By Martha Furman Schleifer
Published in IAWM Journal Volume 12, No. 2 - 2006
I first met Sylvia Glickman in 1988 when I asked her to prepare Volume IV, American Keyboard Music: 1866-1910 for a series I was co-editing with the late Sam Dennison entitled Three Centuries of American Music (G. K. Hall/Macmillan 1989-1992). This was the beginning of years of productive labor and friendship.
In 1991 I received a request from an editor at G. K. Hall to organize a series of volumes on women composers. I immediately asked Sylvia to be co-editor. We began to lay the foundations for Women Composers: Music Through the Ages (G.K. Hall/Macmillan/Thomson/Gale 1996-2006). It took two years of planning and recruiting contributors until we mapped out a 12-volume series that would include scholarly articles with lists of works, bibliographies, discographies and extant music by women composers born from ca. 810 through the 20th century. Our time schedule was overly optimistic, which we realized as we were preparing Volume I (Composers Born Before 1599). We also had to deal with changes in ownership of the publishing company and editorial staff throughout production. During the 15 years we worked on the project we learned much and met many enthusiastic and capable researchers who shared our mission of finding and making available music that had been neglected and unavailable for centuries. Volume VIII went to the publisher ten days before Sylvia died.
Sylvia created the Hildegard Publishing Company (HPC) before we became collaborators. She continued to run HPC and expanded it while also working on the series. Sylvia started with a small hand-operated punch machine that allowed us to put music pages together using plastic binders; once the business grew, she could afford to have the scores professionally bound. In the beginning, Sylvia shipped the music by taking packages to the post office in a sack, but once HPC was well established, the brown truck (a professional delivery service) arrived daily. She began with a few copies of scores created on a desktop machine and progressed to organized shelves filled with many copies of editions waiting to be mailed to musicians all over the world. The HPC catalog, which started with six scores, increased to over 500 compositions. I assisted Sylvia as an editor at HPC and can attest to her demand for excellence from those who proposed their own compositions or editions of works by others for publication. She succeeded in making important music by composers of the past and present accessible and obtainable through HPC.
During the production of Women Composers: Music Through the Ages a request came from Oryx Press/Greenwood Publishing Company for a single volume on women composers (From Convent to Concert Hall: A Guide To Women Composers, 2003) that could be used as a textbook. The volume includes chapters in chronological order, time-lines, suggestions for course organization, glossary and bibliographies. Greenwood Press notes that From Convent to Concert Hall is “the first substantive biographical reference book geared toward the student or nonspecialist, featuring information on nearly 200 women composers of the Western music tradition from the 9th century to the 21st.” Until shortly before Sylvia’s untimely death on January 16, 2006, we discussed the possibility of reprinting the volume as a paperback to make it more affordable to students, a project still being pursued.
Sylvia’s contributions to the world of music by women composers are really beyond brief documentation. She was an advocate and a pioneer who will be sorely missed.