XI.

North America since 1920

J. Michele Edwards,
with contributions by Leslie Lassetter

AMERICAN VOICES

Ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on August 20, 1920, marked the culmination of decades of work by women activists. However, with the right to vote secured, the intensity of collective activity among American women diminished. According to historian Sara M. Evans, “The twenties formed an era when changes long under way emerged into an urban mass culture emphasizing pleasure, consumption, sexuality, and individualism.”¹ These traits were present in the popular music, e.g., jazz and the Charleston, which emerged from black culture and spread into the dominant white culture. Perhaps even the plurality of styles within American music was an outgrowth of a social context focused on individuality and diversity within American life. Consider, for example, the various piano styles represented among the following performers and composers: Lovie Austin's accompaniments for blues singers, Lil Hardin Armstrong's performances and recordings with many leading jazz artists, From the New Hampshire Woods by Marion Bauer, and the piano preludes of Ruth Crawford Seeger.

Marion Bauer and Mary Howe

The musical language of Marion Bauer (1882–1955) and Mary Howe (1882–1964) remained strongly rooted in the Western European harmonic tradition. Rather than followers of the Second New England School, which favored abstract instrumental forms, Bauer and Howe are descendants of Edward MacDowell's emphasis on coloristic harmony, programmatic titles, and narrative, through-composed forms. Both women traveled in Europe during the early twentieth century, and Bauer was among the first American composers to study with Nadia Boulanger. In exchange for harmony lessons in 1906, Bauer provided English lessons to both Nadia and Lili Boulanger as well as to the daughter of Raoul Pugno, Bauer's violin teacher.

Bauer's From the New Hampshire Woods (1921) is firmly grounded in periodic rhythm, tertian harmony, and an integrated melodic-harmonic unit, yet it is colored with tints of impressionism. Written three years later, Turbulence for piano (1924) moves further away from functional tonality with more complex harmonies. Rhythmic energy, more than harmonic seduction, propels this work. Giving it a feminist reading, Ellie Hisama analyzes Bauer's Toccata from the Four Piano Pieces (1930) in terms of gender, sexuality, and shifting power relationships, based on the changing physical relationship of the pianist's hands.² Characterized in the 1920s as the work of a left-wing modernist, by the 1940s Bauer's music was viewed as conservative, yet well-crafted.

Bauer was well recognized during her lifetime with publications and many performances, including those by such prominent soloists as Ernestine Schumann-Heink (alto) and Maud Powell (violin), as well as by the New York Philharmonic under Leopold Stokowski for a 1947 performance of Sun Splendor (1926; orchestrated 1944?). This was the only work by a woman the Philharmonic had performed for a quarter of a century. Mary Howe's orchestral tone poem Spring Pastoral (1937) was originally a setting of a poem by Elinor Wylie for women's chorus. In the orchestral version, lush string writing supports the soloistic treatment of French horn and woodwinds. Howe also composed character pieces for piano as well as other orchestral tone poems, including Dirge (1931), Stars (1927?), Sand (1928?), and Potomac (1940).³

Both Howe and Bauer produced many of their compositions at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Howe spent summers there almost every year from 1927 onward. Bauer, who visited twelve times between 1919 and 1944, expressed her gratitude to Mrs. Edward MacDowell for founding “a haven where many other composers, writers, and painters have shared with me the extraordinary opportunity and privilege of doing creative work in peaceful, stimulating, and beautiful surroundings.”⁴ Along with a supportive atmosphere, the Colony also offered Bauer an opportunity to meet other important women composers such as Amy Beach, Ruth Crawford, and Miriam Gideon. For Howe, Bauer, and others, the MacDowell Colony was a very stimulating “room of one's own”—a necessary component for creative activity by women, according to Virginia Woolf.

Howe and Bauer also made substantial contributions to American musical life beyond composition. Howe, one of the founders of the Association of American Women Composers, was active in many artistic and philanthropic organizations. Bauer, a champion of American music, was active in many musical organizations and was frequently the only woman in a leadership position in groups that included America's most prominent composers. She was editor of the Musical Leader, author of many articles and five published books, and, for twenty-five years, professor of music history and composition at New York University.

Florence Price

In a self-conscious effort to find an American voice and to establish artistic independence from the Central European tradition, some composers in the 1920s and beyond cultivated musical nationalism, incorporating elements from vernacular or ethnic music. Florence Price (1887–1953)⁵ had ties with the Harlem Renaissance, which sought “the elevation of the Negro folk idiom—that is, spirituals, blues, and characteristic dance music—to symphonic form. This elevation could be accomplished through the fusion of elements from the neo-romantic nationalist movement in the United States with elements from their own Afro-American cultural heritage.”⁶ Price was the first black woman to gain recognition as a major composer. Her Symphony in E Minor (1931) was among the earliest by an African American to be performed by a major orchestra, receiving its premiere at Chicago's World's Fair Century of Progress Exhibition concert in the Auditorium Theatre (not at Orchestra Hall). While this symphony does not quote preexisting tunes, it promotes racial pride and awareness. It uses various Afro-American characteristics: incorporating a pentatonic scale, call-and-response, syncopated rhythm, altered tones (or “blue notes”), and timbral stratification, as well as the more obvious inclusion of a juba dance (in the third movement) and African drums (especially prominent in the second movement). Similar characteristics are found in many of Price's art songs, piano pieces, organ music, and the Piano Concerto in One Movement (1933–1934).

G. Wiley Smith

G. Wiley Smith (b. 1946), an active flutist and teacher as well as a composer, grew up in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, and received her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, Oklahoma, where she is currently professor of flute. A member of the Muskogee Creek Nation, Smith is also active in the Indian Education Program in the Edmond Public Schools. She has performed her music at the Indian Education Exposition in Norman, the Red Earth Artist Presentation, and the Seminole Nation Student Honor Reception. Smith's music preserves the sounds of traditional Native American flute playing while adding contemporary influences from her training as a Western flutist. The style of the opening and closing sections of Whisper on the Land for Western flute and piano is especially reminiscent of Native American flute playing. Smith says about this work, written to honor her father:

The piece reflects Native American music and is particularly reminiscent of the native flute. There gradually begins a battle between the cultures as more and more contemporary Western influences are introduced.

This conflict, which many generations of Native Americans have experienced, continues today. I personally have lived with many conflicting values and traditions. Although the Indian culture has all but been eliminated, it still remains a “whisper,” as heard in the closing measures.⁷

Smith's composition Legende, like Whisper on the Land, shows respect for the land as an important cultural value for her people, the Creek Nation. Smith offers the following description of Legende, written for alto flute (or flute) solo:

Whether passing information by spoken words, through paintings, or through music, Indians are natural storytellers. The story of Legende begins near water where an Indian flutist begins to describe the nearby scenery. The teller continues, reflecting on cultural heritage. One can imagine the wealth of proud experience from which the story unravels and fades in quiet melancholy.⁸

Depicting the American Scene

Works by white composers also included the experiences and music of African Americans. Mary Howe's Chain Gang Song (1925) for chorus and orchestra (originally for piano) was her first major composition to be performed publicly. It incorporates three tunes sung by a crew of black prisoners in the mountains of western North Carolina. In her autobiography, Jottings, Howe describes the experience that prompted this composition:

[I was] rounding a bend on horseback…and coming on a gang of twenty or so black convicts in striped clothes…iron ball and chain on many feet, and they sang while they drilled the hole for the dynamite charge. One man held and aimed the iron drill, and two more slugged at it with heavy shoulder weight iron hammers, rhythmically, so the three could know inevitably when the hammer blows would fall.⁹

White composers from other regions of the United States also participated in the American music movement through conscious inclusion of American themes in musical materials. Two Texans, Julia Smith (1911–1989) and Radie Britain (1899–1994), incorporated musical idioms typical of the rural West and Southwest—hoedowns, songs of the rodeo and range, Spanish-American elements, and desert themes. Smith's American Dance Suite (1936, rev. 1963), an orchestral work, sets folk tunes; it was later arranged for two pianos (1957, rev. 1966).¹⁰ Cynthia Parker (premiered 1939), an opera based on the fascinating and tragic story of a young white girl lovingly raised by Comanches and forcibly “repatriated” by whites, quotes Native American melodies. The descriptive titles of several of Britain's works for orchestra bring to life her native Texas: for example, Drouth (1939, also for piano); Red Clay (1946, later versions for piano and a ballet), which employs Indian rhythms; Cactus Rhapsody (1953, also for piano; 1965 arr. for two pianos; 1977 arr. for trio); and Cowboy Rhapsody (1956). Spanish-American rhythms are prominent in Rhumbando (1975) for wind ensemble.

Mary Carr Moore (1873–1957), active as an organizer of several societies to promote American music, employed materials from the Northwest and California, areas in which she spent most of her adult life. Two of her operas, Narcissa (1909–1911) and The Flaming Arrow (1919–1920), make extensive use of American themes and Native American materials. Moore and her mother, who prepared these librettos, worked hard to understand Native Americans—their music, their culture, and the shameful ways in which white Americans had treated them. Narcissa, based on the 1847 massacre of missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman in the Pacific Northwest, is original in presenting the drama through a woman's eyes. Both dramatically and musically, Narcissa's character is the most fully and deeply drawn within the opera. In Moore's opera David Rizzio (1927–1928), another strong woman is the focus: Mary, Queen of Scots.

AMERICAN EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC

Ruth Crawford Seeger

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953) took a different yet thoroughly American path: on the surface she separated her compositional activity from her work with folk materials. Yet as Judith Tick demonstrates, Crawford Seeger wove together the strands of her multifaceted careers with a process of “cultural mediation.”¹¹

FIGURE 11.1. Ruth Crawford Seeger sings folk songs with children at a cooperative nursery school in Silver Spring, Maryland, ca. 1941–1942. Photo courtesy of Michael Seeger and the Estate of Ruth Crawford Seeger.

Because she [Crawford Seeger] remained first and foremost a composer, no matter what she did, all of her various activities as transcriber, editor, and arranger of folk materials reflected that sensibility. I began to see how she understood tradition through a modernist perspective, finding affinities that linked the very old with the very new. An ideology of opposition pervaded her work. Just as modernism flouted conventional practice, so did tradition. Just as modernism rejected Romantic excess, so did tradition. Decoding the ways opposition as a value informed her musical choices integrated the two parts of her musical identity.¹²

The ambiguities and tensions between the “stratosphere” of classical music and the “solid well-traveled highway” of folk song—as Crawford described them in a 1948 letter—were real but not insurmountable for this experimental composer, wife, mother of four children, transcriber and arranger of folk music, piano teacher, and music educator. During the late 1920s and early 1930s Crawford was one of the most innovative, ultramodern American composers, along with Henry Cowell, Edgard Varèse, and Carl Ruggles. Then, from the mid-1930s she concentrated on folk music, setting high standards of transcription with her work from field recordings. She worked with Alan and John Lomax, transcribing American folk songs found at the Library of Congress (Our Singing Country, 1941); created piano arrangements and accompaniments for folk songs (Folk Song U.S.A., 1947, with the Lomaxes and Charles Seeger); and compiled and edited materials for children (American Folk Songs for Children, 1948; Animal Folk Songs for Children, 1950; American Folk Songs for Christmas, 1953). In one composition Crawford did utilize folk melodies: Rissolty, Rossolty (1939) was written for a radio series on folk music, and it was her only concert piece composed between the birth of her first child in 1933 and her final composition, Suite for Wind Quintet (1952). Carrying on her legacy, two of Crawford's children, Michael and Peggy, became professional folk singers.¹³

Crawford's compositions from the 1920s show influences from Scriabin's music, which she had studied with Djane Lavoie-Herz, her piano teacher and a Scriabin disciple. In nine preludes for piano, written between 1924 and 1928 (see HAMW, pp. 271–75 for Prelude No. 2), Crawford's use of melodic cells, dissonance, and irregular phrasing forecast her later stylistic directions. Suite for Five Wind Instruments and Piano (1927, revised 1929), an intense and dramatic work, is rhapsodic, presenting divergent musical ideas and a wide emotional spectrum. Crawford's demanding piano writing suggests her technical skill as a pianist and demonstrates her understanding of the piano's expressive capabilities.

Crawford's eight years of study in Chicago offered many opportunities for an emerging composer: participation in the new music circle that gathered at Madame Herz's salons, acquaintanceship with Carl Sandburg, and, perhaps of greatest impact, her professional relationship with Henry Cowell. Cowell published several of Crawford's works in his influential series, New Music. He is also credited with arranging her move to New York in 1929 and her year of study with Charles Seeger, whom she later married.

From 1930 Crawford's compositions realized in sound the ideas and theories that Charles Seeger articulated primarily with words. He called for a procedure that would reverse or negate tonal organization to allow greater importance for nonpitch parameters. Crawford first cultivated this approach, called dissonant counterpoint, in four Diaphonic Suites for one and two instruments and in Piano Study in Mixed Accents, all composed in 1930. Employing Seeger's principles, Crawford created independent musical lines, described by Seeger as “‘sounding apart’ rather than ‘sounding together’—diaphony rather than symphony.”¹⁴ Her innovative structures employed an economy of melodic material to create organic wholes; elevated the importance of rhythm, dynamics, accent, and timbre; and enacted a role reversal between consonance and dissonance. In parameters other than pitch, Crawford and Seeger defined dissonance (or “dissonating”) as the avoidance of patterns established through repetition and predictability.

Crawford used a serial rotation with a ten-note set in the fourth movement of String Quartet 1931 (see HAMW, pp. 285–90 for the third and fourth movements), coupled with a layered pattern of long-range dynamics and a palindrome structure. Dynamics are also the primary organizing element in the third movement, which Crawford described as a “heterophony of dynamics.”¹⁵ String Quartet 1931, which she considered her most representative work, was composed during the productive year she spent in Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first ever awarded to a woman.

Three Songs (1930–1932), for contralto, oboe, piano, and percussion (see HAMW, pp. 276–84 for “Rat Riddles”), is one of Crawford's most innovative works and employs experimental techniques that only decades later became widely used. In addition to her continued use of dissonant counterpoint and palindromic structures that govern the rhythm and dynamics, Crawford's compositional techniques include vocal performance in “somewhat (though not too much) of the ‘sprechstimme’ mode of execution”¹⁶ for the declamatory vocal line; tone clusters in the piano part; and optional instrumental ostinatos spatially separated from the primary performers. The level of independence among the four concertanti performers is remarkable, yet Crawford created an expressive musical whole consistent with the poems by Carl Sandburg that she set.¹⁷

Vivian Fine

Vivian Fine (1913–2000) continued in the experimental vein of her first theory teacher, Ruth Crawford. Fine studied with Crawford for four years, beginning at age twelve, and began composing at thirteen. Four Pieces for Two Flutes (1930) and Four Songs for voice and string quartet (1933) show an affinity with compositions by Crawford. In each of these early works Fine skillfully employs dissonant counterpoint. The third song, “She Weeps over Rahoon,” involves carefully planned serialized pitch sets that are not related to twelve-tone technique. According to Steven Gilbert, this song “shows a remarkable degree of pitch and timbral control—this in addition to its being a very moving piece.”¹⁸

Fine, an accomplished concert pianist, received a scholarship to study piano at Chicago Musical College with Djane Lavoie-Herz, one of Crawford's teachers, when she was only five years old. In 1931 she moved to New York to begin her career. In addition to premiering much new music, she earned her living as a dance accompanist. Her experience and success in this area led to collaborations with many leading modern dancer-choreographers, including Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham. Between 1937 and 1944, when Fine was most actively composing for dance, her writing moderated to display a more diatonic style, as in The Race of Life (1937), a humorous and popular ballet score, and Concertante for piano and orchestra (1944).¹⁹ Fine identified this move toward tonal writing as an influence from her study with Roger Sessions, as well as a partial response to changing social conditions and a desire to communicate with listeners. Subsequent scores returned to atonality but with less sharp dissonances and an expanded expressive range. In the fourth movement of a 1960 ballet score, Alcestis (see HAMW, pp. 347–54), a prominent melodic motive rises in a succession of perfect fourths. Here an intervallic consistency and a rhythmic motive (a fanfare-like triplet) replace the hierarchical structure of tonality in providing unity to the composition. After the Tradition (1988), commissioned and premiered by the Bay Area Women's Philharmonic in celebration of Fine's seventy-fifth birthday, honors her Jewish origins, although the composer calls this a nonreligious work. The first movement is a Kaddish in memory of cellist George Finkel; the second movement takes its title (“My Heart's in the East and I at the End of the West”) from Yehuda Ha-Levi, a twelfth-century Spanish poet; and the final movement exhibits much vitality.

Several of Fine's compositions highlight feminist issues: for example, Meeting for Equal Rights 1866 (1976) and the chamber opera The Women in the Garden (1977). Meeting, for chorus, soloists, narrator, and orchestra, sets excerpts from nineteenth-century debates on women's suffrage. Although the work is highly complex (it requires three conductors), it still received favorable audience response. One reviewer described it as

a stirring and timely piece devoted to the unhappily still struggling cause of Equal Rights. Taking a feminist viewpoint that is full of righteous rage—which is understandable—and compassion—which is more important—Meeting for Equal Rights 1866…augments and dramatizes the conflicts and hopes of countless generations.²⁰

Fine's libretto for The Women in the Garden brings together on stage Emily Dickinson, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf (quoting from their writings) to create an evocative drama through their interaction.

After her retirement from Bennington College in 1987, Fine remained an active composer and generally wrote on commission. The following works suggest the variety of mediums for which she composed and exemplify the importance of lush string sound in Fine's compositions: Asphodel (1988) for soprano and chamber ensemble; Madrigali Spirituali (1989) for trumpet and string quartet (revised for string orchestra in 1990); Portal for violin and piano; Songs and Arias for French horn, violin, and cello; Hymns (premiered in 1992 for two pianos, cello, and French horn); and the chamber opera Memoirs of Uliana Rooney (1992–1994). Fashioned as a newsreel and including film sequences, Memoirs traces the long life of a woman composer who changes husbands several times as her musical style changes. In this chamber opera, which quotes extensively from her own earlier scores, Fine brings humor and satire to a feminist work.

SERIAL MUSIC

Many American men composers who reached prominence before World War II produced at least some serial compositions during the postwar years (e.g., Roger Sessions, Arthur Berger, and Aaron Copland), and many men composers of the mid-1950s and 1960s established their reputations using serial procedures (e.g., Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen). In composer Jacob Druckman's assessment, “not being a serialist on the East Coast of the United States in the sixties was like not being a Catholic in Rome in the thirteenth century. It was the respectable thing to do, at least once.”²¹ However, as the twentieth century waned, many composers who began as serialists abandoned this process, and few young composers now take up this approach.

Louise Talma

Louise Talma (1906–1996) was among the composers who shifted to the path of twelve-tone writing.²² Talma, whose early compositions were neoclassical and tonal, first adopted twelve-tone serialism in Six Etudes (1953–1954). In a general way, she perhaps took her cue from Igor Stravinsky's gradual incorporation of twelve-tone procedures after the death of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). As a long-time student of Nadia Boulanger and as the first American to teach at Boulanger's Fontainebleau School in France (1936–1939), Talma was strongly influenced by Stravinsky's music. Like Stravinsky's twelve-tone works, Talma's music retains tonal qualities, and serialism is absorbed as an additional unifying factor. Further, Talma indicates she was influenced by Irving Fine's handling of twelve-tone materials in his String Quartet, composed in 1952, the same year that Stravinsky made his first move toward serialism in Cantata. Stylistically, music by Talma and Stravinsky share other common elements: melodies created from short motives, establishment of tonal centers by assertion, nonfunctional harmony, ostinatos, and shifting accents.

