Agrawal, Susan Mina, Northwestern University

The Apocryphal Judith's Female Authority: Representations of Judith by Women Artists

The biblical Judith, slayer of the evil Holofernes and savior of her people, has been a favorite subject of artists, musicians, dramatists, and writers from Biblical times until the present day. Most of these representations, unsurprisingly and regardless of media, were created by men and typically interpret Judith through patriarchal eyes, often representing her as a mere vessel of God without her own power or even as a prostitute. But two early modern women artists also represented Judith: the famed Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi and the French composer Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre. As artists both recognized in their time as prodigies, exceptional talents, and strong women, they have compelling feminine insight into the character of Judith, a similarly independent and remarkable woman. In this paper, the powerful and action-oriented portrayals of Judith by these women artists will be contrasted with comparable works by male artists which alternately depict a weaker and dependent Judith. Gentileschi's strong paintings are contrasted with those of her father and the master of her style of painting, Caravaggio, who both display Judith as less action-oriented, one-dimensional, and even trivial. La Guerre's musical writing is more difficult to compare since she singlehandedly invented and exploited the genre of the sacred solo cantata in which she composed. Nonetheless, her powerful musical writing can be contrasted to the weakened Judith articulated in the cantata's text, written by a male author invested with patriarchal power. These two early modern women, with insights into the character of Judith unavailable to their male contemporaries, paint and compose a portrait of a very different Judith: one of great female power and authority.

Andre, Naomi, University of Michigan

Haunting Legacies: The Castrati in the Early Nineteenth Century

Scholars (Angus Heriot, Rodolfo Celletti, John Rosselli, and Patrick Barbier among others) have long recognized that though the heyday of the castrati was achieved during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the castrati were still around in the nineteenth century. The first part of this paper examines a constellation of four interrelated elements outlining the castrato’s legacy in the early nineteenth century: vocal timbre, travesti roles, singing technique and vocal pedagogy. Building on these four components, the second part of this paper considers two configurations of the castrati in early nineteenth-century European culture: Meyerbeer’s last Italian opera, Il Crociato in Egitto (Venice 1824), which had a leading role for Giambattista Velluti (considered the last of the great castrati) and Honoré de Balzac?s 1830 novella, Sarrasine, which centers  around a fictional castrato living in Paris in the 1820s.

Proponents of an eighteenth-century Baroque singing ideal, the castrati embodied an idealized conception of heroism and masculinity. As nineteenth-century Romanticism forged new directions in opera for male characters, the attempt to more realistically approximate male speaking voices and the subsequent prominence given to the tenor (e.g., the "do di petto"/chest-voice high C), the castrati disappeared from the opera stage. Nonetheless, the presence of the castrati during the primo ottocento illuminates the changing aesthetics of that time and the strong heritage they left for the development of nineteenth-century operatic singing techniques and character types.

Baade, Christina, University of Wisconsin, Madison

"Romance in the Desert": The Propaganda Trail of "Lili Marlene"

"Lili Marlene" was "the most bewitching, haunting, sentimental song of the war" for one British captain stationed in North Africa during the Second World War. Britain's Eighth Army tuned in to German radio to hear it sung by Lale Andersen, a singer in the mold of Marlene Dietrich, and also heard the propaganda that accompanied it. Responding to military concerns, the British Broadcasting Corporation created a competing programme, which featured the popular young singer Anne Shelton and an anglicized version of "Lili Marlene."

BBC producers retooled the seductive song as a vehicle for the tomboyish "Forces Favourite." Shelton's programme represented part of the broader BBC policy for overseas troops, which used message programmes to establish a "life-line" between servicemen and their families, wives, and sweethearts at home. The programmes utilized wholesome "girl friends" as announcers in addition to "croonettes," who performed the sentimental songs so popular with the Forces.

In this paper, I explore how BBC producers molded Anne Shelton's personality and voice into a persona that appealed to servicemen abroad. I consider her relationship with "Lili Marlene," examining the reception of song and singer among Forces and civilian listeners. In a war where radio played a key role in propaganda and morale, I argue that the song was a site where notions of national identity, gender, and sexuality were contested and reformulated.

Baldassare, Joseph, Boise State University

Performance Practices in Troubadour Song: The Comtess de Dia’s A chantar

A chantar is the only trobaritz song (female troubadour) that survives with both complete text and music intact.  Since there are 128 extant troubadour melodies and about 10,000 troubadour poems, this piece is of particular rarity.  We have some 1,000 trobaritz poems, fragments of melodies and anonymous songs which may be by female troubadours, but this is the only one of which we are sure. 

Luckily for us, this song exhibits the finest in the troubadour art in both poetry and melody.  The poem is written in the first person and mourns lost love from a neglecting lover.  However, the singer (perhaps the countess herself, speaking of real-life experience) is “high-born”, constantly retaining her dignity and self-reliance in the poem.

Since the performer will be out of state during the conference, the piece will be performed on videotape.  In the film, the performer will sing the complete five and one-half verses in the original language of Occitan while accompanying herself on the vielle (a predecessor to the violin family).  This was common performance practice, especially in the area of Europe we now know as France.  A printed translation with original language will be provided.

I will highlight key points in the poetry and music, as well as speak about medieval performance practices. 

Beck, Eleonora M., Lewis and Clark College

Teaching Music from Outside the Closet

This paper explores the hurdles and rewards of teaching music history from  outside the closet. It begins with some strategies for coming out in the context of a music class and/or professional academic setting. This is followed by an evaluation of strategies in teaching composers whose lives and music engender an exploration of GLTBA issues. Meredith Monk's opera Atlas is the focal point of my investigation -- an example of a journey of self-awareness as expressed through music. The paper examines Monks' use of repetition and silence as metaphors for growth and evolution.

