View PDF<\/a> Charity Lofthouse and Sarah Marlowe<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A one-day conference entitled, \u201cWomen in Music: An Interdisciplinary Conference,\u201d was held on March 9, 2024, as a connection to International Women\u2019s Day and with the support of the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Mellon Foundation. The conference was jointly organized by faculty from Eastman School of Music, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Rochester Institute of Technology, and took place at the Gearan Performing Arts Center, Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Comprising sixteen regular session papers and five papers in a session devoted to undergraduate scholarship, the conference included approximately sixty in-person attendees and twenty-five remote attendees from around the world. The conference also featured two keynote events: an address by Dr. Roger Moseley (Cornell University) and a piano concert by Dr. Kristin Ditlow (University of New Mexico).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reflective of its name, presentations and performances engaged works from numerous disciplines and featured women as composers, performers, critics, filmmakers, muses, archivists, political agitators, pedagogues, students, trailblazers, and authors. The following account is organized around these identities and activities\u2014women as composers, women as performers and artists, women as undergraduate scholars, and the keynote presentation and concert\u2014with brief commentary throughout regarding the current state of inclusion more broadly for women composers, musicians, and scholars. Participants illuminated a set of central themes throughout the day: women musicians\u2019 and composers\u2019 conditions as a subjective other; their sustained and continuing exclusion, perpetuated across time and space; their enterprising and innovative musical output created despite these limits; and interventions aimed at accelerating progress toward equity.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The full program may be found here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to the keynote (discussed below), just over half of the regular session papers focused on music composed by women. Amongst presentations focused on a handful of familiar names, several involved composers with few or no analytical citations, an unfortunately common situation for women composers. Feminist analytical criticism over the past thirty years has sought to address this imbalance, yet the recent publication of Brenda Ravenscroft and Laurel Parsons\u2019s four-volume Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers <\/em>cites what reviewer Tim Sullivan (2021) refers to as the \u201cultimately depressing\u201d need for more such work: \u201cthe small numbers are simply staggering: between 1994 and 2013, \u2018only 23, or 1.51 percent, of the 1,524 articles published by eight peer-reviewed music theory and analysis journals over 376 issues have been devoted to music by a female composer\u2019\u201d (1960\u20132000, 3).<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In each case, these works rewarded attention to their analytical, musicological, and performance details, examining diverse facets including: harmonic, rhythmic, and formal analysis in song; depictions of sexuality and gender in song; larger-scale instrumental and chamber works; and identity and agency enacted in and through composition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Song literature encompasses a primary and sizeable corpus of women\u2019s compositions and nearly a third of the conference\u2019s presentations focused on songs and vocality. Two presentations foregrounded the incorporation of musical elements at the borders of Romanticism and Modernism, including harmonic complexity, rhythmic syncretism, and formal experimentalism. Kyle Hutchinson (Colgate University) noted in his presentation on Alma Mahler-Werfel that her entire published output is art songs, due to constraints demanded by Gustav Mahler. Hutchinson framed the normative tonal preferences in Scheinakkorden<\/em>\u2014defined as recognizable harmonic entities that evoke tonal-diatonic interpretations\u2014as subject to sublimation by voice-leading processes that evoke contrasting harmonic function in order to recast diatonic relationships as chromatic. Mahler-Werfel\u2019s songs thus create layers of phenomenological interpretations that serve as psychoacoustic trickery and look ahead to modernist twentieth-century post-tonality. James Sullivan (Michigan State University) highlighted multiple layers of syncopation in Florence Price\u2019s \u201cCaged Birds\u201d (1940s) as expressions of Price\u2019s intersectional identity as a Black woman composer. Using Yonatan Malin\u2019s theory of energetics, Sullivan demonstrated local and large-scale musical syncopation as reflective of the caged bird\u2019s struggle and argued that rhythmic manipulation is also an important element of the interplay between poetic syncopation, poetic form, and musical