by Deborah Hayes
as published in the IAWM Journal, June 1995.
The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, Edited by Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1994. ISBN 0-333-51598-6. £45.00. (xlii +548 pp.) U.S. edition: The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. New York: W.W. Norton, 1995 (avail. Sept.). ISBN 0-393-03487-9. $39.95.
The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers is an attractively produced volume of biographical information, descriptions of style and context, worklists, and bibliography for almost 900 women composers in the Western tradition. The pages are slightly smaller than in the 20-volume "parent" dictionary The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980); the print is a bit larger and very readable, in the same typeface as The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (4 volumes, 1986). Layout is attractive, in the New Grove style; about 250 illustrations, organized by Elisabeth Agate, enhance the double-column text format and include composer portraits, photos and reproductions of autograph manuscripts, printed music, and title pages.
International in scope, the volume includes composers in the Western "classical" tradition in virtually every part of the world, including Western and Eastern Europe, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. Composer entries in alphabetical order, almost every one bearing the name of its author, occupy 516 pages or almost all of the volume. Next come an alphabetical list of contributors' names and addresses -- about 325 contributors in all -- and a subject index. Front matter includes a brief foreword by the New Grove general editor, Stanley Sadie, a preface in two parts by editors Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel respectively, a 33-page chronology of events the editors find significant in the history of women in music, and brief lists of bibliographical abbreviations and library siglia.
Promotional material from Macmillan Press estimates that The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers more than doubles the coverage of women composers in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The aim, writes Stanley Sadie in the foreword, has been "to repair a deficiency." Using "the tried Grove procedures involving information-gathering from scholars and critics of substance and authority, evaluation and sorting," the editors have intended to "acknowledge" women's contribution, "to give it a sufficient context and to identify any specific elements of its character."
In spite of the high hopes these words may engender, readers who are accustomed to the thoroughness and extensiveness of other New Grove publications can not help but be disappointed in this volume. It is obviously too small to begin to do justice to the subject. The list of composers is so limited and exclusive, the articles are so brief, the discussions of style and context are so superficial, the worklists are so selective, and the bibliographies and lists of manuscript locations are so incomplete that this scarcely seems to belong in the New Grove series. While the research and writing are of undeniably high quality, as is expected in a New Grove volume, most of the contributors seem to have been hampered by severe limitations on space.
One can compare The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and its coverage of men composers of almost every description, including men who wrote few works, men of influence who were appreciated within a small private circle and published only a title or two, men who ceased composing after marriage, men whose principal career was not actually in music, and men who are remembered chiefly for having been related to, or having worked with, important men. Long articles are devoted to important cities and the men who composed there, and to musical genres and the men who used them in their work. For the "great" composers -- Bach, Beethoven -- one finds book-length sections about the life and works and style, lists of works with opus numbers and catalog numbers, description and location of manuscripts and first editions, extended bibliographies, and on and on.
By these standards the entries in The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers are sketchy indeed. Among the longest are those on Amy Beach (almost 6 pages, by Adrienne Fried Block, from The New Grove Dictionary of American Music), Elizabeth Lutyens (4-1/2 pages), Francesca Caccini (4+), Hildegard of Bingen (4 pages, by Ian Bent, from The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Ethel Smyth (4), Ruth Crawford, and Grazyna Bacewicz (almost 3). Many important names are accorded even less space: Isabella Leonarda, Barbara Strozzi, Marianne Martinez, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Augusta Holmes are discussed in a page or two, as are Alma Schindler Mahler, Florence Price, Germaine Tailleferre, and Cecile Chaminade (2 pages, an expansion by Marcia Citron from her brief entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians). Lists of works, categorized by genre, function, or medium as is customary with New Grove work lists, are almost always "selective," even for major figures.
Extremely brief is the coverage of several women of influence who were appreciated within a small private circle and published only a title or two, especially 18th-century women. The entry for the esteemed salonniere Marie-Emmanuelle Bayon (1746-1825), my sole contribution to the volume, is a mere 100 words; Julie Anne Sadie's articles are similarly brief for Anne Valentine (1762-1842), Mme Ravissa, and Mme Papavoine. The short-lived Lucille Gretry (1772-1790) is discussed more extensively, as are Helene-Louise Demars (c1733-after 1759), Julie Candeille (1767-1834), and Mlle Duval (1718-1775). No mention is made of their contemporaries Jeanne Cecile and Mme de Charriere, formerly Belle van Zuylen, 1740-1805), some of whose works are now available on CD.
