Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester, 17-20 June 1993
a report by J. Michele Edwards
as published in the ILWC Journal, October 1993, pp. 36-39.
Recently in her syndicated column, Ellen Goodman discussed the importance of "seconds," drawing specifically on the significance of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's confirmation to the Supreme Court: the second woman. Goodman notes the fame and adulation often accorded those women who are the first in their field or first to accomplish a particular task. She goes on with a musical image, stating "that the second woman plays a much more important role than that of second fiddle. Firsts may make one giant step . . . [b]ut it's the second who takes the next, maybe most serious stride. It's the second who begins to turn the extraordinary into the ordinary. . . [and moves] away from symbolism."1 Similarly musicians have often given prominence and acclaim to firsts, whether for premiere performances, the first to use a particular compositional technique, the earliest example of a form, or the first to win a prestigious prize.
Perhaps the occurrence of Feminist Theory and Music II: A Continuing Dialogue is an appropriate event to stimulate our re-evaluation and recognition of the significance of "seconds." The conference, held 17-20 June 1993 at the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester, was an outgrowth and continuation of the conference held two years ago in Minneapolis. The meeting confirmed the impact of feminist scholarship and cultural studies across the subdisciplines of music and demonstrated the breadth of involvement by people within our discipline.
Gretchen Wheelock and Ellen Koskoff organized an impressive three and a half day conference for the 235 registrants. Professor Wheelock and the members of the Program Committee (Jane Bowers, Philip Brett, Jeffrey Kallberg, Ruth Solie, and Elizabeth Wood) received 150 proposals enabling them to put together a strong program of 78 papers/presentations, 58 of which were by women and 10 from countries outside of the U.S. (Canada, Germany, Israel, and the Netherlands). Although academic paper sessions predominated, other formats included lecture recitals, study/discussion sessions, and two formal concerts.
Among my strongest impressions at the conference was that of scope. Presenters included people of various ages and locations in their careers, from graduate students of various ages to junior faculty and senior scholars. The conference drew participants from musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, performance, music education, and composition as well as other disciplines, especially literature. The array of topics extended from 13th-century music to recent video and film works, and from canonical repertory to country and popular musics. Male sexuality, especially that of gay males, as well as female sexuality (lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual) was addressed in several presentations.2
"Feminist Queries about Theory and Analysis," the single plenary session, reassembled panelists from the 1992 annual meeting of the Society of Music Theory. Fred Everett Maus, in "Masculine Discourse in Music Theory,""theorized that mainstream music theory emphasizes (heterosexual) male discourse, referred to as "Schenker and Sets," as a way of countering the feminizing or passive role assigned to listeners. For North American theorists, still predominantly male, the formalist approach which does not acknowledge the role of the listener in analysis is a way to preserve masculinity. In "A Woman's (Theoretical) Work," Marion A. Guck also dealt with her own effort to integrate feminist theory with her experience as a listener. She noted that descriptive analysis using metaphorical language is often placed in opposition to technical analysis. Grounding her work in the writings of Donna Haraway and Lorraine Code, Guck exposed the importance of theorists' unacknowledged agendas in the work of those claiming an objective or scientific approach (e.g., Forte and Babbitt).3 In her own work she has recognized that analytical and theoretical approaches are not in opposition and has sought to integrate both elements. Marianne Kielian-Gilbert in a highly dense theoretical paper entitled "Of Poetics and Poiesis, Pleasure and Politics-Music Theory and Modes of the Feminine" discussed the implications of various conflicting and overlapping constructions of "feminine" and gave particular attention to "strategies of analysis in relation to subject position." In her paper gender was viewed, not as a category, but as performative.
