Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World
Denise Von Glahn
For Denise Von Glahn, listening is that special quality afforded women who have been fettered for generations by the maxim "be seen and not heard." In Music and the Skillful Listener, Von Glahn explores the relationship between listening and musical composition focusing on nine American women composers inspired by the sounds of the natural world: Amy Beach, Marion Bauer, Louise Talma, Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Victoria Bond, Libby Larsen, and Emily Doolittle. Von Glahn situates "nature composing" among the larger tradition of nature writing and argues that, like their literary sisters, works of these women express deeply held spiritual and aesthetic beliefs about nature. Drawing on a wealth of archival and original source material, Von Glahn skillfully employs literary and gender studies, ecocriticism and ecomusicology, and the larger world of contemporary musicological thought to tell the stories of nine women composers who seek to understand nature through music.
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About Denise Von Glahn
Reviews for Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World
Choice
Music and the Skillful Listener . . . 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.
Notes
Music and the Skillful Listener is an engrossing study of an important topic that scholars working in a broad array of fields—including American music, music and place, ecomusicology, ecocriticism, gender and music, and many more—will find enriching and illuminating. . . . Scholars pursuing research in these areas or in other related fields will find this book an invaluable resource.
Women and Music
Whether to nature itself, to the compositions of these women, or to the words written by Von Glahn, we must stop and listen. Music and the Skillful Listener invites us all to participate and even delight in the undertaking.
Journal of the Society for American Music