Køn sang

Abstract

Songs by Women Composers between Old and New MusicologyEven though historical women composers have enjoyed a slow butsteady renaissance since the 1980s, there are vanishingly few analyticalstudies of their works, and especially of their songs. In thisarticle, I argue that two sets of circumstances in the historical developmentof musicology as a field have contributed to this neglect.First, genre hierarchies and ingrained ideas about gender affectedthe contemporary reception of as well as subsequent scholarshipabout women composers. Cultural factors meant that many womencomposers composed predominantly songs and works for solo piano,both genres in the low end of the hierarchy. Contemporary criticssaw the predilection for these genres as a sign of musical inferiorityconnected to their gender, and song continued to hold a low statusin analytical music theory of the twentieth century. Second, whilemusicology’s cultural turn certainly facilitated the rediscovery ofwomen composers, it also brought with it a (justified) wariness ofstructural analysis. The result is that we understand the cultural andgendered circumstances under which historical women composed,but we still know very little about their compositions. The article canbe read independently as a critique of the lacuna that women’s songshave become, or it can be read as the introduction to a series of analyticalstudies of historical Danish women’s songs to be published inthis journal.