Choice 评论

The modernist principle of individual expression has long been identified with male composers. Women with unorthodox views were excluded from their society. Hisama (Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY) uses new analytic tools for a feminist analysis of 21 compositions by three American women working during the influential era of the Depression and the McCarthy hearings and all belonging to the post-tonal school. New interpretations based on close readings of selected chamber and solo works demonstrate that gender, politics, and biographical contexts are all present in their music, although frequently hidden in muted or alternative narrative voices, a conceit that is part of contemporary literary theory. Hisama believes that modernism allowed the space that these women needed to stimulate their imaginations. Bauer, an advocate for women composers and author of one of the first studies of 20th-century music, was the mentor of Crawford, an excellent composer who always worked in the shadow of her husband, theorist Charles Seeger. Gideon publicly downplayed the problems of women composers, but her journals show that she too was oppressed in the male-dominated world of composition. This important and provocative study should suggest new paths for feminist analysis. Upper-division undergraduates and above. J. P. Ambrose University of Vermont