form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three additional presentations on song repertoire during the conference\u2019s morning session drew attention to the role of sexuality, gender, and transgressive narratives in less familiar twentieth-century works. Yan Gao (Stony Brook University) turned a critical eye to recently unearthed video footage of Diamanda Galas performing Plague Mass<\/em> in 1991, highlighting the ways Galas reimagines and reconstructs the notion of the \u201cabject\u201d by incorporating dominant cultural symbols in her performance. Galas then queers these symbols through vocality, sonic transgression, and embodiment that places her own body as an expressive space to interrogate liberalism and call attention to the AIDS crisis. Anna Stephan-Robinson (West Liberty University) highlighted the use of subtle yet significant alterations to strophic repetitions in Katherine Ruth Heyman\u2019s \u201cTortie-Tortue\u201d (1920). The song\u2019s protagonist is a woman who lost her husband and is being questioned about the event by curious children; Stephan-Robinson explored the role of these alterations, alongside key relationships and voice leading, in illustrating key concepts of disconnection, reticence, and ambivalence. Closing out the morning\u2019s presentations on songs, a presentation and live performance of Lili Boulanger\u2019s Clairieres dans le ciel<\/em> by vocalist Elise Noyes (Eastman School of Music) and pianist Gina Hyunmin Lee (Eastman School of Music) examined the cycle\u2019s omission of its protagonist\u2019s gender, a strategy linked by Noyes to questions about Boulanger\u2019s sexuality and one that informs advocacy for more performances of the song cycle by singers of all genders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Due to the legacy of historical prohibitions on public and professional music making, larger-scale instrumental and chamber works by women remain underexplored by music scholars and are also generally absent in the world\u2019s orchestral halls. A June 2024 report by the Donne Women in Music Equality and Diversity in Global Repertoire initiative covering 111 orchestras in thirty countries finds that 7.5% of the 16,327 scheduled compositions were by women, 5.8% were by white women, and only twelve women had their works played twenty or more times.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Three presentations by Gui Hwan Lee (James Madison University), Christopher Segall (University of Cincinnati), and Joe Davies (Maynooth University and University of California, Irvine) featured music by three composers from this group of twelve: Unsuk Chin (#6, twenty-six performances), Sofia Gubaidulina (#3, twenty-nine performances) and Clara Schumann (#10, twenty-one performances), as well as Amy Beach (not listed in the report). Their analyses shed welcome light on each composer\u2019s musical responses to societal and autobiographical experiences and detail their sonic depictions of stereotypes, societal collapse, and the renewal of creativity during widowhood, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gui Hwan Lee\u2019s analysis of Unsuk Chin\u2019s Gougalon<\/em> (2009\/2012) detailed how the work\u2019s third movement, \u201cThe Grinning Fortune Teller with the False Teeth,\u201d depicts Korea\u2019s mudang<\/em>, or female shamans, who are figures typically derided and stereotyped in Korean culture. Drawing on Yayoi Uno Everett\u2019s (2021) notion of intercultural analysis, Lee positioned Chin\u2019s musical caricature of the mudang<\/em> as a unique, energetic, and novel depiction of Korean shamanism within both contemporary East Asian and Western sound art circles. Christopher Segall employed interdisciplinary research on Soviet spectrality and Derrida\u2019s notion of hauntology to analyze shadow tuning in post-Soviet works by Sofia Gubaidulina. Two groups of chamber group players are tuned a quarter tone apart, which Segall interpreted as a means for Gubaidulina to consecrate the missing disappeared during Stalin\u2019s Terror and to symbolize musically Soviet spectrality, depicting the haunted state and lack of closure that still exists decades later for those who survived. Joe Davies\u2019s presentation on composition and widowhood\u2014often stereotypically framed as a time of absence, loneliness, weakness, and passivity\u2014unearthed the creative wellspring that accompanied widowhood for Clara Schumann and Amy Beach, and the ways piano culture shaped their works and their identities after losing their husbands. Davies centered primary source materials with the objective of incorporating women\u2019s lived experiences and complex emotions as critical evidence of widowhood\u2019s role as catalyst for renewed creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, identity and agency were themes in two presentations featuring composition as a means to diversify spaces still governed by male-centered and colonizer norms. Composer Chieh Huang (University of California, Irvine) explored the rhythmic, pitch, and metaphoric contours found in the language of the Ayatal, an indigenous group in Taiwan, whose dialects and