Book Review
Jan. 15th, 2014 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kenjariMusic and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World
by Denise Von Glahn
This book looks at 9 American composers active in the 20th century, all of whom are women and all of whom have written works based on or inspired by nature. von Glahn starts with Amy Beach and ends with Emily Doolittle, including composers both well known (Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower) and less well known (Marion Bauer, Victoria Bond). Each chapter covers a single composer and focuses on a few selected works, mixing musical analysis, biography, and musicology to examine each composer's relationship with nature, how her works express this, and her place in the larger thread of women writing about nature.
von Glahn does a terrific job of weaving all her threads together, and making a very coherent picture that incorporates both the smallest individual details of a piece and larger themes about how women's access to nature, education, and the larger artistic world and the changes in these things have affected each composer and her work. It's a very carefully crafted book, and I found von Glahn's perspective and insights very interesting and illuminating. I especially liked the way she treated these women composers not as a minority but as just another subset of composers just as valid and worthy of study as any other, like "russian expatriate composers" or "German pianist-composers". Most importantly, this book introduced me to new music and gave me a different view of music and composing.
by Denise Von Glahn
This book looks at 9 American composers active in the 20th century, all of whom are women and all of whom have written works based on or inspired by nature. von Glahn starts with Amy Beach and ends with Emily Doolittle, including composers both well known (Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower) and less well known (Marion Bauer, Victoria Bond). Each chapter covers a single composer and focuses on a few selected works, mixing musical analysis, biography, and musicology to examine each composer's relationship with nature, how her works express this, and her place in the larger thread of women writing about nature.
von Glahn does a terrific job of weaving all her threads together, and making a very coherent picture that incorporates both the smallest individual details of a piece and larger themes about how women's access to nature, education, and the larger artistic world and the changes in these things have affected each composer and her work. It's a very carefully crafted book, and I found von Glahn's perspective and insights very interesting and illuminating. I especially liked the way she treated these women composers not as a minority but as just another subset of composers just as valid and worthy of study as any other, like "russian expatriate composers" or "German pianist-composers". Most importantly, this book introduced me to new music and gave me a different view of music and composing.
