Music and the Skillful Listener

Denise Von Glahn

Description

Winner, 2015 Pauline Alderman Award, International Alliance for Women in Music

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.

Introduction
1. A Context for Composers: Within the Nature-Writing Tradition
I. Nature as a Summer Home
2. Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach)
3. Marion Bauer
4. Louise Talma
II. Nature all Around Us
5. Pauline Oliveros
6. Joan Tower
7. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
III. Beyond the EPA and Earth Day
8. Victoria Bond
9. Libby Larsen
10. Emily Doolittle
Conclusions: The Repercussions of Listening
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Ebooks
• Art, musique et cinéma
• Musique
• Women
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• Study
• History of classical music traditions
• Musical composition
• Ornithology
• Woman
• The Women
• Instruction
• Music
• Composition

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 09 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780253007933
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 16 Mo

Extrait

Music and the Skillful Listener

MUSIC, NATURE, PLACE

Denise Von Glahn and Sabine Feisst, series editors

Music and the Skillful Listener

This book is a publication of

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

Telephone orders800-842-6796 Fax orders812-855-7931

© 2013 by Denise Von Glahn

Parts of the discussion and analysis of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Symphony No. 4, “The Gardens” first appeared in the author’s bookThe Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape. © Northeastern University Published by University Press of New England, Lebanon, NH. Reprinted with permission.

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48- 1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Von Glahn, Denise, [date]- author. Music and the skillful listener : American women compose the natural world / Denise Von Glahn. pages cm  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-253-00662-2 (cloth : alkaline paper) – ISBN 978-0-253-00793-3 (ebook) 1. Women composers – United States. 2. Music by women composers – History and criticism. 3. Nature in music. I. Title.  ML390.V66 2013  780.92’520973 – dc23 2012033296

1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13

For my mother

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Introduction 1 A Context for Composers: Within the Nature-Writing Tradition PART ONE NATURE AS A SUMMER HOME 2 Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (Mrs. H. H. A. Beach 3 Marion Bauer 4 Louise Talma PART TWO NATURE ALL AROUND US 5 Pauline Oliveros 6 Joan Tower 7 Ellen Taaffe Zwilich PART THREE BEYOND THE EPA AND EARTH DAY 8 Victoria Bond 9 Libby Larsen 10 Emily Doolittle Conclusions: The Repercussions of Listening NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Among the themes weaving together the women in this study, none is more fundamental than collaboration. And so it is with the book itself. Over years and miles I have benefited from the generous collaborative spirit of dozens of people, some close friends and colleagues, and others professionals I’ve never met. If, as my skillful listeners conclude, we are all parts of a larger endeavor, Music and the Skillful Listener is most assuredly the product of an ecosystem of efforts. My thanks must go first to the composers whose music captured my imagination. Victoria Bond, Emily Doolittle, Libby Larsen, Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, and Ellen Zwilich invited me into their lives and helped me to understand the nuances of their relationships to “nature.” They have enlarged my world. I hope that readers will find their way to the pieces that I discuss so that they too can be challenged, transported, and changed. I’m grateful to administrators, faculty colleagues, and graduate students at the Florida State University, College of Music, for encouraging my work. No one questioned me when I proposed courses on music and place in the early 2000s, or offered a doctoral seminar titled “Ecocriticism and Musicology” in spring 2006. Everyone assumed my ideas had merit. I hope this book proves their trust to be well founded. Travel to archives was made possible by support from my area’s Curtis Mayes Orpheus Fund in Musicology. I’m indebted to Douglass Seaton, Frank Gunderson, Charles Brewer, and Michael Bakan for nurturing creativity. In 2009 the university awarded me financial assistance and time away from teaching duties through a grant from the Committee on Faculty Research Support (COFRS). The grant proved essential to conducting interviews, consulting research, and writing the first three chapters. Numerous other colleagues in the College of Music offered a collaborative hand. Sarah Hess Cohen and Sara Nodine, librarians in theWarren D. Allen Music Library, joined me in many a search for elusive materials. Marcia Porter, Alice-Ann Darrow, and Heidi Williams generously listened, sent me to sources, played with ideas, and cheered me on. Dean Don Gibson of the College of Music is a uniquely talented administrator; each day he creates anew an ideal environment to foster growth. This project would not have come to fruition without his personal support. Dean Gibson’s door is always open. His commitment to his faculty is palpable. Each of us is certain we are his favorite. My colleagues and I will miss him when he retires as dean at the end of the 2012–13 academic year. Leigh Edwards, my colleague in the English Department, provided bibliographical ideas and a lunchtime sounding board. Her excitement about the potential of this project and her belief that I was the person to do it were crucial to its happening at all. I’ve been fortunate to work with exceptional students in classes, in seminars, and as my assistants; they’ve contributed to this particular project in a variety of ways, some of which I’m sure they are unaware. Many of them have graduated, but even so in a number of cases our conversations continue. While it is dangerous to name names and risk overlooking someone, I’d rather make that mistake than to not try. With that caveat I want to thank Caitlin Brown, Toni Casamassina, Amy Dunning, Katherine Etheridge, Andrew Gades, Gonzalo Gallardo, Ashley Geer, Dennis Hutchison, Amy Keyser, Megan MacDonald, Charles Mueller, Crystal Peebles, Erin Scheffer, John Spilker, Stephanie Stallings, Dana Terres, Stephanie Thorne, Lyndsey Thornton, Steve Thursby, Catherine Williams, and Felicia Youngblood; Brianna Rhodes took on the Herculean task of creating the musical examples. Their questions, challenges, curiosity, and excitement inform everything I do. Collaborators recognize no geographic boundaries, and many of mine live well beyond my university home. The very first images that appear inMusic and the Skillful Listenercome from Tina Gianquitto’s book“Good Observers of Nature”: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820–1885. Her study was an inspiration for mine. Robin Rausch and Sarah Dorsey made my work on the MacDowell Colony and on Louise Talma possible. I’m regularly emboldened by Sabine Feisst, who lives her commitment to the environment and is a scholar’s scholar. Susan Pickett responded to an inquiry from a total stranger and agreed to share her unpublished work on Marion Bauer with me. While I was visiting his university, Dereck Daschke engaged with me in a thought- provoking conversation regarding the many meanings of “translation.” I’m still thinking about what we discussed. Since we met for the first time at a music and nature symposium in 2006, Aaron Allen has

