Through the experiences of performers, composers, and ethnomusicologists working in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, Music and Gender explores how the uses and descriptions of music shift in response to rapid political, economic, or technological change.
 
A cross-section of case studies from the Central African Republic, Finland, and Turkey addresses issues of how performance reflects gender and furthers other social goals, such as negotiating identity and transforming consciousness. Articles on Croatian and Serbian popular music and on the changing circumstances of women musicians in war-torn Ethiopia and post-Soviet Estonia consider the fate of fragile constructions of gender and nationhood in times of war or crisis. Other essays consider the relationship of gender to digital sound technology--in terms of access to the field, interactions among musicians, and aesthetic decisions--and gender issues in writing the musical lives of women composers and performers.
 
Articulating a theoretical agenda that encompasses perspectives from vastly different musical cultures, this important collection shows how music can help bridge the radical transformations of individuals, groups, and nations.
 
 
 

"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.