By Jane Bowers – IAWM Journal (2002)
The article was originally presented by Jane Bowers at the conference held to celebrate the opening of the Sophie Drinker Institute in Bremen, Germany, May 31-June 1, 2002. The research institute is devoted to women’s and gender studies in music and is named for the American scholar, Sophie Drinker, the first person to write a comprehensive book about women and music. Web page: www.sophie- drinker-institute.de
In the past several decades, musical scholarship has undergone a rapid series of changes. Not only has it broadened under the influence of feminism to include substantial studies about women musicians, their work, and their roles in music history, it has also related the information these studies provide to broader social and cultural patterns. As Ruth Solie points out in her excellent article, “Feminism” in the new New Grove Dictionary of Music,1 a strong interdisciplinary influence from feminist theory and method also helped launch a broader-based critique of the social formation of musical practice in general as well as, reciprocally, music’s role in the process of cultural reproduction (664). Then came the influence of a cluster of new modes of analysis loosely referred to as postmodernism, which has put new emphasis on the representation of gender, sex and sexuality in music, the performance of sex and gender through musical performance, the role of music in the formation of individual identity and subjectivity, music as bodily practice, the situated nature of musical practice and interpretation, and so forth. Not only is the nature of feminist scholarship changing, but many scholars have chosen to work in “gender studies,” which, to use Solie’s words, “proposes to apply its insights even-handedly to both male and female experience” (666).
The three areas I will be focusing on are (1) representation and gender performance, (2) identity and subjectivity, and (3) telling stories about women’s musical lives. These are the areas that captured my attention most vividly when I began to review recent (principally 1995 to present) English-language studies in the field. Although work in these three areas is by no means easy to describe, I hope that the examples I provide will convey something of the nature of current work as well as suggest useful sources for further investigation.
Not surprisingly, opera is a genre that has attracted much recent attention among scholars interested in exploring questions of representation and gender performance. An important impetus to the emergence of such work in North America was the publication of an English translation of Catherine Clément’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women in 1988.2 Since then, a number of important articles, single- and co-authored books, and essay collections exploring gender in opera have been published.
Although the 1995 anthology En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, edited by Corinne Blackmer and Patricia Smith,3 may already be familiar to many of you, I wish to make a few points that illustrate some of the new trends in opera scholarship that text exemplifies. First, Blackmer and Smith observe that, in general, opera “permits an unparalleled range of opportunities for women to subvert and, often, overturn traditional gender roles” (4-5). They then outline what they call a short “queer” history of opera, which they claim begins with Hildegard of Bingen’s musical drama Ordo Virtutum of 1158, which “ends on a triumphant note of utopian female homosocial solidarity that deliberately invokes Eden” (7). They next consider Baroque opera, in which some roles might be played by either men or women, with a wide range of characters available that female singers might play. Their “queer” history of opera continues through the works of Rossini and Bellini with their travesti roles and passionate love duets for two female voices, or duets between female romantic friends. Although opera increasingly centered on nationalism and the “undoing of women” as the 19th century progressed, the fin-de-siècle aesthetic movement brought a swing back in the opposite direction, allowing “the operatic representation of a wide variety of ‘sex variant’ women openly at odds with the social and religious norms of patriarchal culture” (14). Twentieth-century opera brought new developments such as Ethel Smyth’s presumed encoding of lesbian desires in her operas, and Alban Berg’s representation of an overtly lesbian character, the Countess Geschwitz, in Lulu.
The subsequent articles in En travesti address not only trouser roles and other transgressive roles women played, but also audience reception, performers’ biographies, and confessional elements such as Terry Castle’s “coming out” as an infatuated fan of mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender. In her treatment of Ethel Smyth operas, Elizabeth Wood elaborates on her idea of “Sapphonics,” which both describes “a range of erotic and emotional relationships among women who sing and women who listen”4 and refers to a particular kind of voice that crosses register boundaries and thus challenges polarities of both gender and sexuality. Perhaps the most startling viewpoint advanced in En travesti is Judith Peraino’s claim that [Purcell’s] “Dido and Aeneas should be heralded as a lesbian opera classic” (128); Peraino argues that the ambiguities and flaws in the opera “provide access for present-day lesbian audiences by inviting cathartic identification with either Dido or the Sorceress” (100).
Another recent anthology, The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, edited by Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin (1997),5 also explores a wide variety of themes pertaining to sex and gender in opera. One such theme is that of constructing and feminizing the Oriental “Other” in works as diverse as Kapsberger’s Apotheosis or Consecration of Saints Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier (explored by Victor Coelho) and Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (explored by Ralph Locke).6 Other themes include female homosociality or “romantic friendship” in Bellini’s Norma (Patricia Smith), the opera box in 19th-century fiction (Ruth Solie), and the fascination with castrati in London (Todd Gilman). In the last of these essays, Gilman demonstrates how the castrati were satirized by writers of the day as “effeminate,” while the Italian operas they sang in were characterized not only as “effeminate” but also as “senseless”: both constituted a threat to the myth of British identity that valorized manliness.
