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.
In their songs about motherhood, Alicia Needham and Liza Lehmann went far beyond nostalgic lullabies and innocuous children’s songs. Their musical portrayal of motherhood reveals an existential survival strategy.
Lily Strickland’s “Mah Lindy Lou,” a setting of her own Black dialect poem, became internationally popular and was often performed and recorded by Black and white singers
Behind the gentle rhythms and pastoral lyrics British women composed to celebrate Mother’s Days a century and more ago lie several calculated strategies. This is Part 1 of 2.
Songs about life after the death of a mother in childbirth were once extremely popular. Now long forgotten, the tales they tell are worth hearing.
Can the editorial creation of a song-cycle from individual songs help raise the visibility of women composers? The songs of Pauline Viardot-Garcia offer a wonderful opportunity.
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
“The Goop Directory of Juvenile Offenders Famous for Their Misdeeds” is an unlikely source of material for children’s songs. Elizabeth Merz Butterfield thought otherwise.
As European art music began to be challenged by jazz, musically influential women devised ways to cultivate “a taste for ‘good’ music in children.”
Announcing “Beyond the Music: Marian Anderson—Her Complete RCA Victor Recordings”
Ralph P. Locke reviews an astonishing set of 8 CDs that offer dozens of compositions by women performed by major singers, pianists, and ensembles.
Eva Maria Doroszkowska marks the most recent anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with this reflection about the remarkable, but largely unknown, composer Stefania Turkewich.
Lisa Colton recounts the thrill of discovering the autograph manuscript of Edith Smyth’s ‘Mass in D.’
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.
One of our aims is to recover and honor voices that have been overlooked or forgotten.
Sara Teasdale
Women’s covers of Rolling Stones’ songs demonstrate the practice of singers covering a previous cover rather than the original version of a song.
Carrie Jacobs-Bond’s song, “His Lullaby,” routinely moved entire audiences to tears, especially when sung by Ernestine Schumann-Heink. I offer some thoughts on why this happened.
In the years before and after 1900, many women composers obscured their gender by replacing their names with their initials. Here is a look at six of them.
