Friday, January 24
Women’s Voices I (10:00am–12:00pm)
Lori Burns and Patrick Armstrong, Claiming Song Space: Female Vocalists in Gothic/Doom Metal
Emerging with Black Sabbath and intensified by bands such as Pentagram and Candlemass, the genre of doom metal is characterized by slow tempos and thick, distorted, and down-tuned guitars. Within such a heavy texture, it is important to understand how female vocalists participate in the musical structure. For this presentation, we examine three songs featuring female vocalists, selected to illustrate the origins of doom metal and its further developments. We consider song form, the interplay between vocal and instrumental expressions and timbres, and the lyrical narratives that are communicated. These elements are interpreted within the contexts and affordances of doom metal, with the aim of illuminating ways in which female artists work both within and also transform the genre conventions.
Beginning with the The 3rd and the Mortal (1994), we explore the work of Kari Rueslåtten. An early example of a female vocalist at the front of a doom metal band, Rueslåtten’s warm, distant, and ethereal vocals are supported by lighter textures, which are set off by heavier instrumental passages featuring distorted and layered guitars and bass. One decade later, Lisa Johansson contributes to gothic death-doom metal band, Draconian (2005), interacting with heavy textures and growling male vocals in the “Beauty and the Beast” style associated with that genre. Another decade later, Rebecca Vernon of SubRosa (2013) mobilizes powerful and dramatic vocals that carry a weighty presence over the heavy guitar and bass riffs, adorned by violins. With these three vocalists, we witness three very different ways in which female vocalists navigate sonic space in doom metal songs.
Ágnes Vojtkó and Dana Zenobi, Margaret Bonds Sets Edna St. Vincent Millay: Six Powerful Additions to the Art Song Repertoire
This lecture recital introduces the Cascade Song Festival to the combined artistic efforts of composer Margaret Bonds (1913–1972) and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). These six virtuosic settings of Millay’s brilliant sonnets on themes of love, desire, and heartache were left in manuscript form—like much of Bonds’s compositional work—at the time of her passing, in 1972. They have recently been rediscovered through the work of scholars including John Michael Cooper and Louise Toppin. Scores became available to singer/pianist pairs in spring of 2021 via two new critical editions from Hildegard Publishing Company and Videmus Press. Informed by the recent scholarly work by Toppin, Cooper, and others, this presentation will identify important thematic elements in the Millay poetry and highlight stylistic elements of Bonds’s settings, drawing attention to the musical connections that weave some of the songs together into larger musical units. Along with performances of excerpts from the six selections, we will provide essential information on range and level of musical/vocal difficulty to assist colleagues in assigning these pieces appropriately. Links to recordings and scholarly resources will be provided so that attendees can learn more about Bonds, Millay, and this repertoire in particular.
Madison Stepherson, Constructing Femininity through Song: Miranda Lambert’s “Relatable Rebel” Persona
The country music industry is rife with gendered expectations and demands conformity to a singular, heterosexual model of country womanhood in exchange for acceptance and radio play. Artist constructions of femininity are often expressed musically through vocal delivery and lyrics. But what about those women who conform enough to stay welcome in the industry but subtly push against this model? In this presentation, I take Miranda Lambert as a case study to investigate how she communicates white country femininity lyrically and musically in two of her songs, “If I Was a Cowboy” (2021) and “Mama’s Broken Heart” (2013). Lambert presents a rebellious yet relatable persona, which allows her to connect authentically with her listeners.
In “If I Was a Cowboy” Lambert combines transgressive lyrics with traditional vocality. The song’s lyrics consider how her life might be different as a cowboy. Yet even as she presents a rough, masculine character through the lyrics, her vocal timbre remains soft and feminine. The lyrics and vocal delivery in “Mama’s Broken Heart”—which is structured as a conversation between a mother and daughter—highlight a tension between rebelliousness and repression. Where the mother’s actions are repressed, her vocality is not, and the daughter’s rebellious actions are paired with a conflicting subdued vocality. These two songs are representative of Lambert’s ‘Relatable Rebel’ persona. Considering songs like these offers a model for understanding how Lambert and other female country artists both conform to and push subtly against the boundaries of the genre and its gendered norms.
