Project MUSE®: Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 8 (2004) through current issueLatest Articles: Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and CultureTWOProject MUSE®Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture1553-06121090-7505Latest articles in Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Letter from the Editors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939583
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The articles in the current issue, our last as a coediting team, address a wide variety of topics, approaches, and repertories spanning from the eighteenth century through the present. Anna Hoefnagels's article focuses on the Strong Woman Song, an intertribal Indigenous song with roots in Canada, which reveals an important connection with Indigenous feminism. Hoefnagels traces the history of the Strong Woman Song from its origins in the prison system and demonstrates its transformative power both for Indigenous peoples and settler-allies to perform and engage in acts of resistance and social justice.Recovering and revaluing women's contributions and agency from patriarchal forms of representation are explored in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallLetter from the Editors2024-10-18text/htmlen-USLetter from the Editors2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®62812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18Indigenous Women's Empowerment, Memorialization, Resistance through Music: The Strong Woman Song
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939584
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The Strong Woman Song1 is an intertribal Indigenous song with origins in Canada that has become an anthem for Indigenous women's strength, resilience, resistance, and empowerment. It is heard in a wide range of contexts, including public demonstrations and celebrations,2 during cultural programming activities at urban Indigenous resources centers, as background music in documentary films,3 on various social media platforms, and in more private moments when individuals seek personal comfort. In performance, the Strong Woman Song is often invoked to recognize the success or accomplishment of an individual woman, to offer support for a woman who might be in distress, and to acknowledge the important role of women in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallIndigenous Women's Empowerment, Memorialization, Resistance through Music: The Strong Woman Song2024-10-18text/htmlen-USIndigenous Women's Empowerment, Memorialization, Resistance through Music: The Strong Woman Song2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®990742026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18The Remarkable Jenny Cameron: Song and the Rebellious Scotswomen of the 1745 Jacobite Rising
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939585
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It is remarkable of the Fair Sex, that whatever Opinions they embrace, they assert them with greater Constancy and Violence, than the Generality of Mankind: They seldom observe any Medium in their Passions, or set any reasonable Bounds to those Actions which result from them. As they adopt Principles without Reasoning, so they are actuated by them, to all the mad Lengths which their Whim, Caprice, or Revenge can dictate to them: They have, generally speaking, weak Heads and warm Hearts; and therefore we see that this Part of the Species are the first Prosylites to the most absurd Doctrines, and in all Changes of State or Religion, the Ladies are sure to lead the Van.1So begins the anonymously authored 1747
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallThe Remarkable Jenny Cameron: Song and the Rebellious Scotswomen of the 1745 Jacobite Rising2024-10-18text/htmlen-USThe Remarkable Jenny Cameron: Song and the Rebellious Scotswomen of the 1745 Jacobite Rising2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®1109772026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18Music for the Weaker Sex: Gender as an Organizing Principle in Postwar Mood Albums
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939586
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When Henri René's Music for the Weaker Sex was released in 1958, it was one of a much larger discography of mood albums that featured women as a central theme. Artists would select certain ideas and images of women and use them not only in the title and album cover art but the musical conception as well. Some albums reinforced gender norms and catered to the male gaze, while others adopted a more playful approach. Female sexuality was portrayed on a spectrum—as inert, submissive, exotic, passionate, or assertive. René's Music for the Weaker Sex, for example, was meant to sonically stimulate women through musical representation of popular male singers of the period with songs titled "Elvis, Perry, Frankie, Harry
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallMusic for the Weaker Sex: Gender as an Organizing Principle in Postwar Mood Albums2024-10-18text/htmlen-USMusic for the Weaker Sex: Gender as an Organizing Principle in Postwar Mood Albums2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®1206892026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18Giving Voice to Hildegard Jone as Anton Webern's Artistic Muse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939587
