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Lydia Hamessley, associate professor of music at Hamilton College, is co-editor of a new book, Audible Traces: Gender, Identity and Music. The book is a collection for creative artists, scholars and for students of gender and music studies to become acquainted with the many varieties of thinking about the ways in which our own histories can and do affect the ways in which we experience music.

Audible Traces, published by Carciofoli Verlagshaus, is co-edited by Elaine Barkin, professor emerita of the music department at UCLA. The book cover features a quilt designed and made by Hamessley, Gazing to Africa. She also wrote the book's introduction.

The contributors to Audible Traces examine the ways that our self-identity --gender, race, sexuality, sexual orientation, and ethnicity -- intersects with our activities and experiences. In a mosaic of approaches and viewpoints, composers, musicologists, performers, ethnomusicologists, theorists of music and literature suggest and reveal traces of the ways that these complex matrices of identity affect us during the compositional, listening or performing experience.

Among contributors to the book is Peter Rabinowitz, Hamilton College professor of comparative literature, who wrote "Singing for Myself: Carmen and the Rhetoric of Musical Resistance."

Hamessley, who joined the Hamilton College faculty in 1991, teaches music history. She was the program director for "Feminist Theory and Music: Toward a Common Language," a conference held at the University of Minnesota. She has published in Music & Letters, Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, and in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Currently her work focuses on women in bluegrass and old-time music.

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