Dianne Davies and Lisa Neher, Cycles of Life
Cycles of Life is a lecture recital of art songs written and performed by a duo of women composer-performers. Through this music, we explore our identities as modern women and our roles in our families, communities, and the world. Standard song repertoire frames women’s lives as revolving around their husbands, children, and devotion to God (think of Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben, which focuses on the protagonist’s romantic relationship with her husband, and Gioachino Rossini’s La Regata Veneziana, in which a young woman watches her lover compete in a gondola race, her whole being absorbed in inspiring him to keep rowing and win). Such works emphasize romantic, heterosexual love and supplication to God and paint a demure, serene picture of motherhood. In these portraits, the women do not have outside interests, goals, or dreams. In contrast, our work paints a nuanced, complex portrait of modern women, in which many experiences and relationships are important and worthy of reflection, poetry, and song. Our songs explore experiences such as the death of a sister, a first crush, stress about schoolwork and tests, the need to “spill the beans” about an important plot twist, and the pressures of being a woman on social media. We discuss how our life experiences inspired the music and texts and how our interpretive choices as performers are informed by our close relationship to the subject matter. Through this work, we advocate for art song as a relevant, modern, living genre that can reflect the lives of people today.
Issues in Song Performance (1:30pm–3:00pm)
Kendra Preston Leonard, Negotiating Trauma in New Art Song
Living lyricists and composers are often called upon to create works that engage with trauma and tragedy. This, coupled with the demand that minoritized creators exploit their own personal or collective histories of oppression and violence, has led to the development of art song that requires trauma-informed work on the parts of the creators and performers, as well as work preparing audiences for what they will hear. The desire by commissioners to facilitate the creation of such works can cause serious issues, including the potential for re-traumatization of creators, performers, and audiences. While opera companies now employ intimacy directors and other advisors for problematic materials, new art songs dealing with similarly difficult topics and performances of those songs rarely engage with such elements of the songs’ texts, perhaps because of their (usually) unstaged nature. Here, I explore these works and argue for trauma-informed practices in developing and performing new art song, and in educating commissioners and audiences. I discuss how the musical community needs to do more to mitigate the use of trauma and tragedy in superficial ways, and how to prepare artists and audiences for experiencing works such works. Finally, I consider the ethics and complexities of creating new art songs on topics that require significant pre-performance or aftercare for performers or audiences.
Elizabeth Pearse, From the Piano: A Brief Survey of Self-Accompanied Singing
This presentation provides an overview of the art of singing while accompanying oneself at the keyboard, a practice which has been seen as both epitome of musicianship and a mere “novelty” depending on the historical era. Though popular performers from Elton John to Lady Gaga currently perform in this manner, the practice has remained uncommon in the realm of Western classical “art” music for almost a century. After a brief overview of the historical precedent, this presentation will focus on the state of self-accompaniment in contemporary works by living composers including Roger Reynolds, Betsy Jolas, Kate Soper, and others who are currently writing for this specific performance practice. I will discuss concerns related to this practice—subjects including automaticity and multitasking, practical considerations for the interested performer, and related research in the benefits and drawbacks of performing from the piano.
Heather Platt, Singing Diverse American Songs During the “Progressive Era”
Recitals and lectures highlighting diverse American songs emerged during the Progressive Era (1896–1917) as a byproduct of increasing nationalism in both Europe and the United States, debates about the nature of American music, and the emerging fields of folklore and ethnography. Singers were particularly important in disseminating African American and Native American music to white audiences because song recitals and public lectures including songs were near rampant. While Henry Krehbiel’s illustrated lectures on the diversity of America song are known to a few scholars, Villa Whitney White’s and Nelda Hewitt Stevens’s recitals comprising songs of African Americans, Native Americans and Caucasian Americans have been overlooked. Whereas these women’s programs were based on the scholarship of early ethnographers, major concert singers, including Schumann-Heink, were influenced by Harry T. Burleigh’s arrangements of spirituals and by early Indianist composers. Many recital programs combined a few American songs with lieder and French songs, and in so doing enhanced the visibility of unfamiliar American genres. Not all singers, however, were genuinely committed to showcasing the diversity of American music, and some derided songs of Native Americans. Moreover, many programs did not highlight the indigenous or African American repertoire, the performers did not explain these songs to audiences, and many avoided programming such repertoire in conservative states. On the one hand these programs prepared the way for the success of Roland Hayes, but on the other they serve as a warning that well-meaning efforts to diversify programs can ultimately be rendered a forgotten fad.
