Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World by Denise von Glahn (review)

Denise von Glahn’s Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World offers evocative descriptions of compositions influenced or inspired by nature by nine North American women. It is a very readable book that is appropriate for and will likely appeal to undergraduates and general readers with music-reading skills. Von Glahn avoids using the term “ecomusicology” (the burgeoning subdiscipline on whose coattails her book rides) and most of the critical and theoretical aspects of eco-criticism, instead defining her purpose as examining “the many processes individual composers engage in when they reflect nature’s presence in music” (p. 2). She is up-front about the limitations of her “single, homogenous demographic” of “educated, white, middle-class” women, which helps situate this book among other recent publications that engage with the intersections of music and the environment (p. 2). Although she writes in her introduction that she “wanted to study [her] topic in depth,” von Glahn more often provides brief and tantalizing glimpses of the more in-depth studies possible for many of the works she describes; I hope that her book serves as a springboard for scholars to create truly comprehensive analyses of many of the pieces she includes (p. 3).

Von Glahn devotes a chapter each to Amy Marcy Beach, Marion Bauer, Louise Talma, Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, Ellen Taafe Zwilich, Victoria Bond, Libby Larsen, and Emily Doolittle, exploring the (greatly varying) extent to which their compositions owe a debt to the composers’ involvement with or response to nature. She divides the women into groups of threes: those who saw “Nature as a Summer Home” (Part 1); those who found “Nature All Around Us” (Part 2); and those who are working in a world “Beyond the EPA and Earth Day” (Part 3). Von Glahn briefly provides some contextual background on writing about nature and visual art focused on nature by North American women, citing the rapturous accounts by Transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller and the paintings of Elizabeth Gilbert Jarrow. Von Glahn touches lightly on recent feminist ecocriticism such as that by Lorraine Anderson and asks several framing questions about the nature of “women ‘nature composers,’” their values, and the reach of their works, before taking up the topic of three composers who created musical works referring to nature while in residence at the MacDowell Colony: Beach, Bauer, and Talma (p. 22).

This first section and its search for historical roots among composers addressing nature is, however, the weakest part of the book. Von Glahn notes the countless women’s compositions that address nature prior to the twentieth century, but does not sufficiently explain the highly gendered conventions during this time that sanctioned such topics as appropriate for women. Nor does she address the issue of privilege that the women both of that time and ours enjoy that assists them in their creative process. Her emphasis on the MacDowell Colony as a singular place of inspiration to these composers is overstated: it was not the only artists’ colony her subjects attended, and von Glahn ignores the fact that their reasons for attending had more to do with being able to escape the mundane duties of everyday life in order to focus on their work than a desire to be close to nature. In addition, perhaps because of the chronological distance from these composers, and because of the vast amounts of archival material necessary to sift through in order to fully understand these composers’ relationships with nature, these chapters lack the accuracy and authority bestowed by the still-living composers of the later chapters.

Following a biography drawn from Adrienne Fried Block’s biography of the composer, von Glahn adds to our understanding of Amy Beach by presenting a short but useful description of Beach’s song “A Hermit Thrush at Morn.” Von Glahn’s...