Women in the Arts

Eccentric Essays in Music, Visual Arts and Literature

Edited By: Diane Touliatos-Miles, Barbara Harbach

£39.99

This pioneering collection of essays is a multi-disciplined celebration of women creators. It presents an interdisciplinary emphasis on the long-neglected contributions of women to music, visual arts, and literature, and the obstacles they overcame.

Women in the Arts: Eccentric Essays in Music, Visual Arts, and Literature is a multi-disciplined celebration of past and present women creators. It marks a…

Women in the Arts: Eccentric Essays in Music, Visual Arts, and Literature is a multi-disciplined celebration of past and present women creators. It marks a new departure in women’s studies, for it presents an interdisciplinary emphasis on the long-neglected area of women’s contributions to the various genres of the arts. Because of its unique historical approach, this pioneering collection of essays is useful in the areas of humanities and women’s studies as scholarly or pleasure readings.

Many “firsts” are included in this anthology. There are chapters by three prominent award-winning living composers that discuss the plight of women in this male-dominated field and the pioneering contemporary innovations to the discipline of musical composition that women have contributed. Another chapter brings to light pioneering research on the names and musical compositions of the earliest women composers. Another gives historical evidence of the earliest documented women’s conservatory and its performers in the United States located in the Moravian Young Ladies’ Seminary in Antebellum Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The chapter on the MacDowell Colony reveals the history of how Marian MacDowell and her network of women’s music clubs helped to build the MacDowell Colony, a haven for artists that has continued through the twenty-first century. In the visual arts, one essay brings forth visual representations of women’s subjugation; another analyzes the photographic innovations and historical work of the woman pioneer, Nellie Ladd; the artistic contributions of two women of color, Josephine Baker and Frida Kahlo, are contrasted in a historical perspective; and a fascinating historical analyses of women and tattoos is presented. In the area of literature, the “Potters” are celebrated for pioneering the first serial hand-made magazine in 1904; another writer, discusses how she represents the role of motherhood in her female characters; and arguments are presented of how women poets give voice to spiritual feminism.

The thirteen diverse essays present original contributions to the disciplines of music, visual arts, and literature. By bringing forth this collection, it is hoped that there will be greater appreciation for the great diversity and range of women creators and the obstacles that they had to overcome. It is hoped that the essays will provide a historical documentation of the artistic voice of women that have until now been neglected.

Barbara Harbach, DMA, Professor of Music and Director of the Women in the Arts Initiative, University of Missouri-St. Louis, has toured extensively as both a concert organist and harpsichordist, as well as in solo and continuo roles with symphonies throughout the United States, Canada, Korea, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Russia. As a composer, she has written for symphonies, operas, chamber music, string orchestra, organ, harpsichord, Broadway musicals, choral anthems, film scores, ballets, and more. She is also involved in research, editing, and publication of manuscripts of eighteenth-century keyboard composers. Her work is both available in published and recorded form through prestigious recording and publishing companies. See www.umsl.edu/~harbachb/

Diane Touliatos-Miles, PhD, University of Missouri Curators’ Professor, is the Director of The Center for the Humanities and Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Touliatos has an acclaimed international reputation for her research specialties and pioneering discoveries in Ancient Greek music, Medieval Byzantine music and dance, and women composers from those epochs. She has published over 75 articles in refereed journals and several books. Her most recent book is A Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Manuscripts of the National Library of Greece: Byzantine Chant and Other Music Repertory Recovered (2010). For her many awards and publications, see www.hellenicnest.com

Valerie Budig-Markin, Yael Even, Connie Koppelman, Kathleen Nigro, Robin Rausch, Anna Rubin, Jewel A. Smith, Alicja Syska, Mary Troy, Kim Whitehead, Judith Zaimont