Masterclass, Nicholas Phan (3:30pm–5:30pm)
Keynote address, Natasha Loges, Words Fail Me: Reflections on the Legacy of Pauline Viardot (7:30pm)
Saturday, January 25
Underexplored Genres (10:00am–12:00pm)
Raoul Manuel Palm, Parody Song: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1794
During the second half of the 18th century, enlightenment thinkers began to question slavery philosophically. During that period, people of color in Europe and the European colonies in the Atlantic World started to organize themselves against slavery and to create racial equality. The French and Haitian Revolutions were the two major revolutions happening in the Atlantic world where people of color demanded their rights. In the Haitian Revolution, four years of constant and violent struggles resulted in the abolition of slavery on the island of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) in 1793 and its mother country, France, in 1794. Throughout France, the abolition of slavery was celebrated. People of color from France and its colonies participated in these celebrations by giving speeches and creating songs. Most of the known song contributions were so-called parody songs. These songs were not funny, which could be assumed by the name parody. They were texts written on existing, popular musical pieces, mostly other songs, but also arias or orchestral works.
My talk will address the songs created for the revolutionary celebrations in France, especially by women and people of color. I combine findings from musicology and sound history with sources and research results from the Age of Revolutions as well as the History of free people of color and women of color, while examining the practice of creating parody songs during the French Revolution. I argue that creating parody songs for the abolition festivities is a way to link people of color’s struggle with the ideals of the French Revolution and their fight for the human rights that the French Revolution in principle guaranteed them.
Michael Womack, The Musical Theater Song Cycle
Since the early 1980s, musical theatre composers and lyricists have embraced the song cycle structure to showcase their songwriting prowess. Although similar to the early 20th-century genre of the musical revue, musical theatre song cycles are built on the art song traditions of Western classical composers. Some works, like Maury Yeston’s December Songs and Georgia Stitt’s Alphabet City Cycle, adhere to a more conventional structure and instrumentation. In contrast, pieces such as Adam Guettel’s Myths and Hymns and Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World feature multiple singers and intricate orchestration. Each of these compositions integrates central themes, musical motifs, and narrative frameworks. This presentation aims to explore the origins and evolution of this emerging subgenre, define genre-specific terminology, and offer resources for further exploration and performance of musical theatre song cycles.
Matt BaileyShea, Troubled Sleep: The Dark Side of Lullabies in Rock, Broadway, and Beyond
Lullabies are a fundamental part of the human experience; I am not aware of any culture on earth in which lullabies do not play a significant role. Nevertheless, the number of scholarly books or articles on the topic is shockingly small. I find this puzzling not because scholars have overlooked an extremely pervasive genre, but rather because they have overlooked a profoundly interesting one. Lullabies aren’t just tiresome tunes to put children to sleep. They are wonderfully expressive vehicles for parents and caregivers to express their fears, anxieties, and deep-rooted concerns about the past and future. Moreover, lullabies aren’t solely confined to the nursery. They appear as a trope in many of our most beloved and influential genres of Western music.
This talk will explore the various ways that lullabies operate as a medium for dark and complex thoughts. Most importantly, the paper will establish a basic irony inherent in almost every lullaby: namely, that the song typically assures the child that “everything is alright,” but it always does so while recognizing that everything is most certainly not alright. This is a fundamental aspect of early Christian lullabies in which Mary sings to the baby Jesus, but it also continues to be true in lullabies from Brahms to Gershwin to the Beatles. This presentation will begin by establishing the inherent ironic tensions of the lullaby genre and will then show how they manifest in different ways in rock, Broadway, classical music, and film.
