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Women Performing Music: the Emergence of American Women as Classical Instrumentalists and Conductors.

Article Excerpt
By Beth Ableson Macleod. Conductors. NC: McFarland & Company, 2001. [ix, 205 p. ISBN 0-7864-0904-5. $28.50.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

Beth Ableson Macleod's experience as a music student in the 1960s and 1970s taught her, among other things, that "gender defined one's involvement and success as a musician" (p. 1). Reflecting upon that experience a few years later, she became interested in the cultural context within which certain American women pursued careers as performing musicians a hundred years earlier. She examined reviews in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century American newspapers and music periodicals for evidence of some of the gender-based altitudes she had faced and their effect on the lives of the exceptional women who had succeeded as professional musicians in spite of them. Women Performing Music documents her research, illustrating some of the challenges facing women musicians of that era and highlighting the careers of a select few.

Capturing the spirit of the age through liberal use of quotations from contemporary reviewers, Macleod begins her narrative by analyzing ways in which gender-based expectations influenced women's ability to choose careers as instrumental musicians or conductors. Nineteenth-century women frequently pursued a musical education in...

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