Early Musicwomen

Colwell's recorded performance of Gibbs's "Ephelia" setting contributes to the present renaissance of interest in musicwomen of the early-modern era, the subject of a successful new collection, Women Making Music...1150-1950, edited by Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (1987). I also might mention a few useful locations of new audio adjuncts to print scholarship on early women writers: (i) recent compact disks on the musical writings of Hildegard of Bingen, a Medieval abbess and mystic (e.g., A Feather On The Breath of God, Hyperion label, 1981); (ii) Julianne Baird's recordings of selections from Jane Austen's eight manuscript songbooks, preserved at The Austen Memorial Trust in Chawton, England (Jane's Hand, Vox Classics label, 1996); and the ongoing good work of two successful musical groups, The Dryden Ensemble (Princeton, New Jersey), and Music Before 1800 (New York City). The latter group has organized performances of works by or about women of this era, such as "Voices of Women" (The Drawing Center, SoHo, NYC, 18 January 1993), which included settings from the verse of Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Hampden, "My Lady Killingrew," [Anne Killigrew?], et al.

This issue of (Re)Soundings focuses on the allied arts of music and poetry, capably edited by Beverly E. Schneller, who contributed a comprehensive review of my Poems by Ephelia to ECCB.