helped me nuance my ideas and sharpen my prose. He is a most skillful thinker. Kailan Rubinoff suggested that I might be interested in contacting a Canadian composer friend of hers named Emily Doolittle. None of us could have imagined that Emily would become the focus of my last chapter. Elizabeth Keathley challenged my assumptions regarding women’s roles and women’s places. In marathon phone conversations and brief meetings, Tammy Kernodle continues to gently steer me where I need to go. Larry Starr asks questions that no one else thinks of. In certain ways I will always be his student. Over the decades a number of scholars have provided needed criticism, counsel, encouragement, information, good humor, and perhaps most importantly real-time models of who and what I might become. Unknowingly, they are part of this study as well. Karen Ahlquist, Mary Davis, Annegret Fauser, Sarah (Sally) Fuller, Carol Hess, Ellie Hisama, Barbara Lambert, Beth Levy, Leta Miller, Carol Oja, Kitty Preston, Deborah Schwartz-Kates, Anne Shreffler, Judith Tick, and the late Adrienne Fried Block and Catherine Parsons Smith have all guided me. They’ve convinced me of the necessity of role models. I look up to them all. This project has involved the cooperation of a host of publishers, photographers, archivists, and associations. I want to acknowledge the Manfred E. Bukofzer Endowment of the American Musicological Society and thank the society’s publications committee for their subvention award. I am honored. I’m grateful to the Society for American Music for the many opportunities I’ve been given to present my developing research and for the collegial atmosphere that accompanies any gathering of this society’s members. I am grateful to key people at various music publishing houses who endured dozens of permission requests. They include Gene Caprioglio, Aida Garcia-Cole, John Guertin, Subin Lim, Christa Lyons, Edward Matthews, and David Murray. I wanted, when possible, to have visual images to accompany my discussions, and so I appreciate Becky Cohen’s moving photograph of Pauline Oliveros, and Bernard Mindich’s lively likeness of Joan Tower. Kathleen Adams located a photo that captured Ellen Zwilich at the Beal Botanical Garden. Quan Tre generously allowed me to use his picture of a strangler fig, and Amy McLaughlin, among the many things she made possible, saw to it that I could reproduce a picture of MacDowell Colony fellows that included Louise Talma. She also took care of permissions to include the photograph of the Regina Watson Studio, where Amy Beach worked. William Rose, head of Milne Special Collections and Archives at the University of New Hampshire, saw to it that I had full access to Beach’s voluminous papers. My week working at the Milne Collections was epiphanic. Sheri DeJan, executive assistant at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, deftly put me in contact with the private collectors who own the Harriet Cany Peale painting,Kaaterskill Clove, that graces the cover of the book. I’m grateful to Sheri and the generous owners, who prefer to remain anonymous, for entrusting me and the Indiana University Press design department with this beautiful work. Suzanna Tamminen at Wesleyan University Press paved the way for me to secure permission to publish Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem.” Rae Crossman provided permission to quote from his set of poems “all spring.” Christopher Wagstaff of the Jess Collins Trust gave me permission to quote Robert Duncan’s poem “An interlude of Rare Beauty,” and Sylvia Smith allowed me to include an Oliveros recipe fromSonic Meditations. George Tombs granted me permission to quote from an interview he conducted with Emily Doolittle. Kenneth Cooper shared his extraordinary music making, encyclopedic knowledge, and good humor, and he gave permission to quote from his co- written limericks for Victoria Bond’s piecePeculiar Plants. Alvin Curran was among the most gracious of collaborators. Beyond the gift of his music, I appreciate his willingness to engage in an email conversation with me and then allow me to quote from that exchange. All the goodwill and help from those I’ve listed above would come to nothing if it weren’t for the dedicated professionals at Indiana University Press. I’m grateful to Jane Kupersmith, who deftly cultivated this project in its beginning stages. She encouraged me to write the book that I imagined free of constraints, either from without or within. It was a joy to work with Jane.Music and the Skillful Listenerbenefited from the careful stewardship of Sarah Wyatt Swanson. When both Sarah and also Jane chose to leave the publishing world to spend time with their young families, my project was embraced by the new music, film, and humanities editor, Raina Polivka. I could not ask for a more engaged, informed, attentive, and committed editor. I’m not sure that Raina fully appreciated the ramifications of what she had inherited when she took on a project that had over ninety musical examples and images, but to her credit, she never blinked. She is the consummate professional. Daniel Pyle good-naturedly helped me through the process of delivering high-quality digital images. I appreciate his patience and kindness; it does not go unnoticed. My project manager, Darja Malcolm- Clarke, answered questions before I formulated them. My copyeditor, Angela Arcese, understands the music of language and listened to what I wrote. I’m grateful that she found those occasions that needed