Initially, Talma's handling of the row was quite strict. After The Alcestiad (1955–1958), an opera written in collaboration with Thornton Wilder, her approach to twelve-tone ordering procedures became increasingly flexible, and her music often exhibited focus through an emphasis on subsets, intersecting rows, and combinatoriality. She utilized this process in various mediums: the choral work La Corona (1954–1955; see HAMW, pp. 321–32), The Alcestiad, and Textures (1977) for piano. Typical of the writing in her late style, she based Seven Episodes for flute, viola, and piano (1987) on a twelve-tone row, yet also employed traditional tonal relationships. In an analysis of The Tolling Bell (a cantata for baritone and orchestra, 1967–1969) Elaine Barkin concluded that:

Although the work may indeed be “freely serial” [Talma's description], it is not casual, not “indeterminate”; very carefully determined junctures are articulated, critical constraints have been imposed upon all dimensions of the work at “initiating moments” and “points of arrival,” the text-music associations are quite clear—neither overstated nor concealed.²³

The text of Have You Heard? Do You Know? (1974–1980), like the libretto for The Alcestiad, offers ample opportunity to critique gender stereotypes and to raise larger feminist issues. During its seven scenes, we meet Della and Fred (a white, middle-class, suburban couple) and their neighbor Mildred. Analogous musical treatment for Fred's concern about the ups and downs of the stock market and Della's similarly moving hemlines gives parity to traditional male and female experiences. Their desire for a “quiet place” is also handled nonhierarchically, with closely related music. However, the work as a whole reinforces gender stereotypes, seems uncritical of the emptiness of the characters' conversations, and glorifies the desire for material things. Accompanied by a mixed chamber ensemble, Have You Heard? returns stylistically to neoclassicism with melodic recurrence, tonal referents, and ostinatos reminiscent of Stravinsky.

Joan Tower

Before 1974, the music of Joan Tower (b. 1938) employed various serial procedures. Prelude for Five Players (1970) opens with twelve pitch classes, subsequently handled as an unordered aggregate. According to Tower, Prelude “is divided into six sections which are differentiated by changes in tempo, texture, register and dynamics which, for the most part, are associated with various hierarchizations of the twelve-tone set structure.”²⁴ During the early 1970s Tower gradually moved away from serial procedures: Hexachords for flute (1972) is based on a six-tone, unordered chromatic series, and Breakfast Rhythms I and II for clarinet and five instruments (1974–1975) complete the shift. Many of the works that follow are more lyrical and accessible, carrying image-related titles to “open a tiny window into the piece”²⁵ for audiences. For example, Amazon I (1977) reflects on the almost constant flow and motion of the music and the Brazilian river; Wings (1981) draws on the flight patterns of a large bird, paralleled in the hovering and swooping lines of the solo clarinet; and Night Fields (1994) has a title selected to provide a setting consistent with some of the moods of this string quartet. Tower rarely begins with a title or image, but rather allows the title to emerge from events and gestures in the music. Her music is often characterized by vivid orchestration and energetic rhythms, which Tower attributes to eight years of growing up in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. After focusing on sonority during the 1970s, Tower gave more attention to rhythmic aspects of music in the 1980s. Petroushkates (1980), for example, not only quotes from Stravinsky's ballet but paraphrases the very fabric of his score, much in the manner of a sixteenth-century parody Mass.

Tower's early works were primarily chamber music, and many were composed for the Da Capo Chamber Players, which she founded in 1969 and in which she performed as pianist for fifteen years. In 1981 the American Composers Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies presented the premiere of Sequoia (1979–1981), a commission by the Jerome Foundation. It was subsequently performed by the San Francisco Symphony under Davies, by the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, and by several major orchestras under Leonard Slatkin. After the St. Louis Symphony (directed by Slatkin) recorded Sequoia in 1984—the first of several recordings of her compositions—Tower was named composer-in-residence with this orchestra (1985–1988).²⁶ Her increased visibility since 1981 demonstrates the career importance of writing symphonic works that receive performances by major orchestras led by established conductors. Since the success of Sequoia, her first orchestral composition, Tower has focused on this arena in such works as Music for Cello and Orchestra (1984); concertos for piano (Homage to Beethoven, 1985), flute (1989), and violin (1992); Concerto for Orchestra, a joint commission with premieres in 1991 (St. Louis), 1992 (Chicago), and 1994 (New York); and Duets (1994), premiered by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in 1995. Tower won the 1990 Grawemeyer Award, a $150,000 prize for a large orchestral work, Silver Ladders (1986). Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1986) began as a tribute to Aaron Copland and is now generally perceived to be a feminist response to his Fanfare for the Common Man. In less than a decade its popularity spawned four additional fanfares, including one for the centennial of Carnegie Hall (No. 3, premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1991). By 1997 more than two hundred ensembles had performed the first fanfare. According to Tower, the series of fanfares aims “to honor women who are adventurous and take risks.”²⁷ In May 1998 Tower herself was honored with induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her outstanding achievements in music.

Barbara Kolb

Barbara Kolb's (b. 1939) handling of serial techniques in Appello (1976) for piano shows how a personal style can emerge from this compositional procedure. Each of the four movements of Appello is based on a series from Book 1a of Pierre Boulez's Structures (1952), and the third movement “involves a strict time-point organization for control of the rhythmic acceleration that progresses throughout the movement.”²⁸ Appello, however, stands in sharp contrast to Boulez's Structures. Kolb's composition is a rich, often dense, expressive work in comparison to the sparsely pointillistic Structures. Kolb integrates serialism into a larger stylistic repertoire that combines the performer's freedom (in dynamics, pedaling, and indeterminate clusters) with the composer's control. As in many of Kolb's compositions, texture and timbre in Appello remain extremely important expressive means. Her choice of title, which means “call” in Italian, and the poetic references at the beginning of each movement suggest a focus on expressive import, while Boulez's title and subdivisions are pointedly abstract. According to Kolb, each movement is a different call—one that is “reaching and enticing, rather than insistent or demanding.”²⁹

SOUND-MASS

During the first several decades of the twentieth century the domination of music by functional tonality was challenged in a number of ways. Initially these procedures preserved pitch as the foreground compositional element, but gradually compositions refocused attention on other parameters. Sound-mass minimizes the importance of individual pitches in preference for texture, timbre, and dynamics as primary shapers of gesture and impact. As part of the exploration and expansion of sonic materials, soundmass obscures the boundary between sound and noise. Emerging from tone clusters in piano works of American experimentalists in the early twentieth century, sound-mass moved into orchestral composition most noticeably by the late 1950s and 1960s. Many works that involve sound-mass also include other aspects of sonic exploration, such as the extensive use of muted brass or strings, flutter tonguing, wide vibrato, extreme ranges (especially highs), and glissandos (a form of microtonal writing). Early choral explorations of sound-mass occur in Sound Patterns (1961) by Pauline Oliveros and From Dreams of Brass (1963–1964) by Canadian composer Norma Beecroft (b. 1934). Beecroft blurs individual pitches in favor of a collective timbre through the use of vocal and instrumental clusters, choral speech, narrator, and a wash of sounds from an electronic tape. Both Barbara Kolb and Nancy Van de Vate have written compositions that rely heavily on soundmass; however, their compositions also include an array of sources melded into personal stylistic syntheses.

Barbara Kolb

Continuing the American experimental tradition, Kolb has focused her more recent compositional activity on unconventional ensembles as much as on unorthodox styles. Although she has written for solo piano (Appello, see above) and occasionally for full orchestra, many of her compositions are for nontraditional chamber ensembles, some with voice. She has also created a series of works combining prerecorded (nonelectronic) sounds with various instruments: for example, Spring River Flowers Moon Night (1974–1975), for two live pianists and a tape that involves an unusual group—mandolin, guitar, chimes, vibraphone, marimba, and percussion; Looking for Claudio (1975), with guitar and tape of mandolin, six guitars, vibraphone, chimes, and three human voices. Stylistically, both her stimuli and her creations are diverse. Three Place Settings (1968) offers unusual wit and humor in a three-movement work for violin, clarinet, string bass, percussion, and narrator; Trobar Clus, to Lukas (1970) borrows a repeating structure from the eleventh or twelfth century; Solitaire (1971) uses quotations from Chopin; Homage to Keith Jarrett and Gary Burton (1976) draws on jazz and improvisation; Cantico (1982) is a tape collage for a film about St. Francis of Assisi; and Millefoglie (1984–1985)³⁰ combines computer-generated tape with chamber orchestra.

In Crosswinds for wind ensemble (1968) Kolb makes extensive use of sound-mass as she explores the metaphorically loaded title. The work unfolds after the opening segment presents the principal gestures of the whole. Relatively stable blocks of sound (later with more flutter and motion) alternate with soloistic lines suggesting chamber music. The use of mutes creates greater unity between brass and woodwind timbres, contributing to the indistinct plurality of the sound-mass and highlighting timbre and density as the primary compositional elements. The release after the first major climax exposes a single saxophone, reminiscent of the opening bassoon solo in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Here again Kolb writes for an ensemble outside the musical establishment.

During the 1990s Kolb has composed more frequently for larger ensemble, and her style is sometimes more accessible—a shift common to many composers in the United States. In Voyants for Piano and Chamber Orchestra, premiered by Radio France in 1991 and subsequently revised and expanded for publication, Kolb creates a musical narrative with the piano functioning as the seer or prophet mentioned in the title.³¹ All in Good Time, commissioned for the 150th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic in 1994, was premiered under the baton of Leonard Slatkin, who has led subsequent performances with major orchestras. Texture and timbre remain important elements, along with rhythmic development and a hint of jazz, especially apparent in the central section for saxophone solo decorated by vibraphone and bass clarinet. Coupled with minimalism, jazz elements are more apparent in the ballet score New York Moonglow (1995), premiered by jazz notable Lew Tabackin on tenor sax and flute, along with five other musicians. Kolb's dense textures in the outer sections were supported by multilayered choreography, and Tabackin's improvised solo was matched by choreographer-dancer Elisa Monte's own improvisation. Music for the ensemble is fully notated, whereas Tabackin's part is both notated and left to improvisation.

Nancy Van de Vate

Nancy Van de Vate (b. 1930), whose catalogue is large and varied, has pursued an active career as a composer, educator, and promoter of contemporary music. In the mid-1950s she redirected her plans to be a professional pianist when she moved to Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband and child. She felt performance opportunities were limited there and that she could not commit to the necessary daily routine of practice: “I changed to composition, then became so totally engrossed in it that I never again wished to direct the major part of my time and energy to any other aspect of music.”³² Van de Vate taught piano privately and then at several colleges and universities throughout the southern United States and in Hawaii. After leading the Southeastern Composers League for a decade, she founded the League of Women Composers in 1975 (renamed the International League of Women Composers in 1979) and served as its chair for seven years. While living in Hawaii and then in Indonesia for nearly four years (1982–1985), Van de Vate developed an enthusiasm for Asian musics, which can be heard in the colorful orchestrations of works such as Journeys (1981–1984) and Pura Besakih (Besakih Temple, Bali; 1987). In addition to massive textures, Journeys combines minimalist aspects, a melodic focus of the soloists' lines, extended string sonorities, an enlarged percussion battery (especially mallet instruments), and the development of motivic material (C, B, C, D^b). Like Kolb, Van de Vate integrates many different techniques and styles. Van de Vate, who in 1985 took up residence in Vienna, Austria, has expressed a desire to communicate with a broad public and has worked toward this not only in her compositions but also through her involvement as artistic director for Vienna Modern Masters, a recording company that produces an extensive catalog of contemporary music.³³

Chernobyl (1987)³⁴ and Concerto No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra (1996) are among Van de Vate's works for orchestra that utilize sound-mass. According to Van de Vate, Chernobyl was written “to express universal feelings about that event [an explosion at the Soviet nuclear power plant at Chernobyl] and its meanings for all peoples…. [It] is not intended to tell a story, but rather to evoke images and feelings.”³⁵ The first half of the composition layers coloristic, dense, static clusters; the second half is more diatonic and conventional in the treatment of harmony, rhythm, and melody. A descending minor second, which Van de Vate calls a “weeping motif,” is prominent during the second section. It evokes the closing of the Revolution Scene in Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, where a similar string figure of repeated pairs frames the short conclusion sung by the Simpleton. In a prophetic lament, the Simpleton, alone on stage, warns of the impending disaster of war for the Russians. The affinity between these musical gestures is strengthened through the similarity of timbre, rhythm, pace, and range along with contextual links: the setting in Russia and the potential devastation. Van de Vate's Violin Concerto is a virtuosic work based on a symmetrical four-note cell (G, A^b, B^b, C^b) and reveals much contrast within the unified one-movement form. During the late 1990s Van de Vate has concentrated her compositional activities on opera, another large form.

In addition to her commitment to large-scale works, Van de Vate has composed for other mediums. Two trios offer considerable contrast with the orchestral works just discussed: Music for Viola, Percussion and Piano (1976) and Trio for Bassoon, Percussion and Piano (1980, rev. 1982). Timbre remains an important compositional consideration—occasional clusters occur in the piano parts, the bassoon's upper range is explored, and percussion batteries add coloristic elements. However, tuneful melodies and periodic metrical organization also play important roles, and texture is not a primary component.

RESHAPING TRADITIONS

Julia Perry

Julia Perry's extensive catalogue reveals her familiarity with two worlds: the vernacular music of her African-American heritage and Western (neo)classical practices. Born in 1924, Perry linked her early works with their roots in spirituals and blues to the rural past of a colonized people (e.g., the vocal solo “Free at Last” [pub. 1951] and Prelude for Piano [1946, rev. 1962]).³⁶ During the 1950s, while Perry lived in Europe, she abandoned the outward signs of African-American identity and shifted her artistic attention to European models, especially that of her teacher, Luigi Dallapiccola. Perry avoided the twelve-tone system but followed Dallapiccola's focus on motivic unity and the transformation of small melodic cells, using them as her central organizing principles (e.g., in Short Piece [1952, reorchestrated in 1962 and 1965] and Symphony No. 1 for violas and double basses [1961]).

With growing racial awareness emerging from the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, Perry returned to a focus on conspicuous issues of the black experience, transformed and reshaped to reflect her social reality. Contemporary urban referents are found in her programmatic titles and in the incorporation of rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues styles. In the explicit racial components of Bicentennial Reflections (1977) for tenor and six instrumentalists, for example, she draws the audience's attention to race with visual and textual elements, which seem to be supported by the musical gestures. For example, Perry's manuscript prescribes that the three percussionists should be an “American Negro (dark complexion),” a “Chinese American,” and an “American-Aryan or Jew.” In the closing moments of this piece the percussion parts suggest the potential for violence and self-destruction in U.S. race relations, following the final line of text: “By the fountain of dreams flowing in red.”

Hailed as an individual of great promise, Perry was favorably recognized during her twenties with major awards, international study opportunities, publications, and favorable reviews. The 1960s, perhaps her most productive decade in terms of the quantity of large-scale compositions, brought Perry distribution of her music by established publishers and the release of three works on separate recordings by CRI. Although she had some major performances, including one by the New York Philharmonic, her public visibility and press coverage seem to have diminished. Sometime during the 1960s Perry developed serious physical health problems including acromegaly and later, probably in 1971, was struck by another grave tragedy: a paralytic stroke affecting her right side. Although she learned to write with her left hand and continued to compose, she lived her last years in seclusion and with diminished ability to work.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

In the midst of much experimentation and a proliferation of styles in the late twentieth century, the music of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939) continues the American symphonic tradition, with ties to neoclassicism and the great American symphonists of the 1930s and 1940s. Zwilich updates this tradition, yet she retains a primary focus on pitch, relies on recurring and predictable patterns, and employs developmental forms. Discussions of her music frequently mention both her craft and the music's appeal to concert audiences and musicians. Although handled conventionally, Zwilich's orchestration is often vivid, as heard in Celebration for Orchestra (1984), and her string writing virtuosic, as in Prologue and Variations for string orchestra (1983). Describing her recent works, K. Robert Schwarz wrote that Zwilich's “music has become increasingly tonal and consonant. Today it is neo-Classic in concision but neo-Romantic in intensity.”³⁷

After completing a master's degree in composition at Florida State University, Zwilich moved to New York and worked as a freelance violinist. A year later, in 1965, she began a seven-year tenure with the American Symphony Orchestra, gaining important experience for her compositional activity. In 1975 she became the first woman awarded a doctorate in composition from Juilliard, where she studied with Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter, the most important influences on her music. Zwilich has developed a high-profile career with numerous commissions from large, prestigious musical institutions and performers. In 1995 she became the first appointee to the Carnegie Hall Composer's Chair.

In 1983 Zwilich won the Pulitzer Prize for music for her Symphony No. 1 (1982), becoming the first woman to receive this important recognition. The first movement of Symphony No. 1 (see HAMW, pp. 377–401), an organic elaboration of the initial fifteen measures, establishes tonal stability through motivic reiteration, decorated tertian harmony, and pedal points. The intervallic persistence of thirds (especially minor thirds) also contributes to its coherence. String Trio (1982), written at the same time, is noticeably more angular, abstract, dissonant, and virtuosic. A similar contrast between a large-scale public work and a more intimate composition is also apparent in a comparison between Symbolon (1988) for full orchestra and Double Quartet (1984) for two string quartets. Symbolon unfolds in broad, simple gestures, in contrast to the darker, more intense Double Quartet, which explores the concept of duality. Tension between D minor and D major persists until the final moments of the work, when D major is finally confirmed.

Since the mid-1980s Zwilich has created a substantial series of concertos, both for the standard instruments (piano in 1986; the Triple Concerto for piano, violin, and cello in 1995; violin in 1997) and for instruments infrequently featured as soloists with major symphonies (trombone in 1988; bass trombone, strings, timpani, and cymbals in 1989; flute in 1989; oboe in 1990; bassoon in 1992; French horn in 1993). According to Zwilich,

the concerto is an inherently dramatic situation with many analogies to the theatre. For instance, a soloist (protagonist) may have a cadenza (soliloquy) in which to voice his or her essential nature, but the full development of a character requires a dialogue with other strong characters. For this reason, I very much enjoy choosing a special orchestration for a particular solo instrument, aiming for strong but complementary orchestral forces.³⁸

Her approach to the solo writing has been to work closely with each of the soloists—often prominent performers—who would premiere these works in an effort to combine virtuosity and idiomatic capabilities of each instrument and performer.

Libby Larsen

In the past twenty years, Libby Larsen (b. 1950) has become one of the most important and successful composers in the United States, with works for orchestra, dance, opera, chorus, theater, chamber ensembles, and soloists. Larsen, whose works are widely written about and commercially recorded, studied at the University of Minnesota with Dominick Argento and co-founded the Minnesota Composers Forum (now the American Composers Forum) in 1973. In addition to giving many performances throughout the United States and Europe, Larsen has served as composer-in-residence with the Minnesota Orchestra (1983–1987) and with a consortium of musical organizations in Denver, including the Colorado Symphony Orchestra (1997–1999). She won a 1994 Grammy for the CD The Art of Arleen Augér on which Larsen's song cycle Sonnets from the Portuguese (1989) for soprano and chamber ensemble is featured.³⁹ Larsen, who claims Gregorian chant, rock 'n' roll, stride boogie piano, and music from radio and television are all among her musical influences, has frequently sought to update the traditions and sounds of the concert hall through the inclusion of vernacular music. For example, in Ghosts of an Old Ceremony (1991) for orchestra and dance, written in collaboration with choreographer Brenda Way, Larsen focuses on migration, from the physical westward movement of American pioneer women to the migration of sound between the early 1800s and the late twentieth century. This composition not only challenges the expectations of orchestral players and audiences, but it also contests stereotypic, romanticized views of westward expansion and brings to attention the particular hardships and losses faced by these courageous women. According to Larsen,

Sound, and the groups of musicians who represent it, have migrated as surely and strongly as all the other aspects of our culture. Sound, which began in monodirectional presentation in the concert hall, is now heard mixed through speakers coming from multi-directions. Noise has migrated into the domain of musical sound by means of the sampler. At the end of the 1800s, sound was dominated by the high registers of the violin sections. Throughout this century sound has relocated to the bass…with the proliferation of speakers, electric basses, electric drums and digital mixing.⁴⁰

The dancers take center stage, while members of the orchestra perform from both sides of the stage, the side tiers, and the back of the hall. Some of the musicians remain in place, others relocate, and some disappear amid sounds that range from an old hymn tune to readings from diaries of pioneer women to electronic music.⁴¹ Piano Concerto: “Since Armstrong” (1990), premiered in 1991 by pianist Janina Fialkowska and the Minnesota Orchestra, is another example of Larsen's blending of styles. She describes this piece as a dinner party whose guests include Louis Armstrong, Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Jelly Roll Morton, and blues guitarist Robert Lockwood.

In a 1996 interview Larsen discussed the importance of rhythm for her style: “I believe that music springs from language of the people. I am intensely interested in how music can be derived from the rhythms and pitches of spoken American English.”⁴² Although applicable for all mediums, this approach is especially relevant for her vocal and choral works, many of which are settings of texts by women or about strong females. Some examples include The Settling Years (1988) for mixed chorus, woodwind quintet, and piano;⁴³ Songs from Letters (after Calamity Jane) (1989) for soprano and piano; Eleanor Roosevelt (1996), a dramatic cantata for mezzo, speaker, mixed chorus, clarinet, cello, piano, and percussion; and Mary Cassatt (1994) for mezzo, trombone, and orchestra.