Finally, another important collection of essays, Mary Ann Smart’s Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, appeared in 2000.7 In her introduction to Siren Songs, Smart presents an overview of what she calls the “first wave” of feminist opera criticism that responded to Catherine Clément. According to Smart,
If Clément’s view of Carmen could be telegraphically summed up as “Carmen dies,” [Susan] McClary’s extensive discussion of the opera focuses on the seductive rhetoric of Carmen’s songs and the way her death is necessitated by the workings of operatic convention. And while the musical specificity of McClary’s interpretations has been both liberating and instructive, more and more (feminist) listeners now seem to prefer telling stories with the moral: “Carmen sings”...(6).
While the various approaches exemplified by the “first wave” of feminist opera criticism differ from each other, Smart suggests that they “share a tendency to pose their questions in terms of a basic opposition between male and female.” She then proposes how a reading by Roland Barthes of Balzac’s story Sarrasine “maps out an attractive theoretical ground by showing how exploding the fundamental opposition male/female can lead to the collapse of other epistemological categories.” Furthermore, Barthes provides models for writing about the body on stage (9), and Wayne Koestenbaum and Terry Castle have led the way in introducing such “extratextual” material as the experience of the fan, cults of diva worship, and the role of opera in the formation of identity, as well as integrating the body into opera studies (10).8
Thus, Smart lays the groundwork for her discussion of the new pathways the essays in Siren Songs take. For example, Smart’s own essay about Verdi’s recurring themes centers on themes that are physically embodied or “miming.” In I due Foscari, for instance, a clash between a character’s identifying orchestral motive and her vocal style implies a “splitting-off of voice from body, or perhaps a displacement of the character’s ‘true’ voice onto the mimetic orchestra motive,” thus giving more power to the body than to the voice (144-45). In an essay focusing on Strauss’s Salome, Linda and Michael Hutcheon argue that Salome is not objectified by the gaze when she dances, but instead is empowered by it. Thus, they explore the possibility that, in the sounding world of opera, to be looked at is not always to be objectified (14). Three short essays by Wye Allenbrook, Mary Hunter, and Gretchen Wheelock on staging Mozart’s operas offer illustrations of how performance can alter the gendered meanings of even the most classic operatic texts. The authors ask whether producers and singers should “do something” about the discomfort specific Mozart female arias may induce, and if so, what. Although they do not explicitly say so, the authors “consider representation an integral component of performance practice” (50).
Smart concludes that “feminist concern with representation and visual objectification has thrown new and urgent emphasis onto the whole visual dimension of opera and onto the staging of the body. Once seen as an art form that excelled at perpetrating—and aestheticizing—crimes against women, opera has begun to reveal itself on the contrary as embodied, a site for multiple interventions and theoretical experiment” (16).
Like opera, popular music is a genre that has recently attracted the attention of a number of scholars interested in exploring questions of representation and gender performance in music. Since such questions are often intertwined with questions of identity and subjectivity in popular music, I will touch on all these subjects together as they are addressed in popular music studies.
By way of background, let me point to a review essay by Judith Peraino in the Fall 2001 Journal of the American Musicological Society9 that situates many recent women-in-rock histories and biographies within third wave feminism. Peraino points out that these books often see rock as first and foremost a masculinist discourse that women may occasionally inflect, and that their “discussion of rock music as gender discourse is mostly limited to experiences of sexism” (706). This serves as a reminder that an important focus of “second wave” writings about female musicians was women’s “experiences of sexism.” In this period of postmodernism and third-wave feminism, however, some scholars are turning their primary attention to other matters.
Although I will be focusing primarily on studies pertaining to North American and British popular music, I first want to mention three important studies that deal with popular music from other national or regional traditions—Frances Aparicio’s Listening to Salsa;10 William Washabaugh’s The Passion of Music and Dance (on Andalusian flamenco, Argentine tango, and Greek rebetika);11 and Jane Sugarman’s Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings.12 All offer important insights into music, the body, and the engendering of social identities through music performance and listening.
British popular music scholars, in particular, have produced interesting recent work on popular music and gender, frequently from a sociological perspective. Thus, I turn first to Sheila Whiteley’s 1997 anthology, Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender,13 which poses a broad range of questions about both masculinities and femininities in popular music, rock music culture, and music video. In terms of female performers, the topics addressed range from the forgotten women of 1950s rockabilly to the 1990s “riot grrrls.” I found Keith Negus’s piece, “Sinéad O’Connor—Musical Mother,” particularly interesting. Negus’s aim is to consider the artist as an “author” who actively participates in her own visual and audio self-representation; he also demonstrates how her “identity” is produced, performed, and communicated not only through musical texts but also through interviews, personal appearances, videos, and all public communicative actions that contribute to how we understand and interpret a star’s music. Negus states that his point is not about authenticity, or whether O’Connor is singing from the soul or telling literal truth; rather, “it is that this is how she is articulating her identity and performance in order to direct audiences to particular interpretations of her songs” (182).
A second book by Sheila Whiteley, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity (2000),14 is also of considerable interest. One of the premises of this book is that as we move into a new millennium, we are still trying to come to terms with our own identities, and thus we look to artists who can provide specific insights into subjective experience (1). The record buying habits of young women have helped “create a separate and powerful arena for women as active makers of meaning, where the significance of the chosen music lies in its assertion of difference and subversion, so relating to a distinctive musical identity” (6).
