Unsung Christine Ammer
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Unsung: A History of Women in American Music
Christine Ammer
Amadeus Press
Paperback (Century Edition)
382 pages
February 2001
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It’s not often that one finds enlightenment in a bibliography. Bibliographies
are supposed to be where writers demonstrate their homework, not their
interpretive skills. Not so Christine Ammer’s Unsung: A History of Women in
American Music. Her bibliography is massive, stretching to 13 pages (with the
Notes occupying another 32 pages!), and in it we find citations like this:
“Is there a Career for Women Musicians” cited in a 1938 issue of Metronome;
and “Why Not Women in Orchestras?” in Etude Music Magazine in 1952.
Today it is difficult to imagine a world in which such questions occurred. In
the 1998–99 season of the U.S.’s most prominent orchestras, women occupied
between 18 and 38 percent of the positions. Disproportionate to their actual
populace, of course, and also to the percentage of women in music academies
(a majority). But on the plus side this is certainly an improvement over
debating whether they should even be there.
Nor are women musicians anonymous faces behind the music stands any more.
Women conductors have gained national attention, albeit only a handful. Three
women have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for their compositions—a male-only
award up till 1983. The 1999 Avery Fisher Prize went to Sarah Chang, Pamela
Frank, and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the first time the prize went to women.
Author Christine Ammer goes on to site so many women-won honors there is
really only two words to adequately describe her book and her subject: mostly
massive.
More about the “mostly” in a bit. For now, Unsung is the 2nd edition of a
classic text in the field, first published in 1980. The first edition became
the definitive book in the field, which this 2nd edition has considerably
revised and expanded. Now embracing a full two centuries of women in American
music, Ms. Ammer added dozens of composers and performers, including women
involved in such byways and back streets as transcribing Native American and
Cajun music, ragtime and jazz, electronic and performance art, from the late
1800s to the present.
Ms. Ammer’s new material heaps plenty of fact—and no end of superbly
sketched biographical anecdote—on the personal lives, trials, tribulations,
and successes of her subjects. Blessedly, she runs long on detail and short
on polemic. Literally hundreds of women are conjured vividly to life out of
such unpromising material as dusty newspaper archives, hardly-to-be-found
program notes from all but forgotten performances, family albums and letters,
reminiscences of friends and teachers, and obituaries. In her own words,
“The research process for the first edition was long and laborious. I went
through all the journals, newspaper reviews, and programs I could find from
the 1790s to the present, mainly in the Boston and New York public libraries.
None of the material was indexed or computerized, so it took many months to
read it all. When I found particularly interesting women, such as Sophia
Hewitt (organist for the Handel and Haydn Society in the early 1800s), I
tracked down municipal records and the like. For this second, greatly
expanded edition, the clipping files I'd kept over the years, the Internet,
and personal interviews with living artists such as composer Joan Tower, made
the process much less time-consuming but nonetheless fascinating.”
Ms. Ammer has an eye for the telling detail that’s so piquant you are right
there with the individual as events happen:
“[Camilla] Urso’s parents moved to Paris and tried to enroll her at the
Conservatory there. At first they could not even get their foot inside the do
or. The normal enrollment age was ten, and no girl had ever been admitted.
Finally, after nine months of delay the family could ill afford—Camilla’s
father could not find work in Paris and her mother had to take in sewing and
washing—the Conservatory director . . . agreed to hear her play. After this
audition, the eight-year-old was admitted immediately.”
“Undine Smith Moore became known mostly for her choral compositions and
arrangements of spirituals. . . . She herself said her rhythms, choice of
scale structures, use of call and response, and general use of contrapuntal
devices are among the characteristics making her music uniquely black. . . .
‘I hope that everything I have written reflects my blackness. I cannot say,
but I hope so.’”