Given music theorists' slow involvement in feminist theory and cultural studies, it was not surprising that two of the plenary panelists were musicologists: Susan McClary and Suzanne G. Cusick, both of whose work has blurred the boundaries of musical subdisciplines, integrating concepts and strategies from various fields with traditional musicological approaches. McClary, in "Paradigm Dissonances: Music Theory, Cultural Studies, Feminist Criticism," identified a central contention between music theory and feminist activities: that music theory has tried to explain how music works in "purely musical" terms disregarding subjectivity. This has led both sides to claim a lack of rigor in the work of the other group and has limited the insights musical analysis can provide. Citing Bizet's Carmen as both a cultural and musical document, McClary noted that the score includes few new harmonic directions and is easy to analyze in terms of technical harmonic material so that music theory has given it minimal attention. However, the destabilizing modulations of Don José deserve analysis as they were crucial in the opera's ability to give voice to issues of class, race, and gender which were emerging at that time. During the nineteenth century, much was written about sexuality and desire as articulated in Carmen. Theorists and musicologists in the twentieth century have generally been unwilling to deal with these issues and thus have not addressed how music participates in social formation. She concluded on an encouraging note by pointing toward the benefits of more inclusive analysis which integrates technical information with cultural analysis. The session closed with Cusick's "Feminist Theory, Music Theory and the Mind/Body Problem," an engaging paper addressing a fundamental question of Western philosophy and an issue which is heavily gendered. For Cusick the body is central to the intersection of gender and music; and following Judith Butler, she understands gender as performative rather than created through representation. She moved away from a mind-mind conception of music, in which notes structured by the mind of a composer are received by other minds, to look for ways in which the physical act of performance contributes to musical meanings. Examples were drawn from Fanny Hensel's piano trio and a Bach organ chorale prelude. As always, her chain of questions and theorizing was creative and very difficult to summarize.
A deepening familiarity with feminist literature in many fields was evident in the range of approaches utilized and the extent to which feminist theory and musical material were integrated by many presenters. Despite this variety, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble stood out in frequency of citation and as the source of a new direction in feminist work.4 Butler abandons the distinction between sex (biological) and gender (a social construction) to view identity as performative: we are female or male by virtue of what we do. This book has received very favorable reviews and is clearly essential reading for feminist thinkers. Psychoanalysis and feminist reinterpretations based on work by Elizabeth Grosz and Teresa de Lauretis provided the framework for Joke Dame's "The Female Voice as Fetish: Occurrences in the Practice of Psychoanalysis and Music."5 Dame rejected Alvin Suslick's analysis of the female voice as phallus and his diagnosis of the woman as suffering from a masculinity complex. She demonstrated that this actress/patient "is able to deploy her own voice as a fetish and thereby to experience not only a form of castration anxiety, but also and in particular of power and jouissance." Bringing this theoretical frame to musical experience, Dame went on to ask: "can the pleasurable aspect of 'the voice as a fetish' be detected in the way in which listeners experience the (female) singing subject as an object in vocal music?" and then ,via their writings, examined Paul Robinson and Catherine Clément as listeners. In "Opera's Lost and Obliterated Voices," Mary Ann Smart (a winner of the AMS 50 Fellowship Award for 1993-94) linked biographical work of Carolyn Heilbrun and feminist theory in a study of Rosine Stoltz, a famous soprano at the Paris Opéra and contemporary with Maria Malibran. Among the issues Smart addressed were the merging of both Malibran's and Stoltz's lives with opera plots and the way Stoltz re-constructed her life through fabricated autobiography.
Often building on the work of Catherine Clément or Susan McClary,6 opera continues to be a major area for feminist examination as shown in the previous two papers mentioned. Other interesting presentations on opera discussed repertoire from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Mary Hunter's "Rousseau, The Countess, and the Notion of Separate Spheres," offered a very clear, comparative account of Julie D'Etange (from Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise) and the Countess (from Da Ponte/Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro). Noting the surface contrasts between these two women, Hunter nevertheless demonstrated how each forecasts the changing social ideology and emergence of the Enlightenment doctrine of separate spheres. She concluded that "in continuing and elaborating the already well-established operatic convention of making persecuted female figures both aesthetically and morally appealing, Mozart and Da Ponte participated in the process by which the idealized figures of art trickle down to become the mental and emotional stuff of life."
