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Historical Women's Music

MrRING

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I was thinking of sea shanties, and Gregorian chants, two kinds of traditionak Western folk music that seem exclusive of the culture of men. The history of classical music composition is nearly completely male centered too, with the occasional bright spot of a woman's voice and mind. With modern recording, women's voice and music was recorded and the rest is history, so the great strides there are well known.

But in regards to sea shanties and Gregorian chants, is there a known and recorded folk movement of the past that was more associated with women's culture? It seems like that there should be one, but I don't know that I've ever heard of such a cycle of musical art.

Here is a song by the Mediaeval Baebes, women vocalists who specialize in recording older musical styling to wonderful effect:
 
I don't think up to about 120 years ago there was such a thing as 'men's culture' and 'women's culture'. I'm not sure it is actually helpful even now.

Surely now women have something approaching equality we should be equal partners in the same culture, not being divisive. Which is not to pretend that women do not still experience issues that men are in denial about.
 
I thought the phrase 'women's music' started it.
 
I was thinking of sea shanties, and Gregorian chants, two kinds of traditionak Western folk music that seem exclusive of the culture of men. The history of classical music composition is nearly completely male centered too, with the occasional bright spot of a woman's voice and mind. With modern recording, women's voice and music was recorded and the rest is history, so the great strides there are well known.

But in regards to sea shanties and Gregorian chants, is there a known and recorded folk movement of the past that was more associated with women's culture? It seems like that there should be one, but I don't know that I've ever heard of such a cycle of musical art.

Here is a song by the Mediaeval Baebes, women vocalists who specialize in recording older musical styling to wonderful effect:
Maybe the concept of Sirens described as singing to lure sailors to their death might fit in on a female folkore level?.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siren_(mythology)
 
Gregorian chants
I have been looking into female composers and it looks as if one of the great grandaddies of Gregorian Chants is in fact a great grandmammy. St Hildegard has one of the greatest surviving repertoires of any medieval composer and her chants and plays would have been performed by a female cast. I never knew.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen

The Ordo virtutum would have been performed within Hildegard's monastery by and for her select community of noblewomen and nuns. It was probably performed as a manifestation of the theology Hildegard delineated in the Scivias.

Her music is monophonic, that is, consisting of exactly one melodic line.[60] Its style has been said to be characterized by soaring melodies that can push the boundaries of traditional Gregorian chant and to stand outside the normal practices of monophonic monastic chant.[/quote]
 
Oh I should have thought of this sooner but here is a female specific type of music - waulking songs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waulking_song

Waulking songs (Scottish Gaelic: Òrain Luaidh) are Scottish folk songs, traditionally sung in the Gaelic language by women while fulling (waulking) cloth. This practice involved a group of women, who traditionally prepared cloth, rhythmically beating newly woven tweed or tartan cloth against a table or similar surface to lightly felt it and shrink it to better repel water. Simple, beat-driven songs were used to accompany the work.

A waulking session often begins with slow-paced songs, with the tempo increasing as the cloth becomes softer. As the singers work the cloth, they gradually shift it to the left so as to work it thoroughly. A tradition holds that moving the cloth anticlockwise is unlucky.

Typically one person sings the verse, while the others join in the chorus. As with many folk music forms, the lyrics of waulking songs are not always strictly adhered to. Singers might add or leave out verses depending on the particular length and size of tweed being waulked. Verses from one song might appear in another, and at times the lead singer might improvise to include events or people known locally. The chorus to many waulking songs consists of vocables, in which some of the words are meaningless, while others are regular Gaelic words (such as trom), but sometimes have no meaning in the context of the song.

Here is an example from 1940.

 
Gregorian chants
I have been looking into female composers and it looks as if one of the great grandaddies of Gregorian Chants is in fact a great grandmammy. St Hildegard has one of the greatest surviving repertoires of any medieval composer and her chants and plays would have been performed by a female cast. I never knew.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen
I don't know where it exactly is right now, but somewhere in my stacks of old vinyl is a 4-LP set of Gregorian chants. One side is all female.
 
