Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World

Part Two: Nature All Around Us: Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

Part two Nature All Around Us Pauline oliveros, Joan tower, ellen taaffe Zwilich � Composing women born in the 1930s entered a world and a national consciousness that differed significantly from their predecessors.’ The nation that had acknowledged no limits to its potential now had a more realistic picture of its place in the world. For a number of years, the United States shared equally in the widely felt sense of ennui and disillusionment that attended the conclusion of World War I. Confident hopes that had been pinned to social and technological advances of the Gilded Age, and then folded into a general assumption of unending human progress in the early years of the twentieth century, were exposed as naive and then dashed. As Frederick Jackson Turner declared the end of the American frontier in 1893, and as urban centers became the new symbols of American character in the opening years of the new century, ties to the nation’s rural past were strained. Niagara was replaced by skyscrapers as the new symbols of America. Manifest Destiny had served its purpose when the continent was securely united under one flag. Hundreds of thousands of American casualties suffered in World War I, combined with the deaths of more than a half million U.S. citizens during the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, sobered the country as it did nations around the globe whose total population, some estimate, was diminished by between 3 and 6 percent.1 The effects of this human-medical disaster2 were still resonating at the start of the 1920s as families regrouped and tried to put personal tragedies behind them. While the roaring twenties allowed some to 100 Nature All Around Us temporarily forget the past, the decade closed with an international economic meltdown that was then unprecedented and remains so to this day. At the height of the Depression in 1933, just under 25 percent of the U.S. labor force was unemployed. This was the world that welcomed Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932), Joan Tower (b. 1938), and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939). While women in the United States and in many nations had finally won the right to vote and seen their sphere of influence theoretically expand, it would take years for them to fully realize their newly enlarged world. Among the opportunities that emerged for women born in the 1930s was more democratic access to education, and the three women discussed in this section took advantage of it. Oliveros, Tower, and Zwilich all benefited from increased education with the best mentors in their fields and the chance to practice what they learned as professionals. They would be in their twenties and thirties when civil rights sit-ins and desegregated lunch counters and universities , second-wave feminism and its demands for equality, and environmental activism of both the peaceful and violent varieties grabbed and held on to front-page headlines. Born too early to have these social upheavals shape their formative years, Oliveros, Tower, and Zwilich would nonetheless benefit from the changed attitudes they engendered. The direction that Oliveros’s music took starting in the 1970s reflects closely the combination of feminist and environmental sensibilities that were stirring, regardless of whether she considered herself an ecofeminist at the time. Her music provides an easy portal for feminist and ecomusicological studies. The range of works created by Oliveros, Tower, and Zwilich, the recognition accorded the composers, and the influence they wielded would be unprecedented . Slightly younger women, including Sorrel Hays (b. 1941), Meredith Monk (b. 1942), Laurie Spiegel (b. 1945), and Joan La Barbara (b. 1947) have continued the trend of modeling what women composers, unencumbered by limited educations or repressive social constraints, can achieve. In 2011, as Pauline Oliveros, the oldest subject in Music and the Skillful Listener, approaches age eighty, each of the women considered in this section is the holder of a named professorship at an American university. Like Beach, Bauer, and Talma before them, Oliveros, Tower, and Zwilich have evoked nature in their music in widely varied ways, sometimes attaching a leading, nature-related title to a work after the composition was complete, and at other times gathering the sounds of an environment, which then became the whole of a work. While Oliveros and Tower seem to find 101 Nature All Around Us themselves regularly in the midst of nature and so have a constant supply of images from which to draw...