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

1. A Context for Composers: Within the Nature-Writing Tradition

8 Until the 1980s, noted American women composers were few in number; their activities were limited in scope. Social mores and circumscribed educational opportunities had discouraged and denied women’s pursuits of professional musical careers. The situation regarding women and music composition, in particular, differed from the long tradition of notable American women writers , and more particularly for purposes of this study, American women nature writers whose history of public participation went back to the earliest colonial times. Inadequate or nonexistent musical education beyond that which guaranteed a desirable level of “accomplishment” and limiting codes of behavior, which confined women’s musical sphere to the home or school, meant that most aspiring American women composers prior to the twentieth century looked no further than parlor performances as sites for their original songs and piano pieces.1 Public performances that hinted at virtuosic displays would have been construed as unseemly and in certain circles would have drawn severe criticism and even censure.2 Like some of their literary counterpoints, women composers often kept their identities hidden with pen names, or at the very least disguised behind initials or the use of “Mrs.”3 Prior to the closing decades of the nineteenth century, most American women with musical talent confined themselves to singing “sweetly,” or playing violin, organ, piano, or guitar and within a private sphere, often with a goal of attracting an appropriate mate and educating the resulting children.4 1 A Context for Composers Within the nature-Writing tradition � A Context for Composers 9 While women’s literary and musical traditions differed in significant ways, including their duration and degree of public engagement, both developed within similar social circumstances. This chapter provides a context for the study of American women composers and their interactions with nature by considering some of the nation’s earliest women nature writers and the themes that dominated their works. It documents their desire for silence, solitude , and the opportunity to pursue their work, conditions that eluded many women. As becomes clear, the subject matter and perspective of the nation’s earliest women writers and composers have much in common. � In England, in 1650, the first book of poetry by an American author was published. Without her knowledge, Anne Bradstreet’s brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, had taken her writings with him when he sailed across the Atlantic.5 There they were published as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America . . . By a Gentlewoman in Those Parts; the book found its way to the library of King George III. Anticipating by a good seventy years the more famous writings in natural philosophy by Puritan theologians Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, Anne Bradstreet’s Tenth Muse meditated on the deep connection that she perceived existed between nature and God. Appearing 186 years before Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature,” Bradstreet depicted nature as a moral text ripe with lessons to guide one’s personal behavior. Over the next two centuries, women would become increasingly responsible for and identified with the moral instruction of the nation, as that duty was assigned to them and their sphere, the home. Women would use nature’s lessons to teach their families. In 1704, Sarah Kemble Knight (Mrs. Richard Knight) traveled from Boston to New York, a distance of about 150 miles, to help a cousin.6 She did this with no single, steady companion, but with a series of hired guides to assist her passage over uneven countryside and swollen waterways. She recorded her alternately humorous, terrifying, and rapturous experiences in a book published posthumously in 1825 as The Journal of Madam Knight. Within its pages, an eighteen-line paean to the moon, that “Bright Aspect” who diffused Joy through [her] soul, aroused a more secular appreciation of nature than Bradstreet had expressed. While Sarah Knight’s journey without a proper escort –which according to social custom would have been a husband, brother, Music and the Skillful Listener 10 son, or other male relative–might suggest behavior far outside the norms of acceptability for respectable thirty-eight-year-old women at the time, her descriptions of the woods reveal what was then considered a suitable female sensibility. Mrs. Knight portrayed her unaccustomed natural surroundings as comfortable. She employed domestic imagery, which would become the standard vocabulary for women nature writers in the nineteenth century: “the pleasant delusion of a Sumptuous city, filled with famous Buildings and churches...