So You Want to Sing Music by Women: A Guide for Performers

So You Want to Sing Music by Women opens wide a vast repertoire of vocal music written by women to advocate for widespread inclusion of this too-often neglected work in performance repertoire. Hoch and Lister provide a historical and contemporary perspective, chronicling the Western art music canon while also addressing contemporary trends in music theater and CCM. In addition to providing a historical overview and social context in which women created music, this volume explores the music of hundreds of historical and contemporary women composers, such as Hildegard von Bingen, Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger, Cathy Berberian, Erykah Badu, and Sara Bareilles. In addition to discussions of art song, opera, choral music, and avant garde/experimental music, Erin Guinup and Amanda Wansa Morgan also contribute chapters devoted to music theater, CCM, and advocacy for women composers. Interviews with high-profile composers including Lori Laitman, Rosephanye Powell, Meredith Monk, Georgia Stitt provide accounts from the frontlines of today's composing world. Additional chapters by Scott McCoy and Wendy LeBorgne address vocal technique and health, and Matthew Edwards provides guidance for working with sound technology. The So You Want to Sing series is produced in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Like all books in the series, So You Want to Sing Music by Women features online supplemental material on the NATS website. Please visit www.nats.org to access style-specific exercises, audio and video files, and additional resources.

Matthew Hoch is associate professor of voice at Auburn University. He is the author of A Dictionary for the Modern Singer, coauthor of Voice Secrets: 100 Performance Strategies for the Advanced Singer, and volume editor of So You Want to Sing Sacred Music and So You Want to Sing CCM. Hoch is the 2016 winner of the Van L. Lawrence Fellowship, awarded jointly by the Voice Foundation and the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS). He also is affiliate faculty in women’s studies at Auburn University, where he developed the institution’s first-ever Women in Music course.

Linda Lister is associate professor of voice and director of opera at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is author of So You Want to Sing Light Opera and coauthor of Voice Secrets: 100 Performance Strategies for the Advanced Singer. As a soprano soloist, she appears on the albums The American Soloist, Midnight Tolls, and Moments of Arrival. Also a composer, she sings her own art songs on the Albany Records release Pleas to Famous Fairies.