Florence Price Songs: A Playlist
A playlist of 12 songs (and 13 stellar performances) of songs Florence Price wrote to poems by Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and three Black women poets.
Music, Voice, Message
People who identify as women
WSF is an online forum devoted to women’s voices in song, to the many songs by women, and to the many female musicians working in and with song, who have yet to be given the attention they deserve. The Women’s Song Forum provides an opportunity to expand and enhance knowledge and understanding of this rich and significant area of musical practice and scholarship, and – as the name “forum” suggests – aims to encourage discussion and debate across different interest groups. The forum aims to highlight compositions and performances of music that deserve more recognition.
At the heart of the forum is our commitment to diverse approaches and subjects and access by a wide-ranging audience. We normally publish 2-3 posts each month by members of our team and guest bloggers.
A playlist of 12 songs (and 13 stellar performances) of songs Florence Price wrote to poems by Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and three Black women poets.
There are at least two ways to read this striking image of Vivien Lambelet: one personal, the other professional. One reading doesn’t exclude the other.
In this post we turn to “Dog Teeth” by Nicole Dollanganger and to “Gatekeeper” by Jessie Reyez. Content Warning: Discussion of rape and disturbing lyrics.
A Tori Amos song shows how vocal timbre conveys symptoms of trauma in a way that lyrics cannot. Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault, rape, and child abuse.
Jovana Backović’s haunting music for Ophelia in a production of Hamlet spurred this conversation about her influences and artistic goals.
From accounts of individual women or performances to historical essays, from interviews with songwriters and performers to discussions of gender, race and culture in and through song.
Tracy Chapman
Troves of German Lieder composed by women await their first performances. Here is one composer whose songs have recently been recorded for the first time.
To commemorate the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor turned to an unexpected source, Christina Rossetti, setting six of her poems for his Six Sorrow Songs.
A Tori Amos song shows how vocal timbre conveys symptoms of trauma in a way that lyrics cannot. Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault, rape, and child abuse.
In her second post, Heather Platt tracks Villa Whitney White’s lecture-recitals of German lieder from 1895–98. Unusually, White sang complete song-cycles and songs written for men.
Heather Platt discusses an unusual lecture-recital held in Denver in 1898 that brought together songs of Native Americans, Blacks, Creoles and whites. Women’s clubs and Villa Whitney White made it happen.
Qianwen Yu explores the musicality of traditional weaving through a combination of historical research and contemporary technology, interpreting the woven fabric as a map, as a score.
Riché Richardson talks about what Whitney Houston meant to her as a Black teenager growing up in Montgomery, Alabama.
One of our aims is to recover and honor voices that have been overlooked or forgotten.
Sara Teasdale
In the short space of seven songs, Hall transforms the private nature of Anne Frank’s diary into a searing disclosure.
Four exceptional women composers underwent mid-career conversions. Having favored male poets for the first decades of their careers, they began in their 40s to favor women poets.
This audio blog post discusses Julia Johnson Davis’s poem “To My Little Son” and Florence Price’s deeply personal musical setting of it.