As a discipline, ecomusicology has been gathering steam for more than a decade. With early publications including Von Glahn's own 2003 monograph The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape,Footnote ¹ the field has significantly increased in visibility and popularity with the advent of the Ecocriticism Study Group of the American Musicological Society (2007), the Ecomusicology Special Interest Group of the Society for Ethnomusicology (2011), and, most especially, a four-day conference held in Asheville, North Carolina, called “Ecomusics and Ecomusicologies 2014: Dialogues.” Von Glahn's interest in the intersections among music, nature, and culture has a long history; her 1995 dissertation explored space and place in the music of Charles Ives.Footnote ² Her newest book is the first to be released in a new series titled Music, Nature, Place, which Von Glahn is co-editing with Sabine Feisst for Indiana University Press.Footnote ³ Ecomusicology is thriving, and Von Glahn has established her place as a leading scholar in the field. With this book she combines her commitment to ecomusicology with interests in “an array of fields,” including “American studies, nature writing, art history, environmental studies, ecocriticism, [and] ecofeminism” (6).

Von Glahn squanders no words; her introduction begins, “This is a book about nature, and women, and music” (1). She defines her terminology, clarifies the selection of her subjects, and presents two underlying themes of the book: listening and collaboration. In an opening contextual chapter, she situates her research within a larger understanding of the relationships between women and nature. During the nineteenth century, female “nature writers” were often confined behind pen names and within domestic spheres, yet Von Glahn also touches on singular women of the time who moved beyond such limitations, including transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller and prison reformer and abolitionist pioneer Eliza Farnham. She enlarges the discussion to include women nature painters associated with the Hudson River School, including Harriet Cany Peale, whose 1858 work Kaaterskill Clove appears on the book's cover. Finally, Von Glahn takes her overview into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with consideration of recent publications by women in a variety of fields, including ecocriticism and poetry.

The rest of the book is divided into three parts, roughly chronological, each investigating the music of three different women. The MacDowell Colony features as a key location in part 1, “Nature as a Summer Home.” Each of the three composers under examination here, Amy Cheney Beach, Marion Bauer, and Louise Talma, spent time at the Colony. Von Glahn views this first section as “a microcosm of the larger study” in the “range of ways that nature, even very similar nature, informs music” by the three women (28). She also points out the significant impact that “educational opportunities, . . . successful, encouraging female models, and . . . a nurturing community” (28) had on their work and that, by extension, pushed them to move beyond the implicit and explicit limitations placed on women composers. In contrast to the living composers studied in parts 2 and 3, any research on the music and lives of these women must of necessity be archival in nature. Von Glahn's writing reflects this limitation; these chapters read much more like a traditionally conceived monograph (historical background, close musical analysis, summary argument) than those that follow. The music explored in these chapters—including Beach's solo piano piece, “A Hermit Thrush at Morn”; Bauer's Up the Ocklawaha for violin and piano and “From the New Hampshire Woods” for solo piano; and Talma's Summer Sounds for clarinet and string quartet—ranges vastly in inspiration, performing forces, and length. Von Glahn deftly articulates the works’ formal traits and their connections to nature, using archival materials and her strong theoretical background to make plausible connections, for example, between Talma's composition and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, a work that resurfaces repeatedly as a sort of stepping-off point for several of these composers.

Part 2, “Nature All Around Us,” explores the music of Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Halfway through the chapter on Oliveros's Deep Listening, Von Glahn recounts “lying on the floor of a dimly lit room with my head close to and between speakers” listening to “Lear” and “Suiren” (125). I was struck by how personal the writing had become. Von Glahn's autobiographical account of her own skillful listening provides a kind of listening guide to the pieces. Although, of course, no reader is obliged to follow in her footsteps, by carefully shaping her analysis around the listening experience Von Glahn evokes the impact of the music itself. Her comments on Black Topaz, Tower's composition for piano and percussion-heavy chamber ensemble, work in a similar way: “Like the gem for which it is named, the effect of the piece depends upon how one handles the material, how it is cut and turned, how it is buffed and polished, whether it is exposed to large amounts of direct light or experienced ‘dans un brume’ (in a fog). When subjected to heat energy, the gem changes colors and so does the music” (137). The chapter on Zwilich revolves around the composer's singular nature-related work, her Symphony No. 4, The Gardens. Von Glahn's more straightforward analysis of the music fittingly reflects its relatively traditional elements and structure, while her discussion also highlights Zwilich's selection of Latin names of several endangered species for her text and the work's connections to a particular botanical garden.

The final section, “Beyond the EPA and Earth Day,” is full of interviews with and close listening to the music of Victoria Bond, Libby Larsen, and Emily Doolittle, the youngest composer considered in the book. The chapters provide a satisfying entry into the music of these three women and its environmental leanings, illuminating links to the rise of acoustic ecology, zoomusicology, and, especially, ecofeminism, which Von Glahn defines as “an approach to environmentalism that recognizes a connection between the mistreatment of the earth and the mistreatment of marginalized peoples” (210). While several compositions by each woman are considered, certain works and their analyses stand out, such as Bond's Thinking Like a Mountain and Larsen's Missa Gaia. Von Glahn artfully comes full circle in her final pages, returning to Amy Beach's beloved hermit thrush, a bird similarly singled out in Reeds, Doolittle's 2010 multi-disciplinary “site-specific creation,” which involved collaboration among a place, a dancer, instrumentalists, and Doolittle herself. Throughout the book, but in this section in particular, Von Glahn's treatment of the subject is thorough while simultaneously inviting further research.

In a review of this book in Notes (September 2015), Kendra Preston Leonard remarked upon Von Glahn's use of what she termed “purple prose” in her musical analyses (180).Footnote ⁴ While I agree with Leonard's recognition of her colorful wordings—one of my favorites is the description of Bond's “Strangler Fig” as “trilling, punchy, agitated” and “chomping at the harpsichord” (234)—I would argue that it is Von Glahn's ambition to get her words as close to the music's sound as possible. She has, in fact, been exhorting her students for years to do the same. Her thick, rich descriptions of the music she investigates, the women who write it, and their connections to their natural surroundings brought this reader intimately close to the sound worlds conjured up by the composers. The merits of this book are many, but this is one that stood out: with each piece of music, whether I actually sought out a recording or not, I felt as though I could almost hear it in the words.

Music and the Skillful Listener investigates the music of nine women whose compositions connect with nature in a myriad of ways. It includes germane biographical information and, with some of the living composers, tantalizing glimpses into the thought processes impelling their works. It also analyzes the pieces using a variety of methods; each one can prove instructive to musicologists who might find themselves considering works that defy traditional analysis. Furthermore, the book is a model to demonstrate that such diverging kinds of research and analysis require different types of writing: Von Glahn embraces whatever means and methods serve the subject best. Finally, it humanizes its author in a similar way that it personalizes the composers and their music, an element that aided this reader in connecting with the music and the text. And it does all this using elegant and thoughtful prose. In her conclusion, Von Glahn reiterates the themes of collaboration and, especially, listening; she writes of the “growing need for time to connect with ourselves and the world, unmediated” (322). Whether to nature itself, to the compositions of these women, or to the words written by Von Glahn, we must stop and listen. Music and the Skillful Listener invites us all to participate and even delight in the undertaking.