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

• Musique
• Culture musicale
• Histoire de la musique
• Women
• MUSIC
• Multiple signal classification
• Study
• History of classical music traditions
• Musical composition
• Ornithology
• Woman
• The Women
• Instruction
• 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: 3 Mo

Extrait

Music and the Skillful Listener
MUSIC, NATURE, PLACE
Denise Von Glahn and Sabine Feisst, series editors
AMERICAN WOMEN COMPOSE
THE NATURAL WORLD



DENISE VON GLAHN








INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
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 book The 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 the Warren 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 in Music and the Skillful Listener come 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 Mil