Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World

by Denise Von Glahn

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 Skillful Listeners, 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.

Genres: Music

397 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.