Marcia J. Citron - Böcker

A classic in gender studies in musicMarcia J. Citron's comprehensive, balanced work lays a broad foundation for the study of women composers and their music. Drawing on a diverse body of feminist and interdisciplinary theory, Citron shows how the western art canon is not intellectually pure but the result of a complex mixture of attitudes, practices, and interests that often go unacknowledged and unchallenged.Winner of the Pauline Alderman Prize from the International Alliance of Women in Music, Gender and the Musical Canon explores important elements of canon formation, such as notions of creativity, professionalism, and reception. Citron surveys the institutions of power, from performing organizations and the academy to critics and the publishing and recording industries, that affect what goes into the canon and what is kept out. She also documents the nurturing role played by women, including mothers, in cultivating female composers. In a new introduction, she assesses the book's reception by composers and critics, especially the reactions to her controversial reading of Cécile Chaminade's sonata for piano.A key volume in establishing how the concepts and assumptions that form the western art music canon affect female composers and their music, Gender and the Musical Canon also reveals how these dynamics underpin many of the major issues that affect musicology as a discipline.

What happens to opera when it’s presented on the screen? How does an opera change when it becomes a movie, a television presentation, or a video? This book is the first to explore opera and its treatment on the screen from a musicologist’s perspective. Marcia Citron provides a fascinating history of the nearly 100-year-old genre, examines landmark works of opera on screen from a variety of viewpoints, and shows how different electronic media shape the conception of this art form.The book begins with a comprehensive survey of the origins and development of screen opera. Citron then focuses on such significant works as Franco Zeffirelli’s Otello, Francesco Rosi’s Bizet’s Carmen, Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal, Peter Sellars’s four opera productions for television, and the celebrated relay telecast of Otello from the Royal Opera House in London. The author draws on ideas from diverse fields, including media studies and gender studies, to examine issues ranging from the relationship between sound and image to the place of the viewer in relation to the spectacle. As she raises questions about divisions between high art and popular art and about the tensions between live and reproduced art forms, Citron reveals how screen treatments reinforce opera’s vitality in a media-intensive age.

This first scholarly book on Cecile Chaminade, a popular composer, pianist, and one of the few women to attain critical acclaim as a composer in the early twentieth century, contains an extensive biography drawn from a significant collection of primary sources. The study presents basic information, including facts not previously published, on this neglected composer and it offers a discussion of historical and aesthetic issues inherent in her life and career as well as observations about her musical style. The exhaustive bibliography, an annotated listing of her prolific output, contains a selection of reviews of her compositions and first performances, and a brief section identifying her prose works. The up-to-date discography lists every commercially made recording of her individual works, anthologies, and performances, and it includes out-of-print releases.This informative book offers the first detailed presentation of information on the location of Chaminade musical autographs and first editions. It fills an urgent need for the basic facts about her life and activities: exactly what she composed, when and why. It also deals with the nature of her performing career and documents critical reviews of both her playing and her compositions. This is the only volume of its kind on Chaminade and one of the few available on any women composer. It will be an indispensable resource for musicologists and researchers of women composers and French music history, as well as a valuable addition to all university and college music libraries.