Customer Reviews

Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music

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Why do people never think of women when they think of composers? This book does not directly address this issue, but the view of great music being produced only by men only for public listening needs challenging, and this book is one of a small number successfully making a serious effort to do so. If you have any interest in how culture (particularly music) works hand in hand with social power, you will find the perspectives in this book informative, revealing, and even fascinating.

Not nearly as witty as its precursor, "Edna Distracted: Masculinist Perspectives on Declension and Skiing", still a truly self-important book everyone must read--or drop. Sure to secure tenure.

Just as music theory, divorced from musicology and composition, has become an academic dumping ground for failed musicians, so musicology, divorced from music theory, has been overridden by amateur, inept "sociologists". This book is a case in point. (Oh and "Gender"--for what it's worth--is a GRAMMATICAL term. Humans and other animals don't have genders; they have sexes.)

(Ah, another aside: Now I happen to know a particular institution which at least until very recently irrationally discriminated against woman composers (that is, on the basis of their sex, not on the basis of their music or ability), and I don't suppose this institution is anomalous in this regard. Woman composer shouldn't have it tougher than men composers--men composers have it tough enough, and we should hear and read more of the outstanding woman composers of the present and past, but as someone below points out, to do so we'll have to look elsewhere than in this book.)