Women's Work in Music

I am honored to provide a brief essay in this issue celebrating forty years of American Music, but I confess the opportunity to write an op-ed for the discipline is daunting. To be able to express my own wishes for where I would like to see musicological discourse move in the coming years seems almost luxurious—as if it were a substitute for a late-night conversation among friends at a Society for American Music, American Musicological Society, or Society for Ethnomusicology conference, something we have not been able to enjoy since COVID took away the possibility of such reflections among colleagues. Naturally, my essay stems from the point of view of my own research and a desire to see more people take up the question of women's musical practices in centuries past. And why shouldn't they? That, in a nutshell, is my aim.Almost forty years ago (practically coinciding with the emergence of this journal), Judith Tick brought a new focus into the study of music in the United States: women. Although she was not the first to acknowledge women, Tick recognized a long history of women composers and redefined how their life stories would be written. We must not forget that these seemingly disparate research areas were not always sanctioned by the larger musicological community. In the 1970s, few graduate students were encouraged to find their research homes in American music—my own experiences of the late 1980s confirm that even then Europe was the emphasis of a substantially high proportion of dissertation research. This fact alone helps elevate Tick's choice of American women composers as her focus, and her deft handling of a new topic laid the groundwork for many of us who today highlight women's music. With this seminal work, scholars began to see women's music in new guises. Since then, scholars have uncovered American composers from across several centuries, necessitating re-examinations of the narrative of music history. We can look to Bonnie Miller's research on Augusta Browne, Samantha Ege's on women composers of the Black Chicago Renaissance, and Ellie Hisama's publications on Ruth Crawford Seeger as examples of the profound scholarship being created by women scholars about women composers.We have come a long way since George Upton's 1880 Woman in Music, where no women are listed under the composers in Part 2, where women must oblige only as interpreters. About twenty years later, Arthur Elson's Women's Work in Music (1903) sharply contrasted with Upton's book by focusing on women composers. But emphases on biographies of famous performers (such as Jenny Lind) and composers (Amy Beach) left important contributions out of musicological discourse, and women's roles in making music in the Americas remains a comparatively late addition to its historiography. Here, again, Tick's innovative reading of women's music inspired a growing body of research that celebrates women who contributed not as composers but as movers and shakers in other facets of music production, thereby broadening the concept of who is worthy of study. This is an important step forward. Most obviously, clinging to the idea of composer as supreme artist bespeaks a methodology mired in the past, with ties to White male patriarchy. Thankfully, across the discipline (not only in music of the United States) this framework now only serves as one of multiple possibilities. John Spitzer and Douglas Shadle have examined orchestras and their music, Nancy Newman has drawn attention to the Germania Musical Society and its role in shaping tastes across the country, regional studies (such as Beth Levy's Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West or Virginia Whealton's study of the Myers family in Norfolk) demonstrate still other directions from which those of us who focus on “American music” may choose as viable research topics.“Women's work in music” invites such a vast array of inquiry that, in hindsight, it seems an obvious and essential area of research. Nonetheless, we are not there yet. Women who crafted careers in music before 1900 have only recently begun to come to the fore. Katherine Preston's current work on women managers in opera companies, Kori Hill's research on music and Black intellectual thought, and my own examinations of women who worked as civic leaders in the Reconstruction South represent but a few of the directions deserving further exploration.Women who were early musicologists constitutes yet another area of inquiry in need of re-examination and contextualization. Margaret Fuller stands out as an unusual woman of her time, but what about Maud Cuney Hare and Fannie Polk Smith Hosea? As a source on Black musicians of the nineteenth century, Cuney Hare's 1936 Negro Musicians and Their Music should be as familiar a reading assignment as John Sullivan Dwight's writings are for information on White musical practices of the northeastern United States. Drawing on James Trotter's 1878 Music and Some Highly Musical People, her efforts as a historian have yet to be incorporated fully into our assessments of music history. We can look to Juanita Karpf's substantial publication vita as evidence of how much more Americanists have to envelope into our common discourse before we can really view American music as a whole thing. Hosea's 1918 Sonnet History of Music (also published under other titles) remains unknown in musicological circles, yet she presented an early history of opera as well as sonnets that explained the music of the troubadours, Josquin, and other subjects through to Edward MacDowell. Why did this early faculty member at the Cincinnati Conservatory and daughter of a prominent music teacher in Tennessee (Sarah Smith) take the time to compose these sonnets (sonnets that she read in a series of lectures around the same time they were published)?This last question brings me to a topic that has occupied my thoughts