JANE BOWERS
Professor Emerita of Music History and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Jane Bowers holds degrees from Wellesley College and the University of California at Berkeley. She also studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague, Indiana University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Sarah Lawrence College and taught at the University of North Carolina, Eastman School of Music, Portland State University, and Oregon State University before going to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1981.
Her principal areas of research for over thirty years have been the history of the flute and women in music. Her publications related to the flute include her Ph.D. dissertation The French Flute School from 1700 to 1760 (University of California, Berkeley, 1971); editions of flute music by Michel de la Barre (Paris: Le Pupitre,1978) and Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (Amsterdam: Broekmans & Van Poppel, 1993); a facsimile edition of François Devienne's Nouvelle Méthode Théorique et Pratique pour la Flute with an extensive introduction, annotated catalogue of later editions, and translation (London: Ashgate, 1999); and articles in the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, «Recherches» sur la Musique française classique, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1st and 2nd eds.), Early Music, Concerning the Flute (Amsterdam: Broekmans & Van Poppel, 1984), Performance Practice Review, and Music in Performance and Society: Essays in Honor of Roland Jackson (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1997). Her scholarly work on the flute has been informed by her playing of both the modern and Baroque flutes.
In 2003 she published a review of Ardal Powell's book The Flute in the Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, an expanded version of which appears here: <
http://www.uwm.edu/~jmbowers/powellflute.html>. After attending the Renaissance Flute Days in Basel, Switzerland, in September 2002, she prepared a report on that conference: <http://www.uwm.edu/~jmbowers/renaissanceflute.html>.Her publications on women in music include a pioneering anthology co-edited with Judith Tick, Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986) and articles, reviews, and editions published in the College Music Symposium, Black Music Research Journal, American Music, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, the multi-volume anthology of music Women Composers: Music Through the Ages (New York: G.K. Hall, 1996-), and elsewhere. Her most recent article, "Current Issues in Feminist Musical Scholarship: Representation and Gender Performance, Identity and Subjectivity, and Telling Stories about Women's Musical Lives," appeared in the Journal of the International Alliance of Women and Music in 2002: < http://www.uwm.edu/~jmbowers/feministscholarship.html>. She has also done research on women and music in cross-cultural perspective and on pioneering American women musicologists. She is currently working on a biography and repertory study of Chicago blues singer Estelle ("Mama") Yancey and on an article about Yancey's blues pianist husband, Jimmy Yancey.
Contact Jane Bowers at jmbowers@uwm.edu.