Whiteley begins her survey of successful women performers with the counter culture and explosion of girl groups and solo singers such as Aretha Franklin in the 1960s, musical representations of women in the work of groups like the Beatles, and the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement. She then concentrates on just one or two women performers in each chapter. A chapter on Janis Joplin discusses her image and the ways in which she challenged traditional representations of femininity by taking men on at their own game. A chapter on Joni Mitchell examines the way in which Mitchell’s songs offered a model of female experience in coping with the realities of working in a male-dominated industry, confronting the problems of having a child and giving her up to adoption, and exploring relationships while pursuing her own creative pathway (78).
There are also chapters on the feminization of rock in the 1970s, and artists of the 1980s such as Madonna and k.d. lang who challenged traditional representations of femininity, especially in their exploration of identity through masquerade and drag. Two trends in the 1990s conclude the book: the first relating to the singer-songwriter tradition with its emphasis on authenticity, truthfulness to personal experience, and community, and the second being “concerned with artifice and...largely governed by the imperatives of commercial success” (196), which Whiteley explores through groups such as the Spice Girls. Along with extensive social and cultural analyses and discussions of feminist theory, Whiteley presents musicological descriptions of the various artists’ music, performance styles, and lyrics. Thus, Women and Popular Music can be read for analyses of how “music itself” (dare I say it?) contributes to and authenticates the images and identities artists project in their songs.
The most recent contribution to popular music I want to mention is Lori Burns’s and Mélisse Lafrance’s Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity & Popular Music (2002).15 Focusing on four female musicians, or “disruptive divas,” from the 1990s (Tori Amos, Me’Shell Ndegéocello, Courtney Love, and P. J. Harvey), whom the authors consider to have disturbed the boundaries of “acceptable” female musicianship in both sociocultural and musical ways, Lafrance brings what she describes as a cultural studies or critical approach to these artists’ work, drawing on a wide range of feminist theoretical concepts, while Burns adopts a musicological and (music) theoretical approach, emphasizing the structural content of the music. The authors argue that although “mass media regimes continue to read even the most disruptive musical works in ways that marginalize, disarm, and/or effect their subversive potential” (14), their articulation of resistance politics is not completely negated, and it is possible for audiences to produce modified or even oppositional readings of their own.
Disruptive Divas is a densely argued book. One of the key theoretical positions on which Lafrance draws to explain her conceptualization of identity is a group of ideas systematized by philosopher Judith Butler in “Gendering the Body: Beauvoir’s Philosophical Contribution” (1989) and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).16 Since Butler’s ideas have been widely influential in feminist music scholarship in recent years, I want to provide a specific example of how they have been put to use by other scholars.
In Suzanne Cusick’s article “On Musical Performances of Gender and Sex,” which appeared in Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamessley’s Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music (1999),17 Cusick states that she is especially concerned with Butler’s most talked about claim: that gender and sex consist of “performances.” By that, she understands that “both the social roles cultures assign to people based on their possible reproductive roles and the fixation on reproductive organs (or on X and Y chromosomes) as significant elements of bodies are social constructions—figments of the human imagination, however much they have become norms to which we are compelled to adhere” (26). Since both gender and sex result from human actions or “performances,” we might choose to perform the actions that constitute sex and gender in our culture, or choose not to perform them, or choose to perform some but not others, etc. As we grow up, we try out gender and sex roles or parts of roles, and the trying-on of roles and changing of performative bits of them is lifelong, indeed compulsory.
For Cusick, the most promising part of Butler’s notions for thinking about musical performance is that “these performances of a gendered and sexed self are partly, though certainly not entirely, performances of and through the body....For musical performance, too, is partly (but not entirely) the culturally intelligible performance of bodies. Much musical ‘composition’ can be described as the translation of ideas so they can be performed through bodies” (27).
Cusick goes on to compare the vocal performances of the lead male singer in the alternative rock band Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder, with those of the female group Indigo Girls, concluding that these late 20th-century performances demonstrate “a crucial feature of Butler’s theory about gender as performative: that the field of possible individual performances is extremely broad, allowing for a tremendous number of variations that are intelligible, permissible, and capable of being subversive only insofar as they cite or allude to prevailing cultural norms” (38).
Cusick then turns to 17th-century Italian singer and composer Francesca Caccini, questioning how such thinking might illuminate Caccini’s music. Addressing questions about what singing might have meant to early 17th-century people with their beliefs about the body, gender, and sex as articulated in medical and midwifery texts (40), Cusick suggests that to think of Francesca Caccini’s surviving music as texts that may prescribe certain bodily acts that she might have understood as performances of gender and/or sex—this is to think of her music from the experience that seems, with historical hindsight, to have most differentiated her from her contemporaries, the experience of embodiment as a “woman” (41).
