The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks by Victoria RogersReview by: Cynthia RichardsonFontes Artis Musicae, Vol. 58, No. 3, National Libraries (July-September 2011), pp. 347-348Published by: International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres(IAML)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23512826 .

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REVIEWS 347

book, ten of them never arrived in New York, closing out of town. One of them, Little World, Hello (1966), never even began rehearsals.

How can these even be considered part of the

Broadway season? It is equivalent to naming a

movie that shut down production and was never

released as the worst picture of the year.

Even if one can ignore the reasons for se

lecting these one hundred musicals, there is lit tle to be gained by the commentary offered

about these winners and losers. Some entries

have long and involved plot descriptions while others are only given the briefest amount of in

formation. The background information usually consists of counting off how many hits and

bombs the participants had racked up or juicy bits of backstage infighting. Filichia has drawn from interviews by himself and others but

mostly comes up with trivial footnotes or gos sipy commentary. Little attempt is made to ex

plain why a show failed or succeeded except to

quote bad lyrics and record snide remarks by critics, actors, and the author himself. This is indeed a very personal look at Broadway musi

cals, with both prejudices and favoritism hardly disguised, but is anyone really interested in what guests said about certain shows at a Tony

Awards party that the author attended? That said, this might be the ideal book for

those who like their musical theatre on the most

superficial level. It also helps if you aren't too in terested in the facts. The author gets the plot of

Beauty and the Beast wrong and can't even get

the cast members' names right; Terrence Mann

originated the role of the Beast and it was Burke Moses who first played Gaston. With several

such mistakes throughout the book, it helps if the reader pays little attention to the informa

tion and enjoys the chatty narrative. You may

not learn anything new about Broadway musi

cals but you sure will have stories for when you

are invited to a Tony Award party.

Thomas S. Hischak State University of New York College at Cortland

The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks. By Victoria Rogers. Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, Vermont; Ashgate Publishing, 2009. [xviii, 279 p. ISBN 978-0-7546-6635-6. £60; $114.95]

Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks

(1912-1990) is known to have created over sev

enty vocal and instrumental works. Many are

readily accessible in various libraries and archives, and some can be heard on commer

cial recordings, yet the significance of her ac

complishments has been fully appreciated only relatively recently. This in-depth study of Glanville-Hicks' music is a welcome contribu tion to raising her profile. Author Victoria

Rogers is currently an Associate Professor in

Musicology in the School of Music at The

University of Western Australia. This book had its origins in her doctoral thesis completed in

2000, but her interest in Glanville-Hicks' music dates back to 1984, when she was a cellist in the orchestra for the recording of the com

poser's opera The Transposed Heads and

Concerto Romantico and also an occasional

contributor to the Australian national radio net

work ABC Classic FM, which led to her inter

viewing the then-elderly composer. In addition to studying the scores, Rogers

thoroughly examined the composer's volumi

nous papers, which include diaries and corre

spondence that reveal telling details about

individual compositions and challenges the

composer faced in her everyday life. The author frequently cites, and occasionally dis

agrees with, information presented in two ear

lier studies, Deborah Hayes' Peggy Glanville Hicks: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990) and James Murdoch's

Peggy Glanville-Hicks: A Transposed Life (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2002).

Born Peggy Hicks in 1912 in Melbourne, Australia, in 1945 the composer augmented her

birth name to the hyphenated Glanville-Hicks

by borrowing her father's middle name. Her

early training in composition was from Fritz

Hart in Melbourne. In 1932 she moved to

England to study with Ralph Vaughan Williams and did not return permanently to her home land until 1975. After studying briefly with Egon Wellesz in Vienna in 1936, she concluded that serialism was incompatible with her musical sensibilities. She proceeded to Paris in 1937 where she studied seven months with Nadia

Boulanger and began moving beyond the

English pastoral style that had shaped her ap

proach to composition up to then.

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348 FONTES ARTIS MUSICAE 58/3

After emigrating to the United States in 1941, Glanville-Hicks initially produced works under the influence of neoclassicism, but in the late 1940s she was drawn to the work of

such American composers as Colin McPhee,

Alan Hovhaness, Lou Harrison, and Paul

Bowles, who were turning to non-Western mu

sics for inspiration. Glanville-Hicks' distinctive later style, which emphasized modal melody and rhythm over harmony, grew out of her

own study of non-western musics, in particular

that of India and Greece, respectively the inspi rations for her operas The Transposed Heads

and Nausicaa. In 1961, Glanville-Hicks began a fourteen-year residence in Greece, where

Nausicaa had premiered that year. Tragically, in 1967, only a few years after having solidified her own musical voice, she ceased composing

following surgery for a life-threatening brain tu

mor. She died in Sydney in 1990. For most of Glanville-Hicks' career, eco

nomic struggles were front and center.

Focusing exclusively on composition was rarely

an option. While residing in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, she used her formidable fall back talents as an arts administrator, concert

promoter, and music journalist to keep herself

afloat. These activities had the added advantage of placing her at the center of the new music

scene and afforded her a measure of influence

that was uncommon for a woman composer in

that time and place. Her own development as

a composer undoubtedly benefited from her

immersion in this stimulating musical environ

ment, but her health suffered from the eco

nomic necessity of meeting so many commit

ments. She used her considerable contacts to

try to break into the lucrative film music scene on the west coast, but was not successful. It was

not the first or last time that Glanville-Hicks' op portunities were apparently curtailed by gen der discrimination.

The text is organized chronologically to fa cilitate the author's goal of tracing in context

the genesis and realization of compositions that define various stages of Glanville-Hicks' musi

cal development and the resulting stylistic shifts that characterized her career. Rogers

highlights compositional elements that attest to Glanville-Hicks' stylistic inclination at the time and considers how the composer formed and

put into practice her original and highly per

sonal ideas about linear textures and rhythm as

a central structural element. The translation of

theory into practice is nowhere more evident

than in the operas The Transposed Heads and

Nausicaa, which receive the most extensive

treatment. For each composition analyzed, mul

tiple musical examples are handsomely pre

sented and well-coordinated with the text. This detailed examination of many finely

wrought compositions by Peggy Glanville Hicks brings out the distinctive features of each and introduces the reader to a lesser-known but

truly original musical voice. Though never in tended as a substitute for a comprehensive bi

ography, the biographical narrative that Rogers

employs to illuminate the connections between

Glanville-Hicks' stylistic development and musical output and concurrent events in her

personal and professional lives is sufficiently developed to provide a compelling and sympa

thetic introduction to this spirited composer's life as well as her works. A bibliography that in cludes a substantial number of writings by

Glanville-Hicks, a discography, an enumeration of archival collections, a chronological list of

compositions, and an index enhance the re

search value of this work.

Cynthia Richardson

King County Public Library, Seattle, Washington

Lexikon Musik und Gender. Edited by Annette Kreutziger-Herr and Melanie Unseld.

Kassel: Bärenreiter, Metzler, 2010. [610 p. ill. ISBN 978-3-476-02325-4. €89.00]

While many may think that Germans more or

less invented musicology, it has been a source

of bemusement to some in the English speaking world that, throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, musicologists in the German-speaking lands have often stuck

loyally to their engrained distinctions of his torische versus systematische Musikwissenschaft;

for a long time, the innovations of New Musi cology seemed completely to pass many by in

the musicological population. English-speaking academics who turned up at conferences to talk

about gender or post-structuralism may well

have been met with polite yet perplexed audi

ences. Even now, much academic work by

German speakers seems to have changed its

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