A Feminist Ethnomusicology

A Feminist Ethnomusicology
Author: Ellen Koskoff
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2014-06-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252096401

One of the pioneers of gender studies in music, Ellen Koskoff edited the foundational text Women and Music in Cross Cultural Perspective, and her career evolved in tandem with the emergence and development of the field. 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. Her goal: a personal map of the different paths to understanding she took over the decades, and how each inspired, informed, and clarified her scholarship. For example, Koskoff shows how a preference for face-to-face interactions with living people served her best in her research, and how her now-classic work within Brooklyn's Hasidic community inflamed her feminist consciousness while leading her into ethnomusicological studies. An uncommon merging of retrospective and rumination, A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender offers a witty and disarmingly frank tour through the formative decades of the field and will be of interest to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, scholars of the history and development of feminist thought, and those engaged in fieldwork. Includes a foreword by Suzanne Cusick framing Koskoff's career and an extensive bibliography provided by the author.

Women and Music in Cross-cultural Perspective

Women and Music in Cross-cultural Perspective
Author: Ellen Koskoff
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 1987
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780252060571

"The past fifteen years have been a time of intense scholarly interest in women, resulting in an explosion of literature that has begun to reveal the overriding effects of gender on other cultural domains. Affecting all aspects of culture, issues of sexuality, gender-related behaviors, and inter-gender relations also have profound implications for music performance. This volume represents an introduction to the field of women, music, and culture and in no way attempts to be comprehensive in its coverage nor conclusive in its implications. For example, Western classical music is not discussed here, many large world areas are not covered, nor does this volume present a comprehensive survey of all recent developments in feminist-oriented anthropology. What these essays do share is a focus on women's culture identity and musical activity, either in socially isolated performance environments or within the public arenas shared by their male counterparts."--From the preface

Cecilia Reclaimed

Cecilia Reclaimed
Author: Susan C. Cook
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780252063411

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.

Music in Lubavitcher Life

Music in Lubavitcher Life
Author: Ellen Koskoff
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2000-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780252093265

Music in Lubavitcher Life illuminates the world of the Lubavitcher Hasidim, a community of ultra-orthodox Jews centered in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. Drawing primarily on twenty years of close study of the Lubavitcher community, Ellen Koskoff combines lively anecdotes with historical background and musical analysis to reveal music making among the Lubavitchers as a gateway to their ideas about the nature of human spirituality, human social interaction, and God._x000B_Lubavitcher music centers on the nigunim, a body of paraliturgical, folk, and popular melodies that Lubavitchers regard as a primary form of spiritual communication with the divine. For a song to be included in the repertory of nigunim, it must conform to Hasidic religious and aesthetic principles. If brought in from the outside, it must be purified: stripped of its coarse outer shell (usually the text) and recomposed in accordance with coded musical structures (including certain melody types, ornamentation, and formal organization). Performance of nigunim adheres, among other things, to a process associated with the spirituality of the great Hasidic leaders of the past._x000B_Along with vivid descriptions of musical performance in religious contexts and private gatherings, Koskoff details the musical sounds and structures that symbolize Lubavitcher social relations. In particular, she examines the differences between Lubavitcher women's and men's music making and the underlying beliefs and assumptions that give rise to gendered musical behaviors, such as the dictum that prohibits men from hearing a woman sing._x000B_An insightful portrait of a distinctive community's musical and religious life, Music in Lubavitcher Life is also a candid view of ethnographic research and of fieldwork's illusory objectivity._x000B__x000B_

Musicology and Difference

Musicology and Difference
Author: Ruth A. Solie
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2023-11-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520916506

Addressing Western and non-Western music, composers from Francesca Caccini to Charles Ives, and musical communities from twelfth-century monks to contemporary opera queens, these essays explore questions of gender and sexuality. Musicology and Difference brings together some of the freshest and most challenging voices in musicology today on a question of importance to all the humanistic disciplines.

Women in Music

Women in Music
Author: Karin Pendle
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 870
Release: 2012-07-26
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1135848130

Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography emerging from more than twenty-five years of feminist scholarship on music. This book testifies to the great variety of subjects and approaches represented in over two decades of published writings on women, their work, and the important roles that feminist outlooks have played in formerly male-oriented academic scholarship or journalistic musings on women and music.

