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Women and Music in America Since 1900: An Encyclopedia.

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Edited by Kristine H. Burns. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. 2 vols. [xxx, 747 p. ISBN 1-57356-267-X (set). $150; ISBN 1-57356-308-0 (v.1). $74.95; ISBN 1-57356-309-9 (v.2). $74.95.]

With the impact of feminist study on historical and cultural inquiry, the literature on the history of women in music has emerged somewhat akin to a bud emerging ever so slowly and deliberately until just the right combination of environmental conditions at once brings forth a burst of blossom. As the extensive bibliography to Women and Music in America since 1900: an Encyclopedia demonstrates, American women musicologists and historians have been establishing a theoretical groundwork for feminist music study and promoting the lives of musical women since 1948, the date of publication of Sophie Drinker's groundbreaking book, Women and Music: the Story of Women in Their Relation to Music (New York: Coward-McCann, 1948; reprint, New York: Feminist Press, 1995), which, according to Ruth Solie's article in Grove Music Online was, "the first--and for some thirty years the only--attempt to address the history of women in music" (Ruth A. Solie, "Drinker, Sophie Lewis," in Grove Music Online [2003], www.grovemusic.com, accessed 26 November 2003). Surprisingly, there is no entry for Drinker in Women and Music in America since 1900.

As Burns states in the preface (p. vii), the American focus of this encyclopedia refers to women's contributions to the musical culture of the United States. Women whose biographies appear in the encyclopedia were born in the United States or resided in the United States, and maintained the major part of their career or made significant contributions in the United States. Listing only 259 biographical entries for women participating in American music in the twentieth century in virtually all genres, and as composers, conductors, performers, educators, musicologists, and a variety of other professions, the encyclopedia is selective rather than exhaustive. Thus, selected for inclusion are women...

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