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.
Lily Strickland’s “Mah Lindy Lou,” a setting of her own Black dialect poem, became internationally popular and was often performed and recorded by Black and white singers
Behind the gentle rhythms and pastoral lyrics British women composed to celebrate Mother’s Days a century and more ago lie several calculated strategies. This is Part 1 of 2.
Songs about life after the death of a mother in childbirth were once extremely popular. Now long forgotten, the tales they tell are worth hearing.
Can the editorial creation of a song-cycle from individual songs help raise the visibility of women composers? The songs of Pauline Viardot-Garcia offer a wonderful opportunity.
Last summer I assembled a cycle of eight songs by the 19th-century German composer Pauline Decker, understanding this curatorial action as an important form of advocacy.
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
To commemorate the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor turned to an unexpected source, Christina Rossetti, setting six of her poems for his Six Sorrow Songs.
Troves of German Lieder composed by women await their first performances. Here is one composer whose songs have recently been recorded for the first time.
Ralph P. Locke reviews an astonishing set of 8 CDs that offer dozens of compositions by women performed by major singers, pianists, and ensembles.
Eva Maria Doroszkowska marks the most recent anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with this reflection about the remarkable, but largely unknown, composer Stefania Turkewich.
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.
One of our aims is to recover and honor voices that have been overlooked or forgotten.
Sara Teasdale
In this post we turn to “Dog Teeth” by Nicole Dollanganger and to “Gatekeeper” by Jessie Reyez. Content Warning: Discussion of rape and disturbing lyrics.
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.
“Boat Song” was Harriet Ware’s best-selling song. In particular it became a standard for two unexpectedly allied groups of singers: professional men and amateur women.
