A timeless reality in fairy tales re-imagined

“Realism leaves out so much,” wrote science-fiction author Joanna Russ in 1995, introducing “The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women.” Russ was making the common feminist argument that fantasy and fairy tale express the inexpressible, especially for women, whose realities, Russ wrote, “wouldn’t do.”

Long before the Brothers Grimm scooped them up, stories of monsters and fairies encoded real women’s histories of violence and survival; these have become our Cinderella stories, constantly updated. Women have created fiction, music, fashion, visual art and theater in reference to this folklore. This deep historical investment renders the realm of fairy-tale fantasy essentially feminine; J.R.R. Tolkien notwithstanding, the witch rules the wizard in our hearts.

So it’s no surprise that another bunch of fantasy spinners has emerged in time for winter solstice, this time from the folkish side of pop music. These artists vary widely in sound and style but are linked by the feminine fabulist legacy, using it to express radical individualism or to preserve the communal voice it also conveys.

Joanna Newsom, who plays tonight at the Malibu Performing Arts Center and Thursday at the El Rey Theatre, is the trend’s most radical individualist. Her vision exceeds that of any pop artist this year except, perhaps, hip-hop auteur Timbaland. Newsom, 24, doesn’t work in her generation’s palette of beats and samples; she plays and writes on the harp, and has ties to Devendra Banhart’s new folk sphere.

Her widely extolled new album, “Ys,” employs “folk” not in the amateur, strummy sense of the word, but as Charles Ives and Newsom’s favorite composer, Ruth Crawford Seeger, meant it -- its five long songs present a composer’s vision of how popular themes work within a modernist framework. There’s some Stephen Foster in this music, and Sondheim too, along with the polyrhythms Newsom probably learned while studying music at Mills College under the influence of that institution’s groundbreaking composition professor Pauline Oliveros.

If not for Newsom’s gamine charm and the insatiable blogosphere, she would have surely been banished to the outlands where such “classical” genre-benders as Iva Bittova and Phil Kline reside. Instead, after reworking the lieder in the short, sparse, poetically metered songs of 2004’s “The Milk-Eyed Mender,” Newsom did what it takes to make avant-garde music pop: She went for name recognition.

With orch-pop legend Van Dyke Parks lending a friendly tone on the arrangements, and post-punk production studs Steve Albini and Jim O’Rourke turning knobs to create an intimate effect, “Ys” cleanses the art song of its academicism and widens its emotional appeal. Newsom’s whooping, swooping, crone-baby voice, off-putting to some, helps her cause -- seemingly directed by emotion and luck but actually the product of very careful phrasing and tonality, it’s the looking-glass inversion of a classically trained soprano.

Newsom’s sprawling, imagistically rich lyrics embed motifs from the folk tale lexicon just as her music reworks the history of art song. “Ys” contains only one straightforward fable -- “Monkey & Bear,” in which a she-bear escapes her monkey-master by shedding skin and bone.

Elsewhere, Newsom elevates obsessions that could come off as stereotypically girlish -- romantic love, the tension between freedom and domesticity, the continuum of childbirth and death -- by culling from centuries of spun story. The astronomer sister of “Emily,” the sucked-on cherry stone in “Only Skin,” the spectral soul mate of “Cosmia”: These references hint at countless half-remembered stories but retell none.

She has the uncanny ability to make what’s common seem like hers alone. That gift, wrapped up in her quirkiness but not determined by it, lets her stand apart on shared ground.

LOREENA McKennitt is not interested in solely owning motifs. At 49, with seven albums under her silken belt, this Canadian multi-instrumentalist (harpist, for one) is still pursuing the consummate New Age goal of a musical fusion that unites entire cultures. “An Ancient Muse,” her first studio album in nearly a decade -- since the death of her fiance in a 1998 boating accident -- carries the weight of personal melancholy but contains that emotion within a larger narrative of wandering and waiting.

McKennitt’s sound is as smooth and groove-oriented as Newsom’s is jaunty and rhythmically perverse. Her bell-pure soprano arches like that of her countrywoman Celine Dion, but she’s less prone to pathos. Based in Celtic music, her approach incorporates Arabic, Jewish and even Mongolian influences.

Her storytelling crosses borders too, staying grounded in material known to literary cosmopolitans: the history of the Silk Road; the Homeric saga of brave Penelope, awaiting Ulysses; Sir Walter Scott’s tragic poem “The English Ladye and the Knight.” “An Ancient Muse” presents a universalist ideal that clashes with the willful eccentricity of the new folk but is, in fact, more traditionally Romantic. Feminist fairy tale lovers might view McKennitt as a Marion Zimmer Bradley to Newsom’s Angela Carter, rewriting “The Mists of Avalon” while her younger peer delves into “The Bloody Chamber.”

Newsom’s elevation of the self and McKennitt’s self-restraint employ the same archetypes to work their magic. Other emerging lady spinners fall into either camp. On Newsom’s side, there’s her protege Alela Diane (appearing Dec. 8 at the Echo), whose forceful, jaunty debut, “The Pirate’s Gospel,” lends a more American twang to tales of childhood and mothering, and White Magic, the Brooklyn-based band led by keyboardist and singer Mira Billotte, which uses drone and rockish noise to turn mystically tinged lyrics incantatory on its debut album, “Dat Rosa Mel Apibus.”

McKennitt would certainly prefer Espers, from Philadelphia, whose stately psychedelic arrangements present traditionalist folk as a chamber of gorgeous ghosts. On “Espers II,” released last summer, main vocalist Meg Baird sounds like what the Pre-Raphaelites’ paintings of dead and mad princesses look like: beautiful, cold, eternal.

Isobel Campbell, once of Belle and Sebastian, gets similarly elegiac on her traditional-folk debut, “Milk White Sheets,” on V2 Records. Campbell’s tribute to folk mother figures Shirley Collins and Jean Ritchie is self-consciously minimalist, blending traditional songs and originals within stark settings that value the loneliness involved in telling secrets as much as the substance of the tales told. Campbell’s approach shows an admirable exactitude but feels slightly enervated. A dash of Newsom’s hyperbole might have helped.

FINALLY, there’s Karen Dalton. A favorite of Bob Dylan on the Greenwich Village circuit, this enigmatic singer, who died homeless in 1993, recorded her second and most commercial album, “In My Own Time,” in 1970-71 at Woodstock’s Bearsville studios, in the orbit of the Band.

The voice that dominates “In My Own Time” -- just released on Light in the Attic Records with liner notes by Banhart, Lenny Kaye and Nick Cave -- will startle newcomers: It is even more fibrous and strangely bent than Newsom’s. But that voice reveals womanly sorrows as ancient as any witch’s spell.

Dalton wasn’t a writer, and “In My Own Time” veers from soul chestnuts such as “How Sweet It Is” to somber tunes by Fred Neil and the Band’s Richard Manuel. Its two best tracks, though, are traditional. Dalton plays both on banjo, which, in her hands, sounds like the first instrument invented. “Same Old Man” and “Katie Cruel” (the latter also covered with supreme chilliness by White Magic) are tales of dislocation; Dalton turns them into proof of women’s loose footing in a man’s world.

This is the secret that fantasy’s beasts and beauties keep repeating: Humans, not monsters, create the world’s perils. And the tale spinners expose them, even when they can’t escape.

ann.powers@latimes.com