Who We Are – WAM! Women And Music

We are a team of researchers at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, and we have created this web site to to disseminate cutting-edge research to a public audience about the history of Women And Music (WAM!).

Women’s participation in music—as, for example, composers, performers, patrons, instrument builders, copyists, and directors—is very little discussed in the public sphere, yet there are humanities scholars who are actively researching these topics and writing about them for a specialized readership. Our team seeks to engage these scholars in recorded interviews and consultation in the creation of digital content in order to share their research on women in music with a wide public audience.

A digital platform devoted to this subject will be of interest for performers and ensemble directors, teachers, students at all levels, and indeed, a general audience who may feel that classical music is not for them. Working with humanities experts, we create podcasts and videos that present research in this area, as well as web texts that summarize key information, annotated bibliographies, and lists of editions that can be used in teaching, study, and performance. Our aim is to present sound musicological scholarship on women in art music in a way that is accessible to a broad and diverse audience.

Our Goals:

We are musicians and musicologists. From one perspective, therefore, our engagement in the study of Women And Music (WAM) is only natural–after all, we seek to uncover the histories of any kind of music. But the stories of Women And Music are often untold, so, from another perspective, our goals are more specific:

Recognizing that women have often been excluded from narratives of musical history, we hope to contribute to recent attempts at rectifying that problem.
New academic research takes time to permeate the popular narratives about music. We seek to accelerate that progression by presenting cutting-edge research on Women And Music in highly accessible ways.
Increasingly, performers are looking for ways to incorporate compositions by women within their concert programming. More and more resources exist that present women’s compositions. These resources often take the form of databases or lists, providing breadth of information but not always depth. We seek to provide that deep context, enriching the stories of composers and their works.
For many women in history, composition was not an accessible art form. Yet women have always actively shaped their musical environments in other ways. We seek to tell the stories of Women And Music that lie both inside and outside the bounds of compositional history.

Read about WAM researchers below

: Missy Alvarez (B.M. Music Education/Clarinet Performance & Minor in Music Technology) (WAM researcher 2020-2021)

I have been interested in joining the WAM research group since my sophomore year. During this time was when I first became more aware and passionate about women’s issues; I also began to explore the world of music written by women. That same year I wrote a research paper about Clara Schumann for music history class and performed Jennifer Higdon’s Clarinet Sonata in the Annual Celebration of Women in Music Concert. Since then, I have been exploring more and more diverse composers and even composing myself, however I never had the time to commit to another extracurricular. I am so grateful that finally, in my 4th year at Rutgers, my schedule opened up enough to take part in such an inspiring and important project.

Unfortunately, I was never exposed to a diverse group of composers or performers in my music education. So as a result, I grew up subconsciously believing that I could not be a composer, jazz musician or even a serious clarinetist due to the blatant lack of representation. Once I got to college though, my creative interests and endeavors truly blossomed and I became very interested in areas of music that are clearly male-dominated. I was then faced with the reality that although Rutgers is such a large and diverse institution we are still only primarily fed the Western art music of dead-white men. As a music educator, I want to ensure my students have quality representation so that they will feel capable of achieving anything their heart desires. As a performer, I want to continue to perform and lift up the voices of underrepresented composers. Finally, as a composer, I want to feel that my music is just as worthy of being heard, performed and is as meaningful as anybody else’s regardless of my gender. Through this project, I ultimately want to be a better advocate for diversity in music as well as learn all the intricacies of academic research.
: Nathan Bishop (WAM researcher, 2017-2019)

I wasn’t originally planning on studying women in music. Fascinated by American folk music, I was looking for ways to bring that marginalized style of music into music education when my undergraduate advisor sent me some information about the WAM project. As I pondered the role of women in art music, I wondered if there were any parallels between the issues I see with folk music entering the education field and the issues women have encountered with getting recognition for their music. With this in mind, I decided to join Dr. Cypess in studying the people who have been pushed aside despite their many accomplishments.

As I continue forward with the project, I have realized that words and writing will not be enough to give these women the credit they so deserve. In order to help the women of history surpass any stereotypes or societal restrictions that they encountered, we need to be present-day activists on behalf of their compositions, performances, and abilities. As important as it is to empower the prominent women of today’s music world, by recognizing the constant influence of women in classical art music we can break the notion that women have not played a role in shaping the classical music world. Instead, we can realize that they encountered a different set of challenges from their male counterparts–challenges that restricted them from having as public careers or as extensive legacies.

Lastly, as a teacher I want my students to have strong role models that they can relate to, and that requires me to educate myself about composers from all nationalities, genders, and genres so that I can best assist my students. I hope you have a similar belief and that this website helps you on your journey!