Blunsom, Laurie, Brandeis University

Flappers, Suffragettes and the New Woman: Gender and Sexuality in Tin Pan Alley

The first decades of twentieth century presented new opportunities for women to challenge Victorian views of gender and sexuality.  Images of flappers, suffragettes and the New Woman were manifestations of these challenges among white, middle-class women—they signaled the new mores of modern times along with growing political, social and cultural power.  The spirit of change and newness that was the hallmark of the times for women also pervaded early twentieth-century popular music as Tin Pan Alley produced new rhythmic songs that reflected the freedom of the new age.  The relationship between these two powerful historical developments, however, has not been examined, particularly with respect to the effects each had on the other. 

This paper will explore the ways in which Tin Pan Alley reflected the larger cultural values of modernity with respect to gender and sexuality.  I will discuss the ways in which commercialized songs both reinforced and constrained the social and sexual power of women.  First, I will discuss the preoccupation with romantic love that became the mainstay of popular songs and the more open heterosexuality that they promoted.  Next, I will examine the ways in which these songs also reinforced traditional values of submission to male authority.  Finally, I will raise the issue of actual participation by women in the popular music industry and their exclusion from real authorial power within the male-dominated culture of commercialized music.  Ultimately, I will show that the music of Tin Pan Alley reflected a complex and subtly gendered modernity. 

Bryan, Jenny, University of Virginia

Lesbian-ness, Fetish, Fandom, and Genderfuck: Introducing PJ Harvey and Some of my Favorite Imaginary Friends

Discourses surrounding queerness focus almost exclusively upon the process of producing the fictions we call genders. When gender boundaries are fluid in the queerest sense of the word, communities develop a more complex economy of identity construction.

This paper will approach the use of lesbian-ness as a means of constructing identity that is located in queerness. Despite numerous works about commodity culture as a means of purchasing one's identity, they fail to address the discursive function(s) of the engagement with commodity culture in creative and innovative ways.

Informed by queer theory, I will develop my argument principally through a participatory ethnography of my lesbian listening communities. I will show that within my lesbian oriented listening community, our notions of PJ Harvey's lesbian-ness do not rely on consumerism of performer related paraphernalia so much as on conversational engagement with the histories, reputations, and rumors surrounding this performers.

I wish to examine the dynamics through which ambiguously sexualized female performers in general and PJ Harvey in particular are fetishized as an absent, and thus totally malleable, member my listening community. I will show how the circulation of information concerning the presumed lesbian oriented queerness of PJ Harvey and her performances enables the creation, articulation, solidification, redefinition, and celebration of identification with, and membership in, my lesbian listening community.

Chesman, Jeremy, University of Michigan

The Urban Berdache: Gender Politics in Women’s Rap Music

Most Americans subscribe to the traditional binary gender system. Our culture constructs this to be something essential to human nature. However, traditional Native American culture has three genders: male, female, and berdache. This third gender is more appropriately called a two-spirit, signifying the presence of both a male and a female spirit within the body. The two-spirit is in many ways like the psychosexual category of the invert.

I argue that these multi-gendered bodies are not simply things of the past, but that they exist today in the female rapper. That the world of rap music, or American culture in general, is one of heterosexual and male hegemony is rarely contested (successfully). So how can a woman hope to succeed in this world?  I argue that the female rapper must reinvent the two-sprit concept. In order to be considered a part of the scene, she must be as hard as any man is. However, she cannot deny her otherness as a woman. So she must display femininity, although it must almost always be femininity tempered by patriarchy.

From Eve’s self-description as the "illest, vicious pit-bull in a skirt" to Lil' Kim's musical troping on hypersexuality, the markers of a mulit-gendered body are present throughout hip-hop culture. I examine the music, lyrics, and visual images of Eve, Lil’ Kim, Da Brat, and Foxy Brown to uncover this disruption of the traditional gender system. 

Clifton, Kevin, Colby College

Poulenc's “Aubade”: A Musical Confession from the Closet

Surprisingly, after its first performance in 1929, the mood of “Aubade” was described as melancholic, far removed from the lighter (and more humorous) side most often associated with Poulenc. This paper will explore meaning in “Aubade” by focusing on the association between its extra-musical program, based on the myth of Diana, and Poulenc's internalized homophobia. A parallel reading will consider how the ballet conveys familiar traits of the language of "the Closet" (Sedgwick, 1990). First, I will locate the myth of Diana -condemned to chastity and in despair over an impure love-within Poulenc's own struggle to accept his homosexuality in the late 1920's. Second, I will suggest that the ballet can be regarded as double-voiced, carrying two different meanings: a straight interpretation (after Diana) and a gay interpretation (after Poulenc). By tracing the narrative of the Fate theme throughout the ballet, a gay reading will be posited that ultimately conveys no hope of transcendence, or, more appropriately, denial of his homosexuality.

Coulombe, Renee T., University of California, Riverside

Dissonance Unbound: The Emancipation of “The Other” in Western Polyphony

The role and importance of dissonance in determining important aspects of musical style throughout the history of western polyphony cannot be understated. Recent work on the metaphysical and philosophical underpinnings of consonance and dissonance treatment, particularly David E. Cohen's 1993 article "Metaphysics, Ideology, Discipline: Consonance, Dissonance and the Foundations of Western Polyphony" reveals a complex picture, in which dissonance is inscribed from its inception with dangerous and destructive properties that must be controlled and disciplined for music to exist. Indeed, in the most important of the early medieval treatises, that of Boethius (480-524) in the 6th century (itself based on earlier work of the 1st and 2nd centuries), dissonance is constructed as occurring outside of music. Since Boethius excluded dissonance from the category of music, to classify a particular interval as dissonant made it, for him, de facto not music. Boethius' scheme ensured that music could retain its privileged position as the expression of the divine. Thus dissonance from its earliest theorization was a null set, the sound that dared not speak its name.