Chen Yi

Like the other composers in this section, Chen Yi (b. 1953) is committed to composing music that people wish to hear and musicians wish to perform. In addition to fusing music of the East and West, her main goal has been described as “the desire to create ‘real music’ for society and future generations.”⁴⁴ Chen,⁴⁵ the daughter of two medical doctors, began piano and violin lessons at age three. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s she practiced in secret and then spent two years doing forced labor in the countryside as part of her “reeducation.” When Chen was allowed to return to her home city of Guangzhou, China, at age seventeen, she became concertmaster and composer with the Beijing Opera Troupe, which specialized in westernized socialist-realist style. She also began studying Chinese traditional music and music theory. Finally, in 1977, Chen was able to enroll as a student at the Beijing Central Conservatory, and in 1986 she became the first woman in China to receive a Master of Arts degree in composition. That year she also arrived in the United States as a participant in the Center for United States–China Arts Exchange at Columbia University, which composer Chou Wen-Chung directs.

In 1993 Chen received her D.M.A. from Columbia and was appointed composer-in-residence with three San Francisco musical organizations: the Women's Philharmonic (which she helped overcome a serious fiscal crisis), Chanticleer, and the Creative Arts Program at Aptos Middle School. In addition to having a busy schedule of composing, Chen taught composition at Peabody Conservatory (1996–1998). In the fall of 1998 she joined the faculty at the Conservatory of the University of Missouri at Kansas City as the Lorena Searcey Cravens Missouri Endowed Professor in Composition.

Discussing her compositional style, Chen stated:

I want to speak in a natural way in my own language, and that is a combination of everything I have learned from the past—what I learned in the conservatory, and what I learned in the field collecting folk songs. It's all a source for my imagination…. If you just put them together as Eastern and Western, then it sounds artificial—they don't sound together. But if you can merge them in your blood, then they sound natural together.⁴⁶

Reviewers consistently cite her success in bringing these musical traditions together and the exciting timbres she achieves. Duo Ye No. 2 (1987) for orchestra draws on pentatonic material and was influenced by a traditional song and dance form of the Dong minority in the Guangxi Province. After it was performed at Avery Fisher Hall by the Central Philharmonic Orchestra of China, JoAnn Falletta became the first American conductor to program Chen's work with her performance of Duo Ye No. 2 at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Other works that demonstrate Chen's vivid orchestrations include Sparkle (1992) for a mixed octet; Ge Xu (Antiphony, 1994) for orchestra; and Golden Flute (1997) for flute and orchestra. Chinese Myths Cantata (1996) for male choir, orchestra, and Chinese dance—a joint project between Chanticleer and the Women's Philharmonic—emerged as the culmination of Chen's residency program. A poignant and theatrical setting of three Chinese creation myths, it includes four traditional Chinese instruments: erhu (fiddle), yangqin (dulcimer), pipa (lute), and zheng (zither). During the second movement, the audience is encouraged to participate with nonsense syllables to contribute to the climax.⁴⁷

SONIC EXPLORATION

The expansion of sonic resources during the twentieth century can be viewed as an intersection of events, including the enrichment of instrumental and vocal resources throughout the Western European tradition and the century's craving for newness. Further, independence of timbre as a primary compositional parameter emerges from what George Rochberg has described as the shift from a temporal to a spatial concept of music, and it is closely tied to the move away from a melodic-harmonic treatment of pitch material.⁴⁸ By defining “acceptable” musical material, women have found resources to challenge cultural norms and the ideology of dominant culture, to reformulate gender constructions, to confront the gender identification of specific instruments, and to destabilize musical and social hierarchies.

Annea Lockwood (b. 1939) often challenges the line between music and noise in her compositions. While working in many genres, her compositions consistently focus on timbral exploration and performance, including spatial concerns. A native of New Zealand, Lockwood came to the United States in 1973 after living in England for twelve years. In the mid-1960s she moved away from instrumental music and synthesized electronic materials to work more with acoustic sound sources from nature. Her imaginative Glass Concert, performed many times from 1966 to 1973, uses diverse sizes and shapes of glass, which are struck, rubbed, bowed, and snapped:

I began to feel that electronic timbres, that is, the classic studio timbres, were simplistic by comparison with acoustic timbres and spectra, and not satisfying, not intellectually stimulating, not interesting to work with…. I needed to refine my hearing and my audio sensitivity…. What fascinates me still about acoustic phenomena is the large area of unpredictability about them.⁴⁹

During the 1970s and early 1980s Lockwood focused on works for tape and pursued explorations of performance, including theatrical elements, ritual, and improvisation. Tiger Balm (1970) for tape effectively combines the acoustic sounds of a cat purring, a heartbeat, gongs, jaw's harps, tigers mating, a woman making love, and an airplane. Here, and typically, Lockwood's arrangement and selection of sounds are crucial since she uses the sounds unmodulated.

During the 1970s and early 1980s she also gave increased attention to events and installations, such as in The River Archive (recordings of rivers from around the world were collected over a period of years and presented in 1973–1980) and in A Sound Map of the Hudson River (1983), in which the musical parameters of rhythm, pitch, counterpoint, texture, and form are all apparent in the natural sounds of the fifteen locations along the Hudson. Since the mid-1980s Lockwood has returned to composition for acoustic instruments and voice. She has composed a number of solo works, including Amazonia Dreaming (1988), For Richard (1992), and Ear-Walking Woman (1996), plus chamber music such as Thousand Year Dreaming (1990) for four didjeridus, frame drums, conch shells, winds, and projections; and Monkey Trips (1995), developed with the California E.A.R. Unit.⁵⁰

The range of timbres on acoustic instruments has multiplied during the second half of the century, and the literature mentioned here gives only a hint of the scope and breadth of activity. Lucia Dlugoszewski (b. 1934), whose Fire Fragile Flight (1974) was the first work by a woman to win a Koussevitzky International Recording Award (1977), invented the “timbre piano” in 1951. She has consistently worked with expanded acoustic sounds, using conventional and invented instruments. She composed Suchness Concert (1958–1960), which is concerned with Zen immediacy, and Geography of Noon (1964) for an ensemble of one hundred of her newly invented percussion instruments, built by sculptor Ralph Dorazio. Her Space Is a Diamond (1970) for solo trumpet virtually catalogues extended technique for this instrument.

Composer Anne LeBaron (b. 1953) is also an internationally recognized harpist who pioneered extended techniques, prepared harp, and electronic extensions of harp timbres. She breaks the stereotypes of harpists and harp music in works such as the solo improvisation Dog-Gone Cat Act (recorded in 1981) for prepared harp and in Blue Harp Studies (1991) with electronic processing. Whether for the unusually constituted LeBaron Quintet (trumpet, tuba, electric guitar, harp, and percussion) or for conventional ensembles, LeBaron's compositions consistently use evocative, colorful timbres. During the 1980s her vocabulary expanded through an increased use of microtones, world music, sounds from nature, electronics, and new instruments, for example, in Lamentation/Invocation (1984).⁵¹

Although some timbral exploration moves in the direction of noise and high intensity, other compositions highlight quiet, refined effects. Translucent Unreality No. 1 (1978) by Darleen Cowles Mitchell (b. 1942), for prepared piano, flute, and wind chimes, unfolds slowly and calmly, like the ephemeral flowers mentioned in its epigraph. Relative, nonproportional rhythmic durations contribute to the mood of fluid impermanence. From My Garden No. 2 (1983) by Ursula Mamlok (b. 1928), another delicate piece, is scored for oboe, French horn, and piano, with subsequent versions for viola or violin. The piano part includes pizzicato effects inside the instrument, and each performer also plays a crotale (a thick metal cymbal with definite pitch) by bowing as well as striking it.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, both percussion and the allied parameter of rhythm were largely untapped resources in music of the Western European tradition. Percussion now enjoys prominence through its own ensembles as well as an expanded role in orchestras and chamber groups. Before composing Amazonia Dreaming (1988), for solo snare drum, Annea Lockwood thought of this medium as limited; however, she discovered it is capable of making “wonderful, animal-like sounds…as well as great beauty in its own natural resonances.”⁵² Julia Perry's Homunculus C.F. (1960; see HAMW, pp. 335–44), scored for harp, celesta/piano, and an ensemble of eight percussionists, creates a precarious balance between pitch (melodic and harmonic) and rhythm. Although percussion is the principal timbre, the macrostructure is based on a single harmonic unit rather than on rhythm. And although the pitched instruments offer melody and create chords, the chosen instruments (harp, timpani, vibraphone, and even celesta) do not produce sounds with a particularly clear pitch focus. Further, harmonic gestures are virtually nonexistent despite the generation of pitch material from a single chord: a chord of the fifteenth (the “C.F.” of the title) rising from an E. Perry's title also derives from the scene in Goethe's Faust II in which Wagner, Faust's apprentice, brings Homunculus (literally “little man” in Latin) into being in a vial via alchemy. Perry described the work in figurative terms: “Having selected percussion instruments for my formulae, then maneuvering and distilling them by means of the Chord of the Fifteenth (C.F.), this musical test tube baby was brought to life.”⁵³ Like the alchemy process, Perry's musical materials unfold gradually, and only the final phrase (mm. 171–180) builds in density to include all ten performers and all eight pitches. Homunculus “becomes” in a sharp flash. In addition to this surface narrative, Homunculus C.F. can also be analyzed in terms of a narrative focused on instability and on ambiguous roles, perhaps mirroring the insecurity of the experimental artist in contemporary society—particularly true in the case of an African-American woman during the early years of the Civil Rights movement.

Performers as well as composers have been active participants in extending sonic resources, particularly in cases of close collaboration (e.g., Bethany Beardslee and Milton Babbitt; Jan DeGaetani and George Crumb; Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio). Interestingly, the leading vocalists of contemporary music and especially music with extended techniques are almost exclusively women, including performance artists Laurie Anderson, Joan La Barbara, and Meredith Monk. Many of the compositions exploring vocal resources also call for virtuosic performance skills and a reevaluation of text and the human voice as components of musical expression.

Jan DeGaetani (1933–1989), noted for both technical skill and artistic performances of contemporary music, surely influenced and shaped composition for voice. Jacob Druckman, Peter Maxwell Davies, György Ligeti, and Pierre Boulez composed works for her. The link between DeGaetani and composer George Crumb is particularly striking, covering more than two decades. She premiered and recorded most of his music for voice, including Madrigals (1965 and 1969) and Ancient Voices of Children (1970). As professor of voice at the Eastman School of Music and Artist-in-Residence at the Aspen Music Festival for many years, DeGaetani was influential on the next generation of performers.

Like DeGaetani, Cathy Berberian (1925–1983) was a virtuosic performer. Born in the United States of Armenian parents, she developed strong theatrical abilities, and her dramatic presence remained powerful even when illness forced her to perform from a wheelchair. Her vocal skills influenced compositions not only by Luciano Berio, her husband from 1950 to 1966, but also by John Cage, Igor Stravinsky (the final version of Elegy for JFK), and numerous Europeans (Sylvano Bussotti, Henri Pousseur, Bruno Maderna, Hans Werner Henze). A large portion of Berio's output was written for Berberian: Chamber Music (1953), Circles (1960), Sequenza III (1960s), and Recital I (for Cathy) (1972). Berberian's voice is also crucial in Berio's dramatic electronic works, Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958) and Visage (1961), which both link violence and the erotic in disturbing ways. Even after their divorce Berberian and Berio continued to collaborate musically. Berberian's own compositions—Stripsody (1966), Awake and Read-Joyce (1972), and Anathema con VarieAzioni (1972)—were also written with her own voice in mind. Stripsody, which deals with comic strips as cultural discourse, is a collage verbalizing onomatopoeic words from the comics. Inserted into this witty texture are very short scenes from comic strips (e.g., “Peanuts”) or stereotypic movie scenes.⁵⁴

PERFORMANCE ART AND EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC^*

Pushing the boundaries of performance and composition still further, performance art unites the roles of composer and performer and generally incorporates a variety of media. Theatricality, vocal experimentation, multimedia events, Eastern philosophy, dance, and storytelling are among the elements included in its stylistic and musical diversity. Performance art, along with minimalism and neotonality, was one of the new directions of the 1980s that sought to reengage the public. A performance artist par excellence, Laurie Anderson has been especially active in this field. Composers Pauline Oliveros and Meredith Monk both have created numerous pieces that fall under this heading. Joan La Barbara, not a performance artist per se, has been active as a collaborator with avant-garde musicians and has developed an extended vocal technique that earns her the title of experimental musician/composer.

Diamanda Galás

The work of composer–performance artist Diamanda Galás (b. 1955) transgresses many norms, and its unconventional timbres are meant to provoke and to challenge the ideology of dominant culture. Her work is guerilla art. Galás's extraordinary Plague Mass (1989) is an anguished cry of outrage for persons living with AIDS. Bathed in red stage lights and covered with a bloodlike substance, Galás appropriates almost earsplitting screams—high, sustained, and raw—to condemn the treatment of people with HIV and AIDS and to denounce U.S. policy and the response to the AIDS crisis. Her performance is riveting and pushes the boundaries of music or any art form. In the words of Richard Gehr, “She demonstrates how an activist artist can push the limits of acceptable social responses, challenging the status quo.”⁵⁵

In her music Galás utilizes an extensive personal background: keyboard prodigy, jazz singer, and avant-garde vocalist for European composers such as Vinko Globokar and Iannis Xenakis. She also draws on her Greek heritage through the use of gestures and sounds of Maniot women's mourning. The Maniot, like Galás, used their mourning incantations, called moirologi, as a political force: these Greek women would scream and pull out their hair in order to incite people to revenge. Galás acknowledges that these women were considered a threat to the authority of patriarchal society,⁵⁶ their incantations “a form of empowerment for the women—an enactment, an assumption, of the power of death.”⁵⁷ In Plague Mass, the shocking sounds of Galás's lamentation push us as listeners to share her outrage and spur us to political action. In other works Galás has undertaken further wrenching topics in equally compelling ways. Vena Cava (premiered in 1992) explores themes of psychological claustrophobia and solitary confinement as manifest in people with mental illness or AIDS-related dementia. Performed in total darkness, Schrei 27 (1994) and Schrei X (1995), whose titles mean “shriek/scream” in German, address the interior isolation experienced by a person who is tortured or subjected to sensory deprivation. These two works juxtapose high-intensity vocal sounds with absolute silence.⁵⁸

Pauline Oliveros

Theatricality, humor, feminism, meditation, audience participation, and experiment all are important aspects of the music of Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932). Her family was musical: her mother and grandmother taught piano, and her grandfather collected musical instruments. After studying piano with her mother, Oliveros took up her brother's instrument, the accordion. Later she learned tuba and French horn, but her lifelong affinity with the accordion has remained central to her compositions and improvisations. Her studies at the University of Houston (1949–1952) included accordion and composition. From Houston she transferred to San Francisco State College to study composition with Robert Erickson, and received her B.A. degree there in 1957.

Oliveros's early works show a tendency toward experiment. Her Trio for Flute, Percussion, and String Bass (1963) has a Webern-like texture but uses nontraditional notation, with and without indicating exact pitches. In contrast, Aeolian Partitions (1970) has approximately one page of notated music and several pages of instructions, including a list of the required performers and their props (a broom for the cellist, a newspaper and flashlight for the pianist, etc.) and a very detailed scenario. Aeolian Partitions also calls for telepathic improvisation.

Each performer concentrates on another single performer. When he hears an interval or a chord mentally, he plays one of the pitches and assumes that he is sending the other pitch or pitches to the other performer by mental telepathy.⁵⁹

Aeolian Partitions is one of many theatre pieces Oliveros has written. Her earliest work in this genre was Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato (1964). She added her pet mynah bird because it joined in during rehearsals; since the bird added a visual element, Oliveros asked Elizabeth Harris to design stage sets. Harris created a wooden seesaw with revolving chairs, which made reading a score impossible; so Oliveros replaced her original music with a set of simple instructions. The instructions for Pieces of Eight (1965) are more elaborate, calling for stage movement, costumes, cash register, skull and crossbones, and a bust of Beethoven with flashing red lights for eyes. Other theatre pieces include George Washington Slept Here, Participle Dangling in Honor of Gertrude Stein, Double Basses at Twenty Paces, and Link (renamed Bonn Feier).

Oliveros has also experimented with electronic music. In 1961, along with Morton Subotnick and Roman Sender, she founded the improvisation group Sonics, later renamed the San Francisco Tape Music Center. When the Center, now called the Center for Contemporary Music, relocated to Mills College in 1966, Oliveros became its director. Her commitment to electronically produced sound has influenced even her music for traditional performance forces. Sound Patterns (1961), which won a Gaudeamus prize, calls for an a cappella choir, yet it mimics tape devices such as white noise, filtering, ring modulation, and percussive envelope. Bye Bye Butterfly (1965) is an improvised piece realized by Oliveros with two oscillators, two live amplifiers, a turntable, a recording of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, and two tape recorders in delay setup. In 1966 Oliveros experimented with compositions whose fundamental tones were outside the range of human hearing, so that the only musical sounds perceived were the overtones. This use of subaudio and supersonic oscillators to create music was so unprecedented, says Oliveros, that “I was accused of black art.”⁶⁰ Her I of IV is based on the very nature of electricity.⁶¹

In the early 1970s Oliveros became involved with T'ai Chi, karate, dreams, mandalas, and Asian culture. Through a synthesis of her study of consciousness, martial arts, and feminist sociology she developed a theory of sonic awareness in which the goals of music are ritual, ceremony, healing, and humanism; beauty, rather than the goal, is the by-product. Using a parallel to Jung's viewfinder archetype based on sound—sound actively made, imagined, heard at present, or remembered—Oliveros created twenty-five Sonic Meditations. The three most suited to beginners appear in HAMW, pp. 364–66. The first, “Teach Yourself to Fly,” is an exercise in tuned breathing; Meditation XIV, “Tumbling Song,” calls for descending vocal glissandi beginning at any pitch. “Zina's Circle” (Meditation XV) is more complex and involves hand signals between the performers. All three of these Sonic Meditations call for the participants to stand or sit in a circle formation; there is no separate audience.

Though Oliveros wrote her Sonic Meditations for participants only, she incorporated some of their elements into pieces intended for public performance. In the ceremonial mandala piece MMM, a Lullaby for Daisy Pauline (1980), for instance, she invited the audience to participate with humming sounds and audible breathing.⁶² Still later works hark back to earlier compositional techniques. At a 1985 performance of Walking the Heart, the hall illuminated only by candles, the whirling dancer, and the digital delay device recalled both the theatrical aspects and the electronically manipulated sounds of her early works. The Roots of the Moment employs not only an interactive electronic environment but also an accordion tuned to just intonation.

In 1985 Oliveros established the Pauline Oliveros Foundation, based in Kingston, New York. This nonprofit organization supports creative artists worldwide via residencies, international exchanges, the creation of new works, and an active performance schedule.⁶³ Its mission is to explore new technologies and new relationships between artists and audiences.⁶⁴ Prominent performers on the Pauline Oliveros Foundation's concert schedule are the Deep Listening Band and the Deep Listening Chorus. Aligned with Oliveros's Sonic Meditations, the Deep Listening pieces are intended to help musicians, trained and untrained, to concentrate on closely listening to one another. Oliveros explains, “Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear…. [It] includes the sounds of daily life…one's own thoughts…musical sounds. Deep Listening is a life practice.”⁶⁵ In 1992 the National Endowment for the Arts supported the composition of Epigraphs in the Time of AIDS for the Deep Listening Band. The same year Tokyo hosted a five-hour, multimedia Deep Listening marathon.

Deep Listening also underlies the collective improvisations of Oliveros (accordion and voice), Stuart Dempster (trombone and didjeridu, an Australian aboriginal trumpet of wood or bamboo), and Panaiotis (voice, found percussion) in music recorded in the Fort Worden Cistern in Port Townsend, Washington. Oliveros describes the process:

Each composer [Dempster, Panaiotis, and Oliveros herself] has a very individual style of composition. As we improvise together, and listen intensely to one another, our styles encounter in the moment, and intermingle to make a collective music…. Listening, not only to one another but to the transformative spatial modulations, is an essential process in the music. The cistern space, in effect, is an instrument played simultaneously by all three composers…. The tonal qualities produced by each performer are constantly changed by interaction with the cistern acoustics, making it seem as if many more instruments are present.⁶⁶

Lear, one of the pieces created by this process, was used in Act V, iii, of Shakespeare's play as produced by Mabou Mines.

