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.