Music and Women

The Story of Women in Their Relation to Music

Author: Sophie Hutchinson Drinker
Secondary Author: Ruth A. Solie
ISBN: 9781558611160

   Music and Women provides an unparalleled compendium of information about women's relationship to music and a powerful theoretical model for reconceptualizing this relationship. Author Sophie Drinker was an amateur performer and collector fully steeped in the traditions of Western (male) art music who wondered, almost seventy years ago, "Why do [women] allow themselves to be merely the carriers of the creative musical imagination of men? Why do they not use the language of music, as they use gesture and speech, to communicate their own ideas and feelings?"    For answers, Drinker embarked on twenty years of research that took her around the world and resulted in her major work, Music and Women, first published in 1948. Rejecting the focus of traditional musicology on individual genius, Drinker sought out collective music-making, noting that, "Musical education concentrates on two phases, ability to perform and to create. Whereas we regard music as language, as a means of self-e

Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
Publish Date: 1995

Subjects: Music / General, Music / History & Criticism, Social Science / Women's Studies

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: Visual/Performing Arts)