Piano Music by Women Composers: Women Born After 1900, vol. 2.Piano Music by Women Composers, Volume II: Women Born After 1900, by Pamela Foungdahl Dees. Praeger Publishers (88 Post Rd., W., Westport, CT 06881), 2004. 306 pp. $94.95. Piano music by women composers is an all-too-often neglected segment of the repertoire, with innumberable well-crafted, effective works still to be discovered. This volume is an invaluable source for every pianist's reference shelf: Organized in the manner of Maurice Hinson's familiar guides, this book contains information about more than 850 women composers from around the world, born after 1900. In this rather compact, 300-page volume, Pamela Dees has packed brief biographical information, lists of genres for each composer, short style descriptions and lists of works for piano--including harpsichord harpsichord, stringed musical instrument played from a keyboard. Its strings, two or more to a note, are plucked by quills or jacks. The harpsichord originated in the 14th cent. and by the 16th cent. Venice was the center of its manufacture. , piano and tape and 4-hand works. She also provides information about publishers, duration, difficulty and sometimes even websites and e-mail addresses. Dees personally examined thousands of scores and gives her own description of these works. She also lists additional works by each composer that she did not examine. As with Hinson's book, the ancilliary information is invaluable. This includes a helpful set of standard abbreviations and source acronyms; contact information of music publishers and agents with addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and websites; a list of 114 bibliographic resources about women composers; and an index of the composers including dates and nationality. Because most of the composers included in this volume are still living, the information will change constantly, but this book provides readers with the tools to decide which composers to research further, without doing an Internet search. A Google search Google is owned by Google, Inc. whose mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The largest search engine on the web, Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services. of "women composers" will return 66,500 hits; however, some of those top choices have not been updated in years. With this book, readers have an accurate, up-to-date, portable resource--that doesn't have to be plugged in. With a difficulty level ranging from intermediate to advanced, these pieces also feature a wide style range; even the transcriptions of jazz improvisations by Marian McPartland Marian McPartland (b. March 20, 1918), born Margaret Marian Turner in Slough, England, is a jazz pianist, violinist and host of "Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz" on National Public Radio. The jazz critic Scott Yanow has said that McPartland is "... are included. There are excellent descriptions of the major works by eminent composers of the past generation such as Ruth Crawford Seeger Ruth Crawford Seeger (3 July 1901 in East Liverpool, Ohio - 18 November 1953 in Chevy Chase, Maryland), born Ruth Porter Crawford, was a modernist composer and an American folk music specialist. , Vivian Fine Vivian Fine (Chicago, 28 September, 1913 - Bennington, Vermont, 20 March, 2000) was an American composer. Over her 70 year career, Vivian Fine became one of America’s most important composers. She wrote virtually without a break for 68 years, producing over 140 works. , Miriam Gideon Miriam Gideon (23 October 1906 - 1996) was an American composer. She studied organ with her uncle Henry Gideon and piano with Felix Fox. She also studied with Martin Bernstein, Marion Bauer, Charles Haubiel, and Jacques Pillois. , Elisabeth Lutyens, Barbara Pentland, Julia Smith and Louise Talma. Dees provides more detail about the living composers whose works are beginning to enter the standard piano repertoire, such as Emma Lou Diemer Emma Lou Diemer (born November 24, 1927[1] in Kansas City, Missouri[2]) is an American composer. She received both her B.M. and her M.M from the Yale School of Music in 1949 and 1950, respectively. , Tania Leon, Sofia Gubaidulina, Joan Tower, Schulamit Ran, Judith Lang Zaimont and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (born April 30, 1939, in Miami, Florida) is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her early works are marked by atonal exploration, but by the late 1980s she had matured to a post-modernist, neo-romantic style. , among others. Of course, the true treasure of this volume is the gold mine of works relatively unknown, just waiting for the adventurous pianist and teacher to discover. Reviewed by Jerome Reed, Nashville, Tennessee. |
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