While the view of music as expression of the divine has changed much since the early middle ages, the unarticulated philosophical undercurrents which shaped Western polyphony have profound implications for the history of music in the West. The philosophical and metaphysical underpinnings for the treatment of dissonance also have particularly strong implications for feminist scholars seeking to dissect the ways in which musical practice, and more specifically composition, has been constructed as masculine art. Because dissonance in music, like the non-heteronormative or feminine in society, was conceived of as a dangerous element capable of destroying music, the "discipline" of music craft became necessary to preserve music's divine nature. This paper begins with the work of Cohen, and traces out the implications of the metaphysics of polyphony using feminist and queer theories. It then goes further to look at the "emancipation of dissonance" at the turn of the 20th century as a "coming out" from the "official" musical ideology that closeted dissonance since the beginning of western polyphony. Thus the epistemology of the treatment of dissonance can be analyzed as a paradigm for other musical epistemologies in which feminine and non-heteronormative elements in music are suppressed, and as a result serve as shadow forces shaping western thought around the practice of polyphony.

Courtier, Jessica M., University of Wisconsin-Madison

Ladies at the Keyboard: Performing Gender and Haydn's Piano Trios

Late-eighteenth-century expressions of ideals about European upper-class women and music for those women bear striking similarities: both were to cultivate an aesthetic of naturalness through grace, elegance, and lack of intellection.  Simplicity was the declared ideal for music for all amateurs, among whom the “ladies at the keyboard” constituted a hungry audience for published music, including Haydn's piano trios of the 1780s and 1790s. 

As music composed explicitly for publication but which was performed privately – most often with women at the keyboard and men playing the string parts – Haydn’s piano trios invite consideration of music’s role in public-private negotiations of many sorts, including the performance of gender.  Of particular concern to me are the ideas of amateurism and idiomatic writing embedded in the aesthetic of naturalness that appears in writing about this music in both accounts contemporaneous with the trios’ composition and in current research.  By placing emphasis on the idiomatic aspects of the musical material of the trios, the ladies’ physical and intellectual work of learning and performing the at times quite difficult music is neatly concealed behind the mask of non-exertion that defined women of the bourgeois class; these processes of the deliberate naturalization of performance bear striking similarities to contemporary feminist theories about gender.

Currie, James, Columbia University

“Vitellia is” (Re)Presented

Important feminist opera-critique has been directed toward disenchanting discourses of female representation. We now readily estrange ourselves from operatic verisimilitude, instead conceptualizing many of opera's women neither as active subjects of their own enunciations, nor as reflections of an actual state of political affairs, but rather as simulacra of the patriarchal imagination. This stance is indeed pertinent for an engagement with Vitellia from Mozart's "La clemenza di Tito." Vitellia conspires to have Tito assassinated, fails, confesses her heinous crime, and then, by means of a bizarre deus-ex-machina, is exonerated. Politically disruptive female "hysteria" is cured by being bathed in the benign aura emanating from an Enlightened, male authority figure.

Contemplating such a suspiciously well-running piece of machinery, the responsible critic might be justified in her/his reluctance both to accept the suspension of disbelief necessary for "conventional" operatic experience, and from there to assert that Vitellia retains agency within her representation--to say that Vitellia "is." Nevertheless, I suggest that such a reaction tacitly reduplicates the very illusion it attempts to unmask: i.e., that the subject's agency can be passed through the mechanics of representation without being objectified. On the contrary, I argue that even prior to representation agency is alienated--that it is being constructed for, and represented to, rather than possessed by the subject. Thus, Vitellia's representation in "La clemenza di Tito" is to be lauded, since the very artifices that corset her, because of their extremity, deconstruct their own ability to convince us of the agency of the subject they purport to represent. Vitelia "is" because she so obviously is not.

Daugherty, Rebecca, University of Virginia

The Spirit of ‘77...Punk and the Girl Revolution

The history of women in popular music until the 1970s presented few positive, active images of girls. Women were underpaid, undervalued, and restricted to feminine-associated roles. Their images were policed by racialized gender norms. Worst of all, the scope of popular music at the time did not present any attractive alternatives. Punk rock, a movement influenced by the avant garde and the rejects of the pop mainstream, became a space in which women had the freedom to create not only music, but also an organized critique of conventional femininity. Because of the do-it-yourself aesthetics and tolerant ethics of punk, women were involved from the beginning. For the first time, women learned how to play electric guitars and drums, and formed their own bands. By doing so, punk girls undid the exclusively masculine image of the rock musician. These women’s enlightened sexual politics were not indicative of the entire community, however. Punk boys, engaged in displays of the extremes of masculinity, failed to examine their complicit perpetuation of sexism, and some attacked the legitimacy of girls as punks. Punks’ combination of freedom of expression, left-leaning politics, and DIY created the first group of female rock role models and set the stage that would bring strong female voices into pop in the 1980s and lead riot grrls to critique the punk scene and politics of the early 1990s.

Day-O’Connell, Sarah, Cornell University

The Unheard Sigh: Haydn’s Settings of Poetry by Anne Hunter and the Construction of “Private Sphere”

Feminist historical accounts describe eighteenth-century notions of femininity as (in the words of Vivien Jones) an "association between women and the private sphere, domesticity, and leisure." While the ideological force of literary and iconographic depictions of musical women has been frequently asserted, the means by which domestic music could participate in a rhetoric of private-sphere containment have not been explored. Focusing on Haydn's settings of poetry by Anne Hunter (and other canzonets designed for female performance at home) my paper examines musical/textual components and historical performance practice, arguing that the ideological power of this music is not so much devoted to the maintenance of a public/private distinction as to an understanding of the private as subject to the controlling gaze of the public. This process, I argue, is accomplished through a disembodiment of the poems' female protagonist and ultimately the performer: she is highlighted to the point that she - rather than the music - becomes the object of evaluation and consumption. Nevertheless, performers' choices and listeners' reception likely differ from one performance to the next, potentially challenging the music-body conflation and enabling the creation and perception of resistance to the private-sphere label. These twin arguments suggest an historical precedent which resonates with current feminist political exposure of private space as "issues of justice, as sites of power" (Seyla Benhabib) shaped by and subject to public concern.

