Celebrating Women Musicians - Swarthmore College Bulletin

Christine Ammer ’52, Unsung: A History of Women in American Music, 2nd ed., Amadeus Press, 2001

As a woman musician who has been on the scene since the early 1960s, I did not anticipate enjoying and gaining so much information from Ammer’s book. My participation in the music world has been limited to classical music--more specifically, instrumental. So I’ll leave comments about ragtime and jazz, which are covered in the book, to other authorities.

The first edition of Ammer’s book (1980) was called “a publishing event" by Booklist and quickly became the classic text in the field. The second edition is revised and expanded with two new chapters and additional material. The book’s cover jacket summarizes its contents well: “The author documents ... women in America from the period 1800 to 2000. Succinct biographical sketches show the influences on--and of--hundreds of women musicians. Singers are omitted: They compete with only other women in their own voice parts. Rather, the book concentrates on women composers, instrumentalists, conductors, orchestra and opera managers, and music educators."

Ammer points out the important strides women musicians have made in the past 20 years. Women are now in first-ranked orchestras, a handful of women conductors are gaining national attention, and individual instrumentalists have won recognition. Since 1983, three women composers have won the Pulitzer Prize for their compositions, the latest being former Swarthmore resident Melinda Wagner. Her 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion was performed at the College in April by Orchestra 2001, ensemble in residence. Also on campus last season was violinist Pamela Frank, who, along with three other women violinists, received the Avery Fisher Prize in 1999.

The time span covered in this book is as extensive as the wide gamut of areas in music. Ammer has done an extraordinary job of researching and including many significant women musicians in each area. The omission of the Colorado String Quartet, however, is startling. Certainly, this internationally acclaimed ensemble, which has given a series of concerts at the College, is on an equal par with the Lark Quartet, Lydian String Quartet, and Cassatt String Quartet, all of which are mentioned.

What has disturbed me in the past, which Ammer also documents, is how successful women musicians often are the least sympathetic to the striving of other women musicians. My mother-in-law, a talented violinist, was hired to play at a high-society wedding shortly after her graduation from Eastman School of Music in 1930. When the bride’s mother saw that the first violinist of their quartet was a woman, she exclaimed, “Oh, no, we can’t have a woman violinist participating in this wedding, that would be degrading." At a concert of the Boston Symphony 30 years later, this same first violinist exclaimed, “It’s too bad there are so many women in the Symphony now; it cheapens it."

I love Ammer’s account of early 20th-century composer Mabel Wheeler Daniels. The 1940 premiere of her The Song of Jael was performed in Worcester, Mass. She was called to the stage to take bows with the conductor and then encountered a man at intermission who said, “That Jael piece was tremendous, and what a climax with the brass and drums and cymbal all going like mad while the chorus sings, ‘Jael has killed Sisera!’ But tell me, what was that woman doing who came on to the stage when they applauded?"

If playing in an orchestra or composing was a male province, conducting was far more so. Most aspiring women conductors had to form their own orchestras for the opportunity to conduct.

Ammer covers conductors like Antonia Brico, who, in 1930, was the first woman to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic (though the ratio of women to men in that orchestra still makes American orchestras look like feminists). Sarah Caldwell, another recent guest at Swarthmore, is acknowledged as the first woman to conduct the Metropolitan Opera in 1976.

Ammer notes that female woodwind players appear to have had a somewhat easier time in obtaining orchestra positions than brass players. Mentioned were several relatively recently appointed principal winds including Cynthia Koledo DeAlmeida as principal oboe since 1991 in the Pittsburgh Symphony. As one of nine women in the Pittsburgh Symphony in the early 1960s, I (and others) had a part in paving the way for DeAlmeida.

Thank you, Christine Ammer, for a spell-binding and thought-provoking book full of interesting statistics on the role of women in many aspects of music.

--Dorothy Freeman, Associate in Performance

OTHER RECENT BOOKS

Barry Casper ’60, Lost in Washington: Finding the Way Back to Democracy in America, University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Part memoir and part public policy analysis, this book grew out of the author’s experience as senior policy adviser to Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota.

Charles Dempsey ’59, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, University of North Carolina Press, 2001. The author sheds new light on the art of Donatello, Botticelli, and Michelangelo.