Readers may well wonder how the editors have managed to limit their coverage to 875-900 composers, compared to the 6,000 documented in Aaron Cohen's International Encyclopedia of Women Composers (1987). Julie Anne Sadie in her prefatory essay headed "Women Composers in Musical Lexicography," dismisses Cohen's work, an exhaustive compilation of information from published sources, as "derivative"; further, she finds it "less than critical," but offers no further explanation of "critical." Rhian Samuel suggests aspects of critical judgment in her part of the preface, an earnest essay headed "Women's Music: A Twentieth-Century Perspective," in which she explores recent awareness and appreciation of a "female voice" in music. The fact that the work of women performance-artists is easily identified as female may explain the quite lengthy coverage, with photo, of Laurie Anderson (b. 1946). It is not clear, though, that the presence of an identifiable female-ness in a composer's music has been an important basis of the editors' choices. While no one would envy the editors their enormous task of exercising critical judgment and determining merit and prominence and historical significance, their reticence on such matters of editorial policy is puzzling.
On the matter of composers' names, a major issue in women's history, the editors are more forthcoming. Stanley Sadie explains that "the traditional Grove policy has been followed -- of placing an entry where most people are likely to seek it first" (with apologies to "those whose expectations may be disappointed") and by supplying cross-references. Julie Anne Sadie explains further that the editors felt a need to "enumerate and regularize" the often long and complicated forms in which women's names have been transmitted. In practice, the "regularizing" is more evident than the "enumerating." In many cases several of the names and variants so painstakingly listed in Cohen and elsewhere have been omitted, and along with them, of course, the cross-references. In other cases, however, names have been added; Cohen's Maria Teresa Pelegri (b. 1907) is now Maria Teresa Pelegri i Marimon.
Most helpful are the innumerable corrections of birth and death dates and other data in Cohen (and in the hundreds of published sources on which he drew). Further, about 135 composers, or 15 per cent of the names in The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, are not listed in Cohen. Of these, over half are 20th-century composers, many of them born in the late 1950s; among the youngest are Sonia Bo (b. 1960) of Italy, Hilda Paredes (b. 1959) of Mexico, and Suzanne Gireau (b. 1958) of France. Entries on gospel singer-composers in the U.S. are reprinted from The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. Also added (without explanation) is cellist Charlotte Moorman (1933-91).
Additions of earlier names include brief entries by the late Jane Berdes on several 18th-century Venetian women -- Vincenta Da Ponte, Agata Della Pieta, Michielina Della Pieta, Santa Della Pieta, and, perhaps most interesting, Anna Lucia Boni, whose sonatas continue to be re-published under her Germanized name, Anna Bon. Suzanne Cusick has provided substantial new information about Settimia Caccini (1591-after 1661) in Florence and Francesca Campana (d. 1665) in Rome. Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson have identified the two English women Maria F. Parke (1772/3-1822) and Maria Hester Park, nee Reynolds (1760-1813), whose work many researchers have confused. Assuming that an addition may have required omitting someone else, it is unclear why a certain Miss Davis (c1726-after 1755) of Dublin is added, if the author must comment so scathingly that "her only claim to be listed as a composer" is a report of her singing some of her own songs. Yet if, as Stanley Sadie once wrote, New Grove "seeks to discuss everything that can be reckoned to bear on music in history and on present-day musical life," this Miss Davis should be mentioned, along with the several other Miss Davises whom Cohen found but who are absent from this volume.
Obviously what was needed was a New Grove dealing with women composers and their music in, say, ten volumes -- at least. Or perhaps what is even more desperately needed is a New New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians that would be even-handed in its treatment of women and men, not exaggerating the men's contributions and not minimizing and abbreviating the contributions of the women. This new effort would be of usable size -- preferably fewer than twenty volumes. And it would be a best-seller.
Deborah Hayes, Feature Editor for the IAWM Journal, teaches musicology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her publications include studies of music of 18th-century European women and men, and bio-bibliographies of Peggy Glanville-Hicks and Peter Sculthorpe.