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.
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.
Before and after 1900 many women songwriters published their songs with male pseudonyms. Three of the most successful share an unexpected biographical trait.
Two-and-a-half years ago I launched a website devoted to marginalized song composers. In this post, I reflect on where it all began.
A century ago, Christina Georgina Rossetti was the woman poet that women composers set most frequently. Her popularity endures, spanning the globe, as this international playlist demonstrates.
Soprano and poet Janani Sridhar discusses the song cycle ‘SingBites’ that she and composer Nicholas Ho wrote as a set of four love songs to Singapore.
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
Chen Yi’s special affection for the voice of mezzo soprano shaped her composition Bright Moonlight (2001), composed in the dim light of a trans-Pacific flight.
A conversation with soprano Susan Narucki about her new album of art songs by early 20th-century women composers.
Women’s singing, in extremis, has frequently been associated with the non-verbal. Linda Perhacs’s “Parallelograms” (1970) is an example that is grounded in words.
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.
Heather Platt discusses an unusual lecture-recital held in Denver in 1898 that brought together songs of Native Americans, Blacks, Creoles and whites. Women’s clubs and Villa Whitney White made it happen.
One of our aims is to recover and honor voices that have been overlooked or forgotten.
Sara Teasdale
Dawson founded the National Negro Opera Company, and brought this all-Black company to perform at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, even before Marian Anderson sang there.
In the annals of songs that have been banned in the United States, no one would expect to find one of Carrie Jacobs-Bond’s songs.
In her 2011 album Night of Hunters, Tori Amos reflects on a long tradition of classical music penned by men from the perspective of a woman.
