The cultural, social and/or historical interpretation of the biological and physiological category of sex. Nearly every experience of music, including its creation, performance and perception, may incorporate assumptions about gender; and music itself can produce ideologies of gender. Uncovering the workings of gender in even the most ‘absolute’ musical contexts has thus emerged as a basic task of the critical exploration of music.
Gender, like sex, is often taken to be a category ruled by and reducible to a simple binary division, the ‘man’ and ‘woman’ of sex translating into the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ of gender. But recent thinking, supported by the systems of gender used in different times and cultures, has called this foundational dimorphism into question. This suggests, to critics of ideological aspects of contemporary systems of gender, historical and cross-cultural models that undermine the perceived constraints on identity implicit in modern categories of masculine and feminine.
Scholars have also challenged the chain of reasoning that might lead to the supposition that biological categories of sex ‘translate’ into cultural categories of gender. This goes beyond the commonsensical observation that men and women may in equal measure embrace ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ habits. Critics increasingly doubt that the meanings of gender derive from any kind of core premises, claiming instead that gender signifies in culture by means of ‘performative’ (Judith Butler) or ‘representational’ (Teresa de Lauretis) practices that produce gendered identities by means of their persistent repetition. This does not render it any less real or concrete than if the term were grounded in an essential, fixed definition; instead, a performative or representational model draws attention to gender as a learnt phenomenon. This model begins to account for why concepts of gender alter over time and take on different shapes in diverse cultural contexts.
Gender is a relational phenomenon. For any historical moment, the terms within a system of gender are measured against one another in various, sometimes contradictory ways, allowing the analysis of both individual and larger cultural patterns of validation, marginalization and rejection. Certain trends recur, in particular the repeated devaluation, across a wide range of time and societies, of cultural productions and utterances understood to be ‘feminine’. Although this has normally led to the devaluation of the work of women, it would be an oversimplification to collapse ‘feminine’ into the category of ‘woman’, for men too have had their expressions labelled ‘feminine’. Indeed, from as far back as the time of Plato and Aristotle, the entire category of ‘music’, gauged against such domains as science and the military, has commonly been viewed as a feminine realm of human activity. Critics, particularly feminist critics, have studied the hierarchical implications of gender, not only to expose accounts of exclusion on a gendered basis but also to discover where individuals have escaped the control of the dominant, usually patriarchal tradition.
Exploring concerns related to gender permits fresh critical perspectives on music, ones that complement traditional formal, source-critical, historical and biographical approaches, even as they may partake of and even reinforce these traditional modes of enquiry. Early investigation into the effects of gender in music resulted mostly from the efforts of feminist scholars engaged in the study of the lives and works of marginalized women composers from past eras. Uncovering forgotten biographical narratives and compelling compositions have led critics to reflect on the societal constraints that originally obscured these particular composers and their works. From such reflections followed inquiries into the gendered nature of musical education, the various obstacles, including parental, institutional and financial, that until well into the 20th century have hindered the access of women to the kinds of educational resources routinely granted men and into the roles of gender in both the constitution of core musical repertories and in the conceptions of musical talent and creativity.
What has more substantively transformed thinking about music are studies in which the sounds themselves – considered both from the perspectives of the composer who creates them and the listener or performer who interprets them – have come under scrutiny from the standpoint of gender. Most such inquiries broach the topic of gender through some kind of semantic content attached to or construed in the musical work. The words of texted works provide the most obvious source because they may introduce ideas about gender that the critic or historian may ‘read back’ into the music. Not surprisingly, then, most critical enquiry into gender in music focusses on texted repertories, especially opera and song from the 17th century to the present, with a smaller but important corpus of work on earlier texted repertories. A signal achievement of gender criticism in music is the demonstration that the music of such works as Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben or Bizet's Carmen, both as crafted by their composers and sung and played by their performers, contributes with complexity and force to the signification of gender in culture writ large.
For instrumental music, the search for semantic content can be more difficult. Many critics turn to passages where commentators have invoked gendered language of some kind, and then extrapolate these gendered terms on to an analysis of the formal and technical structure of particular works. For example, several theorists, from the 19th century onwards, have described the relationship between first and second subject material in sonata forms in terms that invoke gender (A.B. Marx and Vincent d'Indy portrayed a contrast of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ thematic character; Schoenberg construed the tonic key of the first theme as a ‘patriarchal ruler’). Judging such formulations to reflect generally upon beliefs held during the eras from which they emerged, critics have used them to inform otherwise traditional formal analyses that then reveal dialectics of gender at work in particular symphonic movement by such composers as Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. When such approaches take care to ground the extrapolation of gender on to the formal constructs in solid networks of historical context, they can shed significant light on the way that ‘pure’ sound can become gendered. The danger remains, however, that filtering gender through the formalistic vocabularies of modern musical analysis could perpetuate anachronistic interpretations for eras in which concerns with form remained secondary to other kinds of musical engagement.
Recognizing this risk, some critics prefer to seek gendered meanings in instrumental music by plumbing musical categories that in the past held a broader currency in society at large. Important insights have followed from investigating such notions as ‘character’ (the later Enlightenment notion that music could encompass human characteristics) and genre (when properly construed as a communicative rather than classificatory phenomenon), musical categories defined by a convergence of musical and social thought. The study of genre, a notion with broad chronological relevance, can be particularly profitable to students of gender. Evidence of its value has begun to emerge from research on instrumental music from the first half of the 19th century. Learning, for example, that the audience for the nocturne was understood to be primarily female may help explain the kinds of decision composers made when writing such works: when Chopin chose to include sharply contrasting, agitated middle sections in some of his nocturnes, he may have wished to distance the genre from the exclusively feminine sphere. It may also help account for listeners' reactions when hearing nocturnes: its construal as ‘feminine’ contributed to the aesthetic devaluation of the genre in the 19th century. Similar kinds of evidence help identify a range of possible associations with gender in this period. Hence the battle piece has been upheld as an epitome of ‘masculine’ music, the symphony as an amalgamation of feminine and masculine, and ‘fairy music’ as an evocation of gender ambiguity.
The idea that discourse about music might contain clues about gendered meanings also resonates for present-day musical cultures. Celebrations of and conflicts about gender permeate all manner of musics, from the popular (Madonna) to the symphonic (the reluctance of some orchestras to admit women members); scholarship on these contemporary composers, performers and institutions tends to follow the parameters outlined above for music and musicians of the past. Investigations that interrogate the gendered natures of some of the scholarly disciplines devoted to music offer a somewhat different view of contemporary engagements with gender and music. The study of music theory, for example, has been criticized for the ‘masculine’ orientation of its scholarly discourse, the tendency to prefer a scientific tone of objectivity over one that explores the passionately experiential nature of music. Conversely, and with a less confrontational goal, ethnomusicologists have been likened to feminine midwives, figures who bring traditions and beliefs from the periphery of awareness to the centre of attention. While both kinds of study derive to some extent from the demographics of the respective professions (more men than women are music theorists, more women than men are ethnomusicologists), both properly separate the purported gendering of discourse from the sexes of actual writers. In effect, such investigations return to a basic set of concerns: how music and discourse on music signify gender, even when the ostensible subject may cloak its relationship to the topic.
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JEFFREY KALLBERG