Nathan Bishop is completing his 4th year as a music education major at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.
: I stumbled backwards into the study of women in music. In the midst of writing a book about seventeenth-century Italian instrumental music, I received a question from a graduate student about salons in nineteenth-century Paris. Looking for an answer, I revisited articles that I had seen years earlier on the fascinating woman Sara Levy (1761-1854), a Jewish salon hostess and virtuosic keyboardist who lived in Berlin and was one of the key figures in the transmission of the Bach tradition in the decades after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach and before the public revival of his music by Levy’s great-nephew Felix Mendelssohn.

When I re-encountered Sara Levy, I was hooked. With my colleague at Rutgers, historian Nancy Sinkoff, I organized a conference entitled “Sara Levy’s World,” and we have co-edited a book of essays with the same title. I have written other articles about Levy as well–about her Judaism, her performance practices, her relationship to musical history and the process by which classical music became “canonized.” For me, though, the most important step was to join her as a performer–to play the music she played, to hear the sounds that she heard, to think through the music as well as about the music. Since then, I’ve expanded my research to incorporate other salon women of the eighteenth century as well. I’ve been thinking about their musical tastes, how and what they played, how they acted as patrons and taste-makers within their musical environments.

Some of these women composed and some (including Levy) did not. Even for those who were composers, the act of composition was not necessarily their first priority, nor was it the activity that was most remarked upon by their friends and onlookers.

Through my study of salon women, I have come to see how limited are our narratives about music. When we tell the stories of art music, are we telling it as a story of music–a lived, sounding experience–or are we telling it only as a story of composition? While some women have engaged in the act of composition, many more have exerted their musical agency through other means–as players, listeners, patrons, copyists, instrument builders, teachers, and more. As long as we limit our histories to histories of texts and compositions, we will limit the stories that we allow ourselves to tell about women.

For me, then, the question “Why WAM?” can be answered through reference to my understanding of music. I want to hear and understand music in all of its guises, including the stories of all of its voices. I feel incredibly fortunate to work with a dedicated team of student researchers who share my goals and whose dedication to this subject is a constant source of inspiration. I hope that the WAM web site will enable us to expand the stories that we tell about women’s participation in the history of art music.

Rebecca Cypess is Associate Professor of Music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers Unviersity. For more about her work, see her faculty web page.
: Pamela Ferrali (WAM researcher, 2020-2021)

I have always been interested in critical study of music, and I believe that all of us, as music lovers, find ourselves asking How? or Why? when we hear music that excites and intrigues us. It was as of recently with the WAM Project that I began also considering the question of Who? makes this music, whose work has been recognized, and whose has not.

Interestingly, as a woman in the still rather male-dominated field of percussion, I hadn’t thought too much about my own gender’s place in the field until recently. I’ve grown up around subconscious notions that percussion is inherently masculine, and yet I’ve never felt out of place as a woman in the field. This cognitive dissonance leads me to ask why we prescribe certain musics to a certain gender, or to certain identities in general. Additionally, there are many fantastic women percussionists with stories worth telling. Through the WAM Project, I have been able to explore the incredible lives of women innovators and trailblazers in the field of percussion, who are no less women than they are incredible artists.

Lastly, as an educator, I appreciate how the WAM Project has prepared me to share and include the work of women with my own students.
: Glynnis Gourhan (WAM researcher, 2019-2021)

Working with the WAM! research group has entirely transformed my perception of the experience of music-making, both historically and in my own experience as a performer.

I didn’t always feel as strongly as I do now about recognizing women’s contributions to music history. At first, I was complacent; it was difficult and confusing to question the culture that has produced the music I cherish and have chosen to pursue, and I didn’t like the idea of treating something so cathartic and intimate as a contentious social-justice issue. I loved the art-music canon the way it was, and any suggestion that it wasn’t good enough as it was felt like a sort of personal affront. But as I met more women musicians, I realized that the way we treat minorities in music history contributes to a culture of marginalizing people of those demographics in today’s musical culture.

A vital step in my reimagining of music-making was recognizing the efforts of non-composing musicians in my study of music history. Especially through our work with Dr. Laurie Stras on the performers of the concerto delle dame and in the convents of Ferrara, Italy in the late 1500s, I realized how intrinsic the art of performance is in the development of musical culture. Having made music only in environments that emphasized the composer-performer-listener hierarchy, researching this performance-centered culture has helped me to reimagine the role of performers in music history. Acknowledging the work of the performer has helped me gain a more accurate view of women’s contributions to music history, and has helped me to acknowledge the agency of performers and other non-composing musicians throughout history and in the present day.

I think that this project is important because we are committed to making academic work accessible to students and performers. Our work helps to enable dialogue between students about the way we treat women in music, and it has been incredibly rewarding to see how our work has influenced the student culture here at Mason Gross.
: Bridget Knodel (WAM researcher, 2018-2019)

Music has always been an important part of my life. I started piano when I was four, and could read music before I could read English. I had a great time learning various instruments, participating in choir, and being exposed to all kinds of music. However, something was missing. With almost no exceptions, all the classical music I was encountered was written by men.

