Disclosing women's voices

Recent decades have seen a veritable explosion of gender studies in most fields of academic enquiry, be it history, literature, art or social sciences. This collection of essays examines historical sources from the starting-point of women's lives and musical practices (as composers, performers, patrons, educators or as muse) and situates them in the wider musical culture. From this stance the world can look different, and new interpretations of the lives and work of women musicians become possible.

Already there has been much research into the lives of talented female performers and composers, and this work has enriched the present-day performing repertory with previously unknown or unvalued music. Works by Francesca Caccini, Chiara Cuzzolani, Élizabeth Jacquet de La Guerre and Barbara Strozzi, for instance, regularly feature in concert programmes. This volume adds significantly to the current body of scholarship relating to women musicians in courts, opera and the private world of the convent. A distinctive feature of the volume is its breadth; it looks at women's participation in musical culture in Spain, France, Italy, England and Russia between the 16th and the 18th centuries, and in so doing it highlights considerable national differences. England, for example, produced no major women composers in the early modern period, unlike France and Italy. The essays seek to examine women as active agents in the musical world and to probe their activities as composers and performers, in particular how they used music as a means of expression and of achieving status, intellectual power or financial gain.

The book is arranged in thematic sections, dealing with the voice, the theatre, convent music, and collections and publishing. A substantial introductory essay by Linda Phyllis Austern, 'Portrait of the artist as (female) musician', explores the self-images of women artists who painted themselves as musicians. Despite the restrictions imposed on them in terms of education, intellectual and artistic endeavour, Austern maintains that early modern women flourished and excelled in far more occupations than might have been expected. Not only did they have intellectual and cultural roles as composers, writers and painters; they were also active economically, in business, weaving and agricultural husbandry. Women musicians are widely and variously represented both in text and image. Using visual sources, Austern seeks to understand the meaning of such musical imagery, to elucidate how women musicians saw themselves, represented themselves, and wished to be perceived by their contemporaries. The portraits she examines in detail demonstrate how determined women succeeded in a variety of male-dominated arenas in the 16th and 17th centuries. The portraits themselves are framed within a discussion of the meaning of imagery and other forms of discourse that encode ideologies of power, sexuality and gender. Visual representations have been treated extensively by Richard Leppert, H. Colin Slim and Daniel Heartz among others, but Austern's focus is on the manipulation of musical images by women to achieve a particular end. She finds in the paintings a valuable source of evidence as to how gifted women established their identity and status in an essentially male professional world. This kind of analysis is a far cry from the early feminist focus on women as powerless victims; rather it tries to discover their part in actively shaping and creating the social worlds in which they lived. Austern's work is stimulating, thoroughly documented, and related to thinking of the period.

Several essays examine how women were portrayed in different musical genres. Catherine Gordon-Seifert ('Strong men-weak women: gender representation and the influence of Lully's "operatic style" on French airs sérieux (1650-1700)') has carefully researched a change in gender representation. In the majority of mid-17th-century airs she finds that men are portrayed as effeminate, women as assertive and in control of the game of love. A marked change took place in the airs with the introduction of the operatic style and with musical features taken from Lully. Such musical devices include representations of war with characteristic harmonies and rhythms, and emphatic recitatives; these evoke boldness, courage and heroic...