A Study of Art Song Composition and Interpretation by Three Female German Composers in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Abstract
In the 1990s, Susan McClary brought feminist music criticism into the public eye by challenging the roots of traditional musicology with her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. In this book, she concludes that notions of masculinity and femininity were shaped by social ideas, as well as by notions of gender dissimilarity and discrimination, initially dominated by male artists.
As the first generation of female composers to grow up in the context of public concerts, Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel, and Josephine Lang, are clearly characterized by their originality and representative musical styles. Therefore, this paper selects works from their mature period and applies relevant comparative textual-musical analyses to explore "their" femininity imagery. Through the notation, musical rhetoric, and textual settings, we study and refine the composer's creative characteristics and design intentions, so as to apply them to the analysis of singing.