Reclaiming Gender in Modernist Music
Susan Borwick
Gender and the Musical Canon, by Marcia J. Citron. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, (1993) 2000, 307 pp., $17.95 paper.
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, by Susan McClary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (1991) 2002, 240 pp., $18.95 paper.
Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth A. Solie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 355 pp., $40.00 hardcover.
Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, by Susan McClary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 219 pp., $16.95 paper.
Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music, edited by Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994, 241 pp., $16.95 paper.
Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon, by Ellie M. Hisama. Volume 14 of Studies in Music Theory and Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 215 pp., $65.00 hardcover.
Since the late 1970s, American feminist musicians have struggled on several levels with the discipline of music theory, which seeks to describe and explain the inner workings of musical compositions as they cohere into a meaningful whole. First, the formalist and reductionist nature of the music-theory tradition has measured women's compositions against stereotypical norms such as sonata form, particularly during the era of "common practice" or the common era—that is, the time when composers fashioned their works on tonal relationships, between 1700 and the early twentieth century—and characteristically has critiqued women's works to be ill-conceived or lacking rather than innovative or distinctive. 1 Second, the music-theory tradition has established a "great men" pecking order for itself. "The Theorist" has tended to be godlike in his pronouncements: witness Schenker or Adorno or Forte, all of whose authoritative voices resonate dissonantly in feminists' ears. Third, the voices of women in music theory have been pianissimo: fewer women teach or focus their scholarship in the area of theory or theory/composition than in any other subdiscipline of music. [End Page 189]
Twenty-five years ago, feminist music analysts began to explore representational issues in music where they occurred in obvious and revealing places, particularly in opera, in which a singer plays the role of a dramatic character on the stage. The operatic tendency to objectify female characters, who sing a final aria as they take their last breath—no easy task, to be sure!—is so common in nineteenth-century opera that a feminist perspective—generally, retelling operatic storylines from the perspective of the heroines—provided direct correlations with more fully evolved literary and art feminist criticism. 2 Feminist analyses of art-song and other music genres that contain representational texts soon followed. Last to be explored was absolute music, which music theory traditionally regards as involving a purely musical syntax consisting of tonal (key) centers; melodic repetition, similarity, or contrast; development of melodic ideas by means of fragmentation and tonal instability; and, above all, the return of the familiar, whether key or melody or both. Belief in such a "purely musical" syntax has been the lens through which traditional music theorists have examined the musical structures of Joseph Haydn, W.A. Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and those who followed them during the common era. This traditional lens has established the norms against which women's compositions have been measured and critiqued negatively.
During the first half of the 1990s, a feminist perspective that societal, specifically gendered, context informs all music began to challenge the traditional view that syntax is capable of being purely musical. Marcia Citron, Susan McClary, and a few other feminist musicians 3 addressed some of the extra-musical connotations of absolute music of the common era, Citron only tangentially as she identified how feminist strategies meaningfully address the inadequacies of the musical canon, in Gender and the Musical Canon. McClary attacked the absolute music theory tradition at its heart—for example, in feminist critiques of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, and Brahms's Third Symphony, in an essay in Ruth Solie's edition of forward-thinking scholarship, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. McClary discussed major works by male "stars" and found gender-linked explanations for the structural choices they made: frustrated sexual urges in Beethoven that he projected onto the pent-up tensions of the final movement of his last symphony, for instance. That Beethoven's final movement, "Ode to Joy," had recently—at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—come to signify freedom, made McClary's choice all the more contentious and compelling. McClary's approach was provocative, direct, some-would-surely-say masculine, and effective in rousing the entire discipline of music theory. She also won for herself a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995.
In 2000, Susan McClary shared her broader vision of traditional music theory, in Conventional Wisdom: The Context of Musical Form. Based on [End Page 190] her Bloch Lectures at the University of California at Berkeley, McClary's essays danced among outwardly disparate topics—consistently her strength—from blues to tonal forms, from Renaissance to postmodern compositional and attitudinal penchants, from feminist to formalist analytical methods. Several of her observations were not new: for example, that the formalist tendency to construct music on tonal archetypes and to value expanse, power, tension, and release when doing so, was primarily German—more masculine traits—while French and Italian predilections valued melody, ornamentation, beauty, and charm—often associated with the feminine. In Conventional Wisdom, McClary wove an encompassing theoretical hammock that supported a new and feminist-informed theory of musical form, interlaced in weighty discussions of specific musical works.
What About Modernist Music?
Interestingly, neither Citron nor, more significantly, McClary dealt directly with modernism, which began around World War I in a move beyond common practice, often toward post-tonality—that is, music devoid of a "home" tone to which all other tones seek to resolve in hierarchical order. Indeed, McClary walked carefully through discussions of tonal and postmodern conventions, yet ignored the bridge between them that is modernism. Why, one wonders?
