In 1949 Gideon married Brooklyn College assistant professor Frederic Ewen. Both were political leftists. Ewen, who refused to testify before the Rapp-Coudert Committee in 1940, was summoned to testify before the Senate Internal Security Committee chaired by Democratic Senator Pat McCarran in 1952. He retired to avoid testifying. Miriam Gideon was investigated by the FBI, and in 1954 and 1955 she resigned from her music teaching posts at City College and Brooklyn College.[2]
Gideon composed a lot of vocal music, setting texts by Francis Thompson, Christian Morgenstern, Anne Bradstreet, Norman Rosten, Serafin, Joaquín Quintero and others.[1]
Selected compositions include Lyric Piece for Strings (1942), Mixco (1957), Adon Olom, Fortunato, Sabbath Morning Service, Friday Evening Service, and Of Shadows Numberless (1966).
Gideon's 1958 opera Fortunato, edited by Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, was published as part of the Recent Researches in American Music series by A-R Editions in 2013. Jensen-Moulton has published extensively on Gideon, including a number of essays available online, including "Setting an 'Unused Poem': Miriam Gideon’s 'Böhmischer Krystall' " for the American Composers Alliance.[3]
The Miriam Gideon Prizeedit
The International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) offers the Miriam Gideon Prize annually, sponsored by composer Patsy Rogers,[4] for female undergraduate and graduate students who are members of IAWM. Applicants must be 50 years of age or over, and submit an original unpublished musical score for voice and piano or voice and small chamber ensemble.[5]
^ abcdHisama, Ellie M. (2001). Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon, pp. 6–7. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64030-X.
^Robert Adlington, ed., Red Strains: Music and Communism Outside the Communist Bloc after 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2013), [page needed], ISBN 9780197265390
^Jensen-Moulton, Stephanie (2012). "Setting an "Unused Poem": Miriam Gideon's "Böhmischer Krystall"". American Composers Alliance. Retrieved July 16, 2019.
^"43rd IAWM Search for New Music Competition". www.newmusicengine.org. Retrieved April 19, 2024.
^Search for New Music by Women Composers: Past Award Recipients, archived from the original on September 20, 2015, retrieved October 14, 2015
^ ab"Miriam Gideon". American Composers Alliance. February 19, 2009. Retrieved March 26, 2018.
Further readingedit
Kielian-Gilbert, Marianne. "Of Poetics and Poeisis", pages 44–67. Discusses Of Shadows Numberless.
Perle, George (1958). "The Music of Miriam Gideon", American Composers Bulletin 7/4, 4.
Shaw, Jennifer (1995). "Moon Tides and male Poets: (En)gendering Identity in Miriam Gideon's Nocturnes, paper presented at the Feminist Theory and Music III conference, University of California at Riverside.