Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition 1150-1950

About this book

"Do look after my music!" Irene Wienawska Polowski exclaimed before her death in 1932. And from the urgency of that sentiment the authors here have taken their cue to reveal and "look after" the previously neglected contributions of women throughout the history of Western art music. The first work of its kind Women Making Music presents biographies of outstanding performers and composers as well as analyses of women musicians as a class and provides examples of music from all periods including medieval chant Renaissance song Baroque opera German lieder and twentieth-century composition. Unlike most standard historical surveys the book not only sheds light upon the musical achievements of women it also illuminates the historical contexts that shaped and defined those achievements.