"Affecti molesti and the Dilemma of Pleasurable Pain" by Eva Rieger, Germany's leading feminist musicologist, also recounted changes in the depiction of women during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Until about 1770, musical affects for women and men had been similar. The shifts in European gender roles in the late eighteenth century brought a division of musical affects for women and men, articulated by such traits as melody, key and instrumentation. Affecti jucundi were mostly reserved for male characters; affecti molesti, primarily for females. Love and sadness were closely related in "good" (e.g., dependent, chaste, passive, faithful) women. The musical treatment of "wicked" women (e.g., Queen of the Night) was similar to that formerly used for strong women characters. Rieger presented a broad array of musical examples from operas of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in support of her thesis. Judy Lochhead's paper, "Hearing Lulu: Feminist and Listener-Based Analytic Strategies," again highlighted the importance of a situated listener as gender interpretations of musical codes are developed.
In one variant on the tradition paper session, three New York scholars-Joseph N. Straus, Carol Matthews Whiteman, and Adrienne Fried Block-had developed a productive working group to examine possible gender differences in the musical settings by women and men. Each analyst worked with a pair of art songs with identical love texts by composers working contemporaneously: Clara Schumann/Franz Schubert, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel/Franz Schubert, and Amy Cheney Beach/Arthur Foote. Detailed technical analysis supported each scholar's interpretation of how the music was used to structure gender in distinctive ways and to create different narratives. The collaborative nature of their project was enhanced by each scholar's participation in performance of the examples. I hope they can continue their work together and that other scholars will consider this model, as it seems to hold much potential.
Marcia Citron and Sanna Pederson tackled central issues which structure our discipline and whose rethinking is essential for women or other "outsiders." Citron spoke on the importance of feminist enterprises for musical historiography in "The Canon in Practice: A Place for Women and Their Music," an effective synthesis from the final chapter of her new book, Gender and the Musical Canon.7 She considered curricular implications of the inclusion of women, outlining the advantages of mainstreaming and separatism, as well as addressing ways of interweaving these two approaches. She discussed broader consequences of moving outside the canon to include the study of women in music, e.g., how this leads to a re-evaluation of periodicity in music history. Pederson, in "Absolute Music as Pure Pleasure," delighted the audience with a deft presentation which included references to a Harlequin romance and a CD of classical excerpts arranged to create a steamy plot line as well as a foundation in sophisticated theoretical concepts. By examining unstated assumptions and by situating the idea of absolute music in the culture of nineteenth-century Germany, she unmasked the claim of intrinsic quality for this repertoire. Musicologists and critics who have asserted the purity of absolute music have denounced sensual pleasure associated with musics marked as popular, foreign, or feminine; they have found enjoyment only in their disgust for enjoyment.
Two biographical presentations are linked through the attention given to self-definition. Judith Tick's paper "The Straddler: Writing the Life of Ruth Crawford Seeger" (ably read by Adrienne Fried Block) presented an intriguing sample from Tick's ongoing study of this important composer and musician. Tick examined Crawford's struggle to harmonize life and work-a central issue in Crawford's life and one which is all too familiar for many women musicians today-and how this conflict is revealed in her music. Beginning with an early diary entry in which Crawford chose the "straddler" as a metaphor for her artistic life, Tick charted how Crawford accepted the gender ideology of her generation pitting love and work as incompatible and how she embodied this in her Sonata for Violin and Piano (1926). At the resumption of her composing career with Suite for Wind Quintet (1952), Crawford reinvented herself as a composer through an unconscious reuse of material from the sonata. With attention to both race and gender Susan Cook, in "Singing in the Margins," explored Billie Holiday's efforts to find legitimacy as a black woman through her role as "Lady Day."