culture were severely curtailed during colonization. Exploring her Ayatal lineage through an endangered language that she does not anticipate being able to learn to speak fluently, Huang described the intricacies of using technological tools (Max\/MSP, MalletKat, Mugic, and more) alongside deep exploration of and engagement with the syntactic and acoustic nuances of her ancestral language. This \u201cweaving worlds\u201d served as a re-creating of both linguistic vivacity and cultural production, wherein Huang used her compositions as an urgent means to communicate the musicality embedded in the Ayatal spoken word. Michael Callahan (Michigan State University) incorporated composition into a pedagogical approach that subverts dominant canons of male-centric repertoire by using model compositions as a means of student empowerment. Through examples of model composition assignments and qualitative data from student reflections, Callahan observed how women students reported a sense of expanded musical identities from their compositional assignments. Students also reported expanded agency to compose music that is meaningful to their experiences within the institutional spaces that traditionally discount and marginalize both their experiences and the identities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taken as a whole, these presentations illustrate the means whereby women created and honed their individual harmonic, formal, and timbral dialects; experienced agency and creativity in the act of composing; and used their agency then and now for actualization, formation, transgression, and political and autobiographical commentary. Presentations on women composers at the conference represented a broad range of musical styles, racial and gender identities, and national origin. This broad inclusion is particularly necessary in combating a paradox at the heart of gender and music reception history: the act of composing as a woman has historically been viewed as both transgressive and banal, with women\u2019s works simultaneously considered dangerous and mundanely inferior. Against this backdrop, work that provides a greater and broader understanding of music by women is a key means of combating gendered misconceptions of who is and is not a composer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Complicating notions of performer, muse, agent, and professional musician, several presentations traced women artists and performers from various disciplines, and their navigation of labels throughout their careers. Two presentations focused on performances of vernacular and popular music genres, noting how the act of performance itself may empower women in their efforts to be seen as agents of musical, political, and social change, and not merely as performers. Emily Tam and Chris Stover (Griffith University, Queensland Conservatorium) examined the ways that the label \u201cmuse of bossa nova\u201d estranged Brazilian musician Nara Le\u00e3o from the political and social impact of her works and the innovative musical and artistic elements of her performances. Extending work on popular music and political resistance, Tam and Stover analyzed songs performed by Le\u00e3o in 1964\u2019s Opini\u00e3o de Nara<\/em> as displaying her active contribution to the performance\u2019s activism: this shift in positionality\u2014from muse to musical agent\u2014demotes the idea of Le\u00e3o as simply a means toward a performative-political end and highlights her active role in critiquing governmental oppression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Monica Hershberger (Lehigh University) retraced the musical journeys of performers Nina Simone and W\u00e9 Ani through the connection of Simone\u2019s 1965 rendition of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse\u2019s 1964 song \u201cFeeling Good,\u201d which Ani would perform to acclaim in 2016 on the television show The Voice<\/em>. Hershberger ultimately traced the artistic and personal trajectories of three black women singers: Simone, whose rejection from the Curtis Institute of Music shifted her musical identity from classical pianist to protest singer; Dorothy Maynor, who performed at the Eisenhower inauguration and founded the Harlem School of the Arts (HSA); and Ani, who studied at HSA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These women\u2019s careers serve collectively as case studies on the effects and legacy of race, gender, and class on agency and the role of performance in providing opportunity for marginalized musicians. Indeed, the transition from roles as \u201cvoice\u201d or \u201cmuse\u201d to positions of agency, authority, and leadership in commercial music spaces has been uneven. Though its percentages are better than orchestral halls, popular music\u2014loosely defined by the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative as a genre chiefly recorded, produced, labelled, and marketed by record labels, featured in Billboard rankings, and included in Grammy nominations\u2014still relegates women to the role of \u201cthe singer\u201d and maintains a sizeable (and largely racialized) gap between women artists and songwriters\/producers. While total percentages of women artists in popular music have increased from 22.7 to 37.7 percent over the last twelve years, Annenberg\u2019s 2024 report indicates percentages of women solo performers have stalled at 38.9% and women songwriters are credited in 18.9% of songs; 55% have no women songwriters and less than 1% have only women songwriters.