Paula Alva Garcia, “The Town Cries”: Rosa Mercedes’s Antiguos Pregones de Lima and Peruvian Cultural Identity
“I do not want tributes. I just want Peruvian music to be loved and respected.” These were the words of the Peruvian composer Rosa Mercedes Ayarza de Morales(1881–1969) when interviewed in her 80s for a tribute organized by her students. Despite her profound contributions to the preservation and composition of Peruvian music, her works remain largely unexplored, in part because recordings of her music, as well as commentary about it, are scarce. Among her various contributions, Mercedes’s collection of songs, the Antiguos Pregones de Lima (1944), emerge as a testament to her commitment to preserving and transforming traditional Peruvian music. The pregones (town cries) were recitations that hawkers shouted to sell various products to passersby. Dating back to the 17th century, these chants capture the essence of everyday life in Lima, encapsulating the stories and experiences of street vendors consumers in the city of Lima. In her song collection Mercedes recasts the chants as compositions for voice and piano, memorializing the pregones tradition; her songs are invaluable artifacts that reflect the resilience and vibrancy of Peru’s cultural heritage. In my lecture-demonstration I analyze Mercedes’s Antiguos Pregones de Lima in light of her life and the historical context in Peru, showing how she captured the essence of the pregoneros (town criers) in her music and produced works that established a vital Peruvian cultural identity.
Song and Language (1:30pm–3:00pm)
Sarah Agou, Singing for Language Revalorization: Collaborations by Indigenous Authors in Quebec
This presentation focuses on the notion of collaboration as a space for resistance against cultural impositions and as an act of language revitalization and revalorization in Quebec, Canada. Quebec holds a specific place in North America: its “Loi 101” imposes French as the first and main language in the Province. For the 10 First Nations, as well as the Inuit communities included in Quebec, this law provokes a daily competition between French and their Indigenous languages. In this context, popular music occupies a central role in language diffusion for Indigenous communities. This presentation explores four approaches to the act of music collaborations. (1) Innu translator and poet Joséphine Bacon worked with Quebecois folk artist Chloé Sainte-Marie (1999, 2002, 2009) to diffuse the Innu language within the circles of Quebecois music distribution. (2) Anishnaabe rap singer Samian did many collaborations with Quebecois artists but also with other Indigenous singers, such as reggae and rap Innu singer Shauit, singing tri-lingual songs such as “Nomades” (2007) in Anishnaabe-mowin, Innu-aimun, and French. (3) The two Inuit singers Beatrice Deer and Elisapie gathered to perform Inuit throat singing on a folk-electro arrangement (“Qanniuguma,” 2017). (4) Finally, Innu slam artist Natasha Kanapé Fontaine worked with Colombian singer Ramon Chicharron in “Contigo Escapar” (2021), a bilingual, Innu-Spanish song. These collaborations grant a diverse public for these artists, but they also work towards the reclaiming of spiritual, cultural, and community practices repressed throughout the colonial history of Québec, in an act of language revalorization.
Christopher Parton, Song Translation as Prosthesis: Singing Goethe in Nineteenth-Century Britain
To readers, singers, and audiences in nineteenth-century Britain, Goethe’s famous Mignon Lied “Kennst du das Land” would have been known by the archaic-sounding title “Know’st thou the Land.” The poem proliferated in dozens of English editions, each with a different translation of Goethe’s text made to fit the composer’s music. While such singing translations have fallen out of fashion today, scholars in recent years have begun to take seriously the histories of singing translations in print and performance, focusing on the transnational networks and politics of specific events and translations. This paper offers instead a longitudinal corpus study of the English translations of Goethe’s Mignon Lied published in Britain throughout the nineteenth century. I thus show how translations migrated across different media, revealing changing attitudes to the function of singing translations in the British song market. I propose that such singing translations relate prosthetically to the music. Building on the work of David Wills (1995), I advance prosthesis as both analogy and critical framework to illustrate how translated texts replace the original text to suit the sensibilities of a new cultural context while leaving traces of its otherness. As well as accounting for the changing functions of new translations of Goethe’s poem, this approach foregrounds the intrinsic prostheticity of text-music relations, complicating the assumed unity of text and music privileged by Lied scholarship. Prosthesis, I conclude, offers scholars a shared conceptual framework for future studies of song translation that embrace the ontological challenges of singing translations as the basis for historical study.
