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Kvindelige komponisters sange mellem gammel og ny musikvidenskab

Resumé

Songs by Women Composers between Old and New Musicology
Even though historical women composers have enjoyed a slow but
steady renaissance since the 1980s, there are vanishingly few analytical
studies of their works, and especially of their songs. In this
article, I argue that two sets of circumstances in the historical development
of musicology as a field have contributed to this neglect.
First, genre hierarchies and ingrained ideas about gender affected
the contemporary reception of as well as subsequent scholarship
about women composers. Cultural factors meant that many women
composers composed predominantly songs and works for solo piano,
both genres in the low end of the hierarchy. Contemporary critics
saw the predilection for these genres as a sign of musical inferiority
connected to their gender, and song continued to hold a low status
in analytical music theory of the twentieth century. Second, while
musicology’s cultural turn certainly facilitated the rediscovery of
women composers, it also brought with it a (justified) wariness of
structural analysis. The result is that we understand the cultural and
gendered circumstances under which historical women composed,
but we still know very little about their compositions. The article can
be read independently as a critique of the lacuna that women’s songs
have become, or it can be read as the introduction to a series of analytical
studies of historical Danish women’s songs to be published in
this journal.