"Say Can You Deny Me:" A Guide to Surviving Music by Women from the 16th through the 18th Centuries, by Barbara Garvey Jackson. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, published September, 1994. 480 pages. Price $40.00 cloth. ISBN 1-55728-303-6
a review by Jane P. Ambrose - The University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont as published in the February 1995 ILWC Journal
Jackson's meticulous compilation, "Say Can You Deny Me:" A Guide to Surviving Music by Women from the 16th through the 18th Centuries, is the result of her lifelong commitment to the discovery and publication of music by women. Her ClarNan Editions have made much of this "new" repertory available so that those who choose to perform these works from modern editions can integrate them into their programs to allow women their rightful place in musical history.
"Say Can You Deny Me" will provide years of discovery for performers and scholars desirous of entry to archives and personal collections, and the various appendices allow the researcher to pinpoint by medium as well as by name editions, facsimiles, microfilms, locations by library siglia, OCLC numbers, and other catalog data from over 400 libraries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America. The Internet should be humming with requests far into the future.
There is an enormous amount to be learned about women's lives as composers from a perusal of the works and the indices. Women wrote for the voice rather than for instruments. Much of the instrumental music is for keyboard, an instrument that women could keep in their own homes and practice at their leisure. There are very few symphonic or operatic pieces, although there are many baroque cantatas, mostly for single voice or single voice and one obligato instrument plus continuo. Works for brass instruments, historically not played by women, are virtually non-existent and there are only a half-dozen works for wind band.
Song texts would make an interesting study. They deal with love and romance throughout the period, not only in the late 18th and 19th centuries, where this would be the expectation. There are many pastoral pieces, both vocal and instrumental. A scan of the index confirms previous research that suggests that women composers were frequently the relatives of their male colleagues. Another appendix corrects Cohen's International Encyclopedia of Women Composers, identifying male composers who had mistakenly been identified as females. The expected bibliography of catalogs, books and disserations is complete.
The double meaning of Jackson's subtitle is somewhat ironic. For many years we have heard derogatory comments about our programs which have suggested that "surviving music by women" was more than many concert goers were willing to attempt. The exploration and preparation of works to be discovered through Jackson's research should allay those fears. My own conversion was confirmed when I learned Francesca Caccini's exquisite "O che nuovo stupor," the first piece that my students and I chose to perform for a memorial service after the slaughter of the women at the University of Montreal. (My search for the obscure Brockmans en Van Poppel edition would have been aided by Jackson's listing!) When in 1987 many of us contributed recommendations and essays to Briscoe's Historical Anthology of Music by Women, we were suggesting that from Kassia in the 9th century to Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in our own way of the relatively well-known and the yet to be known, there were enormous riches in the music of women through all ages.. Jackson's guide will serve as an incentive to enlarge that rich repertory, proving once again that the place of women in musical history is secure and worthy of exploration.
"Say Can You Deny Me:" A Guide to Surviving Music by Women from the 16th through the 18th Centuries by Barbara Garvey Jackson. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, published September, 1994. 480 pages. Price $40.00 cloth. ISBN 1-55728-303-6