Xiaoming Tian, Beyond Pronunciation: Exploring the Intertwined World of Intonation Contour and Melody in Chinese-American Art Songs
The pronunciation of Chinese has long been recognized as a major challenge for non-native Chinese-speaking singers. However, the importance of intonation, another fundamental aspect of the language, is often overlooked. Chinese tones not only affect word meaning but also profoundly influence the melodic structure in compositions by native Chinese-speaking composers. This paper explores the interplay between intonation contour and melody in Chinese art songs, drawing from theories of vocal pedagogy, linguistics, music composition, music theory, and traditional opera history, with a particular focus on the intonation contour method.
Renowned Chinese composers like Chen Yi, Zhou Long, and Bright Sheng have created exceptional works by incorporating traditional Chinese music elements into their compositions. For instance, the rhymed half-singing and half-speaking style called “韵白” (Yùn Bái) in Beijing opera and Kunqu has been ingeniously combined with melodies. Chen Yi’s vocal work “Monologue” is an example. The analysis will show the connection between intonation contour and melody becomes evident. Moreover, the presence of intriguing ornamental notes at the conclusion of the musical phrase signifies adherence to traditional Chinese musical conventions. These numerous traditional Chinese musical elements are inseparable from the intonation of the Chinese language. They not only convey linguistic information but also play a decisive role in shaping the ethnic musical style.
By exploring the interplay between intonation contour and melody, this research reveals how traditional Chinese musical elements are intricately intertwined with the intonation of the Chinese language, influencing the overall musical expression. The non-native Chinese-speaking singers can gain a deeper understanding of the cultural and linguistic nuances embedded in Chinese art songs.
New Analytical Approaches (3:30pm–5:30pm)
Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers, Voice Leading as Text Expression in Clara Schumann’s Lieder
This paper illuminates the relationship between text expression and three voice-leading devices that permeate Clara Schumann’s lieder: linear intervallic patterns (LIPs), chromatic wedges, and pedal points. Drawing on existing scholarship concerning these devices, I discuss how Schumann exploits their contrasting kinetic impulses—fluid LIPs, tension-building contrary motion, static pedals—and combines them in ever-varied voice-leading mosaics; and I build on previous analyses of Schumann’s lieder to show how these configurations amplify the poetic texts.
Several examples illustrate the formal role, topical and motivic potential, and expressive effect of such techniques. For example, pedals and LIPs may appear in succession (as in “Liebst du um Schönheit”), the pedal’s stability underscoring the poem’s incipit while flowing LIPs provide musical continuation and poetic elucidation.
Alternatively, LIPs can be superimposed over pedal points, as in “Liebeszauber,” “Die stille Lotosblume,” or “Geheimes Flüstern”: in all three, this layout evokes whispering foliage and bird song; moments where the pedal migrates from bass to vocal part give voice to the protagonist’s innermost thoughts. In other songs (for instance, “Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen”), LIP-derived motivic work hints at the poem’s supernatural elements. Finally, wedges—with or without LIPs and pedals—tend to underscore moments of psychological tension (“Er ist gekommen” and “Beim Abschied”) or to express mirroring poetic images (“Ich hab’ in deinem Auge.”) In sum, Schumann’s kaleidoscopic handling of these voice-leading devices is a key strategy in her sophisticated approach to text expression.
