Volume 16, Number 1, 1995 Voices of Women: Essays in Honour of Violet Archer Voix de femmes : mélanges offerts à Violet Archer Guest-edited by Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, Albert La France and Brenda Dalen

EN:

In this interview, conducted on 18 August 1994, Violet Balestreri Archer revisits her past, recreating the experiences of her youth from the earliest days of her childhood in Como and Montreal to her graduation from Yale University in 1949 and sharing highly personal memories of her family, teachers, and friends. She recalls her first visit to Italy, her school years, her piano lessons, her early attempts at composition, her participation in the Montreal Women's Symphony, and her compositional studies with Douglas Clarke at McGill University, Béla Bartók in New York, and Paul Hindemith at Yale University. In listening to her story, we discover "who" she is and "how" she succeeded in establishing her compositional voice and in creating a space or "room" for herself in a profession traditionally dominated by men.

EN:

The work of Ida Halpern (1910–87), one of Canada's first musicologists and a pioneer ethnomusicologist, has been largely ignored. This essay illuminates her most important contribution to the musical development of this country: the documentation of Native musics. Halpern devoted some four decades to recording and analyzing over five hundred songs of the Kwakwaka'wakw, the Nuuchahnulth, the Haida, the Nuxalk, and the Coast Salish First Nations of British Columbia—a truly remarkable achievement considering that a large part of her fieldwork was conducted during a period when it was illegal for Native cultures to be celebrated, much less preserved. The author discusses the strengths and weaknesses of her methodology as well as some factors affecting the reception of her work by academic peers and by the communities she worked with. While Halpern did not always thoroughly investigate context, she endeavoured to write heteroglossically and to invent a theory that accounted for the music of these songs.

FR:

À sa mort en 1918, Marie Bobillier (pseud. Michel Brenet) a laissé au Département des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale à Paris un nombre impressionnant de notes, de citations et de relevés qu’elle avait accumulés au cours de sa carrière et qui, pour la plupart, demeurent inédits. Dans un dépouillement de ces volumes, l’auteur a extrait les citations, les rapports et les commentaires des auteurs des trois derniers siècles, tous sous le thème « femmes musiciennes ». Il en résulte un éventail assez étonnant des activités musicales des femmes de l’ancien régime sous les rois Bourbon, une espèce de sondage du passé à partir duquel tirer quelques conclusions plus éclairées. Malheureusement, le travail n’a servi qu’à confirmer ce que d’autres ont déjà conclu, à savoir que les femmes des XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles n’avaient qu’un rôle secondaire en musique, tout comme dans les autres aspects de la société, soit artistique, politique ou social. Il faudra attendre le XX^e siècle pour que les femmes puissent commencer à prendre leur juste place dans les rangs de la profession musicale.

EN:

This essay examines the songs of two African-American women, Florence Price (1888–1953) and Margaret Bonds (1913–72), who embarked upon their compositional studies and careers only a couple of generations after the emancipation. Both discovered in the poetry of Langston Hughes (1902–67) the means for reconciling the musical traditions of their African-American heritage with those of their European training. Through detailed analysis of the textual and musical symbolism in Price's Song to a Dark Virgin and Bonds's The Negro Speaks of Rivers and Three Dream Portraits, the author demonstrates the influence of spirituals ("plantation songs"), blues, and jazz and reveals how these African-American idioms are integrated with the melodic and harmonic idioms from the early twentieth-century European tradition.

FR:

L’article situe la vie de musicienne d’une grande chanteuse dont la carrière va du milieu féodal et colonial des cours et des salons jusqu’aux scènes fréquentées par la classe moyenne urbaine d’une Inde indépendante. On y retrouve la question habituellement problématique de l’identité sociale de cette musicienne héréditaire, qui est le corollaire inévitable de l’association entre hommes et interprètes, mais aussi la condition essentielle à l’apprentissage et à la pratique de l’art de la musique. Comment Begum Akhtar a rapidement acquis une réputation en musique grâce à l’appui des nobles, comment elle est « passée » dans le monde respectable du mariage, et comment elle a redéfini son art et sa personne, émergeant comme l’idole nationale de la culture musicale de cour de l’Inde — c’est seulement dans les marges que l’on peut voir tous ces aspects, et ce par le biais d’un kaléidoscope de sources positionnées et de l’expression musicale stylisée d’une artiste dépendante des hommes mais qui a aussi créé des liens musicaux avec des femmes (incluant l’auteure).

EN:

In many societies, musical roles are divided along gender lines: women sing and men play. Men also sing and women sometimes play; yet, unlike men, women who play often do so in contexts of sexual and social marginality. This essay surveys the literature on women's use of musical instruments in a variety of social and cultural contexts and presents some contemporary anthropological theories regarding the interrelationship between social structure and gender stratification. The author concludes that women's use of musical instruments is related to broader issues of social and gender structure, and that changes in the ideology of these structures often reflect changes that affect women as performers.

EN:

The sexual stereotyping of musical instruments in Italian, German, and English society from the beginning of the Renaissance period to the end of the nineteenth century is the object of this essay. Through evidence gleaned from iconography and a variety of written documents, the author demonstrates how the gender association of musical instruments virtually eliminated female participation from important musical activities, ensuring the male domination of the art and preventing women from becoming prominent composers.

EN:

This chronological catalogue of Violet Archer's earliest completed compositions, including works written from 1932 to 1943, is based on manuscripts in her possession and on deposit at the University of Calgary Library, as well as published scores and reproductions of manuscripts in the University of Alberta Library and the libraries of the Canadian Music Centre. It provides the date of composition for each work and summarizes the supporting evidence, including dates found on manuscripts, the types of paper used, entries on lists of works compiled by the composer, and dates of first and early performances. Also included are the medium of performance of each work, a list of movements, the source of any text, and the location of scores and recordings.