Conference Agenda

The Composer’s Forum Laboratory, a weekly concert series supported by the New Deal’s Federal Music Project, provided a unique opportunity for composers to receive feedback from audience members in question-and-answer sessions following the concert. For Johanna Beyer and many other women composers involved in the Forum, this series was a significant opportunity for their works to be performed and discussed; however, the atmosphere during their Q&A sessions was often one of criticism, attacking both the composer’s appearance and their work in gendered terms (de Graaf 2008). Following her performances in the concert series, Beyer wrote two choral pieces about The Federal Music Project and The Composer’s Forum Laboratory. In this paper, I interpret these pieces through a feminist lens as a “double-voiced discourse”: although the lyrics suggest Beyer embraced the Forum, the musical setting reveals a veiled criticism.

Elaine Showalter (1981) proposes that women’s fiction can be read as “double-voiced discourse” which contains “two alternative, oscillating texts simultaneously”—a “dominant” discourse that reflects conventional gender roles, and a “muted” discourse subversive to it (204). Drawing on studies of musical irony and satire (Bourne 2016, Klein 2009, Lumsden 2015, Sheinberg 2000), I propose that Beyer’s songs likewise contain two contradictory meanings. The lyrics in these two pieces, which Beyer wrote herself, portray an exaggerated atmosphere of scholarship and collaboration, referring to the Federal Music Project as “a nucleus of a future so gay” where “all is taught with knowledge, with love through games and fun.” The musical setting, however, satirizes the positivity of the lyrics with an off-kilter march in 5/4; unusual vocal trills and glissandi; and percussive, chant-like polyphony obscuring the clarity of the text.

Feminist music scholarship has become increasingly popular in the past two decades; however, none yet has made use of double-voicedness as an analytical lens. Using Beyer’s choral pieces as a case study, this paper contributes to this body of work by bridging together feminist musicology with work on musical satire to uncover one way a composer might incorporate two contradictory meanings into their compositions—one which seemingly reinforces gendered stereotypes while the other subverts them.

Three years prior to the Boston premiere of her Symphony in E minor, “Gaelic,” Amy Beach made her mark with both large and small scale works at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Exposition, which commemorated the quatercentenary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America, aimed to highlight the artistic and cultural achievements of the United States. Expanding on scholarship on women at the Exposition (Feldman 1990; Palm 2010), I theorize the Exposition as a site for women musicians to advance their position due to the gendered places and spaces of the Woman’s Building and Women’s Musical Congress. Four of Beach’s compositions were performed at the Exposition: the choral piece Festival jubilate, her Romance for violin and piano, the song Sweetheart, Sigh No More, and her Four Sketches for piano. In conversation with scholarship on American musical identity and division at the Exposition (Miller 2003; Cordery 2023), I aim to explore how Beach navigated the gendered and musical spaces at the fair through various genres and scales of music. I will examine her collaborations with other women musicians, including violinist Maud Powell and vocalist Jeannette Dutton. I specifically aim to understand Beach’s navigation of the Exposition through the dedications and other para-musical writings of her pieces performed at the fair. Akin to Emily Green’s approach in Dedicating Music, 1785-1850, I understand Beach’s dedications as representative of a changing marketplace, but rather than the patronage-to-market-driven economy Green explores, I understand Beach’s dedications as a method of parsing the shifting role of women musicians in the fin-de-siècle United States.

“There is a certain amount of fighting for the ‘Wald’ which I feel I must do – I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs.”[1] With this quote, scholars have been inspired to examine the libretto of Der Wald for evidence of Smyth’s proto-feminist tendencies. The music of Ethel Smyth’s second opera, however, has been less investigated in part due to a limited number of performances, difficulty accessing the score, and, until recently, no commercial recording. In 1902-1904, the opera received performances in Berlin, London, at the Met in New York, and in Strasbourg, but it was not staged again until 2021. Consequently, scholarship has focused on the libretto and the vocal score, examining gender representation and power dynamics through the text, with limited exploration of how the music conveys the narrative. With the release of a commercial recording in 2023, however, it is now possible to hear the work multiple times as well as study the score, creating an opportunity to examine the ways in which the music of the opera conveys the narrative and depicts the characters.

At its core, Der Wald is a battle between two women for the love of a man. While this battle is most assuredly conveyed through the text and stage action, it is also conveyed through the melodies of the main female characters. Although described as moral opposites, they inhabit the same vocal range. Over the course of the opera, the performers demonstrate the heroine Röschen’s triumph over the sorceress Iolanthe through the very notes they sing, using voice exchange across multiple scenes to convey rising and diminishing power. Building upon the work of Wood, Lebiez, Gibbon, and Kertesz, and through an examination of the full score and the recording within the context of the libretto and the correspondence between Smyth and her librettist Henry Brewster, this paper will demonstrate the ways in which Smyth expressed through music the power of her female characters.

[1] Ethel Smyth to Henry Brewster, 15 November 1902, Hildebrand Brewster Archive, Villa San Francesco di Paola, Florence, Italy.