Detels, Claire, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

“Ah dagli scanni eternei”: Verdi’s Invocations of the Absent Mother

In her recent book Opera on Screen (2000), Marcia Citron criticizes the 1986 Zeffirelli film of Verdi’s Otello for using an excess of Catholic imagery in a mistaken effort to strengthen the psychological motivations of the characters.  Without taking sides on the merit of Zeffirelli’s portrayal, this paper explores the connection of the Catholicization of Otello to a larger pattern found extensively in Verdi’s middle- and late-period operas, involving the invocation of either the dead mother of the heroine, or a heavenly mother, or both together.  Verdi’s invocations of the absent mother begin with Lina’s aria “Ah dagli scanni eternei” in Stiffelio (1850, libretto by Francesco Maria Piave) and continue in operas composed with various librettists, including Rigoletto (Piave), Il trovatore (Cammarano), Simon Boccanegra (Piave), La forza del destino (Piave), Aida (Ghislanzoni) and Otello (Boito).  Most of these invocations are extraneous to the structure of the plots and to the main literary sources, but they are far from insignificant:  along with the composer’s prominent use of low male voices and his sympathetic portrayal of oppressed heroines, they serve as (probably unconscious) signifiers of the patriarchal imbalance of power between genders in late nineteenth-century society, which, they imply, will be corrected in the next world.  They also reflect, similarly to Puccini’s Suor Angelica, the continuation of the cult of the Virgin in Italy, a continuation that appears to have helped create positive feminine imagery in late nineteenth-century Italian art at a time when cultural fears about the rise of feminism were otherwise leading to harshly negative portrayals.

Dunlap, Susanne, Connecticut Opera

The Nightingale and the Nun: Nature, Power, and Gender in  L’Allegro, Il penseroso ed il moderato

Like all great works of art, Handel’s oratorios, odes, and masques for his English audiences can be read on many different levels and yield rich results when subjected to the most intense critical scrutiny. One of the characteristics that led to his immense popularity was Handel’s vivid pictorial imagination, and his ability to create evocative soundscapes that touched a sympathetic chord in his eighteenth-century English listeners. But this general accessibility is sometimes deceptive. Handel and his librettists were well aware of the important cultural work these public musical monuments performed. The general opinion that music was capable of powerful moral influence informs all of Handel’s works in English, dramatic or otherwise. This is never more true than in Harris’ and Jennens’ reworking of Milton’s poems, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, for a pastoral ode that seems primarily to celebrate—in all innocence—the glories of the English countryside and the distinctly British ability to impose reason and order on unruly emotions.

This paper explores the agendas behind Handel’s ravishing musico-dramatic façade, tracing their development and mutation from the 17^th century humanistic sensibility of Milton’s poems to the rational, hierarchical world of the Age of Reason. Looking at the selection and arrangement of text, the voice parts, musical style, and use of distinctive instrumentation, I elucidate the subtle affirmation of androcentrism that underpins the entire ode. On such examination, the metaphor of the triumph of moderation over excessive mirth and soulful melancholy gains a dimension that extends its meaning beyond the obvious parallel with the British national character. It becomes instead a metaphor of almost universal significance, an icon of a pervasive way of thinking that structured all of Western European society in the mid-eighteenth century, although it was particularly starkly articulated in British upper class society. The “joyful man,” the “contemplative man,” and the “moderate man” thus play out a dialectic of gender and power against a bucolic background of culturally sanctioned elitism, gloriously sensual poetry, and utterly delightful music.

Edwards, J. Michele, Macalester College

Singing Values

Choruses are frequently a source of community, identity, and solidarity for various groups of singers, building team spirit and a feeling of accomplishment through collaboration. While women's choruses can offer an empowering opportunity for women, they are also a source for reinforcing gender stereotypes. Women's school choruses are often assigned second-class status in comparison with mixed choruses. On the other hand, community women's choruses, such as those who are members of GALA (the international association of the lesbian and gay choral movement) or the Sister Singers Network (a feminist organization fostering interaction within the women's choral movement) often articulate a different construction of confidence, strength, and support for other women.

This paper examines the gendered discourse surrounding women's choruses in the U.S.—both replicating negative stereotypes and articulating feminist values. Using several different strategies, I identify and analyze trends in vocal timbre, repertoire, and text selection as my focus. Feminist and literary theory about "voice" provide a foundation to ground my own evaluation of the sound characteristics in recordings and live performances by women's choruses. I also draw on conductor interviews and written material, which discuss the sound ideal for women's voices and describe choral timbre.

Follet, Diane, Muhlenberg College

Feminine Voices in the French Mélodie

From its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century, the mélodie has been graced by the subtle and evocative texts of French poets.  The composers of the mélodie chose the lyric verse of both men and women.

It is the confluence of female poet and male composer that this lecture/recital celebrates.  Songs to be discussed and performed will be chosen from the following eclectic collection, each a setting by a male composer of a poem from the pen of a woman:

            La sérénité, music by Camille Saint-Saëns, text by Marie Barbier
                              Daphénéo, music by Erik Satie, text by Mimi Godebska
                              Fleurs, music by Francis Poulenc, text by Louise de Vilmorin
            Sonnet, music by Darius Milhaud, text by Louise Labé
            Le Lai du Chèvrefeuille, music by Darius Milhaud, text by Marie de France

The theme of this conference will direct the inquiry into these songs.  The poet’s life, including her relationship with the composer, will be examined.  Extramusical influences will be investigated.  A formal and stylistic analysis will consider the marriage of music and text.  Is the text nuanced by the poet’s gender?  Is the composer sensitive to the coloring of the words?  Is there confluence?  Is there divide? 