Cusick’s meticulous investigation of these questions continues in another article, “Performing/Composing/Woman: Francesca Caccini Meets Judith Butler,” which appeared in the Australian Music and Feminisms (1999).18 Through arguments that are too intricate to flesh out in detail here, Cusick concludes that, first, Caccini’s singing “caused her to have ‘performed,’ for most of her working life, a pattern of subjectivity that was understood to model that of a Medici sovereign” (89). Second, that Caccini inscribed “patterns of subjectivity” into the spiritual songs in her Primo Libro (1618), which might teach those who sang them “a pattern of ‘coming to voice’ that would neatly evade the opprobrium that conventionally greeted women who sought access to public utterance in early modern Italy” (89). Third, that Caccini set the text Dove io credea, which expresses the need for a woman who has demonstrated both sexual and intellectual agency to be chastened, to a romanesca bass. But due to Caccini’s free treatment of the romanesca in “pattern-disobeying phrases,” the repetitious musical device intended to contain the singer’s subjectivity becomes “a tool with which to produce her own alternative, equally logical discursive space” (95). Thus, a woman performing the song would have learned “how to perform a subject position we might call ‘feminist,’ and a subject position we might call ‘composing woman’” (95).
It is important to note that one of Cusick’s chief aims in undertaking such analytic work is to redirect some of the current Butler-inspired attention to performance and gender back to women composers and their aesthetically important works. She hopes to illustrate that Butler’s ideas about subjectivity as performance can illuminate ways in which a woman composer’s subjectivity might be formed, and thus “the way women composers might create musical texts that could constitute something like études of feminist theory” (88).
Suzanne Cusick’s work on Francesca Caccini leads smoothly to other feminist critical studies of women’s art music. First, let me point to the work of Australian scholar Sally Macarthur, who has grappled heroically with questions of gender performance and identity in her book Feminist Aesthetics in Music (2002).19 Macarthur’s chief aim, so she immediately announces, is to celebrate l'écriture feminine, to celebrate women’s music, and to “demonstrate that women’s music, which has a long history of being neglected, is deserving of the same kind of lavish attention that has been showered on men’s” (3). But she is also concerned with questions of difference. In her first chapter, Macarthur tries to define what is meant by feminist aesthetics. Basically, it is the “idea that artistic forms can accommodate a woman’s perspective” or that “women’s music adopts aesthetic strategies different from those in men’s music” (12-13). Macarthur emphasizes the deliberately ambiguous nature of feminist aesthetics and debates whether they are embodied or disembodied—embodied aesthetics having to do with interpreting women’s art in terms of archetypal feminine symbols and forms or invoking feminine metaphors associated with the female body (18). She also addresses the idea of a feminine language as proposed by French feminists, and reviews postmodernist theories of readership that permit multiple reading positions of a text. Later in the book, she draws on Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performance, arguing “that it is possible to posit notions of feminist aesthetics, for whatever they are, they are never static or immutable” (124).
The bulk of Macarthur’s study, however, comprises a discussion and analysis of compositions by six composers—Alma Schindler-Mahler, Rebecca Clarke, Elisabeth Lutyens, Anne Boyd, Moya Henderson, and Elena Kats-Chernin. Although strongly influenced by Susan McClary’s work, Macarthur solidly grounds her work in a wide array of critical theories, and she proposes a different method for each of her analyses. Not surprisingly, Macarthur discovers qualities having to do with the sex of the composer in each work, and she seems to consider each composition “as a performance of the composer’s gender” (124-25).
In another innovative work, Gendering Musical Modernism (2001),20 American music theorist Ellie Hisama frames her discussion of the relationship of gender and musical composition rather differently than Macarthur, but deals with some of the same questions. Focusing exclusively on compositions created within a modernist, post-tonal musical idiom, Hisama analyzes music by American composers Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. Rather than arguing that “specific compositions share some sort of commonality because they were written by women who were working within a specific idiom and historical moment” (2), Hisama’s aim is to relate the music to the gender identity and political views of each individual composer.
In brief, Hisama’s method centers on relating each composition to information about the composer’s life during the time she composed each work, if such information is available, or if biographical information is scant, to speculate about possible relationships between the narrative of a work and the composer’s identity as constructed in her writings about music and in reflections by her contemporaries (8). Much like Macarthur, Hisama does not attempt to identify common structural elements or strategies in a diverse group of compositions by different women; rather, she provides close readings of each individual work. Her formalist analysis of each work can be daunting, for Hisama makes use of musical contour theory, an analytical tool measuring the “degree of twist,” the notion of “contour deviance,” and analysis of the relationship of a pianist’s hands to each other, in connection with which there are pages of charts and graphs. By elucidating the work she has chosen for analysis, Hisama hopes to demonstrate that “the aesthetic and techniques of musical modernism are not inherently misogynist,” as Catherine Smith has argued, but that “modernism indeed provides a space for forms of expression by women.”
Perhaps a good transition between the subject of music, identity, and subjectivity, and that of telling stories about women’s musical lives (which is my last topic) is a recent article by Finnish enthnomusicologist Pirkko Moisala entitled “Musical Gender in Performance.”21 Grounding her discussion in gender-based field studies she carried out in two different cultures, Nepal and Finland, and providing numerous examples of the musical lives of people in both cultures, Moisala posits that “at the level of individual experience, there are as many genders as there are human beings. On the micro level of experiences, gender is as idiosyncratic as a thumb print” (3).
