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Cecelia Porter, Independent Scholar, MD
Research: Critical Assessments of Music by Women Composers
in Vienna, 1910-60
Host: Institute for Music Sociology, Vienna, Austria
May 2000-July 2000
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Cecelia
Porter's second book, Women, Music and Society, is a work in progress.
Porter has had to gather information for all her publications
the hard way: bit by bit, in the time left over from her day-to-day
responsibilities as a Washington Post music critic, musicologist,
musician, teacher and mother of four. An independent scholar,
she also had to finance any trips to European libraries and musical
events out of her own pocket-no simple matter when you have a
mortgage and are raising a family.
Porter had pulled together an impressive body of information about
Duchess Sophie-Elisabeth of Germany, Adriana Basile of Italy and
others who had been composing or performing since the late 16th
century. But she still had major research to do on Maria Bach,
a 20th-century Viennese composer whose life spanned both World
Wars, the Anschluss and the birth of the modern feminist movement.
So she leaped at the chance to complete that research in Vienna,
at the age of 62, with the help of a Fulbright grant. Porter's
two months of study (May and June, 2000) in Vienna gave her unparalleled
access to Bach's original manuscripts and critical reviews, and
a chance to exchange information with Austrian musicologists and
performers. She also haunted the local concert halls and covered
a memorial concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for the
Post at Mauthausen, a former Austrian concentration camp. It was,
she says, the longest period she had ever spent away from her
family, and the most rewarding.
Since her return, she has been invited to speak at several Central
and Eastern European embassies in Washington and has arranged
for an Austrian colleague to lecture in the States. The Fulbright
experience has not only deepened her appreciation of the Central
European music she reviews, she says; it also resonates with her
observations about the women she's studied. If they had any success
at all in the historically patriarchal world of music, she says,
it was because they had wealthy, supportive families and, until
the great music academies opened their doors to women, the resources
to study privately.
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