Oliveros has won a respectful following, among composers and audiences, as an experimenter and a forerunner in the now widely accepted field of electronic music. Through her many residencies at colleges and universities she has spread to a younger generation of composers her ideas about creating a music based on listening. Her concern with meditation and Eastern philosophies recalls the ideas of John Cage, though her music does not. Most poetically stated, Pauline Oliveros is, in her commitment to feminist principles and her exploration of new language of sounds, a musical Gertrude Stein.⁶⁷

Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson (b. 1947), unlike the other musicians in this section, never had to give up a preconceived style of composition. As a young adult she was a student not of music but of art history and sculpture, though she had studied violin throughout her youth. In reaction to her sculpture and performance art, with its great emphasis on music and sound, her teachers at Barnard College and Columbia University used to ask her if she were in the wrong department. One early sculpture looked like a mere table. With elbows resting on the table and hands cupped over the ears, however, the viewer could hear music. Anderson began making her own instruments in 1974.

Both sound and the art of the storyteller have always been integral parts of Anderson's work, and her music has very often served a story. To this end the visual element is ever important. As is true of some of Meredith Monk's work, Laurie Anderson's performance art can be appreciated most fully when one sees her perform. With the magical-elfin quality of the spectacle she creates, Anderson is truly an entertainer. In O Superman, a video, a light placed inside her mouth shows eerily through closed lips and glows when she opens her mouth to sing. In live performance her charm, wit, inventiveness, and intellectual sarcasm—when at its best—captivate audiences. By means of slide projections, film, video, altered vocal sounds, and various self-invented instruments, Anderson and her concerts have taken on the alternating qualities of comedy club, rock concert, and magic act. In the sophistication of her stories Anderson is a modern minstrel or “Multi-Mediatrix.”⁶⁸ Many of her tales are partly autobiographical.

In the 1970s Anderson performed throughout the United States and Europe in art galleries and museums, including Berlin's Akademie der Kunst, settings where she could use intimate lighting effects. For example, she once projected a slide out of sight onto a ceiling. When she whisked her violin bow through the beam of light, for an instant the image came into view. She also created haunting music using a violin equipped with a tape-recorder head. Music sounded when her bow, strung not with horsehair but with prerecorded magnetic tape, touched the head. The song “Juanita” uses such a violin. Still another self-invented instrument, a white electric violin, sounds like thunder when played with a neon bow.

Anderson's magnum opus, the four-part, two-evening United States I-IV, was given its premiere in 1983 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This set of “visual songs” took several years to create and was intended “to make a portrait of a country,” says Anderson. “At first I thought it was just the United States, but it's not turning out to be that way. It's a portrait of any highly technological society.”⁶⁹ The work was inspired by the many questions people asked Anderson about her country while she was on tour in Europe. It is documented both on record and in book form.⁷⁰

Anderson has also written music for choreographers, such as Long Time No See, which was made into the dance Set and Reset (1983) by Trisha Brown. Anderson's work often has a very feminine, even feminist, undercurrent. The lyric from Example #22, sung in a pathetically painful tone of voice, provides one instance:

The sun is shining slowly,
The birds are flying so low
Honey you're my one and only,
So pay me what you owe me.⁷¹

In her 1989 Empty Spaces concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Anderson sang “Beautiful Red Dress,” in which the lyrics symbolized menstruation. To support the verbal imagery (red wine, red dress, etc.), the white tile walls became redder and redder as the song progressed.⁷²

In 1994 Anderson went on a tour that promoted her book Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972–92.⁷³ The performance contained autobiographical numbers, such as “My Grandmother's Hats,” a story about her fundamentalist grandmother's confusion over whether to wear a hat at the moment of death, and a monologue about the comedian Andy Kaufman, who once coaxed Anderson to wrestle with him as part of his act. Nerve Bible, however, also continued her turn toward political content, begun in the national-anthem piece, Empty Spaces. Anderson had poked fun at national anthems, especially those that could be translated: “We're the best. We're the best in all the world.” With satirical humor she juxtaposed such lyrics in a paraphrase of the American anthem:

Q. Hey? Do you see anything over there?
A. I dunno…there's a lot of smoke.
Q. Say! Isn't that a flag!
A. Hmmm…couldn't say really, it's pretty early in the morning.
Q. Hey! Do you smell something burning?
I mean, that's the whole song!⁷⁴

Nerve Bible continues this political bent and takes it further. In “Night in Baghdad” Anderson presents the aesthetics of the news media that treat the Gulf War as a cross “between grand opera and the Superbowl.”⁷⁵ The biggest change apparent in her works of the 1990s is the stripping away of spectacle. In the Nerve Bible performance at the Lied Arts Center in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1994, for example, the technical wizardry and laser/video effects were gone.

Despite the multifaceted aspects of Anderson's work—the humor; the homemade violins; the songs, monologues, and toy saxophone; the video, film, and light shows; and the lessening of such theatrical visuals in her work of the 1990s—the central point of it all is the texts. As she says:

I've never been a filmmaker or musician in the classic sense…. I use film and music…to be a subtext for the stories. The real subject, the real work, is the spoken words. I feel that's what I'm best at.⁷⁶

Joan La Barbara

Joan La Barbara (b. 1947), a noted interpreter of new music and champion of avant-garde vocal technique, has premiered the works of John Cage, Charles Dodge, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Alvin Lucier, David Behrman, Roger Reynolds, Morton Feldman, and her husband, Morton Subotnick, among others. Her own music exploits the virtuosity she has developed in her vocal practice. One of her most celebrated pieces, Circular Song (1975), demonstrates a vocal technique inspired by (though not technically identical to) the circular breathing used by wind players. Following a graphic score (Example 11.1), La Barbara vocalizes on both the exhalation and the inhalation of breath. The effect is a series of siren-like glissandi on different vowels and vocal timbres, that is, the production of more than one pitch at a time. Voice Piece: One-Note Internal Resonance Investigation (1974) takes its substance from the various ways in which La Barbara creates multiphonics from a single pitch. The composer calls such early works tightly controlled studies on specific ideas.

EXAMPLE 11.1. Joan La Barbara, “Circular Song,” copyright 1975 (Wizard Records, RVX 2266). Used by permission of the composer.

Aurally more intriguing in its greater musical variety is Vocal Extensions, written in 1974. La Barbara calls this work a

stretching [of] the voice, using sounds I've discovered in earlier experiments and expanding these possibilities by feeding the voice signal through a phase shifter, pitch modulator, and echo unit to shape a sound fabric based on the natural rhythmic flow of thought.⁷⁷

Cathing (1977), which begins with a scathing interview of another singer (Cathy Berberian) who does not use some of the new, extended vocal techniques, has similar electronic elements and multitrack sound. In places La Barbara's vocal effects have the sound of various jungle animals responding to the droning, mantra-like chords of an oriental priesthood. One can also hear the influence of different cultures—Hebrew cantillation, Native American wailing, and Japanese Kabuki speech.

La Barbara's works of the 1980s tend toward larger performance forces than the earlier, accompanied and a cappella solos and taped pieces. Vlissingen Harbor (1982), for amplified voice and seven instruments, was premiered in Los Angeles, as was The Solar Wind, for amplified voice and ten instruments, which was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. One critic calls this piece a one-movement concerto for voice and orchestra in a minimal style. In Chandra (1983) La Barbara expands her tonal palette further to include solo voice, chamber orchestra, and male chorus.

From ensembles featuring vocal solos, La Barbara has gone on to compose for other kinds of ensembles in works that include the large-scale choral piece to hear the wind roar (see CAMW, p. 99) and tree of blue leaves (recorded in 1993) for solo oboe and computer-generated sound. Several choreographers have created dances to her music, among them John Alleyne, Martha Curtis, and Merce Cunningham. Her youngest audience members can hear La Barbara's vocal and electronic music behind Steve Finkin's signing alphabet animation on “Sesame Street” (created in 1977 and still being broadcast).⁷⁸

Meredith Monk

Meredith Monk (b. 1942)⁷⁹ is an artist in the broadest sense of the word. Her work breaks the dividing lines among dancer-choreographer, singer-composer, actress-stage director, and filmmaker-storyteller. Some of her titles have an anthropological ring: Dolmen Music (1981), Recent Ruins (1976), Quarry (1976), or The Plateau Series (1978), for example. Others sound like something from medieval history—Our Lady of Late (1973), Book of Days (1989)—or modern whimsical fantasy—Needle-Brain Lloyd and the Systems Kid: A Live Movie (1970) and Candy Bullets and Moon (1967). In the tradition of other contemporary New York artists, she named the company that performs her theatre pieces The House.⁸⁰ The program for “Tour 8: Castle” in 1971 describes this company as follows:

“The House is a group of artists, actors, dancers and a scientist who are committed to performance as a means of expression and as a means of personal and hopefully social evolution. We seek to unite our life and our work without losing our…individuality. Our work is full of remembered things and felt things that aren't seen and things that are seen outside and things that are only seen inside….” That description of The House still holds…and The House, itself, is still standing…. Meredith is the director, the hub.⁸¹

Today The House is The House Foundation, complete with a paid staff and an illustrious board of directors who raise funds, promote, market, commission, and support the artistic endeavors of Meredith Monk.

As a child Monk studied piano, and at boarding school she sang in the chorus. Her career as a dancer and choreographer began after an intensely creative training period at Sarah Lawrence College. There she studied dance (with Bessie Schoenberg, Judith Dunn, and Beverly Schmidt), music, acting, writing, and literature. Speaking of her college days, Monk says:

I was encouraged to work with a feeling, an idea…and let the medium and the form find itself. It seemed that finally I was able to combine movement with music and words all coming from a single source…a total experience.⁸²

If Wagner approached the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork, from the vantage point of a composer, Monk created what she has called composite theatre from the vantage point of a dancer steeped in all the creative arts. In her work, “the total art experience becomes more important than the significance of a singular message.”⁸³

In the 1960s critics labeled Monk's work Blackboard (1965) as anti-dance and her 16 MM Earrings (1966) as mixed media. Like Oliveros, Monk experimented with music beyond the range of human hearing. Part of the score for Duet with Cat's Scream and Locomotive (1965) included sound waves perceived by the brain but inaudible to the human ear. In her theatre pieces Juice (1969) and Vessel (1971) Monk experimented with moving the audience to different geographic locations instead of changing the sets on a stage.

Education of the Girlchild (1973) is among Monk's most celebrated theatre pieces. Nancy Goldner, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, calls Girlchild a theatre piece about movement and stillness. A video of the work reveals just how still and motionless much of Girlchild is. The beginning of Part I is like an extended exercise in staring, and there are no words or dialogue to break the stillness. Goldner interprets a synopsis as follow: In Part I, a girl is born; she is educated by her female companions. By eating at table with them she becomes socialized. Next she studies bricks and learns about the world. Finally she experiences initiation into the cult of the ancestress. Part II is a long vocal solo in which Monk evolves from old age into youth. Her solo's “running vocal commentary of strange animalistic sounds” is a type of “sound-singing [that] draws one back to a pre-linguistic state.”⁸⁴ Goldner's synopsis is referred to here as an interpretation because Girlchild has few words. In Part I, Monk and her mostly female cast do not create a simple pantomime that makes the story line self-evident; in this sense there could exist as many synopses for Part I as there are viewers. In contrast, Part II, the seminal portion of Girlchild, first performed in 1972, is universally recognized as a backward movement through time beginning from the protagonist's old age. Monk performed Girlchild several times in New York, then in Paris; she revived it in 1979 and again in the 1991–92 season. A few years after Girlchild she created Quarry (1975–76), which received an Obie award; this time she added film as one more element in her theatrical toolbox.

Nearly two decades after Girlchild, Atlas was premiered in 1991 by the Houston Grand Opera. Inspired by the travels of explorer Alexandra David-Neel, Atlas, with its continuous musical score and adventuresome, lifelike narrative, is an opera in the traditional sense of the term except for the near-absence of words. (One scene, “Airport,” can be found in CAMW, p. 206.) Monk's nonverbal libretto is made up largely of nonsense syllables, siren sounds, melodic melismas, and ensemble sonorities that range from glorious cacophony to ethereal harmonies, with the accompaniment sometimes of exotic instrumental timbres arising from the pit orchestra's ostinato-like foundations.

In Atlas, the adolescent Alexandra dreams of traveling the globe. Her parents watch her yearnings with worried eyes, not comprehending her wanderlust. At adulthood, Alexandra sets out to see the world. She chooses traveling companions at the outset of her journey and takes on others along the way. This small band encounters a primitive farm community, desert caravans, tropical climes, militarized cities, cold mountains, and colorful characters in the places they visit. Passing beyond Earth, the travelers reach the realm of invisible light. Here, where Earth's landscapes are seen in miniature, a contemplative, almost heavenly host sings sublime harmonies. Finally, an aged Alexandra sips coffee as she reflects on her life. As in Girlchild, Monk treats woman in the entirety of life: girlhood, adulthood, and old age.⁸⁵

After Atlas, Monk returned to solo dramatic writing with the intimate Volcano Songs (1994, recorded 1997). By contrast, American Archeology #1: Roosevelt Island (1994) included seventy performers. Here Roosevelt Island, linked by cable car to Manhattan, became both the historical inspiration and the actual stage of this open-air theatre piece.⁸⁶ The Politics of Quiet for twelve performers (1996) marked a return to indoor staging while continuing Monk's personal traditions of ritual, dance, multimedia conceptions, and sparse yet graceful repetitive orchestrations.⁸⁷

In her vocal music Monk is interested in exploring the voice as an instrument, allowing it the same flexibility as a dancer's spine. Asserting that music is a universal means of communication, she hints at the reason most of her music is without words: “People can respond directly, without having to go through language. I'm trying to approach a vocal music that's both primordial and futuristic. Maybe there won't be language differentiation in the future.”⁸⁸ In addition to her concert appearances, Monk has made several recordings, among them Key (1970); Our Lady of Late (1974); Dolmen Music (1981, recipient of a German Critics award for best recording); Turtle Dreams (1983); Facing North (1992); Monk and the Abbess (1996, including selections by Hildegard von Bingen); and Volcano Songs (1997).

Monk has not confined her collaborations to the worlds of modern dance (including various projects with Ping Chong since 1972), concertizing, and avant-garde theatre. In 1987 she and popular singer (now conductor) Bobby McFerrin sang a concert together at the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Monk's works of the late 1980s include the film score Fayum Music (1988) for voice, hammer dulcimer, and double ocarina; the music-theatre piece The Ringing Place (1987), first presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; and her feature-length film Book of Days (1989), which played at the New York Film Festival and, in a shorter version, on the PBS series “Alive from Off Center.” Monk presented a short, live version of Book of Days at the Minnesota Opera in 1988.

John Rockwell has called Meredith Monk “the archetypical multi-media artist, having managed to work—one art at a time or in combination—in dance, theatre, film, and video”⁸⁹—not to mention composing for her own vocal ensemble and maintaining her solo concert and recording career. Monk dislikes being labeled a performance artist, as she considers herself first and foremost a composer. Though some of her theatre pieces fall under the performance art umbrella, she is actually an artist from whose brush flow music, song, theatre, film, sound, dance, saga, humor, ritual, and much more. Indeed, Monk stands apart, and shoulders above, many other personalities in the performing arts by the very breadth of her creative activities.

ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC

The gender stereotype that suggests women tend to avoid technology and machines is quickly dispelled by looking at the number of women actively involved in electronic music. Historically, Bebe Barron (b. 1927) and her husband, Louis (1920–1989), in 1949 established one of the earliest electroacoustic music studios. They had experimented with the manipulation of taped sounds since 1948, simultaneously with and independent of Pierre Schaeffer, who is usually named the innovator of musique concrète. Heavenly Menagerie (1951), the Barrons' first composition using the electronic oscillators they had built, employed collage techniques like those later used by John Cage. The Barrons are better known for their electronic film scores, such as Bells of Atlantis (1952) and Forbidden Planet (1956), an MGM science fiction movie that helped establish the early association of electronic music with science fiction and outer space. The Barrons also prepared approximately 600 recorded sounds used by John Cage in Williams Mix (1952), which involved extensive tape splicing.

Currently, women are involved in virtually every aspect of electronic music. In the early 1980s Beverly Grigsby (b. 1928), herself a composer of electronic music, identified forty women in the United States composing with “electronically generated, processed, or manipulated music (using both analog and digital computers),”⁹⁰ and the list continues to grow. About half of these composers teach electronic music at colleges and universities; others work independently. Several of the women founded studios: Ruth Anderson (b. 1928) designed the Hunter College studio in 1968 and served as its director until her retirement in 1988. Jean Eichelberger Ivey (b. 1923) established the studio at Peabody in 1969 and made important contributions to the development of an electroacoustic music curriculum. Judith Shatin (b. 1949), who often combines electronic and acoustic instruments, is director of the Virginia Center for Computer Music, which she founded in 1987 at the University of Virginia. Shatin's Kairos (1991) for flute, computer, and effects processing (adding elements [e.g., various types of reverberation] to a sound electronically) is a musical exploration of the Greek title meaning “most propitious time” or the “now” moment.⁹¹ Women have also developed computer hardware and software (see the work of Laurie Spiegel, Mara Helmuth, Carla Scaletti) and created electronic instruments (see the work of Laurie Anderson, Brenda Hutchinson, Jin Hi Kim). Trained as a traditional musician in her native Korea, Kim (b. 1958) has an electric komungo that extends the potential of the Korean zither (whose origins may go back to the sixth century). Since coming to the United States in 1980, Kim has worked extensively with improvisation and views her music as bicultural.⁹²

Stylistically, women's works in the electroacoustic media cover a wide range. Their styles range from the extended neoclassicism in Emma Lou Diemer's (b. 1927) Trio for Flute, Oboe, Harpsichord, and Electronic Tape (1973) to the experimental collages by Ruth Anderson in DUMP (1970) and SUM (State of the Union Message) (1973); from the integration of nature sounds in Beneath the Horizon I (1977–1978) by Priscilla McLean (b. 1942), for processed whale sounds and tuba quartet, to computer voice synthesis in compositions by Brenda Hutchinson and Pamela Z; and from the meditative, minimal sounds of Laurie Spiegel's The Expanding Universe (1975) to the multilingual electronic opera Apocalypse (1990) by Alice Shields (b. 1943), which draws on styles from heavy-metal rock and Indian classical music.⁹³

Most composers have combined electronic music with live performance, either with acoustic sounds or with other media, such as film (Pril Smiley), dance (Laurie Spiegel, Daria Semegen), or video (Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner). Aesthetic approaches vary radically. For example, Ivey moved to electronic music because she considered the unpredictability of live performance a drawback; Spiegel (b. 1945) claims that machines are nonsexist and therefore politically liberating. Diemer wished to incorporate conventional melodic and rhythmic patterns into electronic music as well as to revitalize her acoustic style; Pauline Oliveros saw “live electronics” as a way to get “noise” into her works. Strategies for musical expression also range widely, from a dramatic presentation of text, as in Joyce Mekeel's tape score for Gertrude Stein's Yes Is for a Very Young Man (1965), to the metaphorical and veiled approach of Carla Scaletti (b. 1956) in sunSurgeAutomata (1987), whose technical processing of sounds mirrors a scientific theorem about the development of life on earth.⁹⁴

The emergence of electronic music at midcentury may be viewed as the convergence of interests in composer control (as seen in serialism), virtuosity, and timbre used for its expressive potential. However, it has also provided flexibility for composers who wish to explore improvisation (e.g., Spiegel's compositions created with her Music Mouse software) or indeterminacy (e.g., Hinkle-Turner's Antigone's Peace, 1994, rev. 1995, for mezzosoprano, percussion, and live electronics, which allows for active audience participation in the creative decision-making process).⁹⁵

Jean Eichelberger Ivey, who wants the immediacy of visual stimuli, often combines live and electronic media in dramatic ways. She has sometimes chosen texts with prominent roles for women. In Testament of Eve (1976?), for mezzo-soprano, orchestra, and tape, the composer reinterprets the biblical temptation story: in Ivey's text, Eve's actions are a conscious choice for knowledge and growth. In the program notes for the premiere by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Ivey points out the bias of traditional interpretations: “[Eve] is very like Prometheus; and yet while Prometheus is usually seen as heroic, Eve in a patriarchal culture was often dismissed as silly, sensual, bad.”⁹⁶ Earlier, in Hera, Hung from the Sky (1973), Ivey completed another composition dealing with a woman's quest for equality with a male deity.

