Gender and Music

"Cecilia, a fifteenth-century Christian martyr, has long been considered the patron saint of music. In this pathbreaking volume, ten of the best known scholars in the newly emerging field of feminist musicology explore both how gender has helped shape genres and works of music and how music has contributed to prevailing notions of gender. The musical subjects include concert music, both instrumental and vocal, and the vernacular genres of ballads, salon music, and contemporary African American rap. The essays raise issues not only of gender but also of race and class, moving among musical practices of the courtly ruling class and the elite discourse of the twentieth-century modernist movement to practices surrounding marginal girls in Renaissance Venice and the largely white middle-class experiences of magazine and balladry."

"In this intellectual memoir, Koskoff describes her journey through the maze of social history and scholarship related to her work examining the intersection of music and gender... Koskoff collects new, revised, and hard-to-find published material from mid-1970s through 2010 to trace the evolution of ethnomusicological thinking about women, gender, and music, offering a perspective of how questions emerged and changed in those years, as well as Koskoff's reassessment of the early years and development of the field."

"A popular university textbook, Women & Music is enlightening for scholars, a good source of programming ideas for performers, and a pleasure for other music lovers."

"A study of musical salons in Europe and North America between 1760 and 1800 and the salon hostesses who shaped their musical worlds... In this book, musicologist and historical keyboardist Rebecca Cypess offers a broad overview of musical salons between 1760 and 1800, placing the figure of the salonnière at its center... Cypess explores women's agency and authorship, reason and sentiment, and the roles of performing, collecting, listening, and conversing in the formation of eighteenth-century musical life."

"A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds draws together topical issues in feminist musicology over the past century. This volume provides insight into the professional and compositional procedures of creative women in music and stands to be relevant for composers, performers, industry professionals, students, and feminist and musicological scholars for many years to come."

"Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music opens up a new way of thinking about the absence of women's music... This book sets out... to develop a new conception of subjectivity that sows the seeds of a twenty-first-century feminist politics of music."

"This volume offers new scholarship on women composers of the past two centuries, covering a wide range of repertoire, institutions and locations, with chapters focusing on such varied topics as women writing opera in early nineteenth-century Paris; the intertextual relationship between works by Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn; women composers writing for instruments not usually associated with them in their time - specifically horn, and organ; and the subversive musical activity of female prisoners in Spain under the Franco regime."

"Featuring music by sixty-seven historical women and/or people of color, Expanding the Music Theory Canon is designed to supplement any introductory Western classical music theory curriculum. At a time when many academics are focused on increasing diversity and inclusion, this book provides the means to seamlessly incorporate works by underrepresented composers into music theory core courses."

"The field of popular music production is overwhelmingly male dominated. Here, Paula Wolfe discusses gendered notions of creativity and examines the significant under-representation of women in studio production. Wolfe brings an invaluable perspective as both a working artist-producer and as a scholar, thereby offering a new body of research based on interviews and first-hand observation."

"An exploration of the musical activities and expressions of women from a thematic perspective, this collection of essays provides a cross-cultural and cross-historical view of the roles women have played as creators and performers, and the representation of women in world, popular and art music."

"Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio... Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures--a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers."

In jazz circles, players and listeners with "big ears" hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz.

How have men used art music? How have they listened to and brandished the musical forms of the Western classical tradition and how has music intervened in their identity formations? This collection of essays addresses these questions by examining some of the ways in which men, music and masculinity have been implicated with each other since the Middle Ages.

From Muddy Waters to Mick Jagger, Elvis to Freddie Mercury, Jeff Buckley to Justin Timberlake, masculinity in popular music has been an issue explored by performers, critics, and audiences. From the dominance of the blues singer over his "woman" to the sensitive singer/songwriter, popular music artists have adopted various gendered personae in a search for new forms of expression.

Through the experiences of performers, composers, and ethnomusicologists working in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, Music and Gender explores how the uses and descriptions of music shift in response to rapid political, economic, or technological change.

"Going beyond singular investigations of history, theory, gender, race, or culture, the contributors to Audible Traces complicate matters. They examine the ways that our supposed self-identity gender, race, sexuality, sexual orientation, and ethnicity intersects with our activities and our experiences. Their concerns also include dance, technology, societal forces, cognitive studies, poetry, fashion, sensory inputs, and politics."

"The ACWC Journal (formerly called ACWC Bulletin or Newsletter) is published each winter and summer by the Association of Canadian Women Composers. Each issue contains in-depth articles from ACWC members, as well as ACWC/ACC events and opportunities."