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n\n\n\n In addition to minimizing their compositional and performance efforts, contributions to music by women authors, librettists, directors, choreographers, and other artists also regularly go unacknowledged. A presentation by Margarita Bonora (University of Cambridge) emphasized the co-creative role of choreographer Maya Plisetskaya in composition and reception of Rodion Shchedrin\u2019s ballet Anna Karenina <\/em>(1972). Anna Karenina<\/em>\u2019s underlying references to Plisetskaya\u2019s successful career as a dancer were a source of cohesion and female expressiveness, one that affected not only the creative production but also the public\u2019s response to experimental works in Soviet Russia. Peter Silberman (Ithaca College) accepted an analytical invitation extended by Jennifer Egan (2010) in her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad<\/em>. Egan\u2019s book features musings by a fictional character about the \u201chaunting power\u201d of pauses in rock songs and rates the songs on a haunting-power scale. Silberman\u2019s innovative analysis connected high haunting ratings to the telescoping pre-outro pause, a structural caesura after the song\u2019s final chorus before an outro that is telescoped outward, or unexpectedly lengthened. This technique creates a haunting temporal expansion just before the song\u2019s final section.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Compared to cultural and institutional limits regarding composition and publication, women have faced fewer prohibitions on access to private music instruction. As a result, educational materials produced in magazines and other periodicals, instructional volumes, and sheet-music collections have become a rich source of inquiry into gendered ideas surrounding music and sites of education and resistance for women students and instructors. Gareth Cordery (Columbia University) shared the physio-pedagogical work of British teacher Edwin Ward-Jackson, whose published lectures and exercises echoed contemporary Victorian ideas surrounding women\u2019s frailty and the benefits of exercise and harm reduction on amateur playing. In contrast, Elizabeth Busch (University of Maryland, College Park) contended that the inclusion of a Sapphic-themed exercise, polkas, and other additions in a bound sheet-music volume by \u201cMiss Tillou\u201d was a subtle yet subversive challenge to the volume\u2019s professed goals of promoting respectability, heterosexual marriage, and domestic gentility. Such materials, long hobbled by stereotypical depictions as simple, served as substantive and sophisticated means of developing theoretical, compositional, and performance abilities. As Rachel Lumsden (2020) notes in an article on music theory in women\u2019s popular press, in prematurely dismissing these kinds of materials \u201cfor being \u201csuperficial\u201d or \u201cweak,\u201d we run the risk of replicating the very same binary oppositions\u201d that have marginalized women for centuries.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n\n\n\n The conference\u2019s early afternoon session was devoted to presentations by five undergraduate scholars. The organizers programmed this as a sole session to encourage greater attendance from all conference participants; and the presentations were followed by a break that allowed time for the presenters to interact informally with the other conference attendees. Two presentations analyzed the music of Florence Price: Virginia Jansen (Boston University) argued that the inclusion of Spirituals in Price\u2019s \u201cCounterpoint\u201d pieces (Five Folksongs in Counterpoint<\/em> and Negro Folksongs in Counterpoint<\/em>) mediates the relationship between Price\u2019s identity as an African American and as a classically trained composer; and Catherine Hechtman (Oakland University) explored Price\u2019s Piano Sonata in E minor<\/em> as a site of both subtle and overt expression of numerous tonal, harmonic, textural, and rhythmic vernacular elements, housed within more traditional Western genre and form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Papers by Katherine Wynn (SUNY at Fredonia) and Allanah Egan (SUNY Geneseo) explored the potential for opera to provide a vehicle for self-expression and for educating audiences about history and oppression. Wynn\u2019s analysis of an aria from Giovanna D\u2019Arco<\/em>, an opera by Russian aristocrat Princess Zinaide Aleksandrovna Volkonskaya, offered a musical introduction to the self-taught royal\u2019s iconoclastic musical style and her unconventional views on art, religion, and women. Egan compared George Gershwin\u2019s Porgy and Bess<\/em> with Toni Morrison and Richard