MUSIC OF RELIGION AND RITUAL

The diversity of religious practice and belief in the United States provides a rich musical resource. African Americans have consistently drawn on the music of their church roots—spirituals and gospel music—and contributed to the repertoires of church and school choirs as well as vocal soloists. Florence Price, Margaret Bonds (1913–1972), Julia Perry, Undine Smith Moore (1904–1989), Evelyn Pittman (1910–1994[?]), Betty Jackson King (1928–1994), and Lena McLin (b. 1929) acknowledged their religious-musical heritages in choral and vocal settings. As teachers in public schools and leaders of various musical groups, Pittman, King, and McLin composed large quantities of music focused on practical, accessible compositions for church choirs and school ensembles, often for immediate performance. McLin, whose music incorporates gospel as well as spirituals, found early influence from her mother, a church musician, and from her uncle, Thomas A. Dorsey, who is also known as the blues singer “Georgia Tom” and as the “Father of Gospel Music.” She acknowledges that gospel music has not always been accepted within black church communities and among classically trained African-American musicians, but believes that it is an important part of her cultural heritage and should be respected—just as spirituals came to be honored.⁹⁷ Bonds, Price's most famous student, fused influences from her training in European styles and from the vernacular elements of her African-American heritage. Like Price, who often set poetry by significant black writers such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes, Bonds retained the spirit of the New Negro Movement. For example, her Three Dream Portraits (1959), “while structurally and materially European-derived, is also unequivocally African American in subject matter and treatment.” In it, Bonds freely but subtly uses ring-derived procedures (i.e., the African, and later African-American, ring shout that is the source for many cultural and musical practices) to set texts by Langston Hughes.⁹⁸

FIGURE 11.2. Undine Smith Moore teaching during a summer festival, “The Black Man in American Music,” at Virginia State University, ca. 1972. Photo courtesy of Mary Easter.

Undine Smith Moore drew conspicuously on her African-American heritage in many of her compositions. Asked what made her music uniquely black, she responded:

Musically, its rhythms; its choice of scale structures; its use of call and response; its general use of contrapuntal devices…; the choice of timbres; melody as influenced by rhythms, timbres, scalar structure. When the harmony is non-tertian, it is apt to use the 4ths and 5ths so often sung by black people in the churches of my youth; the deliberate use of striking climax with almost unrestrained fullness.

Philosophically…I have often been concerned with aspiration, the emotional intensity associated with the life of black people…[and] the capacity and desire for abundant, full expression as one might anticipate or expect from an oppressed people determined to survive.⁹⁹

Moore, whose favorite medium was a cappella choir, is best known for choral compositions and spiritual arrangements. One of her most frequently performed spirituals, “Daniel, Daniel Servant of the Lord” (1952), is more a theme and variations than an arrangement. “Mother to Son” (1955), which sets a Langston Hughes poem for alto solo and mixed chorus, was one of Moore's own favorites and an example of her providing “music of good quality, interesting and fresh”¹⁰⁰ for performers in amateur, church, and school ensembles. “Lord, We Give Thanks to Thee” (1971), written for the hundredth anniversary of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, employs African-American melody and rhythm and builds to intense climaxes. Scenes from the Life of a Martyr (to the Memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.) (1982), an oratorio for narrator, chorus, and orchestra, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1982; Moore called this her most significant work.

Not all of Moore's vocal music is overtly rooted in black styles, nor are all of her instrumental works. “Love Let the Wind Cry…How I Adore Thee” sets a poem by Sappho in the tradition of Western European art song, celebrating love between women in a dramatic and affirming voice. Afro-American Suite (1969) for flute, cello, and piano presents spirituals and includes syncopation typical of black musical traditions. Moore's harmonic practice is generally rooted in tonality, although it is sometimes freely treated or extended through modal references. However, the first and third movements of Three Pieces for Flute (or Clarinet) and Piano (1958) explore twelve-tone writing.

Moore, a graduate of Fisk University, continued her musical studies at the Juilliard, Eastman, and Manhattan conservatories and at Columbia University. She contributed to the education of many musicians during her forty-five years as a faculty member at Virginia State College (1927–1972); among her students were such notables as jazz pianist Billy Taylor and opera singer Camilla Williams. Moore's commitment to education was deep; even after her retirement, she continued lecturing, giving workshops, and teaching as a visiting professor at various colleges. Moore was also cofounder and then codirector (1969–1972) of Virginia State's Black Music Center, which was established to spread information about and cultivate appreciation for black music of all types.

Music for worship, once the province of professionals and arena for stylistic innovation, is often performed now by amateur choirs, thus necessitating conservative melodic-harmonic writing. For example, the choral writing and arrangements of Gena Branscombe (1881–1977) and Alice Parker (b. 1925) rely on triads and tuneful melodies. In addition to writing literature appropriate for Protestant services, both women have also composed much secular choral music. Branscombe, a native of Canada, came to the United States as a teenager to study and became a citizen in 1910. A proponent of American music and women composers, she often focused composing activities around amateur music making, such as her women's chorus (1933–1954, called the Branscombe Choral) or women's music clubs. Her last composition was a commission for a special service at Riverside Church, New York: Introit, Prayer Response, and Amen (1973). Parker set approximately 400 hymns, carols, and folk songs (from various ethnic and racial traditions) for the Robert Shaw Chorale between 1949 and 1968, and many have received widespread performance. Parker's first opera, The Martyrs' Mirror (1971), recounts the lives of four Swiss Anabaptists executed for their religious beliefs. It was written for church performance and is partially based on Mennonite hymn tunes. Since these earlier works, Parker's musical language has become more cosmopolitan.¹⁰¹

Louise Talma, born a Protestant, was an atheist when she began her studies with Nadia Boulanger. After hearing Boulanger identify “priest” as the top profession, Talma read extensively about religion, and at the age of twenty-eight she converted to Roman Catholicism. This remains a foundation for her life. Although Talma has not composed much liturgical music (Mass in English, 1984), her convictions are revealed by her choice of texts from the Bible and poems that address religious issues, including The Divine Flame (1946–1948), La Corona (1954–1955; see HAMW, pp. 321–32), The Tolling Bell (1967–1969), and Diadem (1978–1979), which primarily sets medieval lapidaries.

Miriam Gideon (1906–1996) holds a special place in Jewish music.¹⁰² She joined the faculty at Jewish Theological Seminary in 1955, and was the first woman to receive a commission for a complete synagogue service, Sacred Service (for Sabbath Morning) (1970). Although she did not want to be limited by such labels as “Jewish” or “woman” composer, Gideon acknowledged that some of her most interesting commissions came from synagogues and temples. She was consistently active in Jewish musical life as well as in a broad range of compositional spheres throughout her long and busy career. Gideon spent her teen years with an uncle, Henry Gideon, music director at the largest reform temple in Boston, and learned much about that tradition by playing organ at Temple Israel. Twenty years after completing undergraduate school, she received her master's degree in 1946; she was awarded a doctorate in composition from Jewish Theological Seminary in 1970. As a professional she successfully combined teaching in several academic institutions with her work as a composer.

Gideon is not a “Jewish music literalist,” but in Sacred Service she infused her personal, freely atonal style with “shofar calls, pentatonicism, asymmetrical rhythms, melodicles, and chantlike effects, all reminiscent of numerous aspects and essences of genuine Jewish musical materials from a variety of traditions.”¹⁰³ Many of her compositions have specific Jewish links, including How Goodly Are Thy Tents (1947), a setting of Psalm 84 for chorus; Adon Olam (1954), whose rhythms emulate the accentuation of the Hebrew text in this setting for soloists, mixed chorus, and chamber orchestra; and Three Masques (1958), using cantillation motives. Another such work, Shirat Miriam L'Shabbat (1974) for Sabbath evening, shifts away from dissonance through quartal harmony and freely uses cantillation, prayer modes, and Palestinian shepherd songs. The Resounding Lyre (1979), a song cycle, includes a poem by Gideon's husband; A Woman of Valor (1981) uses Hebrew texts from Psalms and Proverbs. Even in The Hound of Heaven (1945; see HAMW, pp. 293–97), which sets a poem about conversion to Catholicism, Gideon selected verses with particular reference and timeliness for Jewish people. In Gideon's opinion the lines she sets tell how “we must suffer or be charred, as the poem says, in order to live deeply.”¹⁰⁴

In keeping with a general tendency in the twentieth century, some composers and their work remain outside religious institutions yet are still connected with spiritual issues and values. This is not surprising, since institutional religion has often been hostile to women's active participation. Vivian Fine described her Missa Brevis (1972) as a personal religious statement:

Preserving a traditional sense of ritual, it uses both Latin and Hebrew texts. The voice sections—a collage of four separate tracks previously recorded by Jan DeGaetani—are a counterpoise to the parts played by the four cellists.¹⁰⁵

Women's spirituality, concerned in part with holistic healing, meditation, and environmental issues, has stimulated production of music specifically for the recording medium, such as Kay Gardner's A Rainbow Path (1984), Sounding the Inner Landscape (1990), and Musical Massage (1995). On the other hand, Annea Lockwood's verbal-visual score for Singing the Moon (1981) is strictly a participatory sonic meditation.¹⁰⁶ Heidi Von Gunden's Whistle Music: A Sonic Exorcism (1980) infers performers in more traditional terms, yet the “performance” involves meditative focusing of attention on the removal of evil spirits from the people present and from the performance space.¹⁰⁷

POST–AVANT-GARDE SYNTHESIS

Increasingly in the twentieth century, plurality has been expanding not only through successive and concurrent styles, but also through the coexistence of diverse styles within the output of a single composer—and even within a single composition. While this repertoire of synthesis does not focus on the most radical idioms, it also does not reject traditional materials. This fusion focuses on expression—often dramatic in nature—and has been especially hospitable to compositions on social themes or consciously feminist works.

…to piety more prone…(1983, revised 1985) by Elaine Barkin (b. 1932) is a powerful “assemblage” for four live speakers plus taped voices and musicians, including blues singers Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, and Ethel Waters. In addressing society's response to violence committed by women, this hybrid work discloses gender stereotypes. Susanna Does the Elders (1987), by Susan McClary, reworks Alessandro Stradella's seventeenth-century oratorio La Susanna, whose central scene is itself an erotic revision of the apocryphal story of Susanna. In Stradella's oratorio, listeners may well imagine a striptease as they hear the seductive singing used to justify attempted rape. McClary's music-theater piece offers a feminist critique by placing seventeenth-century music—it is all Stradella's—within a new theatrical context. McClary asks:

FIGURE 11.3. A silent monster is only one of the innovations in Libby Larsen's hightech music drama Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus. Photo by Susan Nelson. Reproduced by permission of the Minnesota Opera Company.

What do you do with music of theatrical power but which is antifeminist?…I want the dilemma to be thrown out to the audience. I'm opposed to censorship, but how do we deal with intolerance, of this or any sort, in “great art”?¹⁰⁸

Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus (1990), a multimedia opera by Libby Larsen, revitalizes this traditional genre with extensive and essential video as well as audio technology. The video presents multiple visual and emotional viewpoints, including the monster's perspective and intense close-ups. Larsen's compelling drama, based on Mary Shelley's novel, probes the dilemmas of technology. It is concerned, according to Larsen, with human beings “who, by succumbing to intellectual egotism and ambition, become aliens in the society they wish to enrich.”¹⁰⁹ Premiered in 1998 by Opera Omaha, Eric Hermannson's Soul (1996–98), based on a story by Willa Cather, is another example of Larsen's setting of strong texts by women authors. Like the characters in the story who inhabit “distinct cultural environments,” Larsen has used “three distinct pallets of music, including seven Norwegian hardanger fiddle tunes, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana [opera by Pietro Mascagni], and five fundamentalist hymns, to intertwine the three worlds.” She continues, “These are all filtered through my own harmonic language full of augmented chords and Lydian scale tones to create the tonal world in which the opera operates.”¹¹⁰ Cather “creates landscapes of the mind and soul which operate in relation to their surroundings.” Thus, in contrast to Frankenstein, which depends on technology, Larsen uses simple, stark production values for Eric Hermannson's Soul to give focus to the interior, psychological dimension.

In recent compositions Anne LeBaron shows postmodern tendencies by adding popular music influences to her style, resulting in an integrated approach and more accessible sound. Her opera The E. & O. Line (1991), with libretto by Thulani Davis, reinterprets the Orpheus and Eurydice legend from Eurydice's point of view and mixes elements of the oral traditions of bebop and blues music with her own structured, contemporary classical style. Story of My Angel (1993) for female soloist, women's chorus, piano, and optional live electronics incorporates gospel and jazz elements, while American Icons (1996), written for and premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra, references jitterbug, cartoon riffs, and Latin dance music.

The music of Joyce Mekeel (b. 1931) also melds an array of resources and often emerges from a dramatic or linguistic catalyst. Several of her works include multilingual texts: Corridors of Dreams (1972), Serena (1975), and Alarums and Excursions (1978), the latter working with material in eight languages. In Corridors, mostly sung or spoken in German or English, the execution of the text is an integral part of the composition. The first words are spoken partially through the flute, linking its timbre with the shakuhachi and the following Japanese Noh-style recitation by mezzo-soprano. Later the conductor declaims a marching song in counterpoint with dense instrumental gestures and the singer's stage whisper. Reaching back to earlier musical and literary eras, Mekeel also incorporates simpler materials. Alarums and Excursions, which refers to an Elizabethan stage direction, includes a tonal, Elizabethan-style tune, interrupted by an insistent twentieth-century violin gesture and a Gregorian chant–style recitation tone in stacked perfect fourths. These coexist with gamelan-like sounds produced from prepared piano and with dense microtonal string glissandi. Planh (1975) for solo violin, whose title refers to a lament from the troubadour/trobairitz lyric tradition, suggests improvisation through short-term melodic repetitions and the avoidance of regular phrasing. Among Mekeel's instrumental works, the sound of words remains a part of her timbral resources, as in Rune (1977) for flute and percussion and in An Insomnia of Owls (1984, revised 1985) for woodwind quintet. Mekeel's stylistic synthesis is well matched by her reliance on media outside primary institutional music organizations (such as the orchestra), which are more amenable to innovation.¹¹¹

ORCHESTRAL PERFORMERS

In the first half of the twentieth century, especially during the 1930s and early 1940s, women's orchestras in the United States offered skilled female players and conductors experience and employment in the symphonic world. Women created their own opportunities because they could not obtain positions in all-male (“standard”) orchestras. The Woman's Symphony Orchestra of Chicago and the New York Women's Symphony Orchestra were the best known nationally. The first white women—often harpists—were admitted to professional American symphonies in the mid-1920s, and a handful more were hired during the 1930s. Many major orchestras hired no full-time women players until quite recently: the Boston Symphony in 1945 and the New York Philharmonic in 1966 were among the earliest examples of top-tier orchestras to employ women. In 1964, when pianist Patricia Jennings joined the Pittsburgh Symphony, she became the first black woman under contract with a major orchestra in the United States. After more than two decades of impressive freelance work, timpanist Elayne Jones won a principal position with the San Francisco Symphony in 1972 and became the first black person to hold a first chair with a major American orchestra. However, at the end of two seasons Jones was denied tenure by the players' committee of the orchestra. She agreed to drop her lawsuit against the orchestra in exchange for another audition with a new committee of players. She was again dismissed, and has subsequently performed only on a parttime basis with the San Francisco Opera.¹¹²

Because of labor shortages caused by World War II, the 1940s brought increased employment opportunities for women. Consistent with this national trend, major orchestras hired increasing numbers of women beginning with the 1942–1943 season. Although women were generally viewed as temporary replacements, musicians—unlike women in many other professions—retained much of their gain after the war. Because women found positions with mixed orchestras, many of the all-women symphonies disbanded during the war years. In 1947, 8 percent of the players with major American orchestras were women. Since the 1940s women have made substantial progress in gaining access to professional symphony positions. In 1964–1965, 18.3 percent of the players in the eighteen largest-budget orchestras were women. In 1974–1975, nearly one-quarter (24.9 percent) of the performers in thirty-one major symphonies were women, and by 1983 the figure was 27.8 percent. Gains for women orchestral players in the late 1980s appear to have reached a plateau in terms of percentages: in 1986–1987 women constituted 30.8 percent of players; in 1987–1988, 30.1 percent; and in 1988–1989, 30.8 percent.¹¹³ During the 1990s, the percentage of women performers has risen a little; however, data from 1996–1997 shows very little difference from information for 1994–1995. For the forty-four orchestras with the largest budgets, women constituted 37.9 percent in 1994–1995 and 34.7 percent in 1997–1998. The publication of vacancy notices, legislation against discrimination practices, and blind auditions behind a screen have contributed to the increased numbers of women hired.

Participation of women in orchestras is in inverse proportion to orchestra budgets: the bigger the budget, the fewer the women engaged. Among the “Big Five” orchestras (Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia) in 1972, only thirty-eight (7.2 percent) of the players were women; there were fifty-one (9.7 percent) women players in 1977; and one hundred (19.4 percent) in 1988. On the other hand, the percentage of women in regional and metropolitan symphonies (with budgets in the 1987–1988 season of $1 million to $3.6 million and $280,000 to $1 million, respectively) is larger, reaching 46.3 percent and 47.1 percent for the 1988–1989 season. By the 1996–1997 season this gap had closed somewhat: the “Big Five” (now made up of the symphonies in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco) had 28 percent women players; those orchestras with budgets over $3.75 million had 34.7 percent women; and those with budgets of $1.1 million to $3.75 million had 46.7 percent women.

In the 1970s and 1980s women again formed alternative musical organizations, such as the now-defunct New England Women's Symphony and the Women's Philharmonic (formerly the Bay Area Women's Philharmonic). In these decades, however, a different motivation underlay the organizations than had the all-women orchestras of the 1920s and 1930s: to foster women conductors and to provide a forum for performance of compositions by women. The Women's Philharmonic is working to change the orchestral repertoire through the recovery of music by women of the past, commissioning new works by women, and promoting performances of those repertoires. In 1998 an anonymous woman was spurred to contribute a $l million gift to the Women's Philharmonic after seeing a woman conduct for the first time: Eve Queler leading the Opera Orchestra of New York. These funds will support an advanced training and career development program for women conductors.¹¹⁴

CONDUCTORS

According to a 1996 interview with Beverly Sills, opera diva and former general director of the New York City Opera, “the barriers have mostly broken down for women composers, stage directors, and designers. Conducting is the last barrier.”¹¹⁵ Why has the field of conducting opened so slowly to women? Why is it often called “the last male bastion”? What factors contribute to the “maestro myth” and its exclusion of women? The orchestral conductor—leader of what is perhaps the most prestigious musical organization in Western culture—is an authority figure in the public spotlight. Visually, the conductor is elevated on a podium at center stage, taking the bow for all. These cultural characteristics conflict with traditional views of women and, along with historical discrimination against women, have contributed to the paucity of women as conductors.

During the 1920s and 1930s, increased conducting opportunities for women were linked with the peak in activity for all-women orchestras. Conductors such as Frédérique Petrides (1903–1983) developed careers by leading women's orchestras but were unable to establish themselves with all-male orchestras.¹¹⁶ Petrides founded the Orchestrette Classique (later called Orchestrette of New York, 1932–1943), a women's orchestra, and later devoted herself to outdoor concerts, which attracted large audiences as well as critical and popular acclaim. In order to gain conducting opportunities, a significant number of women have founded ensembles, including Ethel Leginska, Antonia Brico, Margaret Hillis, Sarah Caldwell, Eve Queler, and Marin Alsop.

Both Ethel Leginska (1886–1970) and Antonia Brico (1902–1989) established prominent conducting careers during the 1920s and 1930s. They appeared with major orchestras in the United States and Europe, as well as with various all-women symphonies. Brico received rave reviews for her debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1930; after the threat of war forced her to return to the United States, however, she received few opportunities. By the late 1930s, the novelty of women conductors had declined, and most of the conducting opportunities for these women disappeared. Leginska moved to Los Angeles and taught piano. Brico moved to Denver, where she taught and coached privately. She also conducted a semiprofessional orchestra, eventually named the Brico Symphony, for more than thirty years. After the release of Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman (1974), a documentary film about her life, Brico received some renewed conducting opportunities with major orchestras.

