Chapter 6 shifts the focus to female performers within the classical music industry. Francesca Placanica considers the increased opportunities which female performers, both singers and instrumentalists, gained throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, not only in terms of being able to achieve star status, but also through being able to integrate into professional orchestras. Focusing upon the trumpeter Alison Balsom and percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, she considers the new opportunities that have developed over recent decades for women to maintain careers as virtuosa performers of instruments historically deemed unsuitable for women to play. Placanica also deftly probes the high degree of sexualisation which many contemporary performers, including Yuja Wang, Katherine Jenkins, and Vanessa Mae, face in the contemporary classical music industry and how this can be negotiated in a mediatised culture.

Louis Niebur’s chapter 13, ‘Case Studies of Women in Electronic Music: The Early Pioneers’, considers a range of the earliest ground-breaking women working with electronic music, including Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, at the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in the UK, and Wendy Carlos, Pauline Oliveros, and Suzanne Ciani, in the US.

In her practitioner contribution, composer Elizabeth Hoffman concludes Part I (‘The Classical Tradition’) with a searching consideration of how gender has affected her own career and how it continues to affect women within the academy.

In her practitioner contribution, Virginia Kettle reflects on her career as a folk musician.

Chapter 3, ‘Behind the Iron Curtain: Female Composers in the Soviet Bloc’, turns to the specific situation of women composers working within the Soviet Bloc, where despite the public advocation of gender equality by state-socialist regimes, more traditional constructs of gender difference actually tended to be propagated. With a particular focus on the careers of Galina Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidulina in the USSR, Ruth Zechlin in the GDR, and Grażyna Bacewicz in Poland, Elaine Kelly probes the possibilities open to female composers working under state socialism.

Chapter 15, ‘Women and Music Education in Schools: Pedagogues, Curricula, and Role Models’, surveys women’s contribution to music education. Although women in music has gained a steady foothold in university and conservatoire education over the last two decades, music education at school level (this chapter’s focus) has tended to remain fairly conservative. Robert Legg discusses women’s access to the teaching profession, highlighting that, while it has always been relatively open to women, persistent barriers remain, including a lack of women in leadership roles and the gender pay gap. He also critiques the body/mind dualist view of music education, the lack of female role models in many curricula, and recent pedagogical debates of the twenty-first century.

Chapter 5 turns to the situation of women conductors. It considers the early women conductors of the twentieth century, many of whom, such as Ethel Leginska, founded and led their own women’s orchestras. It explores how – with the important exception of Veronika Dudarowa’s career in the USSR – the majority of women conductors lost opportunities following the general demise of the women’s orchestras during the Second World War. It also examines the re-emergence of women at the heads or orchestras in the later twentieth century, with a particular focus upon the career of Marin Alsop. It concludes by discussing the important work that Alsop and others, notably (in the UK) Alice Farnham, are doing through mentoring and training the younger generation of women conductors through such initiatives as Alsop’s Taki Concordia Fellowship and Farnham’s Women Conductors programme at the Royal Philharmonic Society.

Chapter 2, ‘Women in Composition during the Cold War in Music’, focuses on women active in the West, where, for all the apparent government liberalism, in musical terms, composers had to face what could often, at the time, seem like the monolithic regime of total serialism, as advocated by Pierre Boulez and his circle. Through a range of case studies, including Grace Williams, ElizabethMaconchy (whose pre-war careers are both also discussed in Chapter 1), Elisabeth Lutyens, Thea Musgrave, Betsy Jolas, Louise Talma, Julia Perry, and Miriam Gideon, Rhiannon Mathias deftly considers the compositional strategies which women developed to respond to this musical environment.

The preface briefly outlines the evolving situation of women in music since 1900, and also explores the development of women in music studies/feminist musicology since the 1980s. The Cambridge Companion to Women in Music since 1900 is situated within this field. An overview of the contents of the volume – which considers women in classical music, women in popular music, women and music technology, and women’s wider work in music (including music education and the music industries) – is provided. The preface concludes with a short section of acknowledgements.

In her practitioner contribution, Steph Power presents an an autoethnographic exploration of her own portfolio career, which combines work as a performer, composer, music examiner, and critic.

In Chapter 1, Sophie Fuller considers the musical landscape which composers working in the earlier twentieth century inhabited. From the early days of the twentieth century, when women were expected to concentrate upon song and small-scale piano works, to the wider opportunities which opened up during the interwar period, Fuller considers a range of composers, including Cécile Chaminade, Maude Valérie White, Louise Adolpha Le Beau, Ethel Smyth, Adela Maddison, Poldowski (Irene Wieniawska), Marguerite Canal, Jeanne Leleu, Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Elsa Barraine, Germaine Tailleferre, and Alma Mahler.

Turning to folk music, in Chapter 11, Michael Brocken focuses upon the British folk revival to consider both the traditional marginalisation of women’s voices and the contemporary emergence of a more open folk scene in which women’s voices ‘figure’. Blending an auto-ethnographic and an ethnographic approach, Brocken considers not only his own growing awareness of gender issues within the folk scene as a male researcher, but also draws upon interview material with folk musician Emily Portman and folk and acoustic music promoter Rose Price.

Within the field of game studies, much ink has been spilt in the quest to define and classify games based on their genre, that is, to determine in which category they belong based on the type of interaction each game affords. Some games lie clearly within an established genre; for example, it is rather difficult to mistake a racing game for a first-person shooter. Other games, however, can fall outside the boundaries of any particular genre, or lie within the perimeters of several genres at once. Such is the case with music games. While some may argue that a game can be considered to be a music game only if its formal elements, such as theme, mechanics or objectives, centre on music, musicians, music making or another music-related activity, in practice the defining characteristics of a music game are much less clear – or rather, are much broader – than with other genres. Many game publishers, players, scholars and critics classify a game as musical simply because it features a particular genre of music in its soundtrack or musicians make appearances as playable characters, despite the fact that little-to-no musical activity is taking place within the game.

It was June of 1990; I was four years old, waiting with my mom in our car, which was parked on the searing hot asphalt of a mall parking lot. My brother, who was nine, was inside with my father picking out his birthday present. When they finally returned, my brother was carrying a huge grey, black and red box with the words Nintendo Entertainment System printed on the side. Without this day, impatient and blazing hot in my memory, I might never have known Mario and Link and Kid Icarus and Mega Man, and my life would have been much poorer for it. We brought home two games that day: the promotional 3-in-1 game that came with the system (Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt/Track Meet; 1985), and The Legend of Zelda (1986). It is almost impossible to imagine the rich, diverse game world of Zelda’s Hyrule without its characteristic sounds. How would the player experience the same level of satisfaction in restoring their health by picking up a heart container or lining their coffers with currency without that full, round plucking sound as they apprehend the heart, or the tinny cha-ching of picking up a gemlike rupee (see Example 16.1)?

Sappho’s deployment of mythical material allows us to compare her with other early poets and poetic traditions. Chapter 14 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho shows how, as one of the earliest preserved lyric voices, Sappho sets a benchmark for the rest of Greek – and ancient – literary history in her application of distant stories to the here and now.

Chapter 9 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho sets out the evidence for Sappho’s use of metre, showing its position within the tradition of Greek poetic metre as a whole, as well as the sparse evidence that survives for her music.