“The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that ‘art’ was what men did in… Read More »Madlen Poguntke: Reframing Artsong: Transcultural Perspectives from Korean Gisaeng to European Salon Culture
Use of song as an expression of national identity and the desire for independence from foreign powers permeates Ukrainian history. Poet and First Vice-President of… Read More »Jacy Pedersen: Identity and Nostalgia in Stefania Turkevych’s “Emigration Elegy”
Lullabies convey heavy undertones of gender, as both the genre and the singing practice are rooted in the nuclear family – a space where gender… Read More »Franziska Weigert: ‘Mother, Father, Child’ – Family Portrayals in German Romantic Lullabies and Their Role in Gender Discourse
The life of the blind Viennese musician Maria Theresia Paradis (1859-1824) has become more widely known to the public thanks to a wave of recent… Read More »Christopher Parton: Maria Theresia Paradis and Eighteenth-Century Fictions of Blindness
A more thorough examination of early Romantic art songs reveals that numerous composers of this era have been completely forgotten. While many poets who are… Read More »Lara Venghaus: From gender as an aesthetic category in Friedrich Schleiermachers “Weihnachtsfeier“ to the underrated compositions of Louise Reichardt
My presentation is an excerpt from my upcoming article on Finnish composer Carita Holmström’s song cycle Dagen svalnar (The day cools) – 4 songs to poems by… Read More »Jenna Ristilä: Music as emancipator in Carita Holmström’s Södergran songs
In the 19th century, song offered women composers a socially sanctioned medium of expression, even as monumental musical forms such as symphonies and operas were… Read More »Stephen Rodgers: Gathering Leaves: Pauline Decker and the Limits of the Song Cycle
Composed in 1918, Richard Strauss’s Ophelia Lieder (Op. 67) transform Shakespeare’s fragmented heroine into a tightly framed musical study in madness and fragility. Sung from… Read More »Kimberly Soby: Framing Ophelia: Gender, Madness, and Musical Agency in Strauss’s Ophelia Lieder
This lecture examines the nineteenth-century fascination with Shakespeare’s Ophelia as a cultural symbol of femininity, madness, and tragic beauty, using art song settings as interdisciplinary… Read More »Jennifer Tipton: A Document in Death and Madness: Nineteenth-Century Art Song Settings of Ophelia’s Death
Priaulx Rainier (1903-1986) was born in Howick, in the Natal colony, now the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. She won a scholarship in 1919 to… Read More »Chris van Rhyn: Finding the masculine and White African gay woman in Priaulx Rainier’s Art Songs