One of Moisala’s most compelling points, it seems to me, is that music provides a unique site for the performance and negotiation of gender, and it allows, or may even require, different gender roles than do other aspects of culture (3). Dividing her discussion of musical gender into five sections, Moisala first discusses music as one of the basic modeling systems in which selfhood is constituted—that is, music is one of the first elements which an individual perceives and in which he or she “begins to pattern the gendered ‘world and reality’ of his or her surroundings” (4). Not only does music function as a “teacher” of the gender system in childhood, however; its teaching function continues throughout one’s life because musical traditions actively engender those individuals who participate in them (4). The other main topics addressed by Moisala are music as bodily art, music and gender as subjects of social control, the “performativity of music performance,” and the ability of music to alter consciousness and state of mind, thus giving it a special power to transgress gender boundaries.
In conclusion, Moisala proposes an analytic concept of “musical gender” that argues for music as a specific site for gender performance. But musical gender is not “a priori a gender category. It is not something that is; instead, it is always performed and emergent” (15). And as a gendered music self-image, “musical gender is constructed, negotiated, and performed in all the musical situations one takes part in during the course of one’s life....Experiences gathered and accumulated in any and all possible settings...form a continuous process, in which the musical subject becomes constructed” (16).
Most of us are probably more familiar with biographies and historical accounts about women in Western musical traditions than in other musical traditions around the world. Yet, in recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of ethnomusicological studies focusing on the musical experience of individuals, and I should like to begin with some of these.
In the introductory essay to a recent special issue of The World of Music devoted to “Ethnomusicology and the Individual,” Jonathan Stock discusses three trends within the discipline that have led to a turn toward biography within ethnomusicology.22 Although I will not specifically describe those trends here, I do want to mention that in comparing the writing of biography to other kinds of ethnographic research and writing, Stock states that while biography relies more heavily on historical data not observed first-hand by the ethnomusicologist, the long-standing ethnomusicological emphasis on shared behavior, which acknowledges the highly social nature of most music making, is in little danger of being abandoned by a movement toward biography (16).
A magnificent example of a full-scale ethnomusicological biography is Virginia Danielson’s The Voice of Egypt,23 which focuses on Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, the most famous singer of the 20th-century Arab world. While Danielson indeed focuses on Umm Kulthum’s own agency in the contexts in which she lived—that is, the ways in which she acted on behalf of herself—the analysis of shared experience also holds a key place. Danielson writes, “One wants to account for the impact of exceptional performers on the cultures of their societies without losing track of them as participants affected by their societies. One wants to grasp not only the life behind the myth..., but the myth at the heart of the life. Examining these myths offers a way of understanding what is shared between stars and their audiences” (15).
The World of Music issue devoted to “Ethnomusicology and the Individual” also includes five articles about individual musicians in various cultures; I will specifically mention only those about women here. One centers on Begum Akhtar, an outstanding North Indian ghazal singer (Regula Qureshi),24 an appropriate focus because individual musicians with a high degree of training are characteristic of classical Indian music. In this article Qureshi confesses that she was only led to “discover women as agents of twentieth-century music” after beginning to question what she calls her “long-time complicity in the patriarchy of Indian music”—that is, she had earlier agreed to ignore gender in her working relationship with a musical establishment made up of male musicians and their affluent patrons, also male. For Qureshi, to recognize Begum Akhtar as an individual woman musician meant shifting her priority from collective processes of music making within the male establishment to individual agency positioned within the gendered margin of that establishment (100-101). The other article focusing on women in “Ethnomusicology and the Individual” is also concerned with North Indian musicians; Amelia Maciszewski’s “Stories About Selves: Selected North Indian Women’s Musical (Auto)biographies,” focuses on issues faced by six professional women musicians, centering on their own narratives to do so.25
Another recent collection containing biographical articles about women musicians is Music and Gender, edited by Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond (2000).26 In Part 2 of Music and Gender, entitled “Telling Lives,” the editors introduce the subject thus:
Musicology has prioritized “telling” lives—the lives, that is, of influential creative artists...to an extent that is arguably unparalleled in most other scholarly domains. Furthermore, the peopling of European music histories with “great” artists in the “art music” domain and the relative anonymity of other musicians and other musical practices was a foundational but unexamined assumption underlying the formation of historical musicology. More recently, however, we have become attuned both to the perspectives and factors that ascribe historical significance to lives and to the critical problems of “telling”—representing and interpreting—the enormous complexities of human musical experience (95).
In the articles that follow, Beverley Diamond addresses the issue of essentialized identities in the musical life stories of female musicians from Prince Edward Island, one of Canada’s Maritime Provinces; Pirkko Moisala writes about gender negotiations of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, particularly in relation to her press reception over almost 20 years; I discuss challenges in writing the biography of a black woman blues singer, Estelle “Mama” Yancey, which included coming to terms with different forms of African-American biography that may reflect established storytelling traditions or construct multiple contradictory selves in accordance with the expectations of interviewers or social contexts; and Margaret Myers writes about European ladies’ orchestras in the period 1870-1950 from the perspective of oral historical data.27
Karin van Nieuwkerk’s A Trade Like Any Other: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (1995)28 tells fascinating stories about Egyptian women’s musical lives, based on both historical sources dating back to the 18th century and fieldwork van Nieuwkerk conducted in 1988-90. As Scott Marcus remarks in his review of the book in the March 1999 Notes of the Music Library Association (687-88), “Van Nieuwkerk’s investigation concerns the paradox that, although Egyptians are generally very fond of singing and dancing and regularly include professional entertainers in the most important occasions in people’s lives, the female entertainment profession is widely considered to be disrespectable, shameful, and dishonorable.” While working at weddings brings no moral stigma to men—it is a trade like any other—for women, entertainment is a dishonorable profession. Attempting to uncover the causes for the difference, van Nieuwkerk investigates gender constructs within both religious and daily life discourses, including present-day entertainers’ own stories, which illustrate how these women speak about their respectable marriages, working to meet the needs of their families, and so forth, to deflect as much dishonor as possible.
