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Women and Music in the Nineteenth Century

For past paper questions, click here.

Tutorial 1

Women Composers and the Musical Canon

How should we include women composers in the musical canon? Should there be a separate women’s history of music? Ensure that your answer discusses at least one woman composer in depth.​

  • Citron, Marcia J., “Gender, Professionalism, and the Musical Canon”, Journal of Musicology ​8.1 (1990), pp.102-117. For access, click here.

  • Citron, Marcia J., “Felix Mendelssohn’s Influence on Fanny Mendelssohn as a Professional Composer”, Current Musicology 37-38 (1984), pp.9-17. For access, click here.

  • Wilson Kimber, Marian. “The ‘Suppression’ of Fanny Mendelssohn: Rethinking Feminist Biography”, 19th-Century Music 26.2 (2002), pp.113-129. For access, click here.

Tutorial 2

Women as Composers

How did social circumstance influence the lives of women composers in the nineteenth century? Ensure that your answer gives at least two examples.

  • Reich, Nancy B. “Women as Musicians: A Question of Class”, in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. by Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp.125- 146. For access, click here.

  • Francis, Kimberly A, "Her-Storiography: Pierre Bourdieu, Cultural Capital, and Changing the Narrative Paradigm", Women & Music, 19.1 (2015), pp.169-77. For access, click here.

  • Halstead, Jill, The Woman Composer: Creativity and the Gendered Politics of Musical Composition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997). [Particularly look at Chapter 6, "Tradition and Genre", pp.171-214. To find, click here.

  • Letzter, Jacqueline, “Making a Spectacle of Oneself: French Revolutionary Opera by Women", Cambridge Opera Journal 11.3 (1999), pp.215-232. For access, click here.

Tutorial 3

Women in Opera, and Musical Representations of Women

Opera is an “infinitely repetitive spectacle” of violence against women. (CLÉMENT) Discuss, ensuring that your answer refers to at least one piece in depth.

  • Clément, Catherine, Opera; or, the Undoing of Women, trans. by Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). To find, click here.

  • Abbate, Carolyn, “Opera; or, the Envoicing of Women”, in Musicology and Difference, ed. by Ruth A. Solie, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp.225-258. For access, click here.

  • Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon, “Staging the Female Body: Richard Strauss’s Salome”, in Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. by Mary Ann Smart, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp.204-221. For access, click here.

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