Academic literature on the topic 'Composers Women singers'

This chapter explores Woolf’s relationships with two important French women composers: Germaine Tailleferre and Nadia Boulanger. The former is singled out by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own as emblematic of the professional bias facing women composers. Boulanger and Woolf met in 1936, at a lunch with Ethel Smyth and Winaretta Singer (Princesse Edmond de Polignac). As her correspondence confirms, Boulanger and Woolf stayed in touch for some years and Woolf repeatedly referred to Boulanger’s example when reflecting on the misogyny and obstacles facing contemporary women artists, whether composers, painters or writers. Consideration of Woolf’s relationships with these women is placed in the larger context of their reception in the French and British press, exploring the role that their gender played in the critical reception of their work and aesthetic innovations.

For the opening week of the new Philharmonic Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1962, Barber composed a piano concerto in honor of the 100th anniversary of his publisher. The concerto was tailored to the technical prowess and individual style of John Browning, reflecting the Russian influence of his piano teacher Rosina Lhévinne. The second movement was a reworking of an earlier piece, Elegy, written for Manfred Ibel, a young art student and amateur flute player, to whom Barber dedicated his piano concerto. This chapter details Barber’s compositional process and influences for each movement of the concerto and describes the enthusiastic reception of the debut performance. Nearing completion of the concerto, Barber was invited to Russia as the first American composer ever to attend the biennial Congress of Soviet Composers, where he freely discussed his compositional philosophy and methods. For the concerto, Barber won his second Pulitzer Prize and the Annual Award of the Music Critics Circle of New York. His second composition for the opening season of Lincoln Center was Andromache’s Farewell, for soprano and orchestra. Based on a scene from Euripides’s The Trojan Women, the piece displayed deep emotional expression and striking imagery. With a superior opera singer, Martina Arroyo, singing the solo part, the success of Andromache’s Farewell presaged Barber’s opera Antony and Cleopatra.

Henrik Ibsen’s work Nora in A Doll’s House was a timely and influential inspiration to Chinese writers particularly in advocating gender equality and it offered a role model for many a Chinese woman to ‘walk out’ (of household/family bounds) during an era when China looked to the West to reform its society traditionally governed by Confucian principles. ‘To choose the path of Nora’ was a public statement the female singer Zhou Xuan made in 1941 when she announced her ‘walking out’ of her marriage with the famed composer husband Yan Hua. As China’s pop diva with a ‘golden voice’ in the late 1930s and the 40s, Zhou has been credited by cultural historians and musicologists to have popularized a music trend that fused Western jazz and Chinese folk tunes. Her stardom legitimized her role as a cultured, virtuous and sympathized female singer, a profession and public image that was no longer scrutinized as it had been in the 1920s. Highlighting Zhou’s cross-media performance and her ‘walking out’ as a female public figure in this case study, this paper aims to fill the gap between the readings of music and film experts by examining Zhou’s life and career as a performer.

The sexual labor of music making began, in earnest, with the classic Blues women of the 1920s who epitomized the turn to a national Black popular culture. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey was one of the most prolific of her cohort and made a career describing, in intimate detail, the interior lives of Black women and working class communities. Her popularity was a testament to her talents as a singer and performer but also to the skill of those around her, including the “Father of the Gospel Blues,” composer Thomas Dorsey and his wife, seamstress Nettie Dorsey. The materiality of the relationship shared between Mrs. Dorsey and Rainey is found in the dresses painstakingly sewn by Dorsey and glamorously displayed on stage by Rainey. While pleasant for the eye, these dresses also carry sounds—the music of its making as well as its performative display, making this object a text. In this examination, Redmond exposes the close proximities that exist within the costumes sewn by Mrs. Dorsey and worn by Rainey—namely the relationship between pious respectability and working-class nonheternomativity, laboring femininity and sonorous vocalities. Mrs. Dorsey’s work documents dressmaking as a sonic production capable of facilitating the growth of new industries and challenging the normative practices within the early twentieth century Black public sphere. Microreadings of these items, laborers, and artists expose some of the detail of Black political cultures in this moment and highlight the intertextual and multimedia enterprise of Black women’s sexual economies.

Chanteuse and composer Titiek Puspa (1937-) vocalized the tensions and contradictions of gendered modernity in Indonesia during the socially turbulent 1960s and 1970s. This period of Indonesian history is divided politically by first president Sukarno’s anti-imperialist “Old Order” (Orde Lama, 1950-1965) and second president Suharto’s pro-Western “New Order” (Orde Baru, 1966-1998). Titiek Puspa (hereafter Titiek) cultivated a proximity to state power – to Sukarno, one of Indonesia’s founding fathers, and Suharto, the “Father of Development” (Bapak Pembangunan) – that amplified her voice and enabled it to circulate more widely and freely than other female singers. However, she was not a mouthpiece of these divergent political “orders”; that is, her relatively autonomous voice did not align neatly with either regime. Titiek’s voice and body were contested terrain in both presidential regimes; they patronized and celebrated her, but also wanted to control her. The patriarchal orders used her as a symbol of proper womanhood in her role as wife and mother, but she developed an image as an independent and successful modern woman who supported her husbands and other family members. Titiek Puspa played an important role in each regime’s ideology of modernity, but she also articulated the disjuncture between a woman’s voice and the reigning political order.

This story could begin with a fictional horse named Velvet, or perhaps behind the keyboards in a smoky bar in Halmstad, and it might have had a very different ending were it not for the unlikely excursion of a few medicinal chemists to the exotic southern part of the periodic table into the realm of the Lanthanoids. One or two generations of movie aficionados and the celebrity-hungry populace were upset, intrigued, or just plain nosey when another chapter in what seemed to be the never-ending story of Elizabeth Taylor, last of the great Hollywood divas, was revealed in February 1997. Dame Elizabeth had been diagnosed with a brain tumour just before her 65th birthday and was due for an operation in a few weeks. As it turned out, this non-malignant tumour, which was easily removed by surgery, was probably the least of her medical problems, but when singer Marie Fredriksson fainted in her home in 2002 and the causes were revealed to be a potentially deadly cancer tumour, the situation was radically different. The fate of the 44-year-old, half of the immensely successful pop duo Roxette, affected a different generation to those who had been following the career of Elizabeth Taylor since the 1940s, and was also deeply unsettling since the victim was a woman in the prime of her life with young children. Brain tumours are difficult to deal with—you cannot just break open the skull and poke around until you find them, there far too many sensitive connections and devices that may be broken. Their precise location is a key issue, and for that you need to look inside the head without opening it. The most powerful method is what scientists call Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, known to the public simply as MRI as the little word ‘nuclear’ may have associations that would be unhelpful in situations in which calm and composure may be necessary, both for the patient and relatives. Looking inside human bodies has been of tremendous importance for medicine, but has also meant business opportunities, both for the unscrupulous and the upstanding.