Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World
Author(s): Denise Von Glahn (Author)
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Publication Date: 9 April 2013
Language: English
Print length: 416 pages
ISBN-10: 0253006627
ISBN-13: 9780253006622
Book Description
For Denise Von Glahn, listening is that special quality afforded women who have been fettered for generations by the maxim “be seen and not heard.” In Music and the Skillful Listener, Von Glahn explores the relationship between listening and musical composition focusing on nine American women composers inspired by the sounds of the natural world: Amy Beach, Marion Bauer, Louise Talma, Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Victoria Bond, Libby Larsen, and Emily Doolittle. Von Glahn situates “nature composing” among the larger tradition of nature writing and argues that, like their literary sisters, works of these women express deeply held spiritual and aesthetic beliefs about nature. Drawing on a wealth of archival and original source material, Von Glahn skillfully employs literary and gender studies, ecocriticism and ecomusicology, and the larger world of contemporary musicological thought to tell the stories of nine women composers who seek to understand nature through music.
Editorial Reviews
Review
The book will appeal to students and professionals who want to explore a connection between music and nature through a study of selected works by notable female composers. . . .Recommended.
― Choice
Music and the Skillful Listener . . . offers evocative descriptions of compositions influenced or inspired by nature by nine North American women. It is a very readable book that is appropriate for and will likely appeal to undergraduates and general readers with music-reading skills.
― Notes
Music and the Skillful Listener is an engrossing study of an important topic that scholars working in a broad array of fields―including American music, music and place, ecomusicology, ecocriticism, gender and music, and many more―will find enriching and illuminating. . . . Scholars pursuing research in these areas or in other related fields will find this book an invaluable resource.
― Women and Music
Whether to nature itself, to the compositions of these women, or to the words written by Von Glahn, we must stop and listen. Music and the Skillful Listener invites us all to participate and even delight in the undertaking.
― Journal of the Society for American Music
Review
Denise Von Glahn’s illuminating study of the profound relationship between American women composers and the natural world takes readers into previously uncharted terrain. Especially interesting is the way Von Glahn frames these relationships in terms of ‘collaborations’ between human and non-human. Her book, which spans both place and time, will appeal to musicologists and also to those interested in the intersections of the arts and the environment.
— Tina Gianquitto
Book Description
Winner, 2015 Pauline Alderman Award, International Alliance for Women in Music
About the Author
Denise Von Glahn is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas in the College of Music at Florida State University. She is author (with Michael Broyles) of Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices (IUP, 2007).
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