I don't know where it exactly is right now, but somewhere in my stacks of old vinyl is a 4-LP set of Gregorian chants. One side is all female.
Like the Mediaeval Baebes linked earlier, it could just be modern covers of earlier forms. I wonder if were women allowed to sing them at the time the chants were made?
 
Like the Mediaeval Baebes linked earlier, it could just be modern covers of earlier forms. I wonder if were women allowed to sing them at the time the chants were made?
Min Bannister's post above says Hildegard's compositions were performed by women in her day, and the record I have, probably recorded in the 1950s or 1960s, was of nuns who normally perform the chants for religious purposes, not for a paying audience.
 
Given that playing the piano and singing were seen as "acceptable" passtimes for middle and upper class ladies in the 1700s and 1800s it seems odd that there are no compositions by them (or are there? I'm not musical) I've always assumed that there must have been some but they were not written down or published and hence lost.
 
Given that playing the piano and singing were seen as "acceptable" passtimes for middle and upper class ladies in the 1700s and 1800s it seems odd that there are no compositions by them (or are there? I'm not musical) I've always assumed that there must have been some but they were not written down or published and hence lost.

There are more than you think according to the Wikipedia page on female composers. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_composers_by_birth_date#1701–1750

(Edited to add in the post I was replying to)
 
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English traditional folk music, and, no doubt, Scottish, Welsh and Irish, although I know less about them.

Some caveats:
Whilst it is true that there are many "women's songs" telling the stories of working women's lives from the point of view of the women, we need to be careful about the words traditional and folk.

The modern idea of a body of music, song and dance that is collectively called traditional and/or folk is very much an artificial construct. From late Victorian times through to the inter-war years, there was a conscious and concerted attempt by some intellectuals to "discover" an English cultural identity to "rival" the more conspicuous (at that time) folk customs of our European neighbours.

When it was not possible to "discover" a culture, it was often expeditious to attempt to assemble one from disparate morsels.

In the 18th or early 19th century, working people would sing songs that were local to their village, or which had been picked up either by travellers or from visitors. However, there is no way that a person from Polzeath singing a "traditional" song in the tavern would have thought he was part of a single overarching tradition or culture incorporating the step dances of East Anglia and the pipe tunes of Northumbria, or the songs of the Lancashire mill workers.

When it became fashionable for the middle and upper classes to collect folk songs, tunes and, later, dances, there was a degree of preconception and confirmation bias going on. This continues to the present day, with the more earnest type of folk music enthusiast describing songs or tunes by their place in some post hoc taxonomy. "This is a broken token song," or "This is a capstan shanty."

There was also a process of Bowdlerisation (removing or editing lyrics considered to be rude or unsuitable) and sometimes a parallel process of fitting idiomatic melodies into a conventional harmonic and rhythmic structure.

Back when these songs were a lively part of daily life, a person who knew a couple of love songs might never have heard a mill worker's song, or a shanty. Two songs that might be heard on the same night in a modern session might have originated hundreds of miles and many decades apart. Some were passed on by word of mouth, but others were composed and sold as lyric sheets ("broadsides") and fitted to popular tunes. Others were borrowed from the music hall and other professional entertainers, and often modified or even mangled.

But with all these caveats it is still essentially true that there is a huge body of folk song that tells the stories of women's lives from the woman's perspective, often in quite grim detail. There are songs about working in the terrible conditions in the mills and in the mines (young girls worked in the mines pushing wagons of coal), songs about unrequited love, loss (drowned fishermen, fallen soldiers), and songs about the perfidy of men generally.

Some are bitter, angry, and heart breaking, some are laments, and some deal with the same subjects light heartedly.

In the modern "folk community", a disparate group of mainly white collar workers sing a wide range of these songs, often chosen for a good tune or a memorable chorus, and it is common for "women's songs" to be sung by men, and vice versa.

Without opening any debate about rights and equality today, it is simply a fact that for most of history, most roles in society were largely determined by gender. It follows from this that the material for songs, and the style of songs, was also strongly influenced by gender.
 
Not entirely related but this thread brought Marina Warner to mind. I used to love her books in my 20's. She certainly doesn't prettify our cultural history, although her books are more folklore than general history. Lots of interesting morsels along these lines.
 
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