“When a woman speaks the truth about her body”: Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf, and the challenges of lesbian auto/biography

As professionals who encountered first-hand the invidious barriers within patriarchal society that hindered career women, Ethel Smyth and Virginia Woolf both used their published writings to pursue lifelong crusades against the under-representation of females in their respective disciplines. This article compares the different strategies by which the two artists strove to tell the truth about their experiences as women, and considers the corresponding implications for Smyth’s musical output. While the egotistical Smyth candidly recounted stories relating to herself, Woolf excised overt authorial presence from her texts, instead invoking fictitious, protean narrators to reflect the collective unconsciousness of Womanhood. Woolf’s encouragement and criticism of Smyth’s literary endeavours are examined in the context of her biographical theories and feminist critiques, and of the lesbian proclivities of both women. Their published writings and personal documents suggest that Smyth actively appealed to the very autobiographical strategies that Woolf persistently counselled her to subvert, in order to compete with the (heterosexual) patriarchy on equal terms. She apparently held this option to be the only available one through which to insinuate herself within the canonical traditions specific to music, as distinct from those of literature

Play Selection in the Department of Speech and Drama at Pan American University in the 1970s and 1980s: Twenty Years of Excluding Latino Plays

The theatre program at the University of Texas-Pan American has a long history of excluding Latino plays from its production seasons, even though the university is located near the Mexican border and the majority of its students are Mexican American. The regional population served by this publicly-funded school, which has been state-funded since 1965, is predominantly Mexican American and Spanish speaking. Furthermore, as reflected in its name, the school’s mission has included for more than half a century a commitment to advance the “blending” of the North American and Latin American cultures. This article reviews the school’s production record over a twenty-year period, from 1970 to 1990, when more than one hundred and fifty full-length plays were produced by its theatre program, not one of which was about Mexican Americans or Mexico. Selected background information is provided to help illuminate the historical context in which the school’s theatre faculty decided year after year to exclude Latino plays from their theatre on the Mexican border

Biography and the New Musicology

Traditional musicology has long resisted biographical interpretations in favor of formalistic approaches. While the so-called “New Musicology” has more recently redressed this imbalance by encouraging the contextualization of music, including critical studies that take account of issues of biography in relation to musical works, the ideologies of musical biography themselves have remained largely unexplored. In consequence, the modern discipline may have unwittingly absorbed wholesale many of the tendencies that accumulated within the genre in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The many fascinating scholarly studies of musical biography to have recently appeared offer little assistance in this respect, for they primarily scrutinize the assumptions that historically underpinned the genre without giving due consideration to their lingering existence within current musicology. This essay surveys of some of the most fascinating biographical readings that have appeared in recent years in order to demonstrate that debates such as those over Schubert’s sexuality and Shostakovich’s relationship with the Soviet regime, as well as various other hermeneutical studies conducted in relation to aspects of composers’ lives, have a wider grounding within musical biography’s historical preoccupations than has hitherto been recognized. I show the continuing presence in modern musicology of the phenomenon by which attempts to redress a past biographical misconception merely re-inscribe a new one in place of the old, and argue that the current climate of epistemic inclusivity is such that consideration of the extent to which a given study may be a reflection of its author is now more important than ever. By way of conclusion, I advocate the future cultivation of a more self-reflexive approach in biographical scholarship within musicology, one that knowingly takes into account the relationship between different composer biographies rather than merely focusing on that of a single figure in isolation

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A Review: Some biological effects of high LET radiations

There are qualitative and quantitative differences in the biological damage observed after exposure to high LET radiation as compared to that caused by low LET radiations. This review is concerned with these differences, which are ultimately reflected at the biochemical, cellular and even whole animal levels. In general, high LET radiations seem to produce biochemical damage which is more severe and possibly less repairable. Experimental data for those effects are presented in terms of biochemical RBE's with consideration of both early and late manifestations. An LET independent process by which significant biochemical damage may result from protons, neutrons and negative pion mesons is discussed