One explanation may lie in the publication of two influential collections of gender-related essays in 1993 and 1994. The first, Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship edited by Ruth Solie, offered a notable variety of approaches to gender and sexuality in music, categorized into systems of difference (three essays), cultural contexts of difference (three), interpretive strategies (four), and critical readings of musical works (five), including McClary's probe of Brahms's Third Symphony discussed above. The second, Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music edited by Susan Cook and Judy Tsou, consisted of ten assertively feminist essays that ranged from compensatory (Jane Baldauf-Berdes, "Anna Maria della Pietà: The Woman Musician of Venice Personified") to theoretical (Marcia Citron, "Feminist Approaches to Musicology," which introduced some of the thinking she developed further in Gender and the Musical Canon), from art-music (Adrienne Fried Block, "The Child Is Mother of the Woman: Amy Beach's New England Upbringing") to rap (Venise Berry, "Feminine or Masculine: The Conflicting Nature of Female Images in Rap Music"). Interestingly, each of the collections contained an essay that explored twentieth-century modernist music: Judith Tick's "Charles Ives and Gender Ideology" 4 in the former and Catherine Parsons Smith's "'A Distinguishing Virility': Feminism and Modernism in American Art Music" in the latter. [End Page 191] Both essayists drew similar conclusions that modernist music clashed with a feminist aesthetic: Smith provided evidence that, at the historical moment when the center of the Western art-music world shifted to the United States after World War I, modernism in the hands of many American composers became tied to masculinist intent, in contrast to European Romanticist "effeminacy" (Morris 1993). Judith Tick documented the emotional investment composer Charles Ives, between 1890 and 1920, had in a masculinist ideal for his and all modernist American music. In connecting masculinism with modernism, both Tick and Smith cited Irving Weill, critic for the journal, Modern Music, who wrote in 1929:
One begins to sense a distinctly American quality in some of the American music that has been written recently. One senses in it a distinguishing virility—the virility with which it so constantly seeks to express its ideas and feelings. This characteristic was absent before. The older American music was a labored and generally weary reiteration of thoroughly alien forms and styles.
(7-8)
Smith let the modernist era speak for itself in streams of quotations that included modernist music's chronicler Nicolas Slonimsky, who, for example, once characterized female modernist Marion Bauer's compositions as "crystallized urine" (Cecilia Reclaimed, 98). More recently, Judy Lochhead (1999) analyzed the misogynistic approach that Austrian composer Alban Berg took toward female characters in his highly regarded, though uncompleted, modernist opera Lulu.
Perhaps modernist music, then, was simply too masculinist in intent and result for serious feminist music theorists to seek to describe and explain the inner workings of modernist compositions as they cohere into a meaningful whole.
Enter music theorist and feminist Ellie Hisama's Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon, the fourteenth volume in the prestigious series Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis. An expansion of her 1996 dissertation at the City University of New York, Hisama's book is the first to address the issue of feminism-against-modernism in music-theoretical terms. According to Hisama, "in writing a book on the twentieth-century American women composers Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon, I wanted to develop a branch of music theory that is markedly feminist; this impulse led me to consider elements not typically embedded within the fabric of music analysis" (2000). "Rooted in musical analysis," Hisama's approach circumvents the feminism-modernism debate by postulating that modernist composers Crawford, Bauer, and Gideon imbued at least seven of their compositions with their gendered life experiences (2). In other words, Hisama bridges the gap between feminism and modernist music theory: [End Page 192]
[The fact] that male composers . . . wished to ascribe to modernism stereotypically masculine characteristics is not sufficient reason to claim that modernist music actually is a male preserve. [Furthermore, music is an art] distinct from literature or [visual] art, made up of sound but not necessarily of image or representation, [which] deserves new theoretical models that acknowledge its unique features.[11]5
(11)5
After an eleven-page introduction, "Cultural Analysis and Post-Tonal Music," Hisama analyzes three movements from two works by the foremost American woman modernist composer, Ruth Crawford (String Quartet, movements iii and iv, and the art song "Chinaman, Laundryman" from Two Ricercari), and two works each by Marion Bauer (Toccata and "Chromaticon" from Four Piano Pieces) and Miriam Gideon ("Night Is My Sister" from Sonnets from Fatal Interview for voice and string trio and "Esther" from Three Biblical Masks for violin and piano). Five of the seven works are purely instrumental—that is, absolute—music. A brief epilogue and a nine-page bibliography follow.
In each analysis Hisama presents evidence that appears to establish a gender-nuanced context for the composition using the composer's public record and personal correspondence and journaling, as well as observations by people who knew her or her oeuvre at the time she composed the musical work. The bridge between feminism and musical modernism that Hisama constructs is taut, intense, mathematically complex, and fascinating. Let me briefly discuss two analyses.
In the first analysis, Crawford's String Quartet (1931) movement iii, Hisama weaves several analytical threads: composer/theorist Robert Morris's innovative analysis of "musical contour"; literary theorist Elaine Showalter's term "double-voiced discourse" and related literary concepts of Showalter's; anthropologist Edwin Ardener's position that "women in a society operate both within a dominant group and in a space outside it [and consequently] express their views of the world . . . through encoded realms of art, myth, or ritual" (19); and her own feminist and theoretical insights to show, in Crawford's third movement,
a musical space through which an alternative narrative [of twists in the ordering of first violin, second violin, viola, and cello] . . . proceeds alongside the more prominent narrative of the music's surface that drives toward the climax, . . . [contextualized by Crawford's] existence as a woman composer whose music seemingly accepts the conventions of the dominant group while it in actuality resists them.