Payson Gates; edited and annotated by Eleanor Gates ’52, William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt: The Continuing Dialogue, Falls River Publications, 2000. This reader-friendly guide to Hunt’s career includes annotations as headers, rather than endnotes, to each letter, contributing significantly to biographical literature about 19th-century England.

John McDowell ’69, Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica, University of Illinois Press, 2000. This analysis of the relationship between violence and the corrido offers insights into an Afromestizo Mexican community and its cultural production.

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne ’64, Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries, revised ed., Joseph Henry Press, 1998. In this work, the author explores the reasons for the astonishing disparity in the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to women.

Pamela Miller Ness ’72, Like Salt on Sun Spray, Swamp Press, 2001. This chapbook is a collection of 22 love tanka that were written while the author traveled through the Olympic Peninsula, Washington.

Hugh Nissenson ’55, The Song of the Earth, Algonquin Books, 2001. In this novel, written and illustrated by the author, a mother creates a portrait of her murdered son through e-mails, journals, newspaper clippings, drawings, paintings, and interviews with those who knew him.

Patricia Jones Parnell ’45, Snake Woman and Other Explorations: Finding the Female in Divinity, Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2001. These poems explore the resulting power when female imagery becomes the channel of divine presence.

Wayne Patterson ’68, The Ilse: First-Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawai‘i, 1903-1973, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000; sequel to The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawai‘i, 1896-1910, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000. Using Japanese surveillance records, student journals, and U.S. intelligence reports, the author documents the social history of the Korean experience in Hawaii from 1903 to 1973.

Gabriel J. Chin, Victor Romero ’87, and Michael Scaperlanda (eds.), Immigration and the Constitution, Garland Press, 2000. This three-volume anthology on constitutional immigration law for both novices and experts--providing historical context, contemporary debates within substantive constitutional immigration law, and the treatment of procedural due process with immigration law, respectively--includes original introductions, reprints of the leading cases, articles, and other materials.

Rebecca Rothenberg ’70 (deceased), completed by Taffy Cannon, The Tumbleweed Murders: A Claire Sharples Botanical Mystery, Perseverance Press, 2001. After the author’s untimely death, her friend and colleague completed this story, the fourth in a series, about passion, greed, deceit, and murder.

Saul Rubinstein ’76 and Thomas Kochan, Learning From Saturn: Possibilities for Corporate Governance and Employee Relations, ILR Press, 2001. This work explores labor-management relations and organizational design in an effort to achieve a better social contract among workers, customers, shareholders, and the broader society.

Lisa Silverman ’84, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France, University of Chicago Press, 2001. This book about the meanings and limits of embodiment originated in the hospital bed where the author was forced to lie for several weeks.

Alden Todd ’39, Abandoned: The Story of the Greely Arctic Expedition, 1881-1884, new edition, University of Alaska Press, 2001. Working with official correspondence, diaries, letters, and notes, the author presents an account of the Greely arctic expedition of 1881-1884.

Atala Dorothy Toy ’63, Explorations in Consciousness, The Crossing Press, 2001. This book synthesizes many of the world’s great religious traditions, spiritual paths, and energy-healing practices.

William Weber ’72, Lee J.T. White, Amy Vedder ’73, and Lisa Naughton-Treves, African Rain Forest Ecology and Conservation: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Yale University Press, 2001. Written by conservation scientists and practitioners based in the African rain forest, this book offers a multidisciplinary perspective that integrates many biological and social sciences.

Nancy Hope Wilson ’69, Mountain Posse, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. In this story about family and forgiveness, the author uses excerpts from her own ancestors’ diaries.

Paul Zall ’48, Franklin on Franklin, University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Returning to Franklin’s Autobiography, published in 1758, the author interweaves autobiographical comments from Franklin’s personal letters and private journals.

COMPACT DISKS

Freebo, aka Dan Friedberg ’66, The End of the Beginning, Poppabo Music, 1999. This musician, who had the “honor of playing a concert for the Class of ’66 at the recent 35th reunion,” features songs reflecting many influences including rock ’n’ roll, blues, country, jazz, rhythm and blues, classical, dixieland, Broadway musicals, and more.

Steven Sles ’62, One/Echod, 2000. A painter and poet, this composer debuts his fusion of music, poetry, and prayer in works including “Soundmass,” “Journey,” and “Coming Home.”

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