Danielpour\u2019s opera Margaret Garner, <\/em>noting that the complexity and honesty of Margaret Garner<\/em> not only offers a more honest depiction of racism in American history but also encourages more conversation about systemic barriers. Lastly, Kelly (Ziyue) Yang (Brown University) drew on her own ethnographic research in Yunnan, China, and argued that the Nakhi, an indigenous matrilineal society, was transformed from a matrilineal group that encouraged women\u2019s participation in music into a patriarchal society that curtailed women\u2019s musical opportunities. Nakhi women\u2019s pursuit of \u201cmusical feminism\u201d in the twentieth century, unfolding in three phases, has made progress in allowing women to regain their access to music-making while simultaneously resurrecting their matrilineal musical legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Roger Moseley\u2019s keynote presentation, \u201cJapanese Women at Work and Play: Sonic (Re)creations from the Arcade to the PlayStation, 1982\u20131998,\u201d engaged the work of Japanese women who composed music for video games during the genre\u2019s iconic early days. Positioning their work as responsive and transformative, two key points stood out in Moseley\u2019s presentation. First, Moseley noted that the presence of so many women composers in Japan\u2019s early video game studios was an anomaly that indicated the (at that time) low status afforded to game music composers and programmers, and the high skill level these women brought to their work.<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Second, through live demonstrations of various musical and technological elements on original Nintendo technology, Moseley showed how the work of Yuriko Keino, Kinuyo Yamashita, Satoe Terashima, and Yuko Shimomura was especially amenable to and encouraging of play. Moseley thus positioned the imaginary space of the musical and virtual within the material reality of the technological and embodied, declining to separate these women\u2019s compositions from their physical and ludic environment. Kristin Ditlow\u2019s recital, \u201cFemmages: Five Centuries of Keyboard Music by Women Composers,\u201d featured a variety of works spanning familiar names (Amy Beach, Clara Schumann) as well as newer works by Karola Oberm\u00fcller, Sara Karina Greif, and Ditlow herself. The concert concluded with Fantasia on<\/em> Norma<\/em> by Teresa Carre\u0144o (1853\u20131917), whose score is missing a page that Ditlow completed. The recital\u2019s chronological breadth and stylistic variety powerfully demonstrated Moseley\u2019s characterization of the keyboard as a exceptional location of ludomusical behavior, or \u201ca platform on which musical motives, gestures, propositions, and ripostes can be put into play\u201d (2016, 67).<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n\n\n\n The keynote and concert served as compelling encapsulations of the primary themes running through the day\u2019s presentations and performances: women\u2019s access to performance, to composition, to enfranchisement, to opportunity, to work, to play, to scholarship, and to representation, has always been dependent on proactive efforts to complete the unfinished work. Each of the conference presenters highlighted the range of work undertaken to that end, from scholarly analyses and concert programming to pedagogical interventions and informal mentorship for young scholars.<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n\n\n\n The conference design itself sought to provide interventions that counter prevailing patriarchal and institutional frameworks, not only by creating spaces for scholarship, compositions, and performances, but also by fostering relationships that form and inform those working toward gender equity and by generating interest in, and resources for, those wanting to work on music by women. The conference\u2019s relatively small size; the inclusion of scholars representing a wide spectrum of genders, educational and career stages, and nationalities; the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of the program; and the scheduling of multiple coffee breaks near the presentation rooms, and dedicated space for a catered lunch covered by the grant, afforded the attendees opportunities to share ideas and discuss each other\u2019s presentations. Having the means to support such a variety of musical scholarship and performance is both a testament to the continued progress academia has made in supporting women\u2019s visibility and an invitation to continue making these efforts as often and as enthusiastically as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Return to Volume 38<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n1. Women as Composers<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n2. Women as Artists, Students, and Muses<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
3. Undergraduate Research<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
4. Women at Work and Play<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Conference Program<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n