Gardner, Kara, Stanford University

The American Composer Becomes a Self-Made Man: Modernist Misogyny and Its Consequences

Charles Ives has become infamous for the tirades he unleashed against what he saw as an “emasculated” American culture, for exclaiming in frustration: “Is the Anglo-Saxon going ‘Pussy’?”  This paper will place the misogynistic commentaries of Ives and other modernists within the context of a larger dialogue, in which the feminine was being systematically devalued.  Out of concern that America was becoming overcivilized, many politicians and commentators called for a renewed emphasis on vigorous, masculine virtues.  In music, this helped innovation become a defining feature of American style, because emphasis on bold new musical experiments allowed composers to meet the prevalent masculine ideal of the autonomous thinker, the self-made man.  This stylistic shift had profound consequences, not just for women composers, but also for women patrons.  Their contributions to American musical life suddenly became suspect, because they threatened the newly burgeoning image of the American composer as fiercely independent.  This paper, then, has two goals.  First, to expose the image of the independent modernist innovator as a myth constructed to meet specific standards of masculinity; and second, to reclaim the contributions women made to the development of modernism in America, despite the alienating aspects of modernist rhetoric. 

Goldin-Perschbacher, Shana, University of Virginia

Vocalized Gender Identity: Jeff and Tim Buckley as Dream Brothers

The short but influential life and career of Jeff Buckley (1966-1997), one of the 1990s most creative rock musicians, has left behind a remarkable body of penetrating, yearning, sometimes chilling vocal creations, and surrounding these works, many questions. Amidst the glow around his first and very successful album, Grace, and strain in creating a second album, audiences were struck by the unabashed nakedness of his ambiguously gendered, five-octave voice and equally intrigued by evident envoicement of a creative and personal identity struggle.

After spending his childhood as Scott Moorehead, Buckley began his career by reclaiming his birthname, and with it, the legacy of his father, the late eclectic-folk musician Tim Buckley (1947-1975). Although many congruities appear upon historical examination of the musical and personal lives of Jeff and Tim Buckley, while the two musicians were alive, their relationship was incongruous.  They barely knew each other.  Now, after both lives have ended unnaturally early, a trans-historical relationship unfolds through the recordings they have left behind.  Using the Buckley’s musical creations, I shall examine the influence of fatherlessness in the in formation of masculine identity and metaphorical and literal voice of sons in rock.

Hahn, Tomie, Tufts University; Bahn, Curtis, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

I Hear Music When She Moves: Gender and Pleasure within an Electronic Context

Through history performance has been inextricably linked to the human body; in electronic music performance, however, the body has been noticeably absent. Recently, a wide range of powerful and affordable devices for sensing physical movement and touch have become available to composers. In combination with new resources for real-time interactive sound generation and manipulation, the body has re-emerged through technology as a primary generator of musical information and so infusing the energy and pleasure of physicality back to performance. However, unless qualities of embodied cultural gender expressions are addressed in the conception of the body/machine interface, these cultural sensitivities are often not obvious within the performance context.

This paper examines the relationships between sensed movement and sound generation in an electronic landscape; the sonic "mappings" of embodied cultural knowledge; and the pleasure of performing within a sensuous, virtual soundscape. In the establishment of these "virtual" relationships, one can sensuously express cultural sensibilities through movement and sound, constructing new paradigms of meaning in a technological context. We will discuss the collaborative process, including the conscious creation of "wired" female characters for performance. These wired women skillfully control technology for their sensory pleasure-bound immersion within the virtual space.

To illustrate the live sonification and compositional extension of the female body in performance, we will demonstrate the wireless gestural interface (which includes sonic feedback via body-mounted speakers) and provide multimedia examples from our research collaborations and performances.

Howe, Sondra Wieland, Independent Scholar, Wayzata, Minnesota

Women's Participation in the Music Department of NEA"

The history of music education needs to be reconstructed with a feminist perspective, emphasizing the important contributions of women. This paper will focus on the Music Department of NEA 1885-1920. The Music Department was important because its members founded the Music Supervisors National Conference, which evolved into MENC, the largest organization of music teachers in the United States today.

In the mid-nineteenth century, public school music programs were established by male music teachers who supervised the female classroom teachers. By the 1890s, female music teachers supervised music and were active in local, state, and national music organizations.

Although the officers of the Music Department were mostly male, there were strong female leaders including Francis Clark, Julia Crane, and Elsie Shawe. According to the NEA Proceedings, women served on committees, presented papers, and performed at the annual meetings.

This paper will analyze some of the issues discussed by women, and their occupational status (private teachers, public school teachers, or college faculty). The paper will look at performances of women: instrumentation, genres, and composers. The Music Department was a valuable training ground for women who would later become active in MSNC.

Imbaté, Liana Tyson, flute, Blake Tyson, percussion, Boise State University

A Concert of Music by Women Composers

with Laura Rushing-Raynes, soprano

The Imbaté flute and percussion duo, with Laura Rushing-Raynes, soprano, will present a concert of music by women composers. The program will feature works by Roshanne Etezady, Elizabeth Vercoe, Jane O’Leary, Katherine Hoover, and the world premiere performance of a new work for flute and marimba by Boise composer Carol Matthews. The concert will be approximately fifty minutes in length.

Hot Water/Burn Baby for flute and marimba by Roshanne Etezady begins with a virtuosic explosion of rhythm and concludes with an exploration of the sonic possibilities of the duo. Etezady is currently a graduate student at the University of Michigan and is a founding member of the Minimum Security Composers Collective.