Although Margaret Hillis (1921–1998) conducted the Elgin (Illinois) Symphony beginning in 1971, as well as other orchestras, she is best known for her work as a choral director. During her undergraduate days at Indiana University, Hillis conducted her first choral performance. Because of her success, she was encouraged to pursue a conducting career—specifically one in choral music, which was deemed possible for a woman. Hillis recalled her composition teacher's assessment:

“You are a conductor, but there is no place for a woman in orchestral conducting.”…So [Bernard Heiden] advised me to go into choral conducting. [He said,] “There a woman is acceptable. Otherwise, you're going to go down the drain.” I almost had a nervous breakdown, almost a complete functional breakdown. All of a sudden my world fell apart, this world I had lived in and lived for.¹¹⁷

In the end, however, Hillis took Heiden's advice and began her studies of choral music at Juilliard with Robert Shaw and Julius Herford.

After attending a rehearsal of her American Concert Choir and Orchestra of New York in 1954, Fritz Reiner employed Hillis and her ensemble with the Chicago Symphony during the next three seasons. In 1957 Hillis founded the Chicago Symphony Chorus at Reiner's request, and she led this ensemble until her retirement in 1994. Through four decades Hillis contributed extensively to the stature of choral music and to raising its performance standards through her leadership in the American Choral Foundation as well as her conducting.

Other women known for their work as choral conductors include Elaine Browne (d. 1997), Gena Branscombe, and Ann Howard Jones. In 1948 Browne founded Singing City Choir (Philadelphia), a multiracial, multicultural, and multireligious ensemble dedicated to achieving peace and harmony among diverse people. She continued as its director until the summer of 1987 and remained active as a guest conductor and workshop leader until 1990. Browne was also director of choral activities at Temple University, one of the sponsors for Singing City, in 1944–1956 and again in 1975–1981.

In addition to choral conducting, women are also found more commonly in opera than in orchestral conducting. Having women conduct operas might initially seem odd, given the substantial responsibility of opera conductors and the large financial costs of opera productions. Yet opera conductors do not take center stage. They lead from the pit and are far less visible than orchestral conductors, who are elevated on a podium and consistently in the spotlight. Perhaps women have been more acceptable to audiences or management in this pit location. Further, the route to being an opera conductor often begins with a stint as rehearsal pianist and coach, a position frequently held by a woman, at least in the United States. Women whose conducting careers have focused on opera include Sarah Caldwell (b. 1924), founder of the Opera Company of Boston in 1957 and, in 1976, the first woman to conduct at the Met; Judith Somogi (1937–1988), whose career was centered in Europe with the Frankfurt Opera (1981–1987) after early success at the New York City Opera; and Eve Queler (b. 1936), who has received international acclaim for her concert versions of rarely performed operas.

Eve Queler was hired as rehearsal accompanist and coach at New York City Opera in 1957, just six months after the birth of her first child. The time demands of these two areas of her life created conflicts, and her contract was not renewed for the following year. Queler returned to school to study conducting, then spent the next several years coaching and doing studio work. Her desire to conduct led her to found the New York Opera Workshop, later called the Opera Orchestra of New York.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Judith Somogi also moved through the ranks from rehearsal pianist and coach to become a conductor at New York City Opera. She was hired in 1966 and conducted her first production in 1974. After establishing her reputation with this company, Somogi conducted at the Pittsburgh Opera and served as principal conductor of major opera companies across the United States, including live telecasts with New York City Opera. After her orchestral debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1975, she also appeared as guest conductor with various American orchestras.

Much of the visibility for women conductors is recent history, a string of “firsts.” The situation is clearly improving for women, but, as with women orchestral players, the participation of women conductors is in inverse proportion to orchestra budgets. No woman has yet held a conducting position with a major orchestra in the United States with the exception of a one-year appointment for Rachel Worby as Youth Concerts Conductor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Catherine Comet, associate conductor of the Baltimore Symphony from 1984 to 1986 and originally from France, was the first woman to hold even an associate conductor position with a major symphony in the United States or Canada. A year later JoAnn Falletta became the second, when she was appointed associate conductor of the Milwaukee Symphony. Falletta resigned that post at the end of the 1988 summer season. In 1986, Comet also became the first woman in the principal conducting position of a fully professional orchestra when she was appointed music director of the Grand Rapids Symphony, where she remained until the spring of 1997.

In 1988 twenty-four women held conducting posts with professional orchestras that are members of the American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL); even in 1990 few women held conducting positions with the ninety-nine U.S. and Canadian orchestras whose annual budgets exceeded one million dollars. Only three women (3 percent) were principal conductors: Iona Brown, leading the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra from the principal violin seat; Catherine Comet, music director with both the Grand Rapids Symphony and the American Symphony Orchestra; and JoAnn Falletta, conductor of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra. Three more women held secondary positions: Marin Alsop (associate conductor, Richmond Symphony); Dianne Pope (music advisor, Des Moines Symphony Orchestra); and Tania León (conductor of community concerts, Brooklyn Philharmonic). By 1990 several women held assistant conductor positions with major orchestras (e.g., Dallas, Houston, and Calgary), and others were music directors with smaller-budget professional orchestras: e.g., Victoria Bond (Roanoke Symphony) and Rachel Worby (Wheeling Symphony). Since the late 1980s women in the early stages of their conducting careers have become more visible, and they constitute a growing percentage in conducting workshops sponsored by the ASOL, in the summer program at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Massachusetts, and in important events such as the Stokowski Conducting Competition.

At the end of the 1997–1998 season, women held 47 orchestral conducting positions among the more than 600 member orchestras of the ASOL (excluding youth and college ensembles). However, within the top 25 orchestras by budget size (above $10.8 million total expenses), no women held music director or principal conductor posts; five women held various other conducting positions. In the next tier of 23 orchestras (those with budgets above $4 million)—still considered “majors” by the American Federation of Musicians (union)—two women were music directors, and three held secondary posts. Thus, just over 4 percent of the principal conductors were women. In the next two budget groups, including 64 orchestras (with budgets above $1.2 million), generally comparable to the former category of “regional” symphonies, three music directors (4.7 percent) were women: Falletta at Long Beach and Virginia and Gisele Ben-Dor with the Santa Barbara Symphony. The assistant conductor at Santa Barbara is also a woman—the only orchestra to have more than one woman on its conducting staff—and eight additional women hold secondary positions among the regional symphonies. In the 150 orchestras that are roughly comparable to the “metropolitan” symphonies, many have only one conductor. Women are music directors for 2 orchestras (4.5 percent) with budgets over $700,000 and for 7 orchestras with budgets over $300,000 (7.3 percent). In the final cluster of 359 orchestras, many of which are volunteer organizations or include unpaid personnel, women held thirty-three top posts (9.2 percent).

Direct comparisons over the past eight to ten years are difficult due to inflation, changes in relative budget sizes, and the reorganization of categories used by the American Symphony Orchestra League. The data, however, indicate a slight improvement over the past decade, but apparently the “glass ceiling” remains largely intact. Few women have reached principal positions with the majors, and women are better represented in secondary positions and smaller-budget ensembles. Beginning with the 1998–1999 season, two women stand out for their achievements, visibility, and current positions: Marin Alsop (b. 1957) and JoAnn Falletta (b. 1954).

Marin Alsop

Prior to Alsop's appointment with the Richmond Symphony, she was already conductor of Concordia, a New York chamber orchestra, which she founded in 1984. In 1990 Alsop joined the small group of women music directors with her appointment at both the Long Island Philharmonic and the Eugene (Oregon) Symphony, both of which she conducted until the end of the 1995–1996 season. She has gained considerably more responsibility with several recent appointments: principal conductor and then music director of the Colorado Symphony beginning with the 1993–1994 season; music director of the Cabrillo Festival in California; and an appointment to the Creative Conductor chair with the St. Louis Symphony beginning in the fall of 1996. Alsop grew up surrounded by music, as both of her parents are members of the New York City Ballet Orchestra. When she was about twelve years old, she declared that she wanted to be a conductor, and one of her teachers at Juilliard's Preparatory Department, where she studied violin, told her, “Girls don't do that.” Fortunately, her father's response was to buy her a box of conducting batons.¹¹⁸ After undergraduate study at Yale University, private conducting study, work as a freelance violinist, and two summers of study with Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Festival, Alsop was the first woman awarded the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize at Tanglewood. She also won the Leopold Stokowski Conducting Competition in 1989, both awards clearly important recognitions for career development.

JoAnn Falletta

In May 1998 JoAnn Falletta was appointed music director of the Buffalo (New York) Philharmonic Orchestra, a second-tier orchestra, where she began assuming some responsibilities in the fall of 1998. This is the highest orchestral appointment for a woman in the United States. Falletta, music director of the Women's Philharmonic in San Francisco from 1986 until 1996, was the first American woman to lead regional orchestras, as music director for the Long Beach Symphony (since 1989) and the Virginia Symphony (since 1991)—positions she expects to retain at least through the 1999–2000 season. Earlier Falletta held positions with the Denver Chamber Orchestra and the Queens (New York) Philharmonic, and received considerable acknowledgment of her skill on the podium with a first prize in the Leopold Stokowski Conducting Competition (1985) and the Toscanini Conductors Award. Since joining the (Bay Area) Women's Philharmonic, about 80 percent of whose repertoire is by women composers, Falletta has learned many scores by women and has programmed some of the music with other orchestras she conducts.

FIGURE 11.4. JoAnn Falletta is part of a new generation of orchestra conductors. Photo by Niel Erickson. Reproduced by permission of JoAnn Falletta.

At age seven Falletta began her musical training with guitar lessons because her family's apartment did not have enough room for a piano. When she was about twelve, her immigrant parents began taking JoAnn and her sister to concerts. From this time forward she knew she wanted to be a conductor, although as a teenager she was told this was impossible because no woman had previously worked as a conductor. In spite of this misrepresentation, Falletta continued to pursue her career plans. Her comments in interviews reveal her awareness of gender in relationship to conducting. On the subtlety of gender issues, she claims, “The more I got into conducting, the more I had to come to terms with how I was raised as a young Catholic girl. We were taught to be supportive, nurturing, gentle, kind.”¹¹⁹ Falletta discovered that traditional socialization led women to apologize for making demands, and that this was a problem for a conductor. During her doctoral study with Jorge Mester at Juilliard she learned to avoid phrases and a tone of voice that could sabotage her on the podium. Falletta, who married in 1986, acknowledges the tension between career and family. Although many men have had both with the help of a support system from their wives, only a few women conductors, such as Catherine Comet and Simone Young (an Australian), have been able to sustain both an active career and motherhood. In a 1991 interview Falletta, who has been the first woman on several European podiums, discussed her perception that many European orchestras were eager to have women as guest conductors, but still quite reluctant to consider them for music director positions.¹²⁰

WOMEN AND MUSIC IN MEXICO AND LATIN AMERICA

Even in the twentieth century, women's participation in concert music has emerged only gradually in Mexico and Latin America. Speaking about Mexico, Esperanza Pulido claims that malinchismo (an inferiority complex) and machismo (an exaggeration of masculinity or male pride) have hampered women as performers and composers.¹²¹ Self-taught composer-poet-singer Maria Grever (1885–1951), the first Mexican woman to achieve fame as a composer, moved to the United States in 1916 and later composed for Hollywood films and Broadway shows. Among her hit songs were “Bésame” (“Kiss Me,” her first published song, 1921), “Júrame” (recorded by José Mojica in 1927), “What a Diff'rence a Day Made,” and especially “Tipitín” (the latter two songs recorded by both Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby). The number of Mexican women active in commercial music has increased during the second half of this century. By 1982 at least forty-seven women had contributed regularly in this area and played an important role in shaping both the musical style and topics or content, among them, Emma Elena Valdelamer and Laura Goméz Llanos.

Mexico

Mexico became home to European-born composers Emiliana de Zubeldia Inda (1888–1987) and Mariá Teresa Prieto (1896–1982), both from Spain, and a temporary haven for Ruth Schonthal (b. 1924), who studied there after fleeing the Nazis in 1941 and before moving to the United States in 1946. During her long life Zubeldia Inda worked as a concert pianist (1928–1936) and composer, then spent forty years in Hermosillo at the university as a teacher, choral conductor, broadcaster, and composer. After meeting Augusto Novaro in 1930, Zubeldia became the sole disciple of this acoustician and instrument builder. She adopted his harmonic theories and used his acoustical principles in her Sonatine for two pianos and Once Tientos (pub. 1963) for piano. In contrast, Mariá Teresa Prieto moved to Mexico at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Romantic nationalism, prominent in her early works, is evident in such symphonic compositions as Chichén-Itzá (1944) and Sinfonía breve (1945). Later she adopted extended tonality and harsh dissonances, creating expressionistic works such as Odas celestes (Celestial Waves, 1947) for voice and piano. Subsequently Prieto took up twelve-tone technique in Doce variaciones seriales (Twelve Serial Variations, 1961) for piano and Tema variado y fuga (Varied Theme and Fugue, 1968) for orchestra. Schonthal, who supported herself and her family by playing in nightclubs, composed some works with Hispanic titles during her years in Mexico: Concerto romantico (1942) for orchestra and Capriccio español (1945) for piano.

In the field of classical music, Mexican women, like their counterparts in the United States, have often combined composition with teaching and performing. Rosa Guraieb Kuri (b. 1931), for example, who studied in Mexico and Lebanon, is involved in all three areas. She began composing after studying with Carlos Chavez, writing primarily for voice and chamber ensemble as well as for her own instrument, the piano. Her chamber music includes two string quartets (1978, 1982); Canto a la paz (Song for Peace, 1982) for oboe, bassoon, and piano; and Reencuentros (Reencounters, 1985) for violin, cello, and piano. Marta Garcia Renart (b. 1942) is an accomplished pianist, choral conductor, and composer. Her compositions include choral works, music for a children's play, and Tres momentos (Three Moments, 1978) for piano.¹²² Graciela Morales de Elias (b. 1944) and Graciela Agudelo Murguia (b. 1945) compose primarily for chamber ensemble and reveal an interest in more experimental paths. For example, Agudelo's Arabesco for one recorder player (playing alto and tenor recorders) explores extended techniques such as multiphonics, and her Navegantes del crepúsculo (Sailing in the Twilight, pub. 1992) for clarinet, bassoon, and piano also includes avant-garde techniques.¹²³ Marcela Rodriguez (b. 1951), Lilia Vázquez (b. 1955), and Ana Lara (b. 1959) are among a younger generation of composers. Rodriguez, a guitarist as well as a composer, has written much chamber music. Among her larger works are Religiosos incendios (Religious Fires) for orchestra, the opera La Sunamita (1991), and Concerto for Recorders and Orchestra (1993). Vázquez, a bassoonist and pianist, received a positive reception for her orchestral work Donde habita el Olvido (Where Oblivion Lives, 1984). Lara, who studied in Mexico and Poland, has given particular attention to timbre in her music, as in Vitrales (1992) for viola, cello, and double bass and Icaro for solo recorder.

Alicia Urreta

Mexican composer Alicia Urreta (1933?–1987?) began her musical studies as a talented young pianist. She attended the National Conservatory of Mexico; however, financial difficulties forced her to discontinue her education and earn a living. While pursuing a career as a concert pianist she worked as an accompanist for a dance troupe, which introduced her to music by many contemporary Mexican composers. Her strong sightreading ability was essential in the dance studio, and led to her strong reputation for performances of difficult avantgarde European and American piano repertoire. Urreta began composing in 1964, writing music for a theatre work, and she continued her involvement with theatre, film, and dramatic works throughout her career.

Urreta utilized several of the more experimental compositional approaches discussed earlier in this chapter (sound mass, sonic exploration, improvisation, noise, and electroacoustic elements) to create a personal style synthesizing many influences. She is among a generation of Mexican composers whose nationalism is no longer linked with folkloric music. De natura mortis o La verdadera historia de Caperucita Roja (The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood, 1971) is for a narrator who also uses a synthesizer to distort the voice, an improviser on prepared piano, and an electronic tape. It is a takeoff on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, focusing on the seduction and erotic elements between the girl and the wolf. Homenaje a cuatro (Homage to Four, 1975) for string orchestra, calling for extended techniques, and Salmodia I (Psalmody, 1978) for piano are important works and among her first to bypass a surface story line. The conceptual origin of Arcana (1981), a concerto for prepared and amplified piano and orchestra, was an interesting tarot card reading that used only the twelve major arcana cards. According to Urreta,

The music is like a chain of events which happen without transitions. It is written like reading the cards. This provokes at times very violent contrasts within the work, while at other times there is a very logical sequence that lends toward a musical development.¹²⁴

Arcana, involving precise notation of complex rhythms, features sound mass and timbral variety.

Considered her most important work, De la Pluma al Angel (From the Feather to the Angel, 1982) is a dramatic secular cantata scored for three soloists, narrator, chorus, two organs, harmonium, and percussion. The story concerns angels expelled from heaven who seduce humanity, leaving them without love or passion but with a longing for the angels that have disappeared. Urreta developes her narrative using a wide range of poetic sources, orchestrating each text with a different instrumentation. In addition to having significance as a composer, Urreta also contributed to contemporary musical life through her performances and by organizing annual festivals of contemporary Mexican and Spanish music in Mexico City and Madrid.

Central America and the Caribbean

Roció Sanz (1933–1993) was born in Costa Rica but pursued a career in Mexico from 1953 onward. Known for children's compositions and stories as well as instrumental works and various types of theatrical music, she devoted much of the last two decades of her life to a radio program called Children's Corner, which broadcast music of various composers. Her settings of texts by the outstanding seventeenth-century Mexican poet Juana Inés de La Cruz (Sor Juana), Sucedió en Belén (It Happened in Bethlehem), won first prize in a 1976 choral music competition in Costa Rica. Sanz's Hilos (Threads) for string orchestra and Canciones de la muerte (Songs about Death) for soprano were performed at the International Congress of Women in Music in Mexico City in 1984. Panamanian Marina Saiz (b. 1930) studied extensively with Roque Cordero, first in Panama and then in the United States, where both composers later resided. Her Sonata for Piano uses a free, atonal approach with some complex rhythms suggesting the influence of Panamanian dance.

Ninón de Brouwer Lapeiretta (b. 1907) and Margarita Luna de Espaillat (b. 1921) are both from the Dominican Republic. Brouwer Lapeiretta has become known at home and abroad for her ballet score La reina del Caribe (The Queen of the Caribbean), works for piano, two capriccios for wind ensemble, and Absominación de la espera (Expecting Freedom from Submissiveness) for soprano and orchestra. A professor of music history and theory, Luna de Espaillat has created chamber music, piano pieces, an oratorio called Vigilia eterna (Eternal Vigil), and Elegie for choir, narrator, and orchestra.

Esther Alejandro (b. 1947), born in New York City of Puerto Rican parents, returned to Puerto Rico with her family during childhood. After graduating from the University of Puerto Rico in 1968, she also studied with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau (1972) and at the Conservatory of Music in Puerto Rico. On a commission from the Conservatory of Music Alejandro composed El zapatero prodigioso (The Marvelous Shoemaker, 1980) for orchestra and narrator, a work based on Hans Christian Andersen's story “The Elves and the Shoemaker” and intended for an audience of children. The piece was later performed by the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, their first performance of a composition by a Puerto Rican woman. Unlike many of her works, this composition is tonal and poses only limited technical demands. In Intercambio (Interchange) Alejandro combines a Puerto Rican folk instrument of the guitar family, the cuatro, with a violin and explores the sonorities of this combination. Other works include Claves para una obsesión (Keys for an Obsession, 1980) for voice, bassoon, and piano; O grande jogo/El gran juego (O Large Gamble/The Big Game, 1982) for two actors and tape (musique concrète); and Gratitud, danza puertorriqueña (Gratitude, a Puerto Rican Dance, 1983) for piano.

Cuba

As a pianist, Cecilia Arizti Sobrino (1856–1930) concentrated on composing for her instrument. Arizti's Piano Trio (1893), the first known chamber music by a Cuban woman, uses a Romantic harmonic vocabulary. Working together, Olga de Blanck Martín (b. 1916) and Gisela Hernández Gonzalo (1912–1971)—both composers as well as teachers—implemented significant changes in Mexico's music education system. Both also worked at the Hubert de Blanck Conservatory, founded by Olga's father. Blanck published several musical comedies: Vivimos hoy, Hotel Tropical, Rendezvous de tres, and Un cuento de Navidad (Today We Live, Tropical Hotel, A Rendezvous for Three, A Christmas Story). For Hernández, nationalism became an increasingly important stylistic element in her compositions. She therefore used Afro-Cuban melodies, typical Cuban rhythms shifting between 3/4 and 6/8 meters, and texts by Cuban poets (e.g., in the choral cycle Tríptico [1967]).