(19)
Fascinating!
Marion Bauer's Toccata, a solo piano work, Hisama analyzes in terms of the relationship of hand positions in performance: "The shifting relationship of the hands as measured by which is on top necessitates that one never exclusively controls the other; instead, power is passed between [End Page 193] them, . . . [a psychological] 'room of one's own,' . . . [which provides the composer with] both the technical means and the aesthetic freedom to forge an innovative and subtle musical narrative" (121). Fascinating indeed!
Hisama argues against common narrative themes for the three women composers and even against commonality between any two works by a single woman. 6 She defends her position well by pointing to the contextual nature of musical modernism and whets our appetites for more examples of music analysis that will reveal the nature of the music and the composer, interlocked.
In providing a rare link between music theory and feminist criticism, Hisama proves not entirely acceptable to either side. Non-music theorists may dismiss the mathematical complexity of her musical analyses as reductionist, which they are; non-feminists may dismiss her biographical mapping of the compositions as unnecessary to a grasp of the music. I differ with both rejections. Those feminist theorists among us who patiently read this small volume cover to cover and dare to follow Hisama's thinking—its tautness, intensity, and mathematical complexity—may discover—for the first time—that modernist music is likewise taut, intense, mathematically complex, and fascinating in the revelation of its cultural genderedness, in the hands of women composers, and, one would extrapolate, of men's too.
Hisama's breakthrough work challenges feminists and music theorists to re-examine our biases and venture bravely forward. No doubt, musical modernism will continue to challenge feminists; yet the light has dawned. From McClary and Citron through Tick and Smith to Hisama, the feminist study of musical modernism is stimulating all of us to look toward rather than away from music embedded with masculinist intent and to refashion music theory as we design tools fit for future modernist exploration.
Susan Borwick is Professor of Music and former Director of Women's Studies at Wake Forest University. She is a musicologist specializing in twentieth-century American and German music; a composer of choral, solo, and stage music; and a playwright. Currently she is investigating the songs of Amy Beach.
Endnotes
1. See, for example, Marcia J. Citron's defense of Cécile Chaminade's Sonata, Op. 21, pp. 145-9, in the book reviewed in this essay, Gender and the Musical Canon. According to Citron, the first movement "challenges the representation model of dominance encoded in masculine and feminine in sonata form" (145). [End Page 194]
2. Witness, for example, Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women (1988) or Carolyn Abbate, UnsungVoices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (1991), which also addresses instrumental music. Liane Curtis's essay "The Sexual Politics of Teaching Mozart's Don Giovanni" (2000) illustrates some valuable pedagogical applications of feminist operatic criticism.
3. For example, Marion Guck, "A Woman's (Theoretical) Work" (1994). More recently, see Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, "On Rebecca Clarke's Sonata for Viola and Piano: Feminine Spaces and Metaphors of Reading" (1999).
4. See a review of Tick's later meticulous study in Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music (Borwick 2001).
5. She cites Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, as well as Marianne DeKoven, as "having convincingly claimed that misogyny is part and parcel of specific modernist literary texts" (11).
6. Unlike Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic, who argue that Austen, Shelley, and Dickinson share common themes of alienation and enclosure due to their gendered life experiences (1984).
References
Abbate, Carolyn. 1991. UnsungVoices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Borwick, Susan. 2001. "Review of Musical Women in England, 1870-1914: 'Encroaching on All Man's Privileges,' by Paula Gillett; Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer 1867-1944, by Adrienne Fried Block; and Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music, by Judith Tick." NWSA Journal 13(2):161-5.
Clément, Catherine. 1988. Opera, or the Undoing of Women. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published as L'opéra ou la défaite des femmes, 1979. Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle.
Curtis, Liane. 2000. "The Sexual Politics of Teaching Mozart's Don Giovanni." NWSA Journal 12(1):119-42.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. 1984. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Guck, Marion A. 1994. "A Woman's (Theoretical) Work." Perspectives of New Music 32(1):28-43.
Hisama, Ellie. 2000. "Life Outside the Canon? A Walk on the Wild Side." Music Theory Online: The Online Journal of the Society for Music Theory 6(3). Retrieved 1 July 2003, from: http://societymusictheory.org/mto/issues/mto.00.6.3/mto.00.6.3.hisama.html.
Kielian-Gilbert, Marianne. 1999. "On Rebecca Clarke's Sonata for Viola and Piano: Feminine Spaces and Metaphors of Reading." In Audible Traces: [End Page 195] Gender, Identity, and Music, eds. Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamessley, 71-114. Zurich: Carciofoli Press.
Lochhead, Judy. 1999. "Hearing 'Lulu.'" In Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music, eds. Elaine Barkin and Lydia Hamessley, 231-55. Zurich: Carciofoli Press.
Morris, Robert D. 1993. "New Directions in the Theory and Analysis of Musical Contour." Music Theory Spectrum 15(2):205-28.
Weill, Irving. 1929. "The American Scene Changes." Modern Music 6(4):7-8.
