Awards

• Winner of Winner, 2015 Pauline Alderman Award, International Alliance for Women in Music.

Overview

For Denise Von Glahn, listening is that special quality afforded women who have been fettered for generations by the maxim ""be seen and not heard."" In Music and the Skillful Listener, Von Glahn explores the relationship between listening and musical composition focusing on nine American women composers inspired by the sounds of the natural world: Amy Beach, Marion Bauer, Louise Talma, Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Victoria Bond, Libby Larsen, and Emily Doolittle. Von Glahn situates ""nature composing"" among the larger tradition of nature writing and argues that, like their literary sisters, works of these women express deeply held spiritual and aesthetic beliefs about nature. Drawing on a wealth of archival and original source material, Von Glahn skillfully employs literary and gender studies, ecocriticism and ecomusicology, and the larger world of contemporary musicological thought to tell the stories of nine women composers who seek to understand nature through music.

Full Product Details

9780253006622

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Reviews

In nine case studies of American women composers, Von Glahn conveys passionately the connections between life, work, nature, and humanity. She listens so well to these composers words and sounds, collaborates so productively with them and with scholars from an impressive array of disciplines, and communicates so effectively to her readers that, were she a composer of sounds rather than words, she would deserve a place alongside the accomplished women to whom she ascribes the same important characteristics of listening, collaboration, and communication. Music and the Skillful Listener is a tour de force from a profoundly engaging thinker. It will be of great interest to anyone who cares about the power of music, the place of women in society, the fate of our planet, and what it means to be American -- and human. Aaron S. Allen, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

<p> Denise Von Glahn's illuminating study of the profound relationship between American women composers and the natural world takes readers into previously uncharted terrain. Especially interesting is the way Von Glahn frames these relationships in terms of collaborations between human and non-human. Her book, which spans both place and time, will appeal to musicologists and also to those interested in the intersections of the arts and the environment. --Tina Gianquitto, Author of Good Observers of Nature: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820-1885--Tina Gianquitto Author of Good Observers of Nature: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820-1885

Denise Von Glahn's illuminating study of the profound relationship between American women composers and the natural world takes readers into previously uncharted terrain. Especially interesting is the way Von Glahn frames these relationships in terms of collaborations between human and non-human. Her book, which spans both place and time, will appeal to musicologists and also to those interested in the intersections of the arts and the environment.--Tina Gianquitto Author of Good Observers of Nature: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820-1885

<p> In nine case studies of American women composers, Von Glahn conveys passionately the connections between life, work, nature, and humanity. She listens so well to these composers' words and sounds, collaborates so productively with them and with scholars from an impressive array of disciplines, and communicates so effectively to her readers that, were she a composer of sounds rather than words, she would deserve a place alongside the accomplished women to whom she ascribes the same important characteristics of listening, collaboration, and communication. Music and the Skillful Listener is a tour de force from a profoundly engaging thinker. It will be of great interest to anyone who cares about the power of music, the place of women in society, the fate of our planet, and what it means to be American -- and human. --Aaron S. Allen, University of North Carolina, Greensboro--Aaron S. Allen, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Author Information

Denise Von Glahn is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas in the College of Music at Florida State University. She is author (with Michael Broyles) of Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices (IUP, 2007).

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