fine tuning. In time I’m sure I will regret the few instances Ididn’t take her advice. Kathy Bennett provided indexing expertise. She actually thinks about what she’s indexing and shares her ideas. This is the second project we’ve worked on together, and I look forward to more in the future. Family and friends are collaborators of an indescribable kind, but once again, I will try. I continue to benefit from the long-distance support of my friends Sherry Williams and Kathy Strickland. Listening to their voices makes the thousands of miles of separation bearable. My sisters, Carol and Janet, follow my activities with a kind of loving tolerance that only very close siblings possess. In moments of weakness they tell me they’re proud of me. My sons, Haynes and Evan, now a full decade older than when I first acknowledged them in a book, remain unequaled sources of delight and pride for me. There’s nothing like discussing the finer points of the latest book you’ve read with the children you first read bedtime stories to. Books have been a constant in our lives. It has been one of my greatest pleasures to watch my sons become who they are. I’m lucky to be their mother and humbled by their love. My husband, Michael Broyles, is such an integral part of my life that I can’t imagine what it would look like without him. From the beginning he believed that I could do anything. He has accompanied me to interviews, archives, concerts, and museums, listened to the music that I was studying, and endured what must seem to be endless discussions of evolving ideas. He has read and then reread various passages of the book, offered clear-headed advice, played the role of all-purpose tech-support guy, and endured the vicissitudes of what sometimes became an all-consuming project. He has encouraged and supported me with humor, and grace, and love. Everyone should have such a collaborator. And finally, I need to acknowledge the person who was my very first collaborator. Each evening I talk with my mother, Lorraine Von Glahn. At ninety years of age and at the distance of a thousand miles, she still possesses some kind of super-sensitive auditory gift that enables her to detect when I’m coming down with a cold or have had a difficult day. And she hears all this before I’m done with “Hi, Mom.” The notion of a skillful listener was not new for me: I was born to one. This book is for her.