Throughout college, I was gradually exposed to more women composers through various ensembles, classes, and my own independent listening, but the majority were still male composers and artists. I became interested in WAM after going to the Women in Music concert at Rutgers in 2018, which happened to be around the same time I was assigned a project to research a female composer in another class.

I heard about the application to work on this project and knew I had to get involved. I wanted the research experience, and this had become a topic that I was passionate about. Women have been consistently left out of music history, and I know this is because of a lack of equal opportunities. Lack of representation may not seem like a big deal to some people, but it is important that girls in music have strong role models to look up to. Music is a story, and when we leave women out of the narrative, we miss half of that story. I want these voices to be heard, and WAM has given me the opportunity to help.

Bridget Knodel is a senior in the Bachelor of Music program studying harp.
: Emily McGovern (WAM researcher, 2018-2019)

When I saw that there was an opportunity to join the WAM research group I was immediately interested. This project is important to me not only because I am a female musician but also because of my role as a music educator.

A majority of most people’s (and my own) formal music education is focused on the achievement of white males and western classical music; however, that is only a small percentage of the music occurring in our world. One part of music history that is often overlooked in our education is women’s contributions to music history and important role in the development of the music we know today. Some things that I believe in and strive to achieve in my own teaching practices is representing diverse musical practices from around the world, educating my students on a large variety of music, and providing students with relatable role models. Many great and important works are practically unknown because they were written by a woman rather than a man. I want to bridge this gap in my own classroom and ensure that I am doing my part in providing students with a more diverse and representative knowledge of music and its history.

Working on this project has made me aware of how many women were acting “behind the scenes,” throughout music history and have been unrecognized for their contributions. This has inspired me to continue working on this project and try to raise a greater awareness for and recognize the present-day women who are contributing to music through composition, performance, and more. It is important to me that today women are being provided the same opportunities in the musical world that men are. I hope that our project helps to spread a greater awareness of this issue.

Emily McGovern is a senior Bachelor of Music student at the Mason Gross School of the Arts studying Music Education.
: Tracey Crystal Miller (WAM researcher, 2017-2019)

The moment I saw the WAM research opportunity posted, I knew I had to do it. Dr. Cypess’s research description was able to both put into words and put forward a way to take action about something I’ve been feeling for a long time—that not only were women were absent from the music history taught in classrooms, but that this absence did not reflect the truth.

As I began my research, I started to wonder why exactly I, a woman studying music composition at a music conservatory, wanted to study women in art music. It was something beyond wanting to advocate or spread this awareness to others. I realized that these doubts had always been lingering at the back of my mind as well, and the project suddenly became much more personal.

As someone who grew up learning music inside classrooms, the music education I’ve been exposed to conformed to the “dead white men” narrative taught across the globe. It was only after diving headfirst into the stories of women musicians of the past that I recognized that my lack of confidence in myself as a composer stemmed from my musical upbringing. The worst part was that as much as I advocated for women musicians, deep down I subconsciously projected these doubts onto them. It was devastating. That’s when I decided I didn’t want any more women to feel like I did. And that starts with WAM.

Tracey Crystal Miller is completing her 4th year as a music composition major at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.
: Editor’s Note: Dr. Esther Morgan-Ellis assigned the creation of a WAM video to her students at the University of North Georgia. The video, on Hildegard of Bingen, appears here.

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I first came across the Women in Art Music project in the summer of 2018, and I immediately saw that making a film for the website would be a great project for one of my music history classes. I was already planning a new unit on Hildegard of Bingen, for which I had acquired a facsimile of the Dendermonde Codex. My intention was to lead students through a series of activities that would result in their acquiring an intimate understanding of monastic life, Hildegard’s work, and scribal practices. Why not replace disjointed assignments with a holistic project that would culminate in the creation of a permanent pedagogical resource?

This type of project falls under the umbrella of social pedagogies, which are defined by Randy Bass and Heidi Elmendorf as “design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an ‘authentic audience’ (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course.” The “authentic audience” in this case includes both hypothetical visitors to the website and future music history students at our institution. The latter population includes friends and colleagues of the students who made the video—a resource that will, in large part, determine how future classes learn about and perceive Hildegard. The 2018 cohort also expanded my knowledge of the subject matter and influenced how I will teach it going forward.

This particular project required the entire class of sixteen students to work together. We used a few collaborative tools, including an Outlook Group, Google Docs, and Padlet, but our most productive exchanges took place in class. I assigned two project managers at the beginning of the semester, and it was their responsibility to keep the process moving and to coordinate the various contributions. I always hated group work as a student, and I am therefore sympathetic to the inevitable grumbling that arises when I introduce a group project. But as I tell my students, “Life is a group project.” Learning to collaborate is important, and it can result in the achievement of goals that would be out of reach for the individual. Take our video, for example. No one student in my class possessed all of the skills necessary for its production. Some were good writers, but knew nothing about how to make or edit sound recordings. Some were comfortable managing the workflow, but couldn’t sing. Together, they were able to create a permanent resource that will benefit future classes at our institution and beyond.

