In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Women's Voices Across Musical Worlds
  • Lydia Hamessley (bio)
Women's Voices Across Musical Worlds. Edited by Jane A. Bernstein. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004.

Jane Bernstein opens Women's Voices Across Musical Worlds by referencing its genesis in a Women in Music course she had taught for many years at Tufts University. Like her, I want to begin by thinking about the "typical" Women in Music course.1 Usually the syllabi for these courses fall into two broad types: the chronological and the topical. The chronological is, of course, problematic in that it more often than not replaces the great man trajectory with the great woman trajectory. This type of course often focuses on European and American art music, as does its male model. The topical course, on the other hand, comes in many forms as its teachers attempt to cover a wide range of music, usually [End Page 95] making sure to include not only material from Western art music, folk and traditional music, and popular music but also music from around the globe (which falls into the categories of art, folk, traditional, and popular as well). While covering this wide array of musics, instructors of these classes typically also strive to address the intersections of race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality within the music they bring to their students. Teachers of these courses often find themselves with students who have little or no background in music (many of them probably do not read music) and/or students who have little or no background in women's studies. Further, this daunting task is undertaken without the assistance of even one textbook dedicated to these types of courses. To be sure, there is no dearth of material about women's participation in music in monographs, recordings, anthologies, essay collections, and articles, perhaps leading some to suggest that a textbook for Women in Music classes is unnecessary and that it would, in fact, inevitably replicate all that is limiting about the current music history and world music surveys and music appreciation texts. Nevertheless, as someone who has taught this type of topically oriented Women in Music course, I have often yearned for a textbook that presented a wide range of questions, genres, and approaches and that would lend itself to supplementary material of my own choosing. Bernstein's collection, though not a textbook per se, comes very close.

In her introduction Bernstein states that her "aim is to cross the artificial boundaries of our subdisciplines by juxtaposing studies in world music with those in popular and Western art music" (7). To this end she draws together thirteen essays into what she calls "an unusual constellation . . . [that] explores music making and the roles women have played as creators and performers in various spheres. [The book] also considers representations of women and what they reveal about the cultures from which they emerge" (3). Rather than organizing the essays by chronology, geography, genre, or theoretical approach, Bernstein establishes five sections, each of which addresses "broadly defined subjects relating to women and music" (7). These sections—"Public Voices, Private Voices"; "Cloistered Voices"; "Empowered Voices"; "Lamenting Voices"; and "Gendered Voices and Performance"—bring to mind a myriad of studies published over the past thirty years. Indeed, in the field of women in music, these topics are examples of what Marcia Citron has elsewhere called "canonic area[s] of music study," themes around which much scholarship on women and music regularly centers.2 Thus it is not surprising to find these issues in Women's Voices Across Musical Worlds or that Bernstein situates them within two frameworks in the opening pages of the book: a brief historiographic tour of the study of women in music and an examination of the trope of voice. What makes Bernstein's collection of essays especially suited to textbook service are her own introductions to each of these five sections. These introductions not only place the individual essays in the book within a context of, say, "cloistered voices" but also serve as a sort of primer for the Women in Music student by offering an overview of the issue itself.

Without cluttering up her prose with names of authors or...

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