This multiauthor collection, the first of an unprecedented four-volume series of analytical essays on music by women composers from Hildegard of Bingen to the twenty-first century, presents detailed studies of compositions written since 1960 by Ursula Mamlok, Norma Beecroft, Joan Tower, Sofia Gubaidulina, Chen Yi, Kaija Saariaho, Libby Larsen, and Elisabeth Lutyens. Each chapter opens with a brief biographical sketch of the composer written by the editors, followed by an in-depth analysis of a single representative composition linking analytical observations with broader considerations of music history, gender, culture, or hermeneutics. These essays, many by leading music theorists, are grouped thematically into three sections, the first focused on pitch design, the second on musical gesture, and the third on music and text. The collection is designed to challenge and stimulate a wide range of readers. For academics, these thorough analytical studies can open new paths into unexplored research areas in music theory and musicology. Postsecondary instructors may be inspired by the insights offered here to include new works in graduate or upper-level undergraduate courses in post-tonal theory, history, or women and music. Finally, for performers, conductors, and music broadcasters, these thoughtful analyses can offer enriched understandings of this repertoire and suggest fresh new programming possibilities to share with listeners—an endeavor of discovery for all those interested in twentieth-century music.

Although Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-83) was a pioneer of British twentieth-century music, her work is relatively unknown in North America. This article begins with an introduction to her life and compositions, before going on to a detailed analysis of text-music relations in selected passages of her Motet, op. 27 (1953). The analysis forms the basis for a discussion of the concept of text as representation of music: Lutyens began to compose the music of the Motet first, and chose its text—excerpts from the Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921) by the Austrian-born English philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)—because it seemed a fitting expression of the musical ideas that had already begun to develop

In Essence of Our Happinesses (1968), a three-movement work for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, Elisabeth Lutyens explores the nature of time through settings of texts by Abū Yazīd, John Donne, and Arthur Rimbaud. This essay examines the second movement, Lutyens’s setting of a Donne meditation on the nature of time followed by an orchestral choros entitled “Chronikos.” First, an examination of the tenor’s recurring melody shows how, through orchestration and flexible treatment of the row, Lutyens creates a kind of serial plainchant. Metric analysis of the choros then demonstrates how Lutyens’s juxtaposition of a metrically unpredictable series of motives against a clocklike ostinato provides a wordless commentary on Donne’s text. Finally, the composition is discussed in the context of Lutyens’s many works exploring the paradoxes of human temporal experience.

This chapter challenges the common view that Fanny Hensel’s songs are spontaneous, unpredictable, and guided by “fantasy.” An examination of her song beginnings—which tend to veer quickly from their home keys—reveals that Hensel relied on a handful of recurring patterns but presented them in such a way as to create the illusion of fantasy. The essay focuses on two contrapuntal “schemata” common in her songs—involving opening modulations to the submediant or supertonic—and presents analyses of two songs that use both schemata: “Von dir, mein Lieb, ich scheiden muss” (1841) and “Ich kann wohl manchmal singen” (1846). Taken together, these songs offer the clearest demonstration of Hensel’s uncanny ability to compose pieces that seem to wander freely, as if guided only by the needs of the present moment, even as they tread well-worn paths.

Born into a family of musicians and instrument makers, Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre made her mark early by performing for Louis XIV when she was five years old. By the age of twelve, she was composing as well. Her compositions require the analyst to attend to far more than sight and sound. Like other musicians of her era, she requires us to consider touch, kinetic movement, taste, temporality, color, timbre, space, and even fragrance as we work to bring her notated scores to the ear. This chapter seeks to tease out the ways these parameters intersect to produce their effects in two sarabandes for keyboard.