Among the most creative and well-received papers was Catherine Parsons Smith's "John Cage at Mary Carr Moore's: Theorizing a Feminist Avant-Garde."8 From the barest accounts of two visits by Cage at Moore's Manuscript Club in 1933, Smith developed an engaging feminist reading of the events which led to larger considerations of the patrius sermo ("formal public symbolic male language") and materna lingua ("literal, mother-daughter language") as found in compositions of these and other composers earlier in this century. Smith's paper illustrated an effective meshing of traditional musicology, i.e., digging out the facts, with sophisticated analytical/interpretative theories drawn from Margaret Homans' rereading of the generative myth from The Eumenides and from an article by Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace.9 Smith concluded that these writers' ideas "have powerful implications for understanding the work of both John Cage, who was led to suppress the 'feminine' influences in his artistic acculturation, and Mary Carr Moore, who was forced to address her gendered exclusion from the symbolic language head on in order to compose at all." Smith found that Moore and other early modernist women composers, like their counterparts in literary and visual fields, had to subvert male patriarchal language in order to legitimate their own voices. Moore and others of her generation did this by adapting the passé language of impressionist and post-romantic male composers.
Two papers on seventeenth-century topics demonstrated the significance of examining musical material through a female lens whether dealing with a large repertoire or a single song. In "Women Performers in the Court of Louis XIV: 1643-1715," Barbara Coeyman, who is working with a large database of works and performers, was particularly illuminating in her examination of how King Louis's sexual life was "performed," literally danced, at Court. Through his dancing with courtiers during early manhood, Louis marked his supreme power: militarily over the men and sexually over the women. Both his Queen and mistresses were on stage with him. In the 1680s Louis had become a father figure and no longer participated as a dancer, but watched his three daughters in major productions. In "'Lost Honor and Torn Veils': A Musical Depiction of Rape in Seventeenth-Century Dramatic Song," Lydia Hamessley analyzed the two narratives present in the cantata Accenti queruli by Giovanni Felice Sances: the man's story of unrequited love and the woman's report of rape. The musical treatment of the latter erases her version and subverts the reality of the rape. As her text says "no," the cheerful music lures listeners to disregard the violence against her.
The interaction of music and visuals clearly offers opportunities for gender interpretation whether in iconography or recent music videos. Leslie Dunn's paper focused on the gender implications in representations of women with lutes in early modern England. After a general discussion of Prince's identity, Robert Walser compared the music video "Kiss" by Prince, which decodes/recodes desire, with the subsequent reinscription of cultural norms in the version of this by Tom Jones with The Art of Noise.
In "Lesbian Desire in the Music of Desert Hearts," Martha Mockus offered an alternative reading of the film and gave a good performance-complete with costume. By centering on the sound track and noting its inversions of visual-textual images, Mockus reads this film-perhaps the first American lesbian film with mainstream distribution-as a more positive representation of lesbians than such critics as Teresa de Lauretis and Judith Roof. Mockus provided an effective summary of her paper in the abstract: The country & western songs sung by Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells convey Vivian as femme, while the up-tempo rock tunes of Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley mark Cay as butch. Second, the major heterosexual events in the film's narrative are sabotaged by the musical sound track. Finally, the images and sounds of transportation-trains, cars, and an airplane-are linked to the sexual passion between Cay and Vivian; these sounds represent the ecstasy that cannot be rendered visible through imagery alone.
Other presenters in this session, entitled "Butch-Femmes and femmes fatales: Knowing the Score," were Mary Anne Long, who discussed the soundtrack of The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich, and Carol Vernallis, who examined the interaction of music and image in Madonna's Cherish.10 Music by k.d. lang and the group Two Nice Girls, unlikely topics for scholarly consideration only a few years ago, were the subjects of three papers. Zoe Sherinian examined lang's video compilation, Harvest of Seven Years, while Lori Burns focused on lang's feminist revision of Joanie Sommers' 1962 hit single "Johnny Get Angry," which problematized the issue of violence against women. Using detailed analysis of the musical events (including a Schenker graph) as well as the textual and visual elements, Burn concluded that "lang is saying that the woman's desire for a femininity that is defined by male domination can lead to abuse. By realizing the potential results of this 'femininity,' she reminds women that it is dangerous to accept the role of being dominated." In a much lighter vein, Robin Armstrong analyzed the humorous country western parody by Two Nice Girls entitled "I Spent my Last $10.00 (On Birth Control & Beer)."
