Music, Women, and Pianos in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania


Book Description

This volume documents not only the academic and music curricula offered at a distinguished seminary, but the importance of piano study from a sociological viewpoint, music making in a gendered environment, and performance opportunities available for 19th century women.




Transforming Women's Education


Book Description

Female seminaries in nineteenth-century America offered middle-class women the rare privilege of training in music and the liberal arts. A music background in particular provided the foundation for a teaching career, one of the few paths open to women. Jewel A. Smith opens the doors of four female seminaries, revealing a milieu where rigorous training focused on music as an artistic pursuit rather than a social skill. Drawing on previously untapped archives, Smith charts women's musical experiences and training as well as the curricula and instruction available to them, the repertoire they mastered, and the philosophies undergirding their education. She also examines the complex tensions between the ideals of a young democracy and a deeply gendered system of education and professional advancement. An in-depth study of female seminaries as major institutions of learning, Transforming Women's Education illuminates how musical training added to women's lives and how their artistic acumen contributed to American society.




Women in Music


Book Description

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




The Music of the Moravian Church in America


Book Description

The Moravians, or Bohemian Brethren, early Protestants who settled in Pennsylvania and North Carolina in the eighteenth century, brought a musical repertoire that included hymns, sacred vocal works accompanied by chamber orchestra, and instrumental music by the best-known European composers of the day. Moravian composers -- mostly pastors and teachers trained in the styles and genres of the Haydn-Mozart era -- crafted thousands of compositions for worship, and copied and collected thousands of instrumental works for recreation and instruction. The book's chapters examine sacred and secular works, both for instruments -- including piano solo -- and for voices. The Music of the Moravian Church demonstrates the varied roles that music played in one of America's most distinctive ethno-cultural populations, and presents many distinctive pieces that performers and audiences continue to find rewarding. Contributors: Alice M. Caldwell, C. Daniel Crews, Lou Carol Fix, Pauline M. Fox, Albert H. Frank, Nola Reed Knouse, Laurence Libin, Paul M. Peucker, and Jewel A. Smith. Nola Reed Knouse, director of the Moravian Music Foundation since 1994, is active as a flautist, composer, and arranger. She is the editor of The Collected Wind Music of David Moritz Michael.




Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature


Book Description

This book highlights the multiplicity of American women’s writing related to liminality and hybridity from its beginnings to the contemporary moment. Often informed by notions of crossing, intersectionality, transition, and transformation, these concepts as they appear in American women’s writing contest as well as perpetuate exclusionary practices involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sex, among other variables. The collection’s introduction, three unit introductions, fourteen individual essays, and afterward facilitate a process of encounters, engagements, and conversations within, between, among, and across the rich polyphony that constitutes the creative acts of American women writers. The contributors offer fresh perspectives on canonical writers as well as introduce readers to new authors. As a whole, the collection demonstrates American women’s writing is “threshold writing,” or writing that occupies a liminal, hybrid space that both delimits borders and offers enticing openings.




Cultivated by Hand


Book Description

Cultivated by Hand aligns the overlooked history of amateur musicians in the early years of the United States with little-understood practices of music book making. It reveals the pervasiveness of these practices, particularly among women, and their importance for the construction of gender, class, race, and nation.




American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century


Book Description

Studies of concert life in nineteenth-century America have generally been limited to large orchestras and the programs we are familiar with today. But as this book reveals, audiences of that era enjoyed far more diverse musical experiences than this focus would suggest. To hear an orchestra, people were more likely to head to a beer garden, restaurant, or summer resort than to a concert hall. And what they heard weren’t just symphonic works—programs also included opera excerpts and arrangements, instrumental showpieces, comic numbers, and medleys of patriotic tunes. This book brings together musicologists and historians to investigate the many orchestras and programs that developed in nineteenth-century America. In addition to reflecting on the music that orchestras played and the socioeconomic aspects of building and maintaining orchestras, the book considers a wide range of topics, including audiences, entrepreneurs, concert arrangements, tours, and musicians’ unions. The authors also show that the period saw a massive influx of immigrant performers, the increasing ability of orchestras to travel across the nation, and the rising influence of women as listeners, patrons, and players. Painting a rich and detailed picture of nineteenth-century concert life, this collection will greatly broaden our understanding of America’s musical history.




Complete Wind Chamber Music


Book Description

l + 386 pagesPerformance parts available.




Women in the Arts


Book Description

Women in the Arts: Eccentric Essays in Music, Visual Arts, and Literature is a multi-disciplined celebration of past and present women creators. It marks a new departure in women’s studies, for it presents an interdisciplinary emphasis on the long-neglected area of women’s contributions to the various genres of the arts. Because of its unique historical approach, this pioneering collection of essays is useful in the areas of humanities and women’s studies as scholarly or pleasure readings. Many “firsts” are included in this anthology. There are chapters by three prominent award-winning living composers that discuss the plight of women in this male-dominated field and the pioneering contemporary innovations to the discipline of musical composition that women have contributed. Another chapter brings to light pioneering research on the names and musical compositions of the earliest women composers. Another gives historical evidence of the earliest documented women’s conservatory and its performers in the United States located in the Moravian Young Ladies’ Seminary in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The chapter on the MacDowell Colony reveals the history of how Marian MacDowell and her network of women’s music clubs helped to build the MacDowell Colony, a haven for artists that has continued through the twenty-first century. In the visual arts, one essay brings forth visual representations of women’s subjugation; another analyzes the photographic innovations and historical work of the woman pioneer, Nellie Ladd; the artistic contributions of two women of color, Josephine Baker and Frida Kahlo, are contrasted in a historical perspective; and a fascinating historical analyses of women and tattoos is presented. In the area of literature, the “Potters” are celebrated for pioneering the first serial hand-made magazine in 1904; another writer, discusses how she represents the role of motherhood in her female characters; and arguments are presented of how women poets give voice to spiritual feminism. The thirteen diverse essays present original contributions to the disciplines of music, visual arts, and literature. By bringing forth this collection, it is hoped that there will be greater appreciation for the great diversity and range of women creators and the obstacles that they had to overcome. It is hoped that the essays will provide a historical documentation of the artistic voice of women that have until now been neglected.




Pioneering Education for Girls across the Globe


Book Description

The mid-18th to the early 20th century saw growing interest in the education of girls from all social classes in all regions of the world. During this time period of expanding empires and international travel, pioneering girls’ schools were established by educational entrepreneurs, predominantly men, supported by dedicated women school administrators and teachers who ensured the smooth operation of the schools and well-being of the girls attending them. The schools preceded national and local interest in educating girls, and frequently encountered resistance from the communities they sought to serve for the challenge and potential disruption they threatened to the existing gendered social order. The author examines six of these pioneering girls’ schools drawing her case studies from Britain, Colonial America, Singapore, India, Azerbaijan and Uganda. Placing each school in its geographical and historical setting, she analyses the driving forces that led their founders to undertake the oft-difficult task of funding and promoting the schools. Beliefs and gendered stereotypes regarding the roles of women in society posed further difficulties as did the conflicting educational ideologies, quality and attainment expectations to be negotiated in developing curriculum for the schools. On the global level, the school case studies illustrate how imperial expansion, and oft-accompanying religious missionary activity, exposed previously isolated communities in very diverse environments and social contexts to new ideas and influences creating tensions between desires for change and modernization and fears of loss of ethnic community. The author concludes by considering the ongoing importance of local agency, activism and social entrepreneurship in creating awareness of the need for quality education for girls in many parts of the world today.