Cuban-born Odaline de la Martinez (b. 1949) left her homeland at age nine because of the revolution and was raised by her aunt in the United States. After studying as an undergraduate at Tulane University, she moved to Britain for graduate study at the Royal Academy of Music, and has been based in London since 1972. The first woman to conduct a BBC Promenade Concert at the Albert Hall (1984), Martinez is founding musical director of the Lontano chamber music ensemble, which has toured extensively and recorded works by British women composers. Conductor of the European Women's Orchestra, which she helped found in 1990, Martinez has also led major British orchestras and appeared internationally in countries such as Columbia, New Zealand, and Canada. As director of the Cardiff [Wales] Music Festival in 1994 she included a significant number of works by women on her programs: Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Ethel Smyth, Judith Weir, and a new production of Nicola LeFanu's opera Dawnpath (premiered in 1977). Although perhaps best known as a conductor, Martinez is also a composer whose eclectic works show the influence of George Crumb, electronic-music composers, and her own heritage. In an interview describing her origins in a rural Cuban community, where her musical experiences were exclusively Afro-Cuban, Martinez said: “My earliest memory of music was falling to sleep to the hypnotic sound of the drums and waking up at five in the morning when they stopped. Music even then was a joy to me and that is where I gained my love of strong rhythms.”¹²⁵

Tania León

Tania León (b. 1944), whose family background includes French, Spanish, Chinese, and African elements (her grandmother was a slave in Cuba), received two degrees in music from the Peyrellade's Conservatorio de Música in Havana. She began her career as a pianist while continuing her education in accounting. Later she studied in the United Sates, where she settled and where she has been associated with the Dance Theater of Harlem since 1968. With her involvement as musical director for The Wiz on Broadway, Godspell, and musical theatre works by Robert Wilson during the late 1970s and early 1980s, American idioms such as gospel and jazz became influences on León's compositional style. Beginning in the 1980s she explicitly incorporated textual and rhythmic elements from her African and Cuban cultural heritage alongside contemporary classical techniques (e.g., in De-Orishas [1982] for voices and percussion and A la Par [1986] for piano and percussion). Her works feature dense textures, angular melodies, dissonant harmonies, and colorful orchestrations, as heard in Batá (1985) and Pueblo mulato for soprano and chamber ensemble (1987). Rhythmic energy, polyrhythms, and unexpected accents are often prominent, as in Carabalí for orchestra (1991), which draws on Cuban rhythms. Her compositions are technically challenging, whether for the piano, as in Momentum (1984)¹²⁶ or Rituál (1987); for orchestral instruments, as in Indígena (1991); or for voices, as in Batéy (1989).¹²⁷ León received a commission from the city of Munich for her first opera, Scourge of Hyacinths, which was premiered by the New Music Theatre under her baton at the 1994 Munich Biennale. Her multifaceted career has included being music director for television in Havana (1965–1966), teaching at Brooklyn College, and giving support as new-music advocate-adviser for various organizations, including the New York Philharmonic (1993–1996).

WOMEN AND MUSIC IN CANADA

In the early part of the twentieth century, music by Canadians revealed its heavy reliance on the study and compositional styles of England and France. During the second and third decades, Canadian composers generally followed one of two traditions: French as exemplified by Claude Champagne, or English as exemplified by Healey Willan. Since the late 1940s most Canadians have studied composition in the United States or in Europe and have participated more in the so-called international styles of music.¹²⁸

Although Violet Archer (1913–2000) began composition studies with Champagne, her early works are linked with the English late-Romantic tradition. After studying with Béla Bartók in New York in 1942, her compositions, which she designated as being in “a neo-classic, perhaps neo-baroque style,”¹²⁹ became more dissonant. They presented a new tonal language, juxtaposing and combining various modes but avoiding functional tonality. Following coursework with Paul Hindemith at Yale University between 1947 and 1949, Archer became more austere in her compositions, but they still retained their clarity and reserve. Archer identified her Sonata for Horn and Piano (1965) as a turning point toward greater abstraction and economy of materials. By the 1960s her compositions became more dramatically heightened as she included a new expressionism, and some works from the 1970s incorporate electronic elements.

Archer was a prolific composer, writing for many different media and for performers ranging from young amateurs to highly skilled professionals. Her interest in Gebrauchsmusik and her desire to contribute to the literature for various solo instruments and piano show some of the many influences stemming from her association with Hindemith. Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano (see HAMW, pp. 357–63), which Archer identified as a work that pleased her very much, is one of her most popular instrumental pieces. A 1994 retrospective of her work held in Toronto included one of her major compositions, Evocations (1987) for two pianos and orchestra.

Jean Coulthard (1908–2000) first studied piano with her mother, a professional musician, and later absorbed the English tradition from Ralph Vaughan Williams in London. Her music focuses on lyrical melody with an extended tonal vocabulary, showing commonality with French Impressionism. Among her major works for piano are Sonata for Piano (1947), B-A-C-H Variations (1951), Aegean Sketches (1961[?]), Requiem Piece (1968; arr. for two pianos, 1974), Sketches for Western Woods (1970), and Ecology Suite (1974). Many of her works draw on the Canadian countryside: The Pines of Emily Carr (1969 [?]) for soprano, narrator, string quartet, timpani, and piano, for example, is a title that refers to the landscapes of the famed Canadian painter.

Barbara Pentland (1912–2000) became a composer despite the objections of her parents and her problems with a serious heart ailment. In addition to working with Aaron Copland, three years at Juilliard, and an important summer's study in Darmstadt, Pentland studied with several women musicians: Cécile Gauthiez (in Paris, 1929–1930), Eva Clare (in Winnipeg, 1930s), and Dika Newlin (at the MacDowell Colony, 1947 and 1948). Pentland's style evolved significantly during her long career. Her early compositions, from the late 1930s, were in a neoclassical style, whereas Octet for Winds (1948) was her first work to utilize aspects of twelve-tone technique. Symphony for Ten Parts (1957), a concise and transparent work, reveals the influence of Anton Webern's music subsequent to her study at Darmstadt in 1955. By the late 1960s Pentland employed aleatory elements and microtones. She became interested in unusual timbral combinations through her study of Webern, and sonority became the organizing element in her music by the late 1970s.

Dramatic works, especially on topics of social concern, also emerged during the 1970s. News (1970) for voice and orchestra is a deeply felt response to the casual reporting and public acceptance of the violence during the Vietnam War. In Disasters of the Sun (1976) for mezzo-soprano, chamber ensemble, and tape, Pentland set a poetic cycle by Dorothy Livesay that critiques male domination. In its scenario, the Sun (man) is defeated by the Moon (woman), and Pentland's treatment of woman's victory is calm and understated, as if inevitable. Pentland, who claimed that she had difficulty finding suitable texts, returned to poetry by Livesay in her setting of Ice Age (1986) for voice and piano.

Each of these women—Archer, Coulthard, and Pentland—has played an important role in Canadian musical life and, through teaching, has had a strong influence on younger musicians. Archer chaired the music theory and composition area at the University of Alberta from 1961 to 1978; Coulthard taught composition and theory at the University of British Columbia from 1947 to 1973; and Pentland was a university professor there from 1939 to 1963. In addition to their compositions for advanced players, both Archer and Pentland have written teaching pieces for piano.

Electronic music appears to be an important medium for many women composers in Canada. Norma Beecroft (b. 1934) was active in diverse areas of music: as flutist; programmer, producer, and commentator for CBC radio; cofounder and administrator for New Music Concerts; and composer. Since the 1960s she has frequently written electroacoustic music, especially in combination with live performers: for example, From Dreams of Brass (1963–1964) for narrator, soprano, mixed chorus, orchestra, and electronic tape; Two Went to Sleep (1967) for soprano, flute, percussion, and tape; an electronic piece for the puppet show at Expo '67 in Montreal; Hedda (1982–1983), a ballet with orchestra and tape; and Evocations: Images of Canada (1991) for digital MIDI synthesizer and mixer. During the 1970s Ginette Bellavance (b. 1946) composed a large number of electronic works for film and theater. She was also involved in music as perception and with Yul, a pop-music research group. Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux (1938–1985) studied electronic music with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales de l'O.R.T.F. in Paris and composed for electronic tape alone and with live performers. Earlier works for acoustic instruments are atonal and employ aspects of sound-mass, such as in Hétéromorphie (1970); later works focus on sonic elements, as in her incidental music for marionettes, Comment Wang-fô fut sauvé (How Wang-fô Was Saved, 1982–1983), for flute, french horn, ondes Martenot, cello, piano, percussion, and tape. Timbral exploration also led Bellavance to use the ondes Martenot in Modulaire (1967) for orchestra and in Séquences (1968, rev. 1973) for two ondes Martenots and percussion.

Ann Southam (b. 1937) is best known for her electroacoustic music, especially her lyrical scores for dance, such as Against Sleep (1969), Seastill (1979), and Goblin Market (1986). Her compositions for acoustic instruments give particular attention to the piano, her own instrument: Spatial View of Pond (1986) for piano and tape and In a Measure of Time (1988) for two pianos. Southam and another pianist-composer, Diana McIntosh (b. 1937), cofounded the new-music organization Music Inter Alia. McIntosh has composed music in various styles and for many different combinations of performers, including multimedia. Both women have contributed significantly to Canadian musical life: Southam as the first president of the Association of Canadian Women Composers (1980–1988) and McIntosh through her premieres and performances of contemporary Canadian music and her role as composer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba.

Alexina Louie (b. 1949), a third generation Chinese-Canadian, is among the most prominent Canadian composers of her generation and was named Composer of the Year in 1986 by the Canadian Music Council. She studied music at the University of British Columbia and then with Pauline Oliveros and Robert Erickson at the University of California, San Diego, where she was a member of the Female Ensemble doing sonic meditations led by Oliveros. While in southern California, Louie began studying world music, especially that of China, Japan, Korea, India, and Indonesia. She returned to Canada in 1980 and continues to compose full time, receiving many awards and commissions. In October 1996 Louie was appointed composer-in-residence with the Canadian Opera Company, and she is composing an opera based on a seventeenth-century Kabuki play that she has described as “an erotic ghost story.”¹³⁰ Tony Award–winning playwright David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly) prepared the libretto, and The Scarlet Princess (working title) is scheduled to premiere during the 1999–2000 season.

Louie's expressive style effectively blends musical elements from the East and West: the influence of Asian instrumental timbres, minimalism, Asian philosophy (especially the complementary duality of yin and yang), bitonality, quartal chords, nonmetrical rhythm, and traditional Western multimovement forms. In Music for a Thousand Autumns (1983) for a mixed ensemble of twelve instrumentalists, Louie writes directions for pitch bends, exaggerated vibrato, and harmonics to create an Asian atmosphere with Western instruments. An array of percussion instruments adds further color. The Ringing Earth, a fanfare written for the opening of Expo '86 in Vancouver, has been described as “majestic sounds—beginning with a dazzling flourish of brass and percussion…[and ending with] a rousing finish with full orchestra.”¹³¹ Canadian pianist Jon Kimura Parker, who commissioned Scenes from a Jade Terrace (1988), describes this work as follows:

Compositional techniques, including the use of semi-chromatic scales, bitonality, exotic timbres, minimalist rhythmic patterns, and right and left hand mirroring are woven together into this work. Through a unique manipulation of the timbral possibilities of the piano and a carefully hewn structure, Louie has succeeded in creating an original and significant piano composition.¹³²

Love Songs for a Small Planet (1989, rev. 1992), Louie's first choral composition, brings together the composer's interests in poetry and world spiritual traditions with her humanitarian and environmental concerns.¹³³ Each section of Love Songs presents poems by indigenous peoples of the world that Louie found inspiring. In the final section, entitled “Earth,” which sets a text from the North American Lakota tradition, extended choral techniques and a quartet of blown glass bottles add to the evocative texture of the accompaniment by harp, strings, and marimba. Although definitely using a contemporary vocabulary, Louie's music is repeatedly described as accessible and communicative.

Hope Lee (b. 1953), the youngest of the Canadian composers discussed here, was born in Taiwan, although her parents came from mainland China. After completing her formal composition study at McGill University and the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany, Lee pursued additional studies of Chinese traditional music and poetry and computer music in Berkeley, California. Lee's music is generally atonal and rhythmically complex, and uses extended techniques. In describing her creative process, Lee said:

Things change constantly and continuously…therefore each work should be approached from a fresh angle. Growth is a natural phenomenon reflected in my compositional technique. Not unlike disciplined organic growth—a most fascinating phenomenon—it is the secret of life, the source of true freedom.¹³⁴

The diversity of instrumentations, including electronic works and several compositions using Chinese instruments, is certainly consistent with this viewpoint. Among her principal works are Nabripamo (1982) for piano and marimba; Liú Liú (1984) for pipa, percussion, baritone, and small string orchestra;….I, Laika.…(1988–1989) for flute, cello, and piano;¹³⁵ Voices in Time (1992–94) for large ensemble, tape, and electronics; and arrow of being, arrow of becoming (1997) for string quartet with optional live electronics. Like Alexina Louie, Lee works toward integrating Asian—specifically Chinese—ideas and sounds into a Western framework.

FOR FUTURE CONSIDERATION

This chapter focuses primarily on women composers and performers; however, women have been active during the twentieth century in virtually every area of music. They work within traditional institutions and they create their own organizations and venues. They are teachers, music therapists, philanthropists, arts administrators, publishers, and members of the recording industry. For a comprehensive understanding of the scope and breadth of women's contributions and influence in music, additional research in these and other areas is needed. As we grasp more fully the activities of women, we will gain a deeper understanding of the shape of North American music history.

NOTES

Special thanks are due to those who provided assistance for this chapter: research for the original edition, Jane Lohr (University of Iowa graduate student), Melissa Hanson (Macalester College, class of 1990), Lia Gima (Macalester College, class of 1990), and Jill Edwards (Macalester College, class of 1991); research for this revision, Jennifer Anderson (Macalester College, class of 1998), Catherine Davies (Macalester College, class of 2000), and Megan Opp (Macalester College, class of 2000); the American Symphony Orchestra League (Victoria O'Reilly and Christina Mitchell); Sonya Sezun (Macalester College, class of 1990) for translations from Spanish; Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner for sharing research from her forthcoming book on women and electroacoustic music; and the staff of DeWitt Wallace Library at Macalester, especially Jean Beccone and Terri Fishel. I am also grateful to colleague and friend Dorothy Williams for her suggestions and support.

1. Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: The Free Press, 1989), p. 176.

2. See chapter 6 in Ellie M. Hisama, “Gender, Politics, and Modernist Music: Analyses of Five Compositions by Ruth Crawford (1901–1953) and Marion Bauer (1887 [sic]–1955)” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1996; UMI #9618075).

3. For a sample of seven works, see Mary Howe, Composers Recordings CRI American Masters CD785 (1998); for a recording of Sand, conducted by JoAnn Falletta, see The Virginia Symphony, Music and the Arts 2/2 CDR0497 (1997), available directly from the Virginia Symphony (550 E Main Street; Norfolk, VA 23510-2201); for four songs, see From a Woman's Perspective: Art Songs by Women Composers, Vienna Modern Masters VMM2005 (1993).

4. Madeleine Goss, Modern Music-Makers: Contemporary American Composers (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1952), p. 125.

5. Thanks to Rae Linda Brown (e-mail communication with the author, July 26, 1998), who confirmed the revised birth date of 1887 along with new information about the premiere of Symphony in E Minor.

6. Rae Linda Brown, “William Grant Still, Florence Price, and William Dawson: Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance,” in Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays, ed. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 71. This article (pp. 71–86) provides extended information about Price's Symphony in E Minor.

7. As quoted in CAMW, p. 92. The anthology presents another work by Smith for flute and piano, A Distant Dream. Whisper on the Land was published by Medici Music Press in 1988.

8. Private communication by the composer.

9. Mary Howe, Jottings (Washington, D.C., privately published, 1959), p. 89, as quoted in Christine Ammer, Unsung: A History of Women in American Music (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), p. 119.

10. For a CD including the composition's revised version for two pianos (movements 1, 3, and 4), see Music by American Women Composers, Bravura Recordings BR-1001.

11. Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 356; see also her Web site at http://music.dartmouth.edu/~rcs/.

12. Tick, p. ix.

13. Michael and Peggy Seeger are joined by their late sister, Penny, and four of Crawford's grandchildren in a recording of fifty-three songs from Crawford's American Folk Songs for Christmas, Rounder CD0268/0269. For Animal Folk Songs for Children, Rounder CD8023/24, these performers are augmented by the fourth sibling, Barbara, and two additional grandchildren.

14. Charles Louis Seeger, “On Dissonant Counterpoint,” Modern Music 7 (June-July 1930): 28.

15. Ruth Crawford to Edgard Varèse (letter and analysis), January 8, 1948, Ruth Crawford Seeger Collection, Library of Congress, Item 8m.

16. Crawford, “Notes” to “Rat Riddles” in Three Songs, New Music Orchestra Series, No. 5 (San Francisco: New Music Edition, 1933).

17. For this and other works on CD, see especially Ruth Crawford Seeger: Portrait, Deutsche Grammophon DG 449 925-2. See also Ruth Crawford Seeger: American Visionary, Musical Heritage Society MHS 513493M, and Ruth Crawford, Composers Recordings CRI CD658.

18. Steven E. Gilbert, “‘The Ultra-Modern Idiom’: A Survey of New Music,” Perspectives of New Music 12/1–2 (Fall/Winter 1973–Spring/Summer 1974): 310.

19. For this and other works, see Vivian Fine, Composers Recordings CRI CD692.

20. Byron Belt, Long Island Press, May 21, 1976, as quoted by Jane Weiner LePage, Women Composers, Conductors, and Musicians of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2 (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1983), p. 86.

21. Jacob Druckman, interview, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers, ed. Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982), p. 156.

22. For the Louise Talma Society Web site by Luann Dragone (Ldragone@email.gc.cuny.edu), see http://www.omnidisc.com/Talma.html.

23. Elaine Barkin, “Louise Talma: ‘The Tolling Bell,’” Perspecitves of New Music 10/2 (Spring/Summer 1972): 151.

24. Joan Tower, liner notes for Prelude for Five Players, Composers Recordings CRI SD 302.

25. Joan Tower, as quoted by Michael Redmond, “Towering; Uncommon; Composer,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 2, 1994, p. 30.

26. Elektra/Nonesuch 79245-2 (CD). Other CD recordings include Joan Tower Concertos, d'Note Classics CNC 1016; Joan Tower Music for Clarinet, Summitt DCD 124; chamber music on CRI CD582 and New World Records, NWR 80470; and Fanfare (No. 1) on The American Album, RCA Victor Red Seal 60778-2-RC.

27. Joan Tower, as quoted in Showcase [program for Minnesota Orchestra], September 1991, p. 29.

28. Barbara Kolb, Program Notes to Appello ([New York]: Boosey & Hawkes, [1978]). Further, Boulez had borrowed his series from an unordered pitch set in Olivier Messiaen's pioneering work Mode de valeurs et d'intensité (1949). The pitch-class set used is: E^b, D, A, A^b, G, F^#, E, C^#, B^b, F, B.

29. Ibid.

30. For a score excerpt and additional commentary see CAMW, pp. 71–90; see also the CD Barbara Kolb: Millefoglie and Other Works, New World 80422-2.

31. For score excerpts and additional commentary see CAMW, pp. 71–73, 91–96.

32. Nancy Van de Vate, as quoted in an interview by Jane Weiner Lepage, Women Composers, Conductors, and Musicians of the Twentieth Century [vol. 1] (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1980), p. 257.

33. CDs of many Van de Vate compositions are available from Vienna Modern Masters and other labels.

34. For score and additional commentary see CAMW, pp. 319–53.

35. Nancy Van de Vate, liner notes for Chernobyl, Conifer Records CDCF 168, pp. 3–4.

36. For “Free at Last,” see Watch and Pray: Spirituals and Art Songs by African-American Women Composers, Koch 3-7247-2H1 (CD). For Prelude, see score in Black Women Composers: A Century of Piano Music (1893–1990), ed. Helen Walker-Hill (Byrn Mawr: Hildegard Publishing, 1992), p. 43; Kaleidoscope: Music by African-American Women, Leonarda LE339 (CD).

37. K. Robert Schwartz, “Classical Music: A Composer Who Actually Earns a Living Composing,” New York Times, March 22, 1998, sec. 2, p. 38.

38. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, as quoted by Peter Laki, Stagebill Carnegie Hall (February 1991), p. 20A.