These are but a handful of life story studies about women musicians originating in the field of ethnomusicology that have been published within the last few years.
In the field of musicology, feminist biographies and historical studies about groups of women musicians have become ever more frequent in recent years. Among the many topics authors have been investigating in both articles and books are women and the music profession in mid 19th-century England (Deborah Rohr), American women as classical instrumentalists and conductors (Beth Macleod), “girl singers” with swing and jazz bands (Betty Bennett), and sociological studies of British women rock musicians based on interviews (Mavis Bayton).29 For earlier periods in Europe, there are studies of women trouvères and their songs (co-written by four authors), Isabella d’Este as a musician (William Prizer), nuns and their music in early modern Milan (Robert Kendrick), professional women musicians in early 18th-century Württemberg (Samantha Owens),30 and individual artists such as Barbara Strozzi (Beth Glixon) and the late 19th-century African-American singer known as the “Black Patti.”31
There have also been some substantial brief biographies of women composers published in anthologies of women composers’ works, especially the volumes of Women Composers: Music Through the Ages, edited by Martha Furman Schleifer and Sylvia Glickman, which is scheduled to reach 12 volumes in all.32
I now turn to several recent biographies of particular importance, in order to provide a better idea about the various approaches authors are currently taking. Of the full-blown biographies of composers, Judith Tick’s Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music (1997) stands out.33 As a composer who appeared to be on the cutting edge of modernism in such works as her String Quartet (1932), but who shortly thereafter appeared more or less to have given up her compositional work for marriage, motherhood, and folk song transcription, Crawford Seeger has been of interest to feminist scholars for some time. Did Crawford Seeger’s focus on her family and her involvement in folk music represent the abandonment of her true vocation as a composer? Is the life of Ruth Crawford Seeger ultimately to be seen as a tragic story of a promise unkept, of potential unfulfilled? These are questions Larry Starr poses in his review of Tick’s biography in the Summer 1999 Journal of the American Musicological Society (385). Starr later points out that “rather than dwelling repeatedly on what Crawford Seeger did not create during the years 1933-51”—1951 being the year of her untimely death to intestinal cancer—“[Tick] offers instead an intriguing and utterly convincing hypothesis: that American folk music, rather than being a diversion from composition or weak substitute for it, was in fact a new and totally involving musical outlet for Crawford Seeger the composer, one that engaged her aesthetic concerns and her commitment to modernism completely, and one that resulted in deeply and significantly creative work” (387). Drawing on a multitude of sources including the papers of the Seeger estate in which many of Crawford Seeger’s own personal writings reside, privately held materials, and interviews with family members, friends, and colleagues, Tick leads us to “now fully appreciate the contributions of this outstanding woman in her many complementary roles as composer, arranger, transcriber, teacher, and mother, and look toward a time when it may be easier to view such roles as mutually reinforcing” (388).
Another American composer who has been reconsidered in a finely researched and thoughtful biography by Adrienne Fried Block (1998) is Amy Beach.34 While Block traces Beach’s entire life and examines her work in detail, of special interest is her examination of the influences of both Beach’s mother, who was responsible for much of her daughter’s early musical education, and Beach’s surgeon husband, Dr. H. H. A. Beach, whom Amy married when she was 18, on her development as a musician and composer. Because neither her mother nor her husband provided any opportunity for her to study composition formally, Beach, having been advised to encourage her to study the great masters on her own, did precisely that and pursued an intensive course of self-study as a young woman. The 1890s saw premieres of the larger works she was beginning to write such as her Mass in E-flat, her “Gaelic” Symphony (given its first performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, no less), and her violin sonata; and Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, as she was then known, became a hero for women across the country. Indeed, she would remain a role model for women for the rest of her life, even though she counselled the readers of Etude magazine that “a woman must be a woman first, then a musician.” Block then traces Beach’s work and personal life after both her mother and husband died, beginning with her first trip to Europe in 1911, which she extended for three years but returned home when war threatened; follows her through nearly 30 more years of compositional work; and concludes with her death in 1944. Although Block demonstrates that Beach attempted to incorporate modernist elements into her work, her evaluation of Beach’s identity as both a composer and a person is best illustrated by the title of her book, Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian.
Other notable biographies about American musicians in the last few years include Linda Dahl’s Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams,35 a jazz pianist, arranger, and composer who has been described as “one of jazz’s greatest underappreciated figures.” Dahl covers Williams’ life from the time she began performing publicly at the age of seven; through her teen-age years in big bands, vaudeville, and clubs, where she first began to learn arranging; her early championship of and association with bop musicians; her pioneering writing of jazz arrangements for symphony orchestra; her humanitarian care for dozens of down-and-out musicians; and finally, her work as a jazz educator in her late years. Both the difficulties she faced as a woman in a heavily male-dominated field and the psychological pressures she endured are given sensitive treatment by Dahl.
