THE MUSICAL WOMAN:
An International Perspective,
Volume 11,1984-1985

Edited by Judith Lang Zaimont (editor in chief), Catherine Overhauser and Jane Gottlieb (associate editors). Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Roberta Lamb

This second volume of The Musical Woman, a yearbook of women's musical achievement, both contemporary and historical, is impressive in its scope. The editors have retained the same format used in Volume I, facilitating use of the series as a reference. A substantially expanded Part I: Gazette features lists of performances, publications and so forth, documenting the activities of women musicians, 1983-1986. Part II: Essays include nineteen articles addressing such varied facets of music as musicology, music education, conferences on women in music, music criticism, orchestra management, concert promotion, conducting, and composition.

While The Musical Woman is a most welcome, needed, and useful resource for anyone interested in women in music, it is not without weaknesses. Perhaps one of its strengths, breadth of scope, is also its greatest weakness.

The subtitle indicates that an "international perspective" is represented in The Musical Woman , but that is clearly not the case. Only five of the nineteen articles are about women who are not Americans. The Gazette, though nearly twice the length of the same section in Volume I, clearly is dominated by American women. The editors acknowledge that "Even with all of these resources and the improved documentation of contemporary music in general, it is always impossible to be totally comprehensive;" but since only American sources are listed by name it is not possible to tell which worldwide sources were consulted. Hopefully, future volumes of The Musical Woman will be more international in perspective.

The quality of writing varies greatly throughout Part II: Essays. There are examples of fine feminist scholarship in music: "Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Twentieth-Century Benefactress of Chamber Music" by Carol Neuls-Bates; " Arthur P. Schmidt, Music Publisher and Champion of American Women Composers" by Adrienne Fried Block; "Women Band Directors in American Higher Education" by Carol Ann Feather; "Gennaine Tailleferre: Before, During, and After Les Six " by Laura Mitgang; "Tarquinia Motza (1542-1617): A Case Study of Women, Music, and Society in the Renaissance" by Joanne Riley; and, "Gender and Genre in Ethyl Smyth's Opera's "by Elizabeth Wood. Written in an informal style, but equally informative and appropriate, are the articles on conferences and festivals by Edith Borroff and Katherine Hoover, respectively. However, only one-third of Doris Allen's "Women's Contributions to Modern Piano Pedagogy" actually addresses the topic. The article meanders entirely too a much and includes use of the male 'generic' pronoun when referring to women, (e.g."... pedagogy is his craft, as teacher." The same criticism can be made regarding some of the interviews.

The problems here are twofold: one that may be unique to the discipline of music and one that is common in many areas of feminist scholarship.

The common problem is how to allow for a variety of expression to ensure that all voices are heard; how to avoid excluding important concepts and experiences under the guise of quality, and still maintain standards of scholarship. The editors have dealt with this issue by not limiting The Musical Woman to scholarly papers. It is important that women's lives in music be documented in a variety of ways, including reports from festivals and concerts, interviews, first person essays, and popular visual media. At the same time, additional editing might have been appropriate.

The problem in the discipline of music appears to be a lack of connection to, or awareness of, current feminist thought. It is this missing connection that allows several authors in The Musical Woman to use male 'generic' language. This lack of awareness is most apparent in those essays and interviews that discuss the various careers in which women participate. Three themes warranting further analysis recur throughout the interviews and career discussions: the individual super-woman who can do anything and everything; the concept of woman as civilizing agent in male-dominated situations; and, the rather limiting view of feminism as a movement to counteract overt discrimination against women. Perhaps other researchers could begin with The Musical Woman as a source and analyze these three themes from feminist perspectives.

In spite of these criticisms, much important information regarding women in music is provided throughout, thus alleviating another invisibility in women's culture. Family responsibilities and alternate career paths are frequently discussed. Sometimes general commentary on the arts in society is a part of this reporting, e.g. when Karen Monson tells us that "my experience indicates that opportunities for women in [music] criticism are quite as good as they are for men - which is to say, objectively, not good at all." This particular comment is echoed by other writers in their respective areas of music.

I cannot be too critical of the editors for not directly addressing the lack of connection to feminist thought and the question of experience versus quality scholarship within the context of The Musical Woman. I am not sure that such a yearbook is the place to address them. But I do believe that those of us in music/women's studies need to be aware of the questions and examine them at some point. If we do not, we, as musicians/feminists, leave ourselves open to the criticism of elitism.

The articles by Block, Feather, Neuls-Bates, Riley, and Wood deserve additional comment. Feather's descriptive analysis of women band directors is the only study in The Musical Woman based in the quantitative tradition of educational research. It is designed well and succinctly accomplishes its purpose of describing the status of women as post- secondary band directors. We need more such studies to document the status of women in the arts and identify the pertinent issues.

Block, Neuls-Bates, Riley, and Wood are musicologists and seasoned scholars who have written extensively on women in music. Their contributions are always welcome. Adrienne Fried Block chronicles the work of the turn-of-the-century American publisher, Arthur P. Schmidt, who recognized the compositions of "the leading women of the period, whose works he promoted as energetically as he did those by men." Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, Marion Bauer, Margaret Ruthven Lang, and Mabel Daniels were among the women composers published by Schmidt. Carol Neuls-Bates provides us with a brief but fascinating biography of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864-1953), focusing on her patronage of chamber music. Neuls-Bates points out that "Coolidge undertook musical philanthropy only at the age of 50" so that there is a "striking dichotomy between Coolidge's late career as a patron in the public eye and her earlier private life as a wife and mother."

Joanne Riley and Elizabeth Wood are to be admired for their thoroughness in utilizing gender as a central category of analysis within their respective studies of Tarquinia Molza and Ethyl Smyth. Riley questions the historical assumption that the "Ladies of Ferrara were imitative rather than creative musicians," and provides some evidence that "Molza was involved in developing a style of music that [was] . . . a synthesis of contrapuntal and solo song styles known as the 'luxuriant madrigal. ". Her article won Third Prize in the first Pauline Alderman Prize competition for scholarship on women in music (1986). In a fascinating article, Wood suggests that "opera was Smyth's chosen means - and perhaps the mask - through which she contrived to reveal and reshape her lifelong struggle with what she called the 'eternal sex problem between men and women.'" Wood acknowledges Smyth as "one of our most outstanding women composers." Wood presents concise analyses of four of Smyth's operas to demonstrate how Smyth solves the musical and dramatic problems of "deception and disguise,... the contradictions between what you play and what you are, ... sex and gender ambiguities."

The Musical Woman editors state in the introduction, "Women's presence in music is beginning to be felt in every specialty area. To increase women's visibility and clout, it is vital that we applaud every individual accomplishment, continue intensive efforts to research and present a more balanced view of music history, and above all, press against the battle of prejudice on every front." The editors have met this objective and should be applauded for their work. We will look forward to future volumes in The Musical Woman series.