Herstory IV is a setting by Elizabeth Vercoe of two May Swenson poems. This work is the most recent in Vercoe’s Herstory series. Each work in the series sets texts by women poets. In Herstory IV, the stanzas of Swenson’s highly personal poems are combined in a single movement.

Katherine Hoover’s Seven Haiku is a collection of poems by some of the great writers of Haiku set for flute and soprano.  Hoover’s music mirrors the sparse intensity of Haiku.

Jane O’Leary’s Silenzio della Terra for flute and percussion is a timbral exploration for the duo, which slowly develops into a simple melody drawing inspiration from Irish folk music. The work is inspired by an early poem of Mario Luzi entitled “Alla Vita” (“To Life”). According to the composer, the flute represents the mother’s voice, “la voce materna” which the poet suggests is the source of all things. Although born in the United States, O’Leary has lived in Ireland since 1972.

The final work will be the premiere of Snow Walker, by Carol Matthews, which was commissioned by the Imbaté flute and percussion duo.  Snow Walker takes as its source the world of the Inuit people and describes a landscape of reality and spirit.  Snow provides the source of structure and the ground within which are stationed the Inuksuit sentinels and the spirit of Snow Walker.

James, Robin, DePaul University

“Putting Together an Existence as One Puts Together an Opera”: Kristeva, Don Giovanni, and Feminist Criticism at the Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Musicology

Claiming that “music is the language of love,” Julia Kristeva posits music as a privileged example of her psychic geography. After reviewing what Kristeva means by “love”, its logic, and economy, I turn to her chapter on Don Giovanni to see the ways in which tonal music functions as amorous discourse. Because music and love display the same logic and economy, their intersection gives rise to a third discourse, a critical vantage which plays musicology and Kristevan psychoanalysis against each other to problematize each. If one accepts the basic structure of Kristeva’s topography, then its insistence on the constant presence of a “Third”, extrapsychical element within every stage of (pre)psychic life illustrates how the idea of “absolute music” is a (narcissistic) fantasy. Turning the tables and reading Kristeva’s Tales of Love in light of scholarship in feminist musicology reveals that the forms of music to which Kristeva refers emanate from a patriarchal discourse in which the “feminine” is marked as secondary, subordinate, and incomplete. Thus, if love is expressed in such a language, Kristeva’s attempt to revise the Freudian project is not as revolutionary as it may claim to be, for the very means by which Oedipus is challenged and decentered are themselves variations on the same Freudian theme.

Johnson, Allison Adah, University of California, San Diego

Transformative Sounds, Transcending Cultures: Music of Gender and Hybridity

With the growing visibility of and interest in Asian composers within the United States in the last 30 years, there has been much speculation on the nature of the aesthetics of "the East," with some U.S. music critics declaring the Eastern aesthetic "taxing" and a "no-man's land." Critical reception of music by women has been, at times, similarly essentialistic and hegemonic, as shown in recent studies by Dana Reason and others.

This paper will explore the issues of identity and aesthetics as they relate to the creation and reception of music by Asian women composers and offer a critical look at the writings and biases of Western music critics, particularly how the media has sought to position these composers and their music in a fetishistic and marginalized manner.

Using writings by and interviews with contemporary Asian-American women composers such as Chen Yi, Jin Hi Kim, Bun Ching Lam, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, along with musical analyses of their works, I plan to offer a re-positioning of the critical issues which dominate this gendered and multi-cultural arena where every sonic nuance of their work is subject to both the male gaze and the orientalist gaze.

As an Asian-American composer, I hope to help demystify some of these issues and present them from an intercultural zone which allows a glimpse from both inside and outside the discursive site.

Johnson, Maria, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

“Qualified and Able”: African American Blues Women Playing Electric Guitar

The blues continues to be male-dominated, especially with respect to instrumentalists, and most especially electric guitarists (there has always been a place for female singers, a smaller place for piano players, and more recently a place for female "folkie" singer-guitarists). And, while electric guitar-wielding blues women continue to become more visible, African American women like Deborah Coleman who sing and play hard-driving styles remain an anomaly (ironic considering African American women including Memphis Minnie and Rosetta Tharpe were some of the first to plug in). Which is not to say other Black woman playing electric guitar don't exist (Barbara Lynn and Beverly "Guitar" Watkins, for example, have been playing since the late fifties/early sixties, but it is only recently that their lead capabilities are even hinted at on recordings). And what part do dominant conceptions of "authenticity" play in ensuring that this group remains small and uncelebrated? For example, if authenticity demands music which is acoustic, "rough-hewn", and down-home, and performers who have come from poor, rural, Southern roots, then are electric guitarists like Deborah Coleman, with roots in rock and R&B, simply out of luck?

My intent in this paper is to critically examine the sexual politics of the blues, and the race, class, and gender dynamics which give rise to conceptions like "authenticity" in the music industry, academia, and beyond, in order to begin to create an artistic and scholarly space for African American blues women playing electric guitar.

Joyce, Betsy, Brandeis University

Power and Gender in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni

Power is an important factor underlying much of the interaction of characters in eighteenth-century Italian comic opera (opera buffa).  This is no surprise, as European society was itself characterized by pervasive distinctions in individual power based on the concepts of class and gender.  Both composers and opera conventions were influenced by these concepts, including the contemporary association of women with the “natural” and men with the “rational.”  Women were viewed paradoxically as moral guarantors on the one hand, temptresses on the other. 