Then there is Cyrilla Barr’s biography of an important American patron of music, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge,36 who, after the death of her husband in 1915, suddenly found that she had complete financial and personal independence and soon joined a select group of women using their wealth to commission art. Among her major endeavors were the creation of an artists’ colony in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, the founding of the Berkshire Prize in chamber music composition, and her subsidization of the construction of an auditorium for the performance of chamber music in the Library of Congress. She was also a tireless commissioner of new music, including Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. One of the contradictions that Barr’s biography of Coolidge has brought out, however, is that while Coolidge embraced the work of numerous male modernists, she did not support the work of contemporary women composers, even though some of them were her friends. As Carol Oja has pointed out in her review of Barr’s book,37 Coolidge’s attitude towards women composers was consonant with that of other women patrons of her day, most of whom focused on male artists. “Each of these women found a productive role in a culture that was largely male; they seized their positions individually rather than viewing them as a means to champion the cause of women as a whole” (326).
Another example of the contradictions that seem to have abounded in the lives and work of other women patrons is provided by Linda Whitesitt, who points out that the work of thousands of women dedicated to establishing music clubs, community concert series, and symphony orchestras in the United States “simultaneously perpetuated a cultural hierarchy that excluded the women themselves from active participation” (81). Whitesitt’s essay is one of ten included in Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860, edited by Ralph Locke and Cyrilla Barr (1997).38 An important conclusion that emerges from the volume, according Karin Pendle’s review of the book in Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, is that “most of their patronage had nothing to do with ‘putting on the dog’ and everything to do with a strong belief in the aesthetics of uplift, the moral imperative that saw the finest music as important in building character and in raising listeners above the hurly-burly to a calmer, purer, more enlightened state” (vol. 4, p. 82). Hence, women sponsored not just salons but other venues as well, such as in-school concerts for the children of new immigrants.
Similar themes, interestingly enough, are traced in Paula Gillett’s Musical Women in England, 1870-1914 (2000),39 which, in part, elucidates the link between music and philanthropy—for example, how music was thought to further the moral improvement of London’s disadvantaged; how middle-class women used music as an effective and fashionable means of fund-raising for worthy causes; and how women played major roles in organizations that took music to the people. And because upper-class women could dedicate themselves to moral improvement through musical performance, they created public platforms for their own performances that they otherwise could never have enjoyed, since the “morally improving” situation militated against the possibility of social disgrace.40 Social disgrace is a major recurrent theme frequently noted in a variety of studies about women musicians across many geographical borders and time periods.
Ellen Koskoff, in her foreword to Music and Gender, provides a useful summary of what she calls the three waves, or overlapping historical periods, of feminist music studies that have emerged in recent years, each marked by different research and analytical paradigms. Koskoff calls the first wave “women-centric scholarship,” which I probably do not need to explain. She sees the second wave as “gender-centric scholarship,” which began to refashion the question of women’s music, framing it within the broader context of gender relations. These studies “examined various societies’ gender arrangements and gender styles, seeing music creation and performance as contexts for reinforcing, changing, or protesting gender relations.” Then the third, most current wave of literature began, heavily influenced by postmodern scholarship in feminist theory, gay and lesbian studies, cultural and performance studies, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, and these studies have sought to understand the links between social and musical structures and the ways in which each can be seen as embedded within the other (x).
I have touched on musicological work that belongs to all three waves. While new approaches have been developed, earlier ones continue to reveal ideas that help us understand what music is, how it works in the world, how it contributes to our gender concepts, how we feel about it, and so forth. All types of approaches have contributed to new understandings about women and music, music and gender, representation and gender performance, construction of identities and subjectivity through music, and musicians’ life stories— understandings that were perhaps not even, or just barely, dreamed about 30 years ago. Such change is both intoxicating and challenging!
1. Ruth A. Solie, “Feminism,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. (Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 2001), 8:664-67.
2. Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
3. Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia Juliana Smith, eds., En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
4. The quotation comes from a prior article by Elizabeth Wood, which introduced the concept in her article “Sapphonics” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 27.
5. Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin, The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
6. Locke also treats musical images that Western composers used to evoke the Middle East in “Cutthroats and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and Timeless Sands: Musical Images of the Middle East,” 19th Century Music 22 (1998), 20-53. Among other things, Locke discusses a number of songs written primarily for amateur performers that are filled with Oriental musical colors, or a kind of “sweet-sad sensuousness” that evokes women’s isolation in the harem. According to Locke, “these songs obey the trend toward an emphasis on a mysterious female sensuality as the chief signifier of the imagined Middle East” (36).
7. Mary Ann Smart, ed., Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
8. The Koestenbaum and Castle sources to which Smart refers are Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (New York: Vintage, 1993); and Terry Castle, “In Praise of Brigette Fassbaender: Reflections on Diva Worship,” in Blackmer and Smith, En Travesti, 20-58.
9. Judith Peraino, “Girls with Guitars and Other Strange Stories,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54 (2001), 692-709.
10. Frances R. Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1998).
11. William Washabaugh, ed., The Passion of Music and Dance: Body, Gender and Sexuality (Oxford: Berg, 1998).
12. Jane Sugarman, Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
13. Sheila Whiteley, ed., Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (London: Routledge, 1997).
14. Sheila Whiteley, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2000).
15. Lori Burns and Mélisse Lafrance, Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity & Popular Music (New York: Routledge, 2002).
