What’s a Girl Gotta Do to Get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

By: Alexandra Apolloni (UCLA Center for the Study of Women, Los Angeles, CA) // Each year, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (henceforth Rock Hall) announces a new list of inductees: artists that are deemed worthy of commemoration—and canonization—as rock greats. And in 2016, none of the inductees were women. The underrepresentation of women …

Bromantic Singing: Madrigals and Authenticity

By: (Andrew Dell’Antonio, University of Texas at Austin) // It’s been a common schtick among music history teachers to tell our students that sixteenth-century Italian and English madrigals are not the wholesome, jolly songs about shepherds, nymphs, and fa la la they learned to sing in high school. Ultimately, they’re about sex. Amused at having …

Poor Unfortunate Gender Stereotypes: Gender Transgression and Masculinity in the Music of Female Disney Villains

In the spring of 2015, Dana Gorzelany-Mostak hosted a semi-formal writing competition in her Music Since 1900 course at Rider University. Students were free to explore a wide variety of musical topics and were instructed to model their essays on those found on The Avid Listener. Co-editor Felicia Miyakawa visited Gorzelany-Mostak's class via video chat and …

Poetic Protest: Women, Hip-hop, and Islam

Felicia Miyakawa (Round Rock, TX) When we think about protest music, we tend to think about music sung at political rallies or music created for a cause—the labor movement for example, or anti-war songs. But sometimes protest music is subtle. Sometimes performance itself—the getting up on stage in front of people, the very act of …

Silence from the Salon: In Search of Sara Levy

By: Rebecca Cypess (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) // If history is written by the victors, how can we recover the stories that have gone untold until now? Especially in the history of music—an artform that is difficult to describe and gone in an instant—how can we recover voices of the past that have been silenced? …

Intentional Inauthenticity: Performing Disabled Bodies, Disabled Bodies Performing

By: Andrew Dell’Antonio (University of Texas at Austin) // Operatic bodies, like the sounds they dramatize, are generally meant to be beautiful. But like other cultural forms, opera is also used to explore society's concern with the abnormal, its fear of and fascination with bodies that deviate from a culturally framed “ordinary.” Music-and-disability scholar Blake …

Bespoke Opera: Handel, Fach, and Gender

By: Andrew Dell’Antonio (University of Texas at Austin) // Twenty-first century opera singers obtain—and train for—principal roles in “warhorse” works worldwide according to a system of voice-types, widely known as the “fach” system (using a German word that means “classification”). Casting directors, teachers, and the stars themselves have become accustomed to linking singers to roles …

Hearing Gender in George Lucas’s Galaxy

By: Kendra Leonard (Loveland, OH) // George Lucas’s Star Wars IV: A New Hope was the movie hit of 1977. Its score, composed by John Williams, was equally popular, winning the Oscar for Best Film Score and three Grammy awards; the American Film Institute even declared it the greatest American movie score of all time. …

Women Can’t Do That: Delia Derbyshire and Electronic Music

By: Kendra Leonard (Loveland, OH) // British composer Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001) was probably one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century, but most people—including professional musicians—have never heard of her. Derbyshire’s best-known work was the theme music for the original Doctor Who, as well as the sound effects for the TARDIS, the title …

The Innovations of Ruth Crawford Seeger

By: Kendra Leonard (Loveland, OH) // What does it mean to be a “female composer”? Even today, in our music history books, women who compose music are often called out because of their gender; in some books, women hardly even get mentioned at all. The reason isn’t because we don’t know much about women who …