Female Composers Conductors Performers

Drawing upon extensive archival research, interview material, and musical analysis, Female Composers, Conductors, Performers: Musiciennes of Interwar France, 1919–1939 presents an innovative study of women working as professional musicians in France between the two World Wars. Hamer positions the activities, achievements, and reception of women composers, conductors, and performers against a contemporary socio-political climate that was largely hostile to female professionalism. The musical styles and techniques of Marguerite Canal, Jeanne Leleu, Germaine Tailleferre, Yvonne Desportes, Elsa Barraine, and Claude Arrieu are discussed with reference to significant works dating from the interwar period. Hamer highlights the activities of Jane Evrard and her Orchestre féminin de Paris as well as the reception of the Orchestra of the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs de Musique, a contemporary pro-suffrage organisation that was dedicated to defending the collective interests of musiciennes and campaigning for their employment rights. Beyond women composers and conductors, Hamer also sheds light on female performers and their contribution to the interwar early music revival.

Lepage's latest volume comprises eighteen biographies.

An overview of women's work in classical and popular music since 1900 as performers, composers, educators and music technologists.

Moving beyond narratives of female suppression, and exploring the critical potential of a diverse, distinguished repertoire, this Companion transforms received understanding of women composers. Organised thematically, and ranging beyond elite, Western genres, it explores the work of diverse female composers from medieval to modern times, besides the familiar headline names. The book's prologue traces the development of scholarship on women composers over the past five decades and the category of 'woman composer' itself. The chapters that follow reveal scenes of flourishing creativity, technical innovation, and (often fleeting) recognition, challenging long-held notions around invisibility and neglect and dismissing clichés about women composers and their work. Leading scholars trace shifting ideas about composers and compositional processes, contributing to a wider understanding of how composers have functioned in history and making this volume essential reading for all students of musical history. In an epilogue, three contemporary composers reflect on their careers and identities.

This book explores the experiences of women from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who pursued careers as public performers, charting a new course in an era when women's musical activities were generally consigned to the parlor. Certain instruments had historically evolved as "appropriate for women," and the flamboyant personalities and extroverted emotionalism of Romantic virtuosos and conductors were the antithesis of those qualities traditionally admired in women. However, this work presents an unusual group of young women who nonetheless became noted virtuosos, studying abroad as teenagers and touring North America upon their return. Detailed profiles are given of three remarkable musicians from among that unusual group: Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler (1863-1927)--virtuoso pianist, wife and mother; Ethel Leginska (1886-1970)--pianist, conductor, and 1920s "new woman"; and Antonia Brico (1902-1989)--conductor and transitional figure to the late twentieth century. A concluding chapter contrasts the experiences of women classical musicians in the late nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries. Included are a number of photographs and drawings which impart the perceptions of audiences and critics of the stage presence of these performers.