Dr. Elizabeth L. Keathley, Associate Professor in Historical Musicology and a WGS Program faculty member, has received a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Keathley’s funded project is a book on the ways that women influenced musical modernism in capacities other than composer and is titledThe Feminine Face of Musical Modernism: Women as Collaborators in Arnold Schoenberg’s Musical Networks.
Describing her research, Keathley states that “When we shift the focus of inquiry from fêted modernist composers to the networks that enabled the composition and performance of their music, we find women in key roles—not as passive helpers, but as active subjects advancing their own artistic, social, and personal interests in the collaborative processes that created and sustained musical modernism. Drawing on interpretive models from sociology, philanthropy scholarship, and women’s history, my study uses archival materials to illuminate women’s work in collaborative networks pervading the modern music subcultures in which Schoenberg worked. Using a single composer as a structuring principle rather than a protagonist, the study focuses on networks and interactions, not solely on individual accomplishments. Through their networks and in their roles as performers, librettists, patrons, and writers, women proposed and contested the terrain of musical modernism, affording them agency in the formation of their own modern identities.”
Keathley teaches the music history sequence for music majors and graduate seminars in twentieth-century music and music and gender. She received the PhD and MA in Music History, as well as an Advanced Certificate in Women’s Studies, from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. According to the NEH (http://www.neh.gov/grants/research/fellowships), only 7% of those submitting yearly receive NEH Fellowships.
