Music, Voice, Message
People who identify as women
WSF is an online forum devoted to women’s voices in song, to the many songs by women, and to the many female musicians working in and with song, who have yet to be given the attention they deserve. The Women’s Song Forum provides an opportunity to expand and enhance knowledge and understanding of this rich and significant area of musical practice and scholarship, and – as the name “forum” suggests – aims to encourage discussion and debate across different interest groups. The forum aims to highlight compositions and performances of music that deserve more recognition.
At the heart of the forum is our commitment to diverse approaches and subjects and access by a wide-ranging audience. We normally publish 2-3 posts each month by members of our team and guest bloggers.
A century ago women composers in German-speaking countries often followed their male colleagues in preferring to set poems by men. But a few had other ideas.
When Italian singer Beniamino Gigli made his farewell tour of America in 1955, some three thousand people packed Carnegie Hall to hear his recitals. On
A conversation with Zsuzsanna Ardó and her creative collaborators about the progress of PlanetWoman, the international choral project connecting composers and choirs across the globe.
By far the largest online source of music for performers is IMSLP.org, with nearly 800,000 scanned scores. 14 stellar performances demonstrate the range of their holdings.
In the years before and after 1900, many women composers obscured their gender by replacing their names with their initials. Here is a look at six of them.
From accounts of individual women or performances to historical essays, from interviews with songwriters and performers to discussions of gender, race and culture in and through song.
Tracy Chapman
Carrie Jacobs-Bond’s song, “His Lullaby,” routinely moved entire audiences to tears, especially when sung by Ernestine Schumann-Heink. I offer some thoughts on why this happened.
A century ago, Mary Turner Salter’s cathartic song about the death of a child was sung by female singers nationwide. It spoke to women’s experiences.
A century ago the new Yugoslav ‘national’ music needed women; two influential women, Maja Strozzi-Pečić and Ivanka Milojević, seized the moment to gain a public voice.
Lisa Colton recounts the thrill of discovering the autograph manuscript of Edith Smyth’s ‘Mass in D.’
Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita finds that Lomax’s 1952-53 recordings help us to understand the political situation under Franco, life in impoverished Spain, and the moral constrictions faced by women.
John Michael Cooper interprets Florence Price’s songs, “To My Little Son” and “Brown Arms (To Mother),” as responses to the painful losses of her son and her mother.
In her second post, Heather Platt tracks Villa Whitney White’s lecture-recitals of German lieder from 1895–98. Unusually, White sang complete song-cycles and songs written for men.
One of our aims is to recover and honor voices that have been overlooked or forgotten.
Sara Teasdale
On a lark, I asked my students to listen to a beautiful song by Caroline Shaw and, rather than write about it, draw a picture of it. The results astounded me.
Kitty Cheatham – singer, actress, daughter of slave-owners – was committed to preserving Negro spirituals, even as her performances swore allegiance to the Lost Cause of the antebellum South.
One year ago one of Serbia’s most distinguished musical voices, Isidora Žebeljan, died. Here are three glimpses of what we have lost.