39. Koch 3-7248-2 H1.

40. Libby Larsen, Showcase [Minnesota Orchestra's program book], 23/8 (April 1991), p. 27.

41. See Edie Hill, “Larsen Challenges Orchestral Frontiers,” Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter, June 1991, p. 4.

42. As quoted by Matthew Balensuela, “Composer Emphasizes Rhythm in Her Music,” Terre Haute Tribune-Star, September 5, 1996, pp. D1–2.

43. See Dale Warland Singers: Choral Currents, Innova MN110 (CD). See also Web sites maintained by her publishers at http://www.ecspublishing.com/larsen/larsen.htm and http://www1.oup.co.uk/music/repprom/composer/larsen/.

44. Information on the Web site maintained by her publisher at http://www.presser.com/chen.html (July 25, 1998).

45. Chen Yi's family name is Chen; her personal name is Yi. In Chinese practice, the family name is given first.

46. Chen Yi, San Francisco Chronicle, as quoted at http://www.presser.com/ chen.html (July 25, 1998).

47. Among her CDs are The Music of Chen Yi, New Albion NA 090 CD, with the Women's Philharmonic, JoAnn Falletta, and Chanticleer; Wondrous Love, A World Folk Song Collection, Teldec, 16676-2, on which Chanticleer performs Chen's arrangements of five Asian folk songs. Videos of her music are Sound And Silence (Chen Yi and Her Music) (Paris: International Society for Contemporary Music, Adamov Films and Polish TC, 1989); Overseas Artists (New Concept in Creation) (Taipei: Taiwan Public TV, 1991).

48. George Rochberg, “The New Image of Music,” Perspectives of New Music 2/1 (Fall/Winter, 1963): 1–10.

49. Tony Coulter, “[Interview with] Annea Lockwood,” Ear Magazine 13/4 (June 1988): no pagination.

50. For CDs devoted to Lockwood's music, see The Glass World, ¿What Next? Recordings WN0021; A Sound Map of the Hudson River, Lovely Music LCD 2081; Thousand Year Dreaming, ¿What Next? Recordings WN0010.

51. For CDs including LeBaron's music, see Rana, Ritual, and Revelation, Mode 30; Jewel Box, Tellus 26; Urban Diva, CRI CD654; The Musical Railism of Anne LeBaron, Mode 42; Newband, Music & Arts CD-931. See also her Web site at http://home.earthlink.net/~lebaron/.

52. Coulter, n.p.

53. Julia Perry, liner notes for Homunculus C.F., CRI SD 252 (LP).

54. For CD, see “Magnificathy”: The Many Voices of Cathy Berberian, Wergo WER 60054-50.

55. Richard Gehr, “Mourning in America: Diamanda Galas,” Artforum 27, no. 9 (May 1989): 117.

56. Andrea Juno and V. Vale, Angry Women (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1991), pp. 11–12.

57. Richard Gehr, “Mourning in America,” 118.

58. For CDs, see Plague Mass (from live performances at Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, 1990), Mute (Elektra) 9-61043-2; Vena Cava, Mute (Elektra) 9-61459-2; Schrei X (includes Schrei 27), Mute 9037-2. See also video of concert performances recorded in Chicago and New York in 1992 (52 minutes), Judgement Day: Diamanda Galás, H-Gun Labs Production in conjunction with Mute Records (Chicago: Atavistic Video, 1993). See Galás's Web site, http://www.brainwashed.com/diamanda/Diamanda.shtml, for many links and articles.

59. Pauline Oliveros, Aeolian Partitions (Bowdoin: Bowdoin College Music Press, 1983), p. 59.

60. Pauline Oliveros, “Some Sound Observations,” Source, January 1968, p. 79; quoted in Heidi Von Gunden, The Music of Pauline Oliveros (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1983), p. 59.

61. For a thorough discussion of this work, see Von Gunden, pp. 59–63.

62. For a description of how moving this lullaby can be, see Tom Johnson, “Two Transcendental Experiences,” Village Voice, June 23, 1980, pp. 66, 68.

63. People: Pauline Oliveros, “Longer Bio,” http://www.artswire.org/Artswire.www.pof/peo_po.html, p. 5.

64. Fename Homepage, “Pauline Oliveros,” http://www.gvn.net/fenam/oliveros.html, p. 1. Pamela Z's Web site is http://www.sirius.com/~pamelaz/welcome.html.

65. People: Pauline Oliveros, “Artistic Statement,” http://www.artswire.org/Artswire.www.pof/peop_po.html, p. 1.

66. Liner notes, Pauline Oliveros et al., Deep Listening, New Albion Records NA 022 (1989).

67. For a stream-of-consciousness comparison of Oliveros, Gertrude Stein, and Sappho, see Jill Johnston, “Dance Journal: The Wedding,” Village Voice, January 14, 1971, pp. 33–34.

68. Pamela McCorduck, “America's Multi-Mediatrix,” Wired (4 Ventures USA, 1993), http://www.maths.lth.se/matematiklu/personal/apas/laurie/pl.html, p. 1.

69. David Sterritt, “Laurie Anderson Multimedia Blitz,” Christian Science Monitor, January 31, 1983, p. 17.

70. Laurie Anderson, United States Live (Warner Bros., WB 25 192-1, 1985); and United States (Harper and Row, 1984).

71. Laurie Anderson, Big Science (Warner Bros., WB 3674-2, 1982).

72. Laurie Anderson, Strange Angels (Warner Bros., WB 4-25900, 1989).

73. Laurie Anderson, Stories from the Nerve Bible: A Retrospective 1972–92 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994).

74. McCorduck, p. 2.

75. Laurie Anderson, Nerve Bible, p. 276, as quoted in Woodrow B. Hood, “Laurie Anderson and the Politics of Performance,” Postmodern Culture 4 #3 (May 1994), http://www/maths.lth.se/matematklu/personal/apas/laurie/lap.html, p. 3.

76. David Sterritt, “Laurie Anderson Considers the Heart of Her ‘Performance Art’ to be Storytelling,” Christian Science Monitor, October 24, 1983, p. 26.

77. Joan La Barbara, Voice Is the Original Instrument (Wizard Records, RVW 2266, 1975).

78. Joan La Barbara, “Lovely Music Catalogue by Artist: Joan La Barbara,” http://www.lovely.com/bios/labarbara.html>.

79. Monk was born in 1942 in New York, not in 1943 in Peru while her mother was on a performance tour, as stated in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, s.v. “Meredith Monk.”

80. The Kitchen, formerly located on Broome Street in New York, is a gallery and performance space where Robert Ashley, Laurie Anderson, and others performed early in their careers. The Living Room is the recording studio partially owned by Philip Glass.

81. Lanny Harrison, p. 1 of a two-page typescript, written September 19, 1975. New York Public Library, Lincoln Center, clipping file.

82. L. K. Telbert, “Meredith Monk: Renaissance Woman,” Music Journal, September-October 1979, p. 9.

83. Sue Snodgrass, “Meredith Monk: Solo Performance,” New Art Examiner, March 1985, p. 59.

84. Nancy Goldner, “Stillness Becomes Movement in Monk's ‘Education of the Girlchild,’” Christian Science Monitor, November 14, 1973, p. 18.

85. For more information see Leslie Lassetter, “Meredith Monk: An Interview about Her Recent Opera, Atlas,” Contemporary Music Review 16 (1997): 59–67.

86. Jack Anderson, “Roosevelt Island as a Stage,” New York Times, September 26, 1994.

87. Gerald Brennan, “To see the next stage of musical theater, see Monk,” Ann Arbor News, October 7, 1996; and Kyle Gann, “Monkless Chants,” Village Voice, October 29, 1996.

88. David Sterritt, “When Meredith Monk Sings, the Whole World Understands,” Christian Science Monitor, January 19, 1982, p. 14.

89. John Rockwell, quoted in Current Biography Yearbook, 1985 edition, s.v. “Monk, Meredith.”

90. Beverly Grigsby, “Women Composers of Electronic Music in the United States,” in The Musical Woman [vol. 1] (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), p. 151; Gavin Borchert, “American Women in Electronic Music, 1984–94,” Contemporary Music Review 16 (1997): 89–97.

91. Available on CD, Musgrave: Narcissus/Shatin: Kairos, NEUMA 450-95. See also her Web site at http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jsa.

92. For CDs, see No World Improvisations, O.O. Records, O.O. #2; No World (Trio) Improvisations, O.O. #4; The Aerial [A Journal in Sound] #2 (Santa Fe: Nonsequitur Foundation, 1990).

93. For CDs including works by Hutchinson, see Vocal Neighborhoods: A Collection from the Post–Sound Poetry Landscape, vol. 3 (1993) of The Leonardo Music Journal CD Series; Mini-mall, Tellus, no. 27; The Aerial [A Journal in Sound] #4 (Santa Fe: Nonsequitur Foundation, 1991). Pamela Z's music is found on these CDs: Emergency Music Collection, CRI CD770; Dice 2 [she sways]: A Collection of Contemporary Women Composers, Ishtar CD002; Sonic Circuits. IV, Innova 113. For recordings of Spiegel's music, see her Web site at http://www.dorsai.org/~spiegel. For music by Shields, see Apocalypse, CRI CD647; Pioneers of Electronic Music, American Masters, CRI CD 611. For an interview of Laurie Spiegel, see Joanna Bosse, “Creating Options, Creating Music: An Interview with Laurie Spiegel,” Contemporary Music Review 16 (1997): 81–87.

94. For CD, see Centaur CRC 2045, CDCM Computer Music Series, vol. 3; see also discussion by Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, “Recent Electro-Acoustic Music by Women,” International League of Women Composers Journal (October 1992): 8–14.

95. See Spiegel's Cavis Muris (1986) on The Virtuoso in the Computer Age—III, Centaur CDCM Computer Music Series, vol. 13; also Unseen Worlds, which offers a dozen works composed during 1987–1990, originally on Scarlet Records Infinity Series #88802-2 (1982) and rereleased on Spiegel's own label, Aesthetic Engineering, in 1994. Both CDs are available from the Electronic Music Foundation (http://www.emf.org). Excerpts of Hinkle-Turner's works are available at her Web site (http://www.smu.edu/~ehinkle/).

96. As quoted by Jane Weiner LePage, Women Composers, Conductors, and Musicians of the Twentieth Century [vol. 1], p. 96.

97. See CD of McLin's choral music, Music for My People, Neil Kjos Music NN9617C, available from Kjos.

98. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music. Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 162.

99. As quoted by Herman Hudson, with David N. Baker and Lida M. Belt, “The Black Composer Speaks. An Interview with Undine Smith Moore,” Helicon Nine 14–15 (1986): 175.

100. Ibid., p. 184.

101. See her Web site at http://members.aol.cim/alicep16/index.html.

102. For a survey of recordings of Gideon's music, see J. Michele Edwards [Recording Reviews], American Music 14/2 (Summer 1996): 244–47.

103. Albert Weisser, “Miriam Gideon's New Service,” American Jewish Congress Bi-Weekly (New York, June 30, 1972), p. 23.

104. Albert Weisser, “An Interview with Miriam Gideon,” Dimensions in American Judaism 4 (1970): 40.

105. Vivian Fine, liner notes for Missa Brevis, CRI SD 434.

106. Annea Lockwood, Singing the Moon (score), Ear Magazine East 6/3 (April-May 1981): 20.

107. Heidi Von Gunden, “Whistle Music: A Sonic Exorcism” [verbal instructions], Heresies 3/2 No. 10 (1980): 45.

108. Susan McClary, as quoted by Carla Waldemar, “Looking at Women and Great Art: Oh, Susanna.” Twin Cities Reader, July 8, 1987, p. 17.

109. Libby Larsen, notes for the premiere program, Minnesota Opera, May 25 to June 3, 1990, p. 11. For more information on this and other operas by women, see Karin Pendle, “For the Theatre: Opera, Dance, and Theatre Piece,” Contemporary Music Review 16 (1997): 69–79.

110. All quotations by Libby Larsen are from e-mail to the author, August 23, 1998.

111. For CD, see Premiere Performances by Boston Musica Viva, Delos D/CD 1012.

112. For additional information, see D. Antoinette Handy, “Black Women and American Orchestras: An Update,” in New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. Josephine Wright with Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1992), pp. 451–61.

113. Statistics from the American Symphony Orchestra League.

114. For further information about the Women's Philharmonic and conductor JoAnn Falletta, see J. Michele Edwards, “All-Women's Musical Communities: Fostering Creativity and Leadership,” in Bridges of Power: Women's Multicultural Alliances, ed. Lisa Albrecht and Rose Brewer (Santa Cruz, CA: New Society Publishers, 1990), pp. 95–107.

115. As quoted by Anthony Tommasini, “Music Rarity: One Woman Wielding a Baton,” New York Times, April 9, 1996, p. C13.

116. For more information, see Jan Bell Groh, Evening the Score: Women in Music and the Legacy of Frédérique Petrides (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), which includes annotated facsimiles of all thirty-seven issues of Women in Music (1935–1940) plus relevant photographs.

117. Interview with Hillis, February 23, 1982, as quoted by Kay Donahue Lawson, “Women Orchestral Conductors: Factors Affecting Career Development” (M.M. thesis, Michigan State University, 1983), p. 59.

118. Recounted by Richard Dyer, “Tanglewood Music Center's Star Student Conductor,” Boston Globe, September 3, 1988, p. 9, Living/Arts (available from LEXIS-NEXIS database on-line).

119. Stephanie von Buchau, “JoAnn Falletta at the Podium of the Women's Philharmonic,” San Francisco Magazine, November 1987, p. 58.

120. Interview by Sara Jobin, “Maestra: Five Female Orchestral Conductors in the United States” (B.A. honors paper, Harvard University, 1992), p. 114.

121. Esperanza Pulido, “Mexican Women in Music,” Latin American Music Review 4/1 (Spring-Summer 1983): 120.

122. For CDs of Tres momentos, see Sonoric Rituals, Albany TROY 242; and Mexico: 100 Years of Piano Music. Romanticism, Ethnicity and Innovation, North/ South Consonance N/S R 1010. For 21 rondas mexicanas performed by the composer, see Primer Concurso de Composicion Musical de Queretaro ([Queretaro, Mexico?]: Egracom Queretaro, 1996?).

123. For Agudelo's Toccata on CD, see Clavecin contemporaneo mexicano ([Mexico?]: Fonca, 1996); for Arabesco, see Musica mexicana para flauta de pico, Serie siglo XX; vol. 8 ([Mexico City]: INBA/CENIDIM, 1992).

124. As quoted from an interview by Jeannine Wagar, “Stylistic Tendencies in Three Contemporary Mexican Composers: Manuel Enriquez, Mario Lavista and Alicia Urreta” (D.M.A. final project, Stanford University, 1985) (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1987), p. 145.

125. Martinez, as quoted by Joanna Pitman, “Take the Cue from Her,” Times (London), October 11, 1994, Features section (available from LEXIS-NEXIS database on-line).

126. For score and commentary see CAMW, pp. 155–63.

127. For five works on CD, see Tania León, CRI CD 662; see also works as part of the Louisville Orchestra: First Edition Recordings, LCD010; and The World So Wide, Nonesuch 79458-2.

128. Biographical information and a list of selected works are available for each of the Canadian composers at the Canadian Music Centre Web site (http://www.culturenet.ca/cmc/); the CMC lending library catalog of perusal scores is also at the Web site.

129. Interview by Harvey Don Huiner, quoted in “The Choral Music of Violet Archer” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1980), p. 217.

130. As quoted by Steven Mazey, “Composer Thrilled by Date with NACO,” Ottawa Citizen, August 5, 1998, p. E2 (available from LEXIS-NEXIS database on-line).

131. Roxanne Snider, “Celebrating the Nation's Composers,” Maclean's May 19, 1986, p. 44, Music section (available from LEXIS-NEXIS database on-line).

132. Jon Kimura Parker, “The Solo Piano Music of Alexina Louie: A Blend of East and West” (D.M.A. thesis, Juilliard, 1989), p. 58. The thesis includes considerable formal analysis and reprints complete scores for Scenes and Music for Piano (1982).

133. See Love Songs for a Small Planet, Centrediscs/Cetredisques CMC-CD 4893. This and several other CDs are available from the Canadian Music Centre.

134. Hope Lee, as quoted in her “Bio” (1998) on the Canadian Music Centre Web site (http://www.culturenet.ca/cmc/).

135. For this and another work on CD, see New Concert Discs NCD 0294.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

In addition to the items mentioned in the text or cited in the footnotes, the following sources provide information about twentieth-century women in music in North and Central America.

Ardito, Linda. “Miriam Gideon: A Memorial Tribute.” Perspectives of New Music 34/2 (Summer 1996): 202–14.

Armer, Elinor. “A Conversation with Vivian Fine: Two Composers Talk Shop.” Strings 5/5 (March 1991): 73–78.

Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/Bill T. Jones. Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, 1998.

Britain, Radie. Ridin' Herd to Writing Symphonies: An Autobiography. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1996.

Brown, Rae Linda. “William Grant Still, Florence Price, and William Dawson: Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance.” In Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays, ed. Samuel Floyd, Jr., pp. 71–86. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.

———. “The Woman's Symphony Orchestra of Chicago and Florence B. Price's Piano Concerto in One Movement.” American Music 11/2 (1993): 185–205.

Callahan, Moiya. “Mary Carr Moore's Narcissa.” M.M. thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1999.

Contemporary Music Review 16/1–2 (1997), special issue, American Women Composers, ed. Karin Pendle.

Edwards, J. Michele. “All-Women's Musical Communities: Fostering Leadership and Creativity.” In Bridges of Power: Women's Multicultural Alliances, ed. Lisa Albrecht and Rose M. Brewer, pp. 95–107. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990.

Flanagan, Michael. “Invoking Diamanda.” In Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and Aids, ed. Thomas Avena, pp. 161–75. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1994.

Gagne, Cole, ed. Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993.

Gagne, Cole, and Tracy Caras, eds. Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982.

Hilferty, Robert. “The Avenging Spirit of Diamanda Galás.” High Performance 13 (Spring 1990): 22–25.

Jowitt, Deborah, ed. Meredith Monk. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Kielian-Gilbert, Marianne. “Of Poetics and Poiesis, Pleasure and Politics: Music Theory and Modes of the Feminine.” Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (Winter 1994): 44–67.

Lochhead, Judy. “Joan Tower's Wings and Breakfast Rhythms I and II: Some Thoughts on Form and Repetition.” Perspectives of New Music 30/1 (Winter 1992): 132–56.

McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Mockus, Martha. “Sounding Out: Lesbian Feminism and the Music of Pauline Oliveros.” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1999.

Moss, Linell. “An Interview with Composer Libby Larsen.” IAWM Journal 5, #1 (Winter 1999): 8–10.

Nicholls, David. American Experimental Music, 1890–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Pappas, Elizabeth Helen. “Contemporary Performance Art Composition: Post-modernism, Feminism, and Voice (Diamanda Galás, Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson).” Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1996.

Parker, Jon Kimura. “The Solo Piano Music of Alexina Louie: A Blend of East and West.” D.M.A. thesis, Juilliard School, 1989.

Peters, Penelope. “Deep Rivers: Selected Songs of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds.” Canadian University Music Review/Revue de musique des universités canadiennes 16/1 (1995): 74–95.

Pope, Rebecca A., and Susan J. Leonardi. “Divas and Disease, Mourning and Militancy: Diamanda Galás's Operatic Plague Mass.” In The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, ed. Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin, pp. 315–33. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Schwarz, David. Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

Smith, Catherine Parsons, and Cynthia Richardson. Mary Carr Moore, American Composer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987.

Sordo Sodi, Carmen. “Compositoras Mexicanas de Musica Comercial.” Heterofinia 15 (1982): 16–20.

Straus, Joseph N. The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Tick, Judith. “Dissonant Counterpoint Revisited: The First Movement of Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet 1931.” In A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock, ed. Richard Crawford, R. Allen Lott, and Carol Oja, pp. 405–21. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1990.

———. Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

———. “Ruth Crawford's ‘Spiritual Concept’: The Sound-Ideals of an Early American Modernist.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 44/2 (Summer 1991): 221–61.

Wilding-White, Ray. “Remembering Ruth Crawford Seeger: An Interview with Charles and Peggy Seeger.” American Music 6/4 (Winter 1988): 442–54.

Zelenka, Karl. Komponierende Frauen: Ihr Leben, ihre Werke. Cologne: Ellenberg Verlag, 1980.

---

^* This section, except for the material on Diamanda Galás, is by Leslie Lassetter.