Based on my observation of the various instances of empowerment or disempowerment of Mozart’s leading women in The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, I devised an analytical paradigm consisting of the four major forms of power which I find to be the most prevalent in those operas.  Based on their functions, I call these types of power institutional, relational, situational, and performative.  Of course, these categories are not exclusive and may also overlap on occasion.  Using these constructions of power, I show that, in Figaro, the major female characters are generally empowered.  In Don Giovanni, however, their potential power is often subverted in various ways.  Nonetheless, in both operas, female power is constantly subject to fluctuation and renegotiation. 

Keathley, Elizabeth, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

A Context for Eminem’s “Murder Ballads”

The day of the Grammies I taught Verdi’s Otello in my music history sequence course.  The previous week I had taught Bellini’s Norma.  The following week, I taught Berg’s Wozzeck.  Catherine Clement’s Opera, or the Undoing of Women has come into then fallen out of fashion, and musical works in which women are murdered remain staples of our historical canon: try as we may to “problematize” them, they are there.  It is difficult to imagine, then, what moral authority musicologists might have to weigh in on Eminem’s raps about murdering his wife (“’97 Bonnie and Clyde” on The Slim Shady Album and “Kim” on The Marshall Mathers Album), but it seems crucial that we do so.

We should begin by acknowledging that the type of violence and degradation of women that NOW objects to in the raps of Eminem is our stock in trade, our bread and butter, distinguished only by aestheticizing music and poetry, by pretensions to social criticism, or by the aura of masterpiece status.  Having acknowledged our complicity in whatever ways that music about violence against women contributes to real violence against women, we can then interrogate the music and the discourse around it.  In this paper I will argue that Eminem’s “murder ballads” should have received two different treatments.  I will further argue that, although these recordings seem to be marketed as products of the rage of an oppressed underclass, they employ strategies with long bourgeois traditions, particularly “masquerading” in a genre of a racial “other” to make transgressive statements, and making those statements at the expense of women.  Finally, I will consider the “liberal” and “progressive” media immediately prior to and after the Grammies, with attention to how the issue of violence against women became eclipsed by that of homophobia and what that might say about the way violence against women has been normalized in our culture. 

Keathley, Elizabeth, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Does Electronic Music Have a Gender?

A defining moment of my high school education happened in this wise: in my chemistry classroom, before the beginning of class, a small group of boys gathered around the teacher and laughingly tried to persuade him to sign a petition requesting that Walter Carlos come to our school to play all of the Well Tempered Clavier on the Moog synthesizer.  Thinking that that sounded pretty neat, I offered to sign the petition.  "You don't know anything about Moog synthesizers," the alpha boy sneered.  "Yes, I do."  "Then you don't know anything about Bach."  Thus dismissed on both technical and musical grounds--surely because of my gender--I was unimaginably delighted in the late 1970's when Walter became Wendy.

In spite of a now distinguished history of electronic music composition, women remain marginal to the mainstream discourse of electronic music, just as electronic music remains marginal to the mainstream discourse about music.  Although stereotypes of women as non- or even anti-technological have persisted, women in electronic music have recently gained increased visibility over the world wide web through the pages of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community, "Pink Noises," and the WAVES listserv, begun by Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner.  These reveal some interesting continuities among the experiences of women in electronic "art" music and those in electronic "pop" music, including, in many cases, attempts to use electronics to neutralize the category of gender.  Several of the women on these sites are reluctant to identify with other women, and particularly with feminists, but one young woman, DJ Shortee, from Atlanta, Georgia, has created a course "DJ101" to encourage other women to take on the DJ virtuosities of scratching and beat juggling, and she participates regularly in the "Take Back the Decks" tour.

Killam, Rosemary, University of North Texas

Can Textsetting Reveal Gendered Compositional Techniques?

Women and men have historically and frequently set the same texts. Comparisons between liturgical text settings by both women and men offer obvious avenues of study of similarities and differences in compositional styles. What is the case in shorter works from lest standardized texts, such as lieder?

This paper examines the settings of Novalis' "Geistliche Lieder," "An Maria," a poem described by Nancy Reich as about "both the mother of Christ and Novalis' lost love. . ." Novalis (1772-1801) died only a few years after Louise Reichardt (1779-1826) met him, and set his text a few years before Franz Schubert (1797-1828) set it also (D.658).

Reichardt's and Schubert's settings have much in common. Both are in major: Reichardt, EbM; Schubert, DM. Both use primary 4-phrase structures with two subsidiary key areas in the middle phrases. Both set the text so that light cadences can be heard after the 1st two measures of each phrase. Both use simple accompaniments which can be reduced verticalized 4-voice structures.

The obvious differences lie in the text settings: The author posits that Reichardt's melody is more adventurous, especially in her extension of her melodic tessitura, so that "Himmel" is the peak of the third phrase's melody. Schubert's melody uses more motivic repetition, and extends his third phrase by a measure, to stress the eternity of "ewigkeit." Schubert's compositional contexts and their underlying gendered implications have elicited much valuable new research. Comparison of his work with that of Reichardt, a woman composer slightly his predecessor, offers an extension of previous analytical work on both composers. This paper will present a close analysis of both works in historical context of the gendered expectations of the time and speculate on the significance of applications of such analytic methodology to other texts set by both women and men, as a paradigm for comparison and contrast in gendered compositional techniques.

Lambelet, Marianne, Northwestern University

She Perfumes the Ayre with Her Breath: Gender and Culture in Early Modern Song

Print in sixteenth century England was, for authors and consumers, a medium fraught with cultural, social, and economic complexities. Within this multi-layered context-in which cultural gestures evolved to accommodate shifting social hierarchies-composers carefully crafted dedications to suit their potential patrons' inclinations. Appropriating contemporary court style, composers drew on themes of gift-exchange, privacy, and ornament. They also presented their compositions as allegorical children offered to the dedicatee's more favorable protection and tutelage. In particular, as composers sought patronage from prominent women and men, they adapted their dedicatory rhetoric to fit cultural gender ideals.