in 2022: why have consumers not figured more prominently in our research, in our calculation of what should be studied, in our justification for how we determine what is important? In 1917, Helen Beulah Clark made women's music clubs the subject of her thesis, and eighty years later Ralph Locke and Cyrilla Barr edited a collection that focused on women as musical patrons and activists. The people included in such works, rarely described in general histories, were vital contributors and sustainers of the music that has figured in published research. Without them—women like Rose Fay Thomas, speaker on behalf of women's music clubs at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893), or Mariah Dillon Kowalewski, de facto leader of the Mobile Musical Association in the 1870s—where would music in the United States be?1In expanding the concepts of who mattered in music history, I would like to encourage scholars to interrogate music consumption as seriously as any other aspect of musicological inquiry. Could we imagine music in the nineteenth-century United States without the women who bought and performed waltzes, Italian opera, and English ballads in their parlors? If we consider that Henry Bishop's “Home! Sweet Home!”, Franz Abt's “When the Swallows Homeward Fly,” and Vincenzo Bellini's “Casta Diva” were the most popular pieces being performed in households across the country in the 1850s, how do we account for a skewed narrative that elevates the songs of Stephen Foster—I would argue disproportionately—over what a vast amount of primary source materials proves to have been heard across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century?2 The fact that Bishop, Abt, nor Bellini were American composers probably encourages this obfuscation of the evidence, but the fact remains that if we dropped down almost anywhere in the nation in 1858, we would have a solid chance of hearing at least one of them. Charles Hamm's Yesterdays: Or, Popular Song in America (1979, 1983) emphasized these three works decades ago, but their popularity then and comparative obscurity now bespeaks a problem of historiography that has yet to be corrected.The practitioners who sang these works in English, German, or Italian, or who played arrangements of them large or small on piano, guitar, or harp fixed these foreign compositions in the minds of people throughout the country.3 Somehow, we must extend our understanding of “American music” to accommodate such realities. This matters not only for our own conversations but also for how music is read as part of the larger culture. A recent history symposium in which I participated demonstrates how the misconceptions perpetuated by the bulk of publications on music in the United States ca. 1860 impacts future scholarship. The topic of this meeting was simply music in the nineteenth-century United States. In discussing my contribution on two binder's volumes owned by the same southern woman, the historians present queried why I hadn't addressed patriotic music more and why I hadn't explained the overwhelming proportion of European composers in my sources. These responses are natural considering the prominence modern authors have placed on patriotic music during the 1860s as well as the focus on American composers when writing our own history. Nonetheless, those views stem from looking at history only from male perspectives: the music of soldiers and war or writing music history composer by composer. The evidence presented in thousands of binder's volumes, however, does not support this emphasis, at least for women. Yes, the Civil War touched most Americans and patriotic music survives in numerous collections, but its music does not exist in the dominating proportion that it enjoys in modern publications.4Looking to the practices of consumers reveals yet another side of music in culture. This methodology provides a new set of historical actors whose musical lives inform analyses of what was going on in the United States, especially concerning women's experiences. Furthermore, we can foreground performance practice and accurate presentations of the music being consumed in any given period or region and examine the factors that worked to determine public taste. Several scholars have produced illuminating studies that point in this direction, and hopefully such work will be incorporated more generally in American studies, creating new readings of a well-known repertory and informing how we interpret the nineteenth century.When I think about where I would like to see the discipline head, I reiterate what some have been saying for quite some time: when we look to consumers, we must understand that not everyone looks like the people who wrote those earlier histories of music in the Americas. Many consumers bring with them alternative cultural backgrounds, a different “common knowledge,” and dissimilar frames of reference. Stephen Foster and Lowell Mason-styled hymns are not as universally recognized as some of us (older?) musicologists might imagine. Many of us know this, but it has yet to impact pedagogy as thoroughly as it needs to. There are music history classes in the United States where none of the students identifies as White, where a church service based on liturgy is a foreign conception, where rock music of the late 1960s and 1970s is as unfamiliar as musique mesurée. Many references that authors may make fall on blank faces because a common experience is assumed. As historians, we owe it to these disparate audiences to include consumers of all types in our examination of music in culture across time. The musical history of the United States has always been multinodal: our investigation of it requires a methodology that appreciates this fact and moves us into a more complete, more representative understanding than what currently exists

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