-1967), who was of high socioeconomic status and had servants to complete household duties. (11) Drinker was an American-born feminist writer and author of Music & Women (1948). Because of its feminist discussion and the negative response of critics, Music & Women originally survived underground via hand-to-hand circulation among women musicians and historians. It was republished by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York in 1995. Drinker was also active in music and particularly encouraged women to pursue musical activities and pursuits. For Drinker, home support was not an issue. This theory is not supportable, though, as other women such as Clara Schumann struggled constantly with financial constraints, particularly after her husband, Robert, died. She spent considerable time away from home to earn money through recital work, relying on others to look after her children. Alternatively, the lack of focus on home support could be because musicologists have paid little attention to the sociology of music;12 hence, as a sociological issue, work/life balance has not been a focus of research in musicology or music history. Another contributing factor may be that although women have always made music, they have been subject to limitations and prescriptions; historically they have been encouraged as amateurs but not as professionals. …

Medhårs och mothårs

When doing cultural history research, the researcher can come across already established opinions of what the history is in a field. Aitologies, lists of heroes and masters, turning point anecdotes and written histories are present as more or less taken for granted within a community. This is a convenient starting-point and background material for a researcher, but can also hide more than it shows by confirming contemporary definitions, power relations, inclusions and exclusions. As an example, I analyse tendencies within Swedish Jazz History by going through interviews made at the Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research. A conventional attitude would be to accept the collection as fairly representative: the most important musicians have been interviewed and there is a good sample across different decades. However, in a reading “against the grain” by the use of Katherine Galloway Young’s concepts of Taleworld, storyrealm and interview situation, the interviews stand forward as negotiations of what jazz styles, what musicians and what qualities should be included in the Swedish jazz field and what is to be left out. In this case, foreign born musicians and women musicians are marginalized in Swedish jazz history, as well as styles that can seem to be too commercial. The musicians chosen are either stars, or witnesses to the stars. Working against the grain of the emic Swedish Jazz history is to problematize what has been outdefined and how, to ask counterfactual questions on what could have happened if other discourses had dominated, and reflect on new questions to ask, new definitions of the research object, and the need for new and/or revised documentation.

"Sempre tivemos mulheres nos cantos e nas cordas": uma pesquisa sobre o lugar feminino nas corporações musicais

O presente artigo insere-se em projeto de pesquisa-intervenção sobre a música e suas articulações identitárias nas corporações musicais da região dos Campos das Vertentes, em especial São João del-Rei e cidades vizinhas. Nessa região, a música tem papel significativo na formação da identidade cultural dos cidadãos e na história dos municípios. O recorte atual apresenta uma investigação sobre determinações de gênero, visando conhecer como se dá a participação de musicistas nas bandas e orquestras da região. Para tanto, utilizou-se a análise arqueológica do discurso, a fim de contrapor falas de musicistas às falas de músicos das corporações e, também, às falas masculinas presentes na filosofia e ao discurso utópico sobre a mulher. Observou-se que as diferenças de gênero tradicionais conservam-se encobertas no cotidiano das corporações musicais. Entretanto, observou-se também que as musicistas começam a ser reconhecidas nas corporações e, sobretudo, reconhecem-se como capazes de, nelas, alçarem voos.

Black Women Working Together: Jazz, Gender, and the Politics of Validation

In essay Black Women and Music: A Historical Legacy of Struggle (2001), Angela Davis chronicles cultural and historic trajectory black women musicians have advanced through music in their transition from free people to enslaved persons to free but oppressed people in relation to context of their lives in Africa and America. While Davis situates her discussion in how black women have used spirituals and blues as a means of developing social and political consciousness, her theoretical scope could easily be enlarged to include other forms of black music, most notably jazz. One of arguments Davis raises concerns common reading of black women's relationships with each other in larger scope of popular culture. These relationships are often framed as competitive and antagonistic. Rarely has complex and layered engagement between black women been acknowledged. In recent years, popular culture has perpetuated trope of competitiveness, hostility, and violence between black women through social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and reality television (e.g., Basketball Wives, Real Housewives of Atlanta). These depictions have been used to stereotype black women, discredit their viability in certain social environments, and reject them as intellectual beings. But close examination of social and familial relationships between women exposes a complex culture of engagement and socialization. These relationships are at times defined by layered and multifarious praxes through which collectives of black women have engaged in self-definition; created systems of knowledge that provided skills to navigate political, social, and economic spheres; and formed safe that have supported their process of brokering power. Why has this competitive narrative permeated popular culture and our readings of how black women engage with another? One reason is that this narrative has been defined by emotional responses generated from engagement between black and women in public and private spheres. The supposed lack of good black who can sustain good relationships with good black women serves as undercurrent for competitive and sometimes toxic relationships between black women. This is furthered with proliferation of mythology of strong black woman and her engagement with weak black men and supposed subversion of social and power structures that define masculinity. These ideological beliefs raise a number of questions when considered in relation to interactions between black women and in larger contexts of popular culture. How has competitive narrative framed how black women musicians are read and defined within popular culture history and criticism? To understand this we must interrogate how narrative of competition and engagement of black women musicians have been documented in historiography of jazz. The narrative of competitive personality or inability to get along among black women musicians has become paramount to mythologies that have shaped public understandings of culture of jazz. (1) It is often used as of rationales for why women are disruptive to work being done in spaces where jazz is created. The prevailing thought is that competitiveness that women exhibit in these spaces is that is destructive rather than productive to working environment. The male competitive spirit in jazz, however, is essence of creative energy generated. It is the necessary constant, for it produces cultural hallmarks, real-time moments of genius and frames infinite nature of possibility that occurs when work together even when poised or posed in competitive stances. When this type of analysis is extended to women musicians, it is often subverted from its role as tool of empowerment that helps develop her individual musical voice to where she is forced into battle to be one female creative voice that survives and earns a place in historical narrative. …

Crafting Alternative Femininities on the Public Stage: Women Performers of Ethnic Music in Contemporary Istanbul

This article investigates the strategies women performers of ethnic music in contemporary Istanbul employ to escape the common associations of women of 'loose morals' and to craft alternative femininities on the public stage. How have women playing this music genre been able to do so while, at the same time, gaining and maintaining social respectability? Drawing on fieldwork in Istanbul, the article argues that ethnic music provides better opportunities for women to build their musical careers and to be perceived seriously for their artistic talents. Ethnic music's specific audience, locus of performance, repertoire, flexibility in dress codes and its performers' frequent associations with feminist organisations are all factors helping women to shape their own interpretation of what a woman musician in the twenty-first century could be.