Elizabeth Hepach, Hugo Wolf’s Use of Motivic Gestures to Create Structure within and Connections between Selected Songs of his Mörike-Lieder
This presentation addresses how Hugo Wolf uses motivic elements to create form within and connections between songs in the Mörike-Lieder collection. On the one hand, motivic elements have been used to create bridges between songs, such as both “Der Knabe und das Immlein” and “Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag” as well as the “Peregrina” pair, which Susan Youens discusses extensively in her well-known book Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs. I draw upon this research to focus on two main ideas. First, I explore how Wolf creates connections between songs using specific motivic gestures. Within this large collection, several songs are musically linked together by Wolf by using specific motivic ideas. I use “Frage und Antwort” and “Lebewohl”—two songs that are not typically performed as a pair or identified as such in the literature—as a springboard for other musical pairings. Second, I discuss the ways in which Wolf uses motivic units to create structure within several songs of this collection. Wolf often manipulates or varies a motivic gesture in diverse ways to create cohesion between songs, both within the entire collection and within their original publication groupings. These insights can help both performers and analysst come to grips with the vast collection of songs within the Mörike-Lieder.
Stephen Rodgers, Texture as Form in Lili Boulanger’s Clairières dans le ciel
“Au pied de mon lit,” the fifth song of Lili Boulanger’s Clairières dans le ciel, is fewer than forty measures long, yet in that span the piano accompaniment uses six different textures. Some of these textures underline shifts from one formal section to another, but others happen in the middle of a single section, even a single phrase. Many aspects of the song contribute to its power and beauty, but what shapes our experience above all is its textural drama.
How are we to make sense of that drama? And how does the song’s textural drama relate to its other dramas—formal, tonal, poetic, etc.? My presentation explores these questions, using Boulanger’s cycle as a case study. Drawing upon recent studies of texture by Johanna Frymoyer and Jonathan De Souza, I offer a method for exploring the relationship between textural form, harmonic-melodic form, and poetic form, and I outline three textural strategies that Boulanger uses throughout the work: juxtaposition, transition, and suspension. An analysis of these songs helps us to deepen our understanding of Boulanger’s musical style, and to see that one of its hallmarks is her varied and inventive use of the piano. It also allows us to broaden our conception of “form.” Looking at Boulanger’s songs from different formal perspectives suggests that a single piece is not in a single form but instead in many forms at once, the number of forms dependent upon the number of parameters we attend to, the degree of correspondence or conflict among them, and the elements that captivate us most.
Kaitlyn Clawson-Cannestra, Florence Price’s Epic Endings
If there’s one word I would use to describe my favorite Florence Price songs, it’s “epic.” For example, at the end of “Hold Fast to Dreams,” the soprano soars to a beautiful high A, the pianist whisks through a whirlwind of chromatic notes, and Price drives to a dramatic final cadence. This kind of epic ending is common in her songs, both spiritual and secular. But how exactly does Price achieve “epicness” and what lies in the performers’ hands to make her music really sing?
In this presentation, I bring together score-based and performance analysis to celebrate Price’s most powerful moments. Grounding my analysis in Black feminist thought, I center scholarship by women and people of color, especially Samantha Ege, Horace Maxile, and Marquese Carter. Additionally, I analyze the piano-vocal-duo in performance to show how text, texture, and collaboration contribute to Price’s epic endings (Stein 1996, Leong 2019, Malawey 2020). For instance, in “Bewilderment,” Price again takes the soprano to their highest range, repeats key lyrics, and takes the pianist through chromatic, sweeping figurations at the song’s close. In performance, Karen Slack and Michelle Cann bring Price’s song to life with virtuosic dynamic and temporal pacing to the epic end. Across Price’s song catalogue, I argue that that all of these elements serve common text-expressive goals like supplication, transcendence, and ultimately, faith. This project offers an important addition to the small but growing body of analytical work on Price’s music, and seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
Recital, Nicholas Phan and Myra Huang (8:00pm)
Sunday, January 26
Women’s Voices II (10:00am–11:30am)
Laura Loge and Angela Drăghicescu, Der Skreg en Fugl: Exploring Unsung Norwegian Women
Edvard Greig dominates Norwegian art song and despite progress in gender equality, visionaries of 19th- and 20th- century Norwegian song have remained unknown. These unsung heroines helped develop Norwegian art song alongside Grieg and brought Norwegian music to Europe and the U.S. They fought to preserve their culture and identity when female composers were discouraged from even pursuing this career. Both gender discrimination and circumstances of history have relegated their works to be forgotten, unpublished, and either never or rarely performed. To be released in 2025 on the Chandos label, our album Der Skreg en Fugl (A Bird Cried Out) is a world-premiere collection of Norwegian art songs by eleven female composers including a premiere recording of Agathe Backer Grøndahl’s Op. 26, Six Songs, as a tribute to Norway’s best-known female composer. We hope to give a voice to these composers who were crucial to the development of Norwegian Romanticism despite sstheir struggles as women, and to realize their dream of being heard. Our lecture-recital highlights several of these composers (including Agathe Backer Grøndahl, Hanna Marie Hansen, Mon Schjelderup, Anna Lindeman, and Anna-Marie Ørbeck), outlines the challenges and rewards of finding and learning this repertoire, and explains how we found these songs, from manuscripts in library archives to scholarly editions.
