one of the greatest and most influential chanters in the onna gidayū tradition;
Jane Hassinger traces the lives and careers of the Boswell Sisters, important
American jazz figures in the earlier part of this century; and Esther Rothenbusch
examines the effect of women composers on the hymnody tradition in the United
States during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Other essays are primarily genre studies, based on historical and current prac-
tices. Judith R. Cohen, for example, describes the all-female genre of Sephardic
wedding music; Patricia Shehan presents a comparison of various Balkan so-
cieties and the role women play as preservers of the folk song tradition; Hiromi
Lorraine Sakata, too, in her treatment of women musicians in Afghanistan,
stresses the role of women as cultural innovators and preservers; R. Anderson
Sutton discusses the role of the female singer in Java and provides an analysis of
individuality in performance style; and Karen E. Petersen discusses an all-female
genre current in the Western popular tradition, women-identified music.

The remaining essays, primarily anthropological in orientation, present de-
scriptions and analyses of a variety of cultural/musical settings. Susan Auerbach
examines the tradition of lamenting among women in rural Greece, stressing the
intimate links between this tradition and a woman's social and gender identity;
Ellen Koskoff discusses the role and status of women in an orthodox Jewish
community and the implications of gender on music performance; Marina Rose-
man, in her examination of the Temiar of Peninsular Malaysia, discusses the role
music plays in mediating inter-gender relations; Ellen B. Basso describes various
gender-specific rituals among the Kalapalo Indians of Central Brazil that act
socially to transform gender roles; and Carol E. Robertson, in a cross-cultural
examination of six music cultures, discusses the role music plays in reflecting or
protesting various gender arrangements, ranging from male dominance to female
separation.

Before turning to the Introduction, I would like to thank the following people
who have helped in many ways with the completion of this book. First, I am
most grateful to the authors in this volume, whose contributions to a new per-
spective on women and music will hopefully inspire others to continue this
research and discovery. I also thank the organizers of Opus 1 and 2, Conferences
on Women in Music at the University of Michigan School of Music, Ann Arbor,
1982-83, for providing opportunities for many of us to present our ongoing
research in a supportive atmosphere. I thank Joan Swanekamp of the Eastman
School of Music's Sibley Music Library, who taught me creative search tech-
niques for finding relevant material on women and music cross-culturally. I also
thank Roseanne Scheuermann and Rebecca Cadregari, who spent many tedious
hours typing (and retyping) bibliographies, and Don Jones, whose transcriptions
have made the music in this book far easier to read. Finally, I am grateful to my
friends and colleagues, Ayalah Gabriel, Victoria Lindsay-Levine, Robert Mor-
ris, Sue Roark-Calnek, and Gretchen Wheelock for innumerable discussions,
arguments, and suggestions, and for the care with which they read portions of
this work.

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