This project was not without its hitches. In the spirit of fostering true collaboration, I served only as a gentle guiding force. I set tentative deadlines, but I encouraged students to be responsible to one another, not to arbitrary calendar dates. I made my expertise available to students, but I rarely inserted myself into the process. The results were mixed. On the one hand, this video was truly created by my students. On the other, we fell behind schedule, to the detriment of those whose work came at the end of the process (a process that, despite my intentions, did not conclude until the last weeks of the semester), and certain elements might have been higher in quality if I had taken a more dictatorial role. All the same, I don’t intend to make major changes when we repeat this project next year. I still believe in the value of delegating responsibility to students and treating them as genuine collaborators.

I exercised my editorial power at three points in the process. First, I edited the questions for Dr. Margot Fassler before they were sent to her, asking the team of question writers to clarify their intent in some places. Second, I submitted the script to an outside fact checker and required students to address her concerns before allowing the script readers to begin their work. Finally, I approved (or did not approve) the recorded chants before they were integrated into the film.

This project did require a significant amount of class time. However, I am committed to meaningful learning at the expense of coverage, whether that means taking time to engage deeply with the material or creating space for complex scholarly projects. I always ask myself, “What will students remember about this class in ten years?” In this case, I can be sure that they will remember Hildegard.

See Dr. Morgan-Ellis’s advice on creating a WAM video with your musicology/music history class here.

Dr. Esther Morgan-Ellis is Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Georgia. She is the author of Everybody Sing!: Community Singing in the American Picture Palace (2018). Her work has appeared in American Music, the Journal of Historical Research in Music Education, and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and she has presented papers and lecture-recitals at national conferences. Dr. Morgan-Ellis currently serves as Managing Editor for the Journal of Popular Music Studies and Book Review Editor for the Bulletin of the Society for American Music. Dr. Morgan-Ellis is also a professional cellist and appears regularly with regional orchestras. At UNG she teaches music history, world music, music in Appalachia, and cello, and she directs the orchestra in Dahlonega. Read more at https://ung.edu/music/faculty-staff-bio/esther-morgan-ellis.php.
: Claire Oplinger (WAM researcher, 2020-2022)

My involvement with WAM! began as a casual interest in musicology, with the hopes of gaining practical research experience. In the fall of 2020 when I joined the project, I was blissfully unaware of how deep an impact this endeavor would have on me.

Prior to entering college, music was a love of mine that was only skin-deep. It existed merely on the paper and in the air when it was performed, for isolated moments in an isolated context. I never questioned who wrote the music, or why those composers were important; I assumed that the composers who I heard most frequently were also the most influential, talented and essential to classical music. As I began more serious study of music, I started to question the patterns I noticed among the famous composers in the western canon.

For me, the study of women in art music has had both musical and personal repercussions. Studying these women has transformed my concept of music-making into a fully immersive experience. This project has allowed me to see past the momentary experience of music and to gaze into the realm of the composer- their thoughts, emotions, challenges, resilience, and artistry which are indelibly and perpetually woven into their works. WAM! has taught me that composers never write in a vacuum and with each note they pen, they dictate their own history, political climate, and experiences. It has brought me to entirely reimagine the way that I perform and understand music. It has also shaped the way that I see myself as a female musician- that my own unique musical voice is worth using and paints a meaningful picture of my own experiences.

My hope in continuing to work on this project is not only to raise awareness of these incredible women’s contributions, but also to assure current artists whose voices have grown quiet due to historic marginalization that their work is powerful and essential to creating the history that future generations will one day admire.
: Nicholas Wagner (WAM researcher, 2018-2019)

In the fall semester of my junior year, I had the opportunity to choose my own research topic for a final paper in one of music education courses. I chose to write on the assigned gender roles elementary band instruments are conventionally given, and the effects these conventions have on elementary instrumentalists throughout their lives, which, I found, are far-reaching. I found that, in general, in musical genres where “male-gendered” instruments are the focus (especially jazz and rock), there is a concerning absence of female musicians, and more importantly, female role models. I hope to do more research on this topic in the future, which is why the WAM project was such a great opportunity for me.

Through WAM, I have been able take part in an initiative that aims to show the general public that women have not only been involved in music making for centuries, but many were leaders and role models whose contributions have been forgotten. It is my hope that through our project, we can give these female musicians the attention and respect they deserve, and also inspire current working female musicians to take charge, and be role models for the younger generation.

Nicholas Wagner is in his 5th year at Mason Gross, studying Music Education and Jazz Studies