Beyond modernism's edge: Johanna Beyer's String Quartet No. 2 (1936) and Vivian Fine's "The Race of Life" (1937)
Item
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Title
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Beyond modernism's edge: Johanna Beyer's String Quartet No. 2 (1936) and Vivian Fine's "The Race of Life" (1937)
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ab6e909fe6ac:11509
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identifier
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12016
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Creator
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Lumsden, Rachel,
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Contributor
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Joseph N. Straus
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | Womens studies | Gender studies
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Abstract
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Although a number of women were active as composers in New York during the Great Depression, their efforts have typically been neglected in favor of those of their male colleagues. Over the last two decades, scholars have begun to examine the small oeuvre of Ruth Crawford Seeger in greater depth, but aside from a few well-known publications much of this work has not been analytically oriented; in addition, scholarship on Crawford has tended to overshadow studies of the great variety of music by other modernist women composers. This dissertation addresses these lacunae in several different ways. First, I provide in-depth discussions of compositions by Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888--1944) and Vivian Fine (1913--2000), whose music from this era has not previously received extensive analytic attention. These close readings are strongly informed by feminist theory, as I explore how contextual issues (such as biography, contemporaneous attitudes towards women, and the "problem" of being a woman composer in the 1930s) might enliven and enrich our understanding of these women's works.;After the introduction (Chapter 1), Chapter 2 contains a biographical sketch of Johanna Beyer. Chapter 3 discusses the complicated ways that borrowing and gender intersect in Beyer's String Quartet No. 2 (1936), a work in which Beyer's dissonant setting of a Mozart aria about marriage provides an opportunity to both emulate---and subvert---"ultramodern" and common-practice stylistic principles and traditional conceptions of womanhood. Chapters 4 and 5 examine a collaborative work by Doris Humphrey and Vivian Fine, entitled The Race of Life. Loosely based on a series of drawings by James Thurber, this piece is significant not only because it was Fine's first major composition for modern dance (a genre for which she composed extensively in the late 1930s), but also because it provides a glimpse into some of the strategic ways that women used humor in the performing arts during this era, a topic that has received minimal scholarly attention. Chapter 6 offers final thoughts and outlines several different directions for future research.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Music
