needs to be taught in music classes, Brava! Eight women composers. Francesca CacciniBarbara StrozziElisabeth Jacquet de la GuerreMarianna MartinezsFanny Mendelssohn HenselClara Wieck SchumannLili BoulangerElizabeth Maconchy,
"Ambitious fathers and talented mothers prodigy brothers and trailblazing sisters courts, cities or nations in need of a soundtrack, even if, and sometimes because it is composed by a woman.
. . "
Beer wrote a scholarly historical account of these composers in the setting of their lives, without being pedantic, preachy, creepy or judgmental, The time each woman composed in set the stage for how her art would be received, While each as a musician could perform though not in public, please composition was a different discipline, Talking with a friend yesterday I mentioned a couple of contemporaries to further dress the context, "Yes, but Mozart was a prodigy," the man said, OK. So were these women. If you're performing at court atyears old, I don't care if you're male, female, reptile or alien, that's prodigal realm,
Fair warning: you may get mad, The author was kind enough to mellow the circumstances so you can get over it fairly quickly, Keep in mind that the composers did what they needed to do tocreate artwrite music, andlive in the time and place,
Beer is an excellent approachable writer, so take your time with this book, Find videos of the music being performed as you start a new composer chapter, Be your own set designer! Best of all the best, she has A Highly Personal Playlist at the back, in front of a glossary, so a reader may listen further, and needn't be intimidated by musical wordage.
Superb. My tiny book designer whinge the author is blameless Zapfino font And obscuring the beautiful portrait of Guerre, tsk. An unabashedly feminist introduction to eight women composers from theth through theth centuries, Sounds and Sweet Airs is a good overview of the lives of these composers.
Beers gives frank and interesting commentary on how ideas about women and their roles throughout history have defined and limited the ways women could create and perform music, and shows how these limitations affected each of the composers for good or ill.
This book is meant for the general reader rather than the serious music student, but is very enjoyable and a good gateway to further study of these composers, Author Anna Beer's Sounds and Sweet Airs tells about the almost forgotten history of women composers, Her book tells about some of the women who wrote beautiful music during a time when women were supposed to marry and keep quiet,
I love how Beer manages to painlessly tell the history as her writing is entertaining while being educational,
The one drawback of her book is I thought her Notes From the Silence was a bit long,
Recommend. I really enjoyed this compilation of biographies on female composers, Beer wrote it in such a way that I also learned about the evolution of music throughout the years and across continents, I didn't know any of these women, I'm not by any means a musical person, and I still enjoyed it immensely, I read it with a group Read Women and we had a great time discussing the composers, the book, and their music, Listening to some of their pieces as I went along added so much joy to my reading of this book, I highly recommend. Anna Beer's wellresearched book offers a comprehensive look at European female composers between theth andth centuries, The book examines Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Marianna Martines, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger and Elizabeth Betty Maconchy, The book considers not only these women's sizable contributions to music but also the social, historical and cultural contexts in which they performed and produced music, I had never read a book like this, and appreciated the opportunity to discuss it with a group of enthusiastic and intelligent women, This had been on my shelves for awhile, and I'm glad I gor around to it! Disclaimer: I received this book for free through a First Reads giveaway,
I found the concept of this book interesting, it allowed to discover new composer I'd never heard about, The structure, each chapter focusing on a different person, is quite accessible as you can just put the book down after a chapter and get back to it,
I received an uncorrected proof copy so will not comment on the writing itself as I am sure it was edited, I can say the language is accessible to a person who doesn't know too much about the world of music, I found there was quite a bit of repetition at times, but here again, it may well have been edited,
I was also not too keen on the author telling you personal things, such as explaining she is writing for Paris or listening to such and such piece of music while writing, in a nonfiction book.
I found chapters,,andto be very interesting and enjoyed them a lot, The last two chapters I wasn't overwhelmed with, but that is because I like preth century classical music and these chapters are aboutth century composers,
Chaptersandwere clearly lacking in my opinion, It seems to be that there wasn't enough knowledge about the life and work of Barbara Strozzi and Marianna Martines, so the author keeps going on about other things and repeats herself quite a lot to reach the required number of pages.
All in all, I would say it is an interesting introduction to music or feminist studies, but I don't think I will be keeping my copy, Sounds and Sweet Airs reveals the hidden stories of eight remarkable composers, taking the reader on a journey from seventeenthcentury Medici Florence to London in the Blitz,
Exploring not just the lives and works of eight exceptional artists, historian Anna Beer also asks tough questions about the silencing of their legacy, which continues to this day.
Why do we still not hear masterpieces such as Hensels piano work "The Year," Caccinis arias and Boulangers setting of Psalm
A longoverdue celebration of neglected virtuosos, Sounds and Sweet Airs presents a complex and inspirational picture of artistic endeavour and achievement that deserves to be part of our cultural heritage.
The featured composers are: Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Marianna Martines, Fanny Hensel née Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger and Elizabeth Maconchy, Un libro necesario. It took me quite some time to read this whole book, but this is mostly because I wanted to really, truly, learn and process the lives of each of these women to listen to the music and think of their lives.
It is so vastly important that this book exists as a person with not one, but TWO degrees in classical music, it was shocking to me how little I knew if anything! about each of these composers.
The composers that I had heard of in college were primarily juxtaposed with their more famous counterparts Clara with Robert, Fanny with Felix and mentioned flippantly and without focus on their work.