Jonathan Spatola-Knoll, The Songs of Elfrida Andrée (1841–1929): Music like “Those Little Ladies” or for “Admirable Musicians”?
Elfrida Andrée (1841–1929) is increasingly regarded as a pioneer in her native Sweden. She was the first Swedish woman to become an orchestral conductor, compose a symphony, and become a cathedral organist. Indeed, her writings emphasize her steadfast commitment to feminist ideals. In 1870 she stated, “It would be easier to tear a piece from a rock than to tear me away from my ideal: the elevation of womankind!” Modern attention toward Andrée’s music tends to focus on her orchestral and chamber music, which she typically situated within the prestigious post-Beethovenian stylistic tradition. Composing multi-movement instrumental works evidently aligned well with Andrée’s desire to elevate the status of women as composers. When her father suggested in 1869 that she turn her focus to shorter works for the private sphere, she retorted, “I do not want the popularity of all those little ladies writing piano fantasies and nice songs with kingly lyrics. I instead strive for the esteem of admirable musicians.” Nevertheless, Andrée composed dozens of songs for sacred, private, and public consumption. This presentation introduces underexplored and previously unheard excerpts from Andrée’s songs while considering how this repertoire engages with her feminist philosophy. I reveal how Andrée’s songs subvert expectations conventionally applied to female musicians—particularly song composers—within her context. As I relate Andrée’s music to the ideas of progressive thinkers whom she admired like John Stuart Mill, I demonstrate how songs may convey a feminist message, even in the absence of an overtly feminist text.
Kamilla Arku, Dancing Barefoot in the Rain: Women in African Art Song
How does African art music negotiate gender? In exploring the genre, scholars have focused on its relationship to traditional music (Euba, 1975; Nketia, 1964), memorialized its (male) composers (Omojola, 2007; Sadoh, 2016), interrogated its intercultural style (Euba, 1989; Sadoh, 2004) and contemplated its place in the classical canon (Agawu 2016, 2023). The literature around the genre has, however, rarely centered women and gender. This lecture-demonstration bridges this critical gap, examining gender in African art song.
While women participated in the creation and performance of traditional African music, their agency in the formation of the new African art music verged on nonexistent. I locate gender in vocal repertoire by African art music’s pivotal 20th-century figures: Fela Sowande, Ayo Bankole, Akin Euba and Joshua Uzoigwe. Analyzing their music through an intersectional feminist lens, I emphasize how colonial narratives influenced not only the lived experiences of African women, but fundamentally shaped gender concepts in the African musical imagination. I argue that the restructuring of gender and the resulting exclusion of women during colonial rule in African society (Oyewumi 1997, 2016; Bertolt, 2018) was mirrored and reinforced by the arrival of Western tonality (Agawu, 2016)—a nested oppression which led to the sonic sidelining of African women. By acknowledging this absence of women in the contemporary canon forming around African art music, and suggesting more inclusive paths forward based on my own creative practice, I aim to contribute to larger conversations around the empowerment and visibility of African women.
Cascade Song Festival * January 15-18, 2026 