a book review by Deborah Hayes as published in the IAWM Journal, June 1994, pp. 35.
Don L. Hixon & Don A. Hennessee. Women in Music: An Encyclopedic Biobibliography. 2nd ed. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993. 2 vols. Pp. 1,849. ISBN 0-8108-2769-7. Price: US $149.50
Locating information about women musicians, thousands of women working in Western classical music in a great number of capacities since our earliest history, can now be a faster, easier, and more systematic undertaking, thanks to the new, greatly expanded edition of Women in Music: An Encyclopedic Biobibliography by Don Hixon and Don Hennessee. These two thick volumes are sure to become an indispensable starting point for almost every research project, saving countless hours of searching through 157 basic sources on one's own.
For each musician, the authors give place and date of birth and death, the woman's specializations in music, and a list of music dictionaries, encyclopedias, general biographies, Who's Who volumes of various types and other reference works where information about that individual may be found.
Women in Music, or "Hixon and Hennessee," as it has come to be called, was a groundbreaking project in 1975 when the original slim volume was published, providing an index to 48 sources. The word "Encyclopedic" has justly been added to the subtitle: the second edition indexes over three times as many titles, reflecting the increase over the past 20 years in titles that deal specifically with women's contributions. It also adds recent editions of standard works such as Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
The great increase in the number of composers' names seems to come mainly from the two editions of Aaron Cohen's International Encyclopedia of Women Composers (1981, 1987), which draw on hundreds of published sources and active composers' updated questionnaires. Other exceedingly fruitful sources that are new to this edition are Who's Who volumes: César Saerchinger's International Who's Who in Music and Musical Gazeteer (New York, 1918), the International Who's Who in Music and Musicians' Directory (1985 through 1992), Who's Who in American Music: Classical (1983, 1985), Who's Who of American Women (1981) and Who's Who in Entertainment (1992).
About one-third of Women in Music, or most of the second volume, is a series of lists of musicians classified by 124 specializations, in alphabetical order from accompanists to zitherists, and then arranged by century and nationality. There are archivists, composers (also classified by genre of composition), conductors, critics, harpsichord makers, instrumentalists (also classified by instrument), ethnomusicologists, inventors, managers, music administrators, music educators, music librarians, music therapists, musicologists, singers, writers on music, and many more.
The best coverage seems to be of composers, perhaps because of the availability of Cohen and even more recent composer lists. If any fault can be found with this generally superb resource by Hixon and Hennessee, it is that coverage is less reliable in other fields such as music education and musicology. Lists of academic staff members, such as the College Music Society Directory for the U.S. and Canada, are not among the authors' sources, nor are music periodicals. The various Who's Who series are the principal sources for these names. Among ILWC Journal editorial staff members, Hixon and Hennessee list composers Sally Reid and Julie Scrivener and musicologist Deborah Hayes, but not Laurine Elkins-Marlow or Laura R. Hoffman. Continuing a search for names of some of the currently active musicians which appeared in our previous issue (February 1994) one finds listings in Women in Music for Janice Macaulay, Jeannie Pool, Nancy Reich, Ruth Solie, and Elizabeth Wood, but not for Susan Cook, Suzanne Cusick, Deborah Stein, Judy Tsou, or Gretchen Wheelock.
In Women in Music, Hixon and Hennessee provide an index of 157 major sources, as promised, and they do it exceedingly well. They make no judgments about women musicians' historical importance but simply report which names have appeared, and in which sources. For women musicians active now, using Women in Music may lead us to consider our own historical record. In the immortal words of Jeannie Pool, we must "document, document, document," even if it means filling out yet another questionnaire from the compilers of a Who's Who or other new reference source.