Gender studies in music evokes a quilt crafted by various aesthetic perspectives and methodological approaches, as these three volumes amply demonstrate. Unsung: A History of Women in American Music is an ambitious sampler highlighting the history and current activity of women instrumentalists, composers, teachers, scholars, and patrons in American music. Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective is a multiauthored exploration of how gender constructions affect perceptions of gender in music performance and vice versa, pointing out and filling in gaps in previous ethnomusicological scholarship. Music and Gender is a multiauthored exchange that reflects on gender issues in music, recognizing ever-changing societies and musical practices, and thus scholarly outlooks. Each book includes a discussion of the separate (and at times isolated) spaces in which women compose, perform, and learn music, and each persuasively argues for the inclusion of gender and women's involvement in music in research and pedagogy.

Unsung: A History of Women in American Music addresses a variety of topics, including keyboardists, instrumentalists, orchestras, conductors and ensemble leaders, and music teachers; composers in European and American idioms (including electronic music, film music, multimedia, and performance art); and advocates and patrons of women in American music. The Century edition updates the original 1980 publication, providing new information throughout and new discussions of several prominent composers, child prodigies, and emerging musicians.

Ammer notes that the Century edition omits women singers, as did the previous edition, because “they compete only with other women in their own voice parts, and hence are immune to the gender discrimination faced by women composers, instrumentalists, and conductors” (9); however, Charlotte Church competes with the Three Tenors, and female singers of Lieder with male singers. Unsung contains an impressive number of biographical sketches within a concise narrative that tells how women were marginalized or supported in US music history. Unfortunately, there are no musical examples, which would have enhanced Ammer's description of stylistic and formal features of works by Amy Beach, Ruth Crawford, Dika Newlin, and other composers.

Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective consists of fifteen essays that examine musical performance in Greece, the Balkans, Tunisia, Afghanistan, India, Java, Malaysia, Japan, and Brazil, as well as Jewish communities in Toronto and Brooklyn. Additional essays provide historical information about women writing psalm texts and composing psalmody in the United States during the nineteenth century, women-identified popular music during the 1970s, and women in jazz and blues. The final essay addresses directions for a methodology of studying gender constructions. The book demonstrates how studies of gender construction can be applied not only to musical performance practices in world cultures but to American music as well. It will encourage musicologists to consider methodologies drawn from ethnomusicology; in particular, the chapters on women composers of nineteenth-century psalmody and The Boswell Sisters demonstrate such borrowings.

Music and Gender divides its fourteen essays into four parts: performance and gender representation, biography or identity studies, gendered musical sites in nations that have undergone radical change, and technologies and gender issues in music. In the foreword, Ellen Koskoff identifies three overlapping waves of scholarship in feminist and music studies: “women-centric,” addressing the absence or conspicuous invisibility of women's musical involvement; “gender-centric,” dealing with more wide-ranging questions and issues on gender and music; and an unnamed wave of scholarship that focuses on the deep connections of social and musical structures. Both Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective and Music and Gender usefully explore issues such as whether researchers should record informants or take part in ritual performances. The essays in both volumes vary in quality but provide excellent springboards to discussions about gender and women's involvement in music.