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In his late vocal works, Anton Webern selected texts written exclusively by a single author, Hildegard Jone. While this fact is well known among scholars of Webern's music, Hildegard Jone remains marginalized in Webern scholarship,1 and she is little known in the historical record on Austrian literature. Scant attention has been allocated to the extraordinary nature of Webern's commitment to Jone's poetry in his late music and the impact of this commitment on his creative output from 1934, when he completed his first setting of Jone's poetry, to his death in 1945. Webern became interested in setting texts by Jone as early as 1926, and over a period of almost twenty years until Webern's death, the two artists
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallGiving Voice to Hildegard Jone as Anton Webern's Artistic Muse2024-10-18text/htmlen-USGiving Voice to Hildegard Jone as Anton Webern's Artistic Muse2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®1097422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18Girl Group Lament: The Shangri-Las, the Supremes, and Racial Melancholy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939588
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Girl groups were an iconic staple of popular music in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. While their songs frequently ruminated on the excitement and enchantment of young love, these songs occasionally turned toward darker, more morose content that was more akin to the laments of operatic divas. Two illustrative examples are those performed by the Shangri-Las and the Supremes.1 The laments of the Shangri-Las tended to be lachrymose, filled with excess in terms of their vocality, lyrical content, and production. The Supremes' music, on the other hand, conveyed similarly tragic sentiments but avoided many of the dramatic characteristics employed by Shangri-Las' songs. In the case of these two examples
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallGirl Group Lament: The Shangri-Las, the Supremes, and Racial Melancholy2024-10-18text/htmlen-USGirl Group Lament: The Shangri-Las, the Supremes, and Racial Melancholy2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®993352026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18Folkie Madonnas and Founding Fathers: Women and Authenticity in 1960s–1970s Folk Rock
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939589
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This essay1 examines the historic relationship between an influential group of mainly East Coast music writers, a group dubbed the "Founding Fathers" of US popular music journalism,2 or rock criticism, and a group of woman musicians they described as "second rate folkie Madonnas."3 The former group marginalized the latter in the emergent critical discourse of rock music, not so much via the sexism of the San Francisco-based magazine Rolling Stone, but more indirectly, through considerations of authenticity central to the developing rock aesthetic. This aesthetic was based around a white-constructed figuration of Black sound, a white, masculinist conception of rock and roll as loud, exciting, youth-oriented rhythmic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallFolkie Madonnas and Founding Fathers: Women and Authenticity in 1960s–1970s Folk Rock2024-10-18text/htmlen-USFolkie Madonnas and Founding Fathers: Women and Authenticity in 1960s–1970s Folk Rock2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®1509452026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18Cecilia's Instrument Reclaimed: A Woman's Seat at the King of Instruments
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939590
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I have been told that I play the organ "like a man." Intended as a compliment, the assumption was clearly that such was the right way to play the instrument. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this comment was inspired by my confident use of the entire volume and range of the instrument; I have also been asked how "such a small wisp of a thing" could hope to command such a grand instrument. I responded, naturally, by pulling out all the stops, in the truest sense of the phrase, and blasting out that bombastic staple of the organist's wedding repertory: Charles-Marie Widor's infamous toccata. For a young woman at the console, the organ's association with Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music and, according to hagiography, the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallCecilia's Instrument Reclaimed: A Woman's Seat at the King of Instruments2024-10-18text/htmlen-USCecilia's Instrument Reclaimed: A Woman's Seat at the King of Instruments2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®1136042026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18Singing Her Own Song: Poems from an Organ Recital
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939591
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The poems here by Kate Blackwood and Taylor Daynes were written for a recital of organ music by women, which I gave in February 2022 at the First Presbyterian Church in Ithaca, New York. Alongside music by Elfrida Andrée and Florence Price, the two works discussed in the preceding essay were the cornerstones of the recital: Gubaidulina's hell und dunkel and Bingham's Ancient Sunlight. These poems respond directly to those two works, and the whole could be seen, in the words of Kate Blackwood, "as a collaboration between all five women."Struck by how Gubaidulina's hell und dunkel forced a confrontation with the extreme range of the organ, Kate Blackwood's poem "Conjure" spiraled out from thinking visually, imagining