Dedications by Thomas Morley and Robert Jones, for instance, to such patrons as Lady Mary Sidney, Lady Mary Wroth, and Sir Robert Cecil demonstrate composers' careful management of gendered imagery, and reveal the kind of authority attributed to, and the kind of patronage expected of, patrons of different sexes. Thomas Morley, in particular, incorporated themes that suggest links to neoplatonic ideas about the nature of music, the senses, and woman's ability to conduct his creations to men's hearts. This analysis will demonstrate composers' careful incorporation of early modern cultural ideals and of contemporary attitudes toward gender and music.

Littlejohn, Jean, Northwestern University

François-Joseph Fétis and the Gendering of Tonality

Since the 1789 revolution, the ideal of liberty has been embodied in a female form in France through paintings, statues, and pageantry. In his harmony treatise of 1844, F.-J. Fétis breaks new ground by making tonality the organizing principle of his theory of harmony, but the novelty of this reconceptualization is tempered by the familiar personality of la tonalité. Fétis endows la tonalité with a strong female presence and with many characteristics recalling the beloved icon la liberté. Tonality also is an ideal, toward which composers, parallel to citizens, strive and inevitably fall short. Fétis's vision for music is that the "laws of tonality" be earnestly upheld. But because composers are imperfect, they at times violently wound tonality instead, just as the French citizenry by turns uplifts and betrays liberty.

Scholars such as Schellhous and Christensen have shown that Fétis's conceptualization of tonality was indebted to Hegel's theory of history. But accounts that depict Fétis's tonalité as simply an abstract concept overlook the physicality of his language and the gendered nature of his descriptions. Fétis's republican sentiments and his statements about the necessary relation of music to politics underscore the plausibility of an association between la tonalité and la liberté.

Long, Mary Ann, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Haresfoot Club Between the Wars: Singing through the Feminine Voice on the University Stage

The Haresfoot Club of the University of Wisconsin was one of six members of the College Musical Comedy League. Productions of this league represented a unique tradition of twentieth-century musical theatre, drawing upon burlesque, vaudeville, operettas, and early musical comedies. Within this tradition, female students were prohibited onstage, with the result that men assumed female roles, and cross-dressed, high-kicking male chorus lines became a popular focus.

This paper explores ways in which musical, dramatic, and visual aspects of these productions contributed to the popularity and longevity of female impersonation on the college stage at a time when it was becoming taboo in many other musical theatre venues. As recently as the turn of the century, audiences had marveled at the illusions created by genteel female impersonators on the middle-class vaudeville stage.  However, female impersonation sharply declined on the American popular stage between the World Wars as the public increasingly linked it with the gay subculture. It is paradoxical that the Haresfoot Club—performing for college students and alumni, as well as civic organizations—achieved its greatest success during this time, as shown by glowing newspaper reviews and healthy financial records. As a site where female impersonation could safely embody glamour and allure, the college musical comedy provides insight into contemporary views of the sexes and how they related to each other between the World Wars.

Lowgren, Andrea, University of Oregon

Why Marriage and Music Don't Mix, or The Story of Composer Elisabeth Lutyens

Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983) despised being called a woman composer. Yet almost half a century after her heyday and two decades after her death, Lutyens is precisely what she did not want to be -- a rarely performed, published or recorded "woman composer." Though some find it tempting to make essentialist judgments about the inherent genius quality of the canon of great works and great composers, the social factors surrounding music and the construction of the canon are also major factors in its construction. For women in the centuries preceding the twentieth there are easy institutional explanations for the lack of canonic female composers. In the twentieth century, however, these biases within the institution of music are harder to identify because women like Elisabeth Lutyens have supposedly had equal access to education and a professional life.

Or have they? My argument in this paper is that there are larger issues to consider. The institutions of society, in addition to those particular to music, can hinder women from realizing their full potential as composers. In the case of Lutyens, it is the heterosexual institution of marriage and motherhood that played the most crucial role. A juxtaposition of her voices through autobiography, libretto and music illustrate the profound effect that the institution of marriage and motherhood had on her life. Lutyens' experience shows that is not enough to examine the institutions of music itself to counteract the prejudices that continually bypass womens compositions. In order to better understand the place of women composers in history it is necessary to cultivate a holistic perspective that recreates the contexts in which women composers lived, worked, and made music.

Lysloff, René T.A., University of California, Riverside

Dangerous Emotions: The Anxiety of Musical Pleasure in Java

When I studied traditional gamelan music in Central Java, my teachers taught me not to let it overwhelm me with its power. Yet, I also discovered that pleasure lies very close to the surface of every performance even while remaining carefully hidden from scrutiny. While musicians might acknowledge the emotional, even sensual, pleasure of music, they play with perfect self control and complete physical efficiency: no wasted movements, no bobbing heads, and no smiles of enjoyment. The female singers, too, perform in total serenity even as they sit in public display under the gaze of their predominantly male audiences. All in all, Javanese musicians appear to be utterly placid, almost bored, as they perform on stage. However, this should not be understood as analogous to Western rationalist objectivity. Rather, it reflects deep anxieties over the power that music may hold over the emotions and, by extension, the self.

In this paper I want to examine the extremes of Javanese musical pleasure, represented in the concept nganyut—perhaps best translated into English as the oceanic experience (lit., to be carried away, to drift off, or to lose oneself). The oceanic here is closely associated with both spiritual transcendence and erotic bodily pleasure, encompassing trance states as well as sexual ecstasy. Yet, the word nganyut also refers to insanity and death (the absolute and irreversible loss of self). Because of these conflicting associations, experiencing the oceanic may be extremely pleasurable yet it is fraught with danger. Thus, Javanese pleasure in music is juxtaposed upon a dark backdrop of emotional dread over the loss of self.

Mather, Olivia Carter, University of California, Los Angeles