16. Judith Butler, “Gendering the Body: Beauvoir’s Philosophical Contribution,” in Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, eds. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 253-62; and Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
17. Suzanne Cusick, “On Musical Performances of Gender and Sex,” in Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music, eds. Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamessley (Zürich: Carciofoli Verlagshaus, 1999). Audible Traces also contains many other fine studies exhibiting a variety of perspectives on music and gender; for example, Marianne Kielian-Gilbert’s “On Rebecca Clarke’s Sonata for Viola and Piano: Feminine Spaces and Metaphors of Reading,” Su Zheng’s “Redefining Yin and Yang: Transformation of Gender/Sexual Politics in Chinese Music,” and Judy Lochhead’s “Hearing ‘Lulu,’” which accounts for the changing critical reception of Berg’s opera by foregrounding the way in which semiotic codes in music are subject to historical variabilty.
18. Suzanne Cusick, “Performing/Composing/Woman: Francesca Caccini Meets Judith Butler,” in Musics and Feminisms, eds. Sally Macarthur and Cate Poynton (Australian Music Centre, 1999), 87-98.
19. Sally Macarthur, Feminist Aesthetics in Music (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002). [The book is reviewed in this issue of the IAWM Journal.]
20. Ellie M. Hisama, Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
21. Pirkko Moisala, “Musical Gender in Performance,” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 3 (1999), 1-16.
22. Jonathan P. J. Stock, “Toward an Ethnomusicology of the Individual, or Biographical Writing in Ethnomusicology,” The World of Music 43/1 (2001), 5-19.
23. Virginia Danielson, The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
24. Regula Burckhardt Qureshi, “In Search of Begum Akhtar: Patriarchy, Poetry, and Twentieth-Century Indian Music,” The World of Music 43/1 (2001), 97-137.
25. World of Music 43/1, 139-72. Another article by Maciszewski—“Multiple Voices, Multiple Selves: Song Style and North Indian Women’s Identity”—in Asian Music 32 (2001), 1-40, examines the life histories of four other female vocalists.
26. Music and Gender, eds. Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
27. Music and Gender also contains numerous studies that are not principally biographical, including, for example, one on the performative nature of gender identities among the BaAka pygmies in the African rain forest (Michelle Kisliuk), and another on the maintenance and production of gender concepts in the process of everyday music rehearsals in a traditional instrumental musicians’ group in Finland (Helmi Järviluoma), which has relevance for Pirkko Moisala’s concept of the formation of musical gender. The editors and contribuors to the volume also conducted fieldwork on themselves, and in their introduction were thus able to provide a sort of “self-ethnography” that clarifies the subject position of each author vis-à-vis her own work.
28. Karin van Nieuwkerk, A Trade Like Any Other: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
29. Deborah Rohr, “Women and the Music Profession in Victorian England: The Royal Society of Female Musicians, 1839-1866,” Journal of Musicological Research 18 (1999), 307-46; Beth Abelson Macleod, Women Performing Music: The Emergence of American Women as Classical Instrumentalists and Conductors (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2001); Betty Bennett, The Ladies Who Sing with the Band (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000); and Mavis Bayton, Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
30. Songs of the Women Trouvères, ed., trans. and introduced by Eglal Doss-Quinby, Joan Tasker Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer, and Elizabeth Aubrey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); William F. Prizer, “Una ‘Virtù Molto Conveniente a Madonne’: Isabella d’Este as a Musician,” Journal of Musicology 17 (1999), 10-49; Robert L. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Samantha Owens, “Professional Women Musicians in Early Eighteenth-Century Württemberg,” Music & Letters 82 (2001), 32-50.
31. Beth L. Glixon, “New Light on the Life and Career of Barbara Strozzi,” The Musical Quarterly 81 (1997), 311-35; Glixon, “More on the Life and Death of Barbara Strozzi,” The Musical Quarterly 83 (1999), 134-41; and John Graziano, “The Early Life and Career of the ‘Black Patti’: The Odyssey of an African American Singer in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53 (2000), 543-96.
32. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1996-. The volumes are being published in the order of the birthdates of the composers and are further divided by genre.
33. Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
34. Adrienne Fried Block, Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867-1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
35. Linda Dahl, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999). Dahl’s earlier work includes the pioneering Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen, which was published in 1984.
36. Cyrilla Barr, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge: American Patron of Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1998).
37. Carol J. Oja, review of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, in Music & Letters 81 (2000), 324-26.
38. Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860, eds. Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
39. Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870-1914: “Encroaching on All Man’s Privileges” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
40. Nicky Losseff, review of Musical Women in England, in Notes of the Music Library Association 57 (2001), 906.
Jane Bowers is Professor Emerita of Music History and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. As a scholar who has been researching women in music for nearly 30 years, she co-edited with Judith Tick the pioneering anthology of articles Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950 and published articles related to women and music in the multi-volume Women Composers: Music Through the Ages and in a number of professional journals. She is currently completing a biography and repertory study about Chicago blues singer Estelle (“Mama”) Yancey. Her other scholarly interests include the history of the flute and flute playing.