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Finding Mollie Fines
Wichita’s newspaper, The Negro Star, helps document the remarkable life of Mollie Fines, and shows that she regularly used new musical experiences to create new opportunities.
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.
Wichita’s newspaper, The Negro Star, helps document the remarkable life of Mollie Fines, and shows that she regularly used new musical experiences to create new opportunities.
The momentous recovery of the long-missing alto partbook of Maddalena Casulana’s five-voice madrigals in the Russian State Library makes possible their first recording.
“Boat Song” was Harriet Ware’s best-selling song. In particular it became a standard for two unexpectedly allied groups of singers: professional men and amateur women.
A playlist of 11 songs (and 12 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.
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
“My friend, Maja Strozzi, perhaps the most beautiful voice of both hemispheres.” Thomas Mann (Doctor Faustus, chapter 37)
In this post Verica Grmusa, Nicole Panizza, and Stephen Rodgers bring to life an unpublished Hensel song from 1826, and reflect on the meaning of domestic spaces then and now.
Carrie Jacobs Bond’s world-wide hit, “A Perfect Day” (1910), was one of the most purchased, most sung, and most parodied songs for decades.
Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita finds that Lomax’s 1952-53 recordings help us to understand the political situation under Franco, life in impoverished Spain, and the moral constrictions faced by women.
John Michael Cooper interprets Florence Price’s songs, “To My Little Son” and “Brown Arms (To Mother),” as responses to the painful losses of her son and her mother.
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.
One of our aims is to recover and honor voices that have been overlooked or forgotten.
Sara Teasdale
Coming next fall! PlanetWoman, an innovative program of world premieres by women composers setting poems by women. Zsuzsanna Ardó found her inspiration in writings of Hildegard of Bingen.
Dawson founded the National Negro Opera Company, and brought this all-Black company to perform at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, even before Marian Anderson sang there.
My efforts as a volunteer working with music for a group of mild Alzheimer’s patients led me, unexpectedly, to recover musical memories of my own.