In addition to four lecture recitals and a presentation by Janika Vandervelde about her compositions, two formal concerts were included. On the first evening, Empire Chamber Concert Ensemble under the direction of Timothy Koch presented "Choral Music of American Women." The seventeen members of this independent ensemble are primarily graduate students attending Eastman. After intermission the singers were joined by woodwinds in selections from Alice Parker's There and Back Again and Libby Larsen's attractive and energetic setting of pioneer texts, The Settling Years. Other composers included on their diverse program were Williametta Spencer, Louise Talma, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and Judith Lang Zaimont. The chamber music concert on Saturday evening offered outstanding performances by three members of the Eastman faculty plus two additional professional artists. Catherine Tait and David Liptak presented violin sonatas by Ruth Crawford and Ursula Mamlok; the latter was commissioned by Ms. Tait in 1989.11 Margaret Tait joined Catherine Tait in Sofia Gubaidulina's Rejoice for violin and cello, whose movement titles refer to works by the eighteenth-century Ukrainian philosopher and religious thinker Grigory Skovoroda. The program concluded with works by Amy Beach and Rebecca Clarke for cello and piano in fine performances by Pamela Frame and Robert Weirich.
Following the "serious stride" of this second conference, preparations are already underway for round three in the summer of 1995. Most likely, this will be held in Claremont, CA; for further information contact Jennifer Rycegna (Religion Dept., Pomona College) or Philip Brett (Music Dept., University of California, Riverside).
For those interested, abstract booklets from the 1993 conference are available ($5.00). Send check (payable to Eastman School of Music) to: Amy Bray, Dept. of Musicology, Eastman School of Music, 26 Gibbs, Rochester NY 14604.
1. "Second Woman Justice No Second Fiddle," Star Tribune, 6 August 1993, p. 22A.
2. For related essays, several of which were presented at the Minneapolis conference and other recent professional meetings, see Queering the Pitch. The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, eds. Philip Brett, Gary Thomas, and Elizabeth Wood (New York: Routledge, forthcoming October 1993); Musicology and Difference. Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
3. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-99, rev. and repr. in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 183-201.
4. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
5. For a longer version of this paper, see The Point of Theory, ed. Inge Boes and Mieke Bal (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 1994). Elizabeth Grosz, "Lesbian Fetishism," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (1991): 39-54; Teresa de Lauretis, "Perverse Desire: The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian," Australian Feminist Studies 13 (1991): 15-26.
6. Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Susan McClary, Feminine Endings. Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
7. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); see also Joseph N. Straus, ed., Music by Women for Study and Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993) for a music theory anthology which moves beyond the canon.
8. See also Catherine Parsons Smith, "'A Distinguishing Virility': On Feminism and Modernism in American Concert Music," in Cecilia Reclaimed: Exploring Gender and Music, eds. Susan Cook and Judith Tsou (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); idem and Cynthia Richardson, Mary Carr Moore, American Composer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986).
9. Margaret Homan, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, "Fleurs du mal or second-hand roses?: Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, and the 'Originality of the Avant-Garde,'" Feminist Review 40 (1992): 6-30.
10. A longer version of the Vernallis paper is forthcoming in Popular Music.
11. These two sonatas will soon be released on a Gasparo CD of violin and piano works by American women composers, recorded by Catherine Tait, violin, and Barry Snyder, piano.
J. Michele Edwards, professor of music at Macalester College, St. Paul, is a musicologist and conductor. Her research focus is women in music and feminist musical scholarship with recent work about women and the American orchestra, Helen May Butler and her Ladies Military Band, and Japanese women composers. At the Rochester conference she read a paper entitled "Women's Sonic Strategies: senza sordini." She contributed two chapters (ancient/medieval era and North America since 1920) to Women and Music: A History, edited by Karin Pendle, and has over twenty articles in the forthcoming New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers.