JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. many fields formerly reserved for men, it is difficult for female orchestral conductors to gain critical and popular acceptance. It was just. as difficult in the 193os, when Nadia Boulanger burst onto the international conducting scene. Within only a few years of conducting her first entire program in 1933, she became the first woman to appear as a conductor for the Royal Philharmonic Society and the first to direct the orchestras of Boston and Philadelphia. Before the end of the decade she had become one of the few women to appear with the National Symphony and the New York Philharmonic; she had directed dozens of Parisian orchestras, and conducted for radio in France, Belgium, England and the United States. Her astonishing success was due to a com-Cook for reading an earlier version of this study, and for their many helpful suggestions. Much of the material for this article was drawn from a collection of press cuttings held by the Fondation Internationale Nadia et Lili Boulanger, Paris. I am very grateful to the secretary of the Fondation, Mlle. C6cile Armagnac, for her help in consulting the collection, and to the British Academy, who generously provided funding for my research in Paris. Earlier versions were presented at the Universities of Reading and Sussex (U.K) in 1994, at the Feminist Theory and Music III conference (Riverside, CA, 1995) and at the 1995 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in New York. This content downloaded from 138.73.1.36 on Tue, 29 Dec 2015 20:13:52 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BROOKSbination of factors, chief among them her undeniable musicianship and lengendary charisma. But Boulanger's achievement was also due to her successful negotiation within a culture unwilling to accept female conductors. This negotiation took many forms, and relied upon the complicity of her audiences and reviewers in constructing her public image. Five years before Boulanger conducted her first full program, a concert at the salon of the Princesse de Polignac, an article appeared in the woman's newspaper Minerva which illustrates the approach that many later reviewers of her performances would take. In the issue of 15 July 1928, Minerva announced that its readers had elected Boulanger "Princesse de la Musique" with 1,562 votes.' The wording of the award would suggest that (1) Boulanger's gender (she is a "princesse" and the award was made by women voters in a woman's paper) and (2) her "ruling" or leading qualities would be emphasized in the article accompanying the announcement, but this is not the case. The article begins by comparing her to a priest, erasing both her sexuality and her gender by identifying her with a celibate male. H...
Music was an important metaphor for Ronsard, and references to music and musical instruments are frequently found in his poetry. His writings about music are few, however. In his article ‘Ut musica poesis: Music and Poetry in France in the Late Sixteenth Century’ Howard Brown has referred to two of the most explicit examples of such writing: the preface to Le Roy and Ballard's Livre de meslanges (1560) and the passage from Ronsard's Abbregé de l'art poëtique françois (1565) on the desirability of union between poetry and music. Such passages are important in illuminating poets' attitudes towards music and in demonstrating ways in which the relationship between text and music could be conceptualised in the sixteenth century. They are frustratingly vague, however, about how the poets' ideals should be achieved, and they leave many practical questions unanswered. Did poets have any influence on composers' choices of texts? Did movements in poetic circles ever affect the pitches or rhythms of musical settings – that is, could poets influence the way music sounded?
François de Billon’s Fort inexpugnable de l’honneur du sexe feminin (1555) was among the most extensive contributions to the sixteenth-century polemic on the nature of women known as the querelle des femmes. In keeping with the military connotations of its title, Billon’s ‘impregnable fortress’ is an exercise in bellicose rhetoric; his sallies are illustrated with woodcuts of roaring lions and fire-spitting cannons to heighten the effect of bravado. In the section on women’s musical gifts, he vaunts the ‘angelic sweetness’ of the female singing voice, and claims that although male musicians more often win fame, women have always been better singers:In [singing] nevertheless women have always been the very best. Whatever may be said by Sandrin, Arcadelt or Janequin, the most renowned musicians of Europe in our time, whom I would willingly ask, ‘Where is it that one can find sweetness of vocal harmony, in general, if not in the musical throat of Woman, even if she puts forth only a little warbling?’ And if they answered that in some men one finds more, could I not rightly reply, ‘What is the reason, my friends, that so few men of your profession are married and that you all flee marriage, if not that through propriety [honnesteté] you would be forced to bring your wives (instead of choirboys) into princely chambers to sing with you, or without you, which would be found so much sweeter than any childish voice? O what harmony, if you were all married in the normal fashion to beautiful women; if they were well instructed by you in the rules of music; and if in the aforementioned manner, you tuned yourselves well with them. The pleasure of listening to you would be double, the advantage triple, and thus, frequently nothing would be sung except in duo’.
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