“... some outstanding work was done by three American women who studied
American Indian music. Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838–1923) did the first
important work, beginning about 1882. ... She wrote a treatise on the songs
of the Omaha Indians and articles on the music of the Sioux and Pawnee
Indians. ... Natalie Curtis Burlin (1875–1921) ... worked on the Indians of
the Southwest, particularly the Hopi and Zuni, beginning about 1900. She
published her findings in The Indian’s Book, which contained more than 200
songs of eighteen tribes.”
Regrettably, the mention of “American Indian” brings up one of the book’s
shortcomings: its poor index. The term “American Indian” spreads all over
page 167 but does not appear in the index. It appears to be a
names-and-institutions index that was compiled by the “index” function of a
word processor, whose limitation is that they don’t catch ideas, movements,
or generic subjects that occupy multiple pages.
But back to Ms. Ammer. All this started virtually by accident. When asked
about the initial idea, Ms. Ammer responded,
“The original impetus came in the mid-1970s. I was asked to introduce an
all-women's wind quintet, and when I went to the library to look up some
background on women wind players, I found absolutely nothing. My children
were in school orchestras and bands, which included many girls. I symphony
orchestras, chamber groups, and soloists consisted almost entirely of men. So
I wondered what had happened to all the girls in school ensembles. And why
were all the works I heard in concert, records, and on radio composed by men?”
Until you pick up her book and open it at random, it is easy to overlook the
vastness of the subject. Fortunately Ms. Ammer is as methodical as she is
exacting. She does not address the subject chronologically; music is too
diverse for the timeline approach. Rather, she arranges—so to speak—her
study according to discipline. It is easier to simply quote part of the Table
of Contents:
- The First Flowering—At the Organ
- The "Lady Violinists" and Other String Players
- Seated at the Keyboard
- The First "Lady Composers"
- Apartheid—The All-Women's Orchestras
- American Composers in European Idioms
- Grass Roots—Composers in American Idioms
- Opera Composers and Conductors
- Contemporary and Postmodern Idioms—After 1950
- Electronic Music, Mixed Media, Film, Performance Art
- Today’s Orchestras, Conductors, and Instrumentalists
While she is proud of what American women have done, she is less sanguine
about the recognition they receive even today:
“The personnel of major American orchestras is now 25 to 35 percent women,
and there are many all- or part-women's chamber ensembles, string quartets,
etc. But, the numbers are still small-three out of a hundred prizewinners;
one out of two dozen...conductors; one-fourth to one-third women players when
conservatories graduate a majority of women. Further, in some fields such as
music education, women still are consigned to the lower ranks, such as
untenured or adjunct professors in colleges and conservatories. Women brass
players have a particularly hard time winning acceptance; very few have made
it into the big time, and it is not for want of talent or ability. Prejudice
lingers, and for those women who have gotten a foot in the door, there is
often a glass ceiling.”
Unfortunately, “lack of recognition” is a term that can be applied to Ms.
Ammer’s work itself. There are, for all her exactitude, some astonishing
lacunae. None of the following are even mentioned, much less is their role in
female musicology assayed: Ann Dudley, Anna Turner, Joan Doan, Gabrielle
Roth, Constance Demby; and the genres of world fusion, ambient, soundspace,
minimalism, blues, trance, techno, space jazz, electronic and acoustical
space, hip-hop, punk. Ms. Ammer’s focus on institutional/academic music and
music long assimilated into the mainstream, such as ragtime and jazz,
neglects almost everything that has been happening in the nonacademic
creative sector. We must forgive her for the omission on the grounds of the
book’s already massive content, and perhaps the inhibition of the publisher
to add another 50 pages or so to a book already in danger of being priced out
of the market. (At $19.95 it’s the bargain of the year in academic
publishing.)
In any event, nonacademic creative work surely deserves the attentions of an
exacting and lucid scholar like Ms. Ammer. Perhaps she will consider the
topic for another book, or at least extended article. Or consider this: An
all-color large-format book about all that lies behind the Hearts of Space
phenomenon—with all those exotic names, instruments, and performances—is
surely a strong coffee-table candidate once the art book publishing industry
gets out of the present doldrums.
© 2002 by Dana De Zoysa for Curled Up With a Good Book |
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