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallSinging Her Own Song: Poems from an Organ Recital2024-10-18text/htmlen-USSinging Her Own Song: Poems from an Organ Recital2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®71902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18Embodying Eroica: Pregnancy and Performativity on the Podium
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939592
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Visibility is a trap. … It provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession.1Orchestral conductors mediate their mortality with repertoire. I still haven't conducted Alpine Symphony. I'll always remember my first Beethoven 9. "Rep lists" represent more than résumé building: they tell the tale of a musician's self-consumed desire to embody those historically and culturally inculcated apexes of form and expression. There's a kind of materialism in this magpie-tendency to collect scores, and personification—even synecdoche—in the significance and intimacy through which conductors profess their fidelity to the canonical works they perform.For me (guilty), that work was Ludwig van
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallEmbodying Eroica: Pregnancy and Performativity on the Podium2024-10-18text/htmlen-USEmbodying Eroica: Pregnancy and Performativity on the Podium2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®1566802026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18Hearing Sexism: Gender in the Sound of Popular Music. A Feminist Approach by LJ Müller (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939593
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Hearing Sexism situates itself methodologically squarely within the psychoanalytic vein of feminism, opening with a concise, methodic, even encyclopedic introduction to psychoanalytical concepts adapted from Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and their cinematic extensions via scholars Kaja Silverman and Laura Mulvey. Concepts typically examined in the context of lyrics or in service of establishing metaphorical relations between what listeners hear and how it makes them correspondingly feel—"homology," "desire," Lacan's mirror stage, Kristeva's "chora" and "pleasure"—are introduced in easy-to-digest summaries. Müller, however, is not satisfied with the psychoanalytic apparatus and instead takes to task gendered invocations
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallHearing Sexism: Gender in the Sound of Popular Music. A Feminist Approach by LJ Müller (review)2024-10-18text/htmlen-USHearing Sexism: Gender in the Sound of Popular Music. A Feminist Approach by LJ Müller (review)2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®316402026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18Clementi and the Woman at the Piano: Virtuosity and the Marketing of Music in Eighteenth-Century London by Erin Helyard (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939594
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Erin Helyard's Clementi and the Woman at the Piano: Virtuosity and the Marketing of Music in Eighteenth-Century London reexamines the legacy of composer Muzio Clementi through the six sonatas of his 1779 opus 2. His analysis relies on the audience and market for this particular musical work—women amateur keyboardists. Seen through the new types of musical expression opus 2 offered them, his writing points to important changes that were happening in keyboard practice and Enlightenment culture as Romantic ideologies of music began to appear.As is reflected in his writing, Helyard is committed to bolstering lines of communication between musicology and performance. He also continues to wear many different musical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallClementi and the Woman at the Piano: Virtuosity and the Marketing of Music in Eighteenth-Century London by Erin Helyard (review)2024-10-18text/htmlen-USClementi and the Woman at the Piano: Virtuosity and the Marketing of Music in Eighteenth-Century London by Erin Helyard (review)2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®220982026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18For the Culture: Hip-Hop and the Fight for Social Justice ed. by Lakeyta M. Bonnette-Bailey and Adolphus G. Belk Jr., and: Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance by Lauron J. Kehrer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/939595
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What would come to be known as hip-hop culture was produced in a lengthy moment of intentional political forgetfulness and neglect of the racialized and marginalized residents of New York, particularly in the area of the Bronx. Fifty years later, hip-hop's artforms continue to remind audiences around the globe that the multisensory dynamics of its sounds, the shades of its sights, and the textures of its feels cannot be ignored. For the Culture: Hip-Hop and the Fight for Social Justice, edited by Lakeyta M. Bonnette-Bailey and Adolphus G. Belk Jr., and Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance, authored by Lauron J. Kehrer, illustrate how hip-hop's undeniably material and embodied
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300/image/coversmallFor the Culture: Hip-Hop and the Fight for Social Justice ed. by Lakeyta M. Bonnette-Bailey and Adolphus G. Belk Jr., and: Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance by Lauron J. Kehrer (review)2024-10-18text/htmlen-USFor the Culture: Hip-Hop and the Fight for Social Justice ed. by Lakeyta M. Bonnette-Bailey and Adolphus G. Belk Jr., and: Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance by Lauron J. Kehrer (review)2024-10-182024TWOProject MUSE®344942026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002024-10-18