If you're curious about this book, I highly recommend it, Beyond the historical content, the music that can be discovered is well worth the time, I received this book from the publisher through an Early Reading program, I have a number of these books about forgotten/unknown female pioneers in a variety of professions, Most have a lighthearted chatty tone with brief biographical sketches, This book was different. Beer is a serious scholar who devoted overpages to just eight women composers fromC Florence throughC Britain, She explores their careers in relation to their families, the political situation, role of women, and musical developments of the time, It's a fascinating journey through musical history and women's role in it, Unfortunately, I'm not a musician so I skimmed most of the musical theory discussion, For musically knowledgeable people, add another star, In spite of my ignorance, I enjoyed the stories of these remarkable women, Anna Beer writes compellingly of these eight composers, how they struggled and dealt with
the sexism they encountered, and how they have been received and remembered, I really appreciated how she presented the information available and also provided her own interpretations and theories, This book should absolutely be required reading for every music major, I will surely be reading this again, I learned so much about thecomposers featured in this book! The story of Fanny Hensel was the most tragic for me: that such immense talent was suppressed only to have Hensel finally decide to start publishing right before her life was cut short!
The book could be so much more accessible and reach a wider audience with a good editor.
Repetitiveness, side tangents that dont add to the story, and messy chronology could be cut or reworked, It would have been immensely helpful to have a timeline of the lives of thesewomen with perhaps some data on their contemporaries so as to better place them, Finally, I was frustrated to find the “Works Consulted” organized by authors last name, This book is reallyminibiographies and it would have made so much more sense to organize this section by listing the sources consulted for each composer! One of the best books of music history I have read, ever.
Beautifully researched and written, it not only tells the often hardtofind stories of eight women at various eras of music history, but does a beautiful job of contextualizing their stories within the eras and societies in which they existed.
Beer brings a lot of nuance to how the role of women composers has evolved through the centuries, In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf recalls how men once opined that the idea of a woman writing put them in mind of a dog walking on its hind legs: "it is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.
" But while Woolf argues that this opinion has fallen out of fashion when it comes to female writers as people like the Bronte sisters have won wide acclaim, she is able to find a music critic who uses this very quote to disparage the female composer Germaine Tailleferre.
And that quote is from, the very year she wrote this essay, She concludes that female composers have a very difficult path, far more difficult than the rocky roads that female writers once faced,
And when you think about it, that makes a lot of sense, A female composer needs everything that a female writer needs, Time, money, a room of one's own, and probably at least basic literacy, But she also needs highly specialized education, and she needs to convince many, many, people, likely men, to perform her work,
Anna Beer's Sounds and Sweet Airs explores how eight women were able to create extraordinary music in spite of those barriers, And they didn't just face those obvious obstacles, Female composers were sexualized, having your work performed in public was regarded as obscene, And after female composers die, there are still more barriers that keep them from being better known today, And even if you do manage to compose music, it will be undervalued and it is much less likely to have been written down, And it is less likely to be recorded today, which means that it is impossible to listen to it today unless you can somehow attend a live performance featuring their work.
And the types of music that these women had the resources the produce songs, sonatas, and the like are undervalued today compared to more expensive genres of classical music like symphonies, operas, and concertos, which has harmed many of these women's contemporary reputations.
It is unsurprising that the majority of these women were the children, sisters, or wives of other musicians and composers, But while those connections granted them access to education and opportunities, the very men that gave them those opportunities limited their careers, Seeing how these eight very different women managed to negotiate these difficult realities is riveting and fascinating, I was very invested in all these women's stories, Barbara Strozzi was a likely courtesan who knew that her music would not be appreciated in her lifetime, and responded by publishing all of it as a time when all the bigname composers balked at publishing their work for fear that they would reveal their secrets.
Fanny Mendelson had a magnificent career in the privacy of her home while her equally talented brother Felix traveled the world and gained widespread recognition, Clara Schumann managed to compose so much wonderful music while taking care of her volatile husband and supporting her family with a frighteningly busy concert and touring schedule, Lili Boulanger achieved unprecedented success in spite of and even because of her disability and the even more debilitating treatments for her disability,
I loved them all, I loved reading about them and discovering their music, And fun fact: this book is the source of my Goodreads profile picture, which is a painting of the Italian Baroque composer Barbara Strozzi, Myyearold piano teacher, who spent a lifetime as a concertizing pianist, recommended this to me, My musical history knowledge is sparse at best, so I'm sure she got more out of it than I did but even to a layperson, it's shocking to learn how very limited women's lives have historically been.
Like my favorite historical fiction, the stories of these eight female composers Caccini, Strozzi, Jacquet de la Guerre, Martines, Hensel, Schumann, Boulanger, and Maconchy made the challenges of simply surviving as a woman much less finding a way to let society provide space for creativity and expression very real.
Ranging from theth century to the midth, the roadblocks for each woman are different, but no less inspiring, I knew, for instance, that society has associated actresses and singers with prostitution until well into theth century, but didn't realize that in theth century courtesans were effectively the ONLY women who created or performed music.
For Caccini to do the work on which she thrived, her only choice was to navigate the tricky social waters of court, Even for the later composers Boulanger and Maconchy the support and cooperation of the men in their lives was critical their success, Though an academic work, this book is engaging, and opens up a whole new world of music to explore, .