Completing the Women's Song Database

Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, 2013

This article calls attention to a database devoted to women composers and songwriters and points to a few of the historical issues that this database makes it possible to investigate. The focus is women who composed songs between roughly 1890 and 1930, and who published in the United States, Great Britain, and the British Commonwealth. When this article was written, the database contained more than 15,500 entries of songs and song publications by 1,607 women who wrote in all styles (including classical, popular, and a range of styles in between). It documents the extraordinary rise and decline of women song composers that occurred in the years before and after the First World War, to identify the leading composers and the most popular poets, and to discuss differences in the careers of American and British women songwriters. The thirty women with the best representation have at least eighty songs or song collections. At the top of the list are Liza Lehmann, Lily Strickland, Maude Valerie White, and Carrie Jacobs Bond. Winner of the 2014 Richard S. Hill Award, awarded by the Music Library Association for outstanding article on librarianship or article of a music-bibliographic nature.

2025

This database is devoted to the 5527 women composers and songwriters who wrote songs between roughly 1890 and 1930, and who published them in the United States and in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the countries of the British Commonwealth, especially Canada and Australia. Because the database accounts for where a song was published rather than the nationality of the composer, it includes a few composers like Cecile Chaminade, who published substantially in London and in the United States, and Maria Grever, a Mexican who lived and worked for many years in New York City.