Gender and the Musical Canon

Gender and the Musical Canon
Author: Marcia J. Citron
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2000
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780252069161

A classic in gender studies in music Marcia J. Citron's comprehensive, balanced work lays a broad foundation for the study of women composers and their music. Drawing on a diverse body of feminist and interdisciplinary theory, Citron shows how the western art canon is not intellectually pure but the result of a complex mixture of attitudes, practices, and interests that often go unacknowledged and unchallenged. Winner of the Pauline Alderman Prize from the International Alliance of Women in Music, Gender and the Musical Canon explores important elements of canon formation, such as notions of creativity, professionalism, and reception. Citron surveys the institutions of power, from performing organizations and the academy to critics and the publishing and recording industries, that affect what goes into the canon and what is kept out. She also documents the nurturing role played by women, including mothers, in cultivating female composers. In a new introduction, she assesses the book's reception by composers and critics, especially the reactions to her controversial reading of Cécile Chaminade's sonata for piano. A key volume in establishing how the concepts and assumptions that form the western art music canon affect female composers and their music, Gender and the Musical Canon also reveals how these dynamics underpin many of the major issues that affect musicology as a discipline.

The Routledge Handbook of Women’s Work in Music

The Routledge Handbook of Women’s Work in Music
Author: Rhiannon Mathias
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2021-12-31
Genre: Music
ISBN: 042957715X

The Routledge Handbook of Women’s Work in Music presents a unique collection of core research by academics and music practitioners from around the world, engaging with an extraordinarily wide range of topics on women’s contributions to Western and Eastern art music, popular music, world music, music education, ethnomusicology as well as in the music industries. The handbook falls into six parts. Part I serves as an introduction to the rich variety of subject matter the reader can expect to encounter in the handbook as a whole. Part II focuses on what might be termed the more traditional strand of feminist musicology – research which highlights the work of historical and/or neglected composers. Part III explores topics concerned with feminist aesthetics and music creation and Part IV focuses on questions addressing the performance and reception of music and musicians. The narrative of the handbook shifts in Part V to focus on opportunities and leadership in the music professions from a Western perspective. The final section of the handbook (Part VI) provides new frames of context for women’s positions as workers, educators, patrons, activists and promoters of music. This is a key reference work for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in music and gender.

Black Women and Music

Black Women and Music
Author: Eileen M. Hayes
Publisher:
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2007
Genre: Music
ISBN:

Features a collection of essays that detail black women's experiences in various forms of music and details such topics as black authenticity, sexual politics, access, racial uplift through music, and the challenges of writing black feminist biographies.

Big Ears

Big Ears
Author: Nichole T. Rustin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2008-11-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0822389223

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. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Café Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz’s film adaptation (1950). Taken together, the essays enrich the field of jazz studies by showing how gender dynamics have shaped the production, reception, and criticism of jazz culture. Scholars of music, ethnomusicology, American studies, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies approach the question of gender in jazz from multiple perspectives. One contributor scrutinizes the tendency of jazz historiography to treat singing as subordinate to the predominantly male domain of instrumental music, while another reflects on her doubly inappropriate position as a female trumpet player and a white jazz musician and scholar. Other essays explore the composer George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept as a critique of mid-twentieth-century discourses of embodiment, madness, and black masculinity; performances of “female hysteria” by Les Diaboliques, a feminist improvising trio; and the BBC radio broadcasts of Ivy Benson and Her Ladies’ Dance Orchestra during the Second World War. By incorporating gender analysis into jazz studies, Big Ears transforms ideas of who counts as a subject of study and even of what counts as jazz. Contributors: Christina Baade, Jayna Brown, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hairston, Kristin McGee, Tracy McMullen, Ingrid Monson, Lara Pellegrinelli, Eric Porter, Nichole T. Rustin, Ursel Schlicht, Julie Dawn Smith, Jeffrey Taylor, Sherrie Tucker, João H. Costa Vargas