Much of the scholarship concerning women composers has focused on biography and the task of making scores available to performer. Relatively little has dealt with the music itself and the aesthetic criteria we need in order to treat these women the ways we address the male composers of the canon. In this talk, Dr. Susan McClary will discuss music by Kaija Saariaho and other composers working today.

Biography

Susan McClary (Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music, Case Western Reserve University; Distinguished Professor Emerita, UCLA) specializes in the cultural criticism of music. Her books include Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality; Georges Bizet: Carmen; Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form; Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal; Reading Music; Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music; Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Expressive Culture; The Passions of Peter Sellars: Staging the Music; and Making Sense of Music. She previously taught at University of Minnesota, McGill, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and University of Oslo. McClary received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 1995, and her work has been translated into at least twenty languages.