2019

I confess I enjoyed accentuating the character, perhaps as a provocation!" Thus Isabelle Aboulker, a renowned contemporary French composer, justified setting a viciously misogynistic text by Jean de la Fontaine in her song "La femme noyée" (The Drowned Woman). Her comment demonstrates a deliberate strategy for proactively and provocatively engaging with her own problematic cultural history through composition. This is just one of many approaches that contemporary female composers take to the negotiation of gender in their work. This dissertation addresses Aboulker's approach, together with those of Libby Larsen, Caroline Shaw, Pamela Z, and other composers and composer-performers of the current generation to the composition of art songs and vocal music in the twenty-first century. Engaging with musical-textual interpretation, performance studies, and emerging theories of collaborative musicianship, I develop an approach to their work that takes account of both creative musical acts and the social and historical place of the composers in question. My research addresses three central issues in feminist musicological scholarship through the analysis of both notated music and live and recorded performances of art song: first, the relationships and tensions between iii poetic text and musical composition; second, the focus of female bodies in performance as a site for the construction of meaning; and third, the category of the "female composer" as a marked and often derogatory term. Using a variety of examples by women composers with diverse compositional styles, I offer fresh insight into the multifaceted musical experiences of women in performance and composition. My work draws on interdisciplinary methodologies both to destabilize traditional hermeneutic interpretation and to develop a new set of tools for a feminist understanding of musical works by women. Ultimately, I argue, the conventional focus on musical text as the primary object of study is a detriment to more dynamic areas of cultural production. Drawing attention away from the "text," I focus instead on the women and on female body as conduits of composition, performance, listening, and understanding. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation has been a collaborative effort in every sense. I am deeply indebted to my teachers, subjects, colleagues, and family for their invaluable assistance in completing this research. I want to express my most special and deepest thanks to my advisor and mentor, Rebecca Cypess, whose enthusiasm for my preliminary research launched this entire project. I thank her for her thoughtful questions, her skilled editing, and her deep commitment to me and my work. She has the uncanny ability to help me articulate my own ideas more clearly than I ever could alone, and I am so grateful. As a mentor, she has been instrumental in helping shape my entire identity as a musicologist, and heartily supported all my academic endeavors. This dissertation would not exist without her; I am a better scholar for studying with her, and I am a better person for knowing her. I also want to thank the members of my committee for their thoughtful insight into this project. I am grateful to Eduardo Herrera, who encouraged me from my very first year of study to pursue the projects I cared about and provided me with invaluable resources to do so through coursework and discussion; his mentorship has been indispensable. I extend my thanks to Nancy Rao, who helped me enormously to shape and refine the goals and purposes of this research. I am especially grateful to Nina Eidsheim, who graciously agreed to be my outside reader. Her career and writings have influenced me greatly, and her thoughtful insight into my own research was a true gift. I must also express my gratitude to the composers who selflessly agreed to share their work and experiences with me as part of this project: to Isabelle Aboulker, for welcoming me into her home and providing me with the most expert vocal coaching I've ever received; to Caroline Shaw, for her candor, openness, and generosity in sharing her thoughts and her work, v including unpublished manuscripts and private recordings (and also for knowing where to find good coffee); and to Pamela Z, for granting me a most enlightening and moving interview. Many members of the faculty at Rutgers University have assisted me massively with this work. I extend my thanks to Chris Doll, who in his seminars taught me to be a more critical reader, and provided wonderful feedback on the earliest version of my Isabelle Aboulker case study. I am also grateful to the musicology professors with whom I took coursework during my time at Rutgers, for sharing their knowledge and encouraging my independent thought, especially Doug Johnson, Floyd Grave, and Rufus Hallmark. I am grateful to Steve Kemper for his contributions to my case study on Pamela Z, and to Jonathan Sauceda, Performing Arts Librarian, and Kayo Denda, Librarian for Women's Gender and Sexuality studies for their constant support of my research. I started my academic career as a vocal performance major at the University of Connecticut, where I received my Bachelor's and Master's degrees; I was encouraged and prepared for my leap into musicology by the stellar faculty who supported me. I owe a tremendous debt to Alain Frogley, Peter Kaminsky, and Eric Rice, for the education they provided me, and for encouraging me on this path. I owe special thanks to Connie Rock, who as my most excellent voice teacher and mentor provided me with numerous opportunities and made sure I would never stop singing. My colleagues and classmates at Rutgers have been instrumental in helping me to complete the dissertation. With their friendship and support, I have felt a strong sense of belonging, and that is an enormous help during the often isolated period of dissertation-writing. I am grateful in particular to my quals cohort, Mike Ford and Michael Goetjen, for reading the earliest versions of this project. I am thankful to Lynette Bowring for providing an excellent example and answering all my questions. I must also express my thanks to Taylor Meyers for vi suggesting so much wonderful literature for my bibliography, and to Rachel Horner for her supportive presence at my defense. This dissertation was aided by the direct contribution of a number of remarkable individuals. Mark Leuning beautifully translated and transcribed my interview with Isabelle Aboulker, and Valentine Baron served as my interpreter during our meeting, despite my best attempts to improve my French. I am grateful to William Lewis and Frederique Added of the Franco-American Vocal Academy for introducing me to Mme. Aboulker ten years ago, and for encouraging my research today. I extend my deep gratitude to Denise Von Glahn, for her important scholarship on Libby Larsen, and for taking the time to discuss that work with me. I am also very thankful to Lucy Dhegrae, founder of the Resonant Bodies Festival, for speaking with me at length about her work, and for curating the phenomenal 2018 New York Festival, where I conducted my performance analyses for both Caroline Shaw and Pamela Z. This work could not have been completed if not for the gracious and unconditional support of my family; I have been blessed with an embarrassment of riches. I am grateful to the whole Binaco family for their encouragement of my educational pursuits, and to the Lansang family for welcoming me so readily into their lives as I began my PhD program, and also for all the babysitting. I am thankful for the Zrenda family for raising me and empowering me to pursue my interests as just one of a myriad of overachieving children. I am especially grateful to my beloved, departed grandparents: Dorothy Zrenda, for being a model to us all, and Stephen Zrenda, who during his lifetime worked to instill in me both a passion for music, which stuck fast, and a sense of pragmatism, which, despite his efforts, stuck less well. I extend my deepest and most heartfelt thanks to my husband, Michael, who has been my sounding board, my biggest cheerleader, and my help in all things great and small; his support of my doctoral study and his input on this dissertation cannot be overstated. I am also grateful to my daughter, Cecilia, whose vii energy and enthusiasm for life is deeply inspiring; I have gleaned a surprising amount of perspective from a two-year-old. Finally, I offer my most profound gratitude to my mother, Laurie Zrenda, to whom this dissertation is dedicated. There is, of course, no way to sufficiently thank her for the many gifts she has bestowed upon me, and the unconditional love she has provided. Her generosity knows no bounds, and she has supported me physically, financially, and emotionally in ways I could never repay. This work was possible because of all she provided, and I will remain eternally grateful. viii DEDICATION To my mother, Laurie, who taught me that with love all things are easy.

2024

This list contains the names of the 5527 women composers and songwriters that are included in the database of women who published songs between 1890 and 1930 (women listed under more than one name are counted only once). The number of listings for each composer appears in parentheses after each name.

2021

This anthology begins with two major essays that explain why we rarely see women composers included in music history textbooks, or hear their music performed in major concert venues. The book then continues with chapters on the lives and legacies of nine women musicians who made a major impact in their respective fields and communities: Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Clara Schumann, Ethel Smyth, Amy Beach, Agathe Backer Grondahl, Maude Valerie White, Ethel Smyth, Amy Beach, Florence Price, Vera Lynn and Vitezslava Kapralova. The history of early lady orchestras and their maestras is also explored.