Description:
This multi-author collection, the second to be published in an unprecedented four-volume series of analytical essays on music by women composers from the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries, presents detailed studies of compositions written up to 1900 by Hildegard of Bingen, Maddalena Casulana, Barbara Strozzi, Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, Marianna Martines, Fanny Hensel, Josephine Lang, Clara Schumann, and Amy Beach. Each chapter opens with a brief biographical sketch of the composer, followed by an in-depth analysis of one representative composition or a small number of comparable compositions, linking analytical observations with broader considerations of music history, gender, culture, or hermeneutics. These essays, many by leading music theorists, are grouped thematically into three sections, the first focused on early music for voice, the second on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century keyboard music, and the third on lieder and piano music. The collection is designed to challenge and stimulate a wide range of readers. For academics, these thorough analytical studies can open new paths into unexplored research areas in music theory and musicology. Post-secondary instructors may be inspired by the insights offered here to include new works in graduate or upper-level undergraduate courses in early music, theory, history, or women and music. Finally, for performers, conductors, and music broadcasters, these thoughtful analyses can offer enriched understandings of this repertoire and suggest fresh, new programming possibilities to share with listeners—an endeavor of discovery for all those interested in music composed before 1900.