Composing Women - 'Femininity' and Views on Cultures, Gender and Music of Southeastern Europe since 1918

This volume presents fifteen musicological perspectives on the creativity of women composers and the question of 'femininity' in Southeastern-European musical cultures from 1918 on. In the questions about and beyond a 'female aesthetics', socio-cultural approaches to the lives of creative women prove to be indispensable for contemporary musicological gender research, because highly complex facts of musical life and social realities in political systems cannot be separated from each other. By this means the exclusion and marginalization of women composers in the national and international music establishment, as well as strategies for overcoming these systems, are made visible and brought to consciousness. This volume therefore focusses on the social, cultural, and biological preconditions of cultural action, and intends to arouse curiosity for multi-layered realities; it aims to increase the reception of the compositional oeuvre of women composers from Southeastern Europe by the global music scene, the musicological discourse, and an engaged audience.

Elfriede Reissig is an Austrian conductor and musicologist specializing in contemporary music and gender, author, and editor of numerous volumes on Luigi Nono and Giacinto Scelsi. Monograph 'Das atmende Klarsein' (Pfau-Verlag, Germany). In 2010-12 she was a collaborator in the 2 years FWF research project 'Giacinto Scelsi and Austria'. 2014-16 Research assistant at the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Music in Graz. Research interests include gender studies in aesthetics and analysis of classical modernism in music, as well as theoretical and empirical studies of cooperative creative processes of Giacinto Scelsi and women interpreter/performers. Leon Stefanija is a Slovenian musicologist at the Department of Musicology/Ljubljana, whose research focusses on the history of contemporary musical culture, and cognitive science of music; Stefanija is an external collaborator of the Music Academies Zagreb and Sarajevo and member of the editorial boards of several music-related journals. Graduated in 1995 from the Department of Musicology at the Faculty of Arts, where he was also invited as a young researcher the same year. PhD, 2001, entitled Understanding the 'old' and the 'new' in recent Slovene music. His musicological work has focused on the analysis of the musical phrase, research in recent Slovenian music and the sociology of music. Head of the Department of Musicology at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where he also lectures.