Women's Voices across Musical Worlds (review)

Jane A. Bernstein's edited collection is cause for celebration. It gathers essays on musical women from a broad range of cultures and eras, and presents them thematically, bypassing a chronological structure. This has enormous advantages. Commonalities emerge across time and place, and the juxtaposition of far-flung neighbours suggests new ways of thinking about women and gender. The collection is also noteworthy for its quality. Compared with single-author books, anthologies offer the benefit of diverse approaches, but they can suffer from uneven quality. Happily most of the present book avoids that pitfall, and in many cases presents first-rate scholars who know how to combine consummate expertise with a comprehensible style. For this reason, the volume has something important to say to scholars, students, and the broader public alike.

The collection contains thirteen essays which are distributed among five large categories. Part I —'Public Voices, Private Voices'—explores the intersections between public and private, and offers new ways of looking at the relationship. 'Cloistered Voices', Part II, is more focused than other sections, treating musical nuns of the Western tradition. Part III, 'Empowered Voices', explores music and politics in Egypt and in popular music in the Americas. Next, 'Lamenting Voices' juxtaposes studies of black women in blues and women's roles in Handel cantatas. The final section, 'Gendered Voices and Performance', treats Eastern and folk practices and also includes an essay on travesty roles in Italian opera.

The volume offers a well-balanced selection of topics. Six essays cover Western art music, four are ethnographies in world culture, and three treat popular music. An overarching theme is performance, and how modes of performance affect understanding, meaning, and ideology in a given culture. Many essays fall into more than one category, but for the most part seem suitably grouped. On a practical level, the performative theme cries out for a CD and/or video to accompany the collection. Despite (or because of) an author's evocative prose, I often wished I could see the dance or hear the voice featured in the essay—repeatedly I wrote in the margins, 'there needs to be a CD and video'. Maybe Bernstein and her contributors pushed for such supplementary material, but were turned down by the press for economic and copyright reasons. Might I plead for the inclusion of a CD or video? In my view the book would be twice as effective, especially for the ethnographic studies. A CD or video would also make the volume much more viable as a textbook for women-in-music courses. Personally, I would be less likely to order it without something that shows the performers in action.

Among the outstanding essays in the collection is Margot Fassler's contribution in Part IV, 'Music for the Love Feast: Hildegard of Bingen and the Song of Songs'. A magnificent piece of work, Fassler's study shows the hand of a seasoned medievalist and a knowledgeable engagement with the culture and liturgy under investigation. I am amazed at how she offers new ways of reading and hearing Hildegard's creativity, amounting to original scholarship, while embedding them in an introductory journey into Hildegard's world. Indeed, the only way it is introductory is in the breadth of Fassler's points and the clarity of her arguments. Her prose is lovely and often mystical, and becomes a parallel to the texts of the Song of Songs and Hildegard's aesthetic reaction to them. Fassler writes, for example: 'Like all medieval exegetes, Hildegard was accustomed to lying between the breasts of scriptural and liturgical images, nurtured from the one verse, and then another, drinking from several spouts of words' (p. 97). Overall, Fassler brilliantly succeeds in her attempt to explore 'Hildegard's female voicing'. The essay is a must-read for scholars and students alike.

Heather Hadlock's essay in Part V, 'Women Playing Men in Italian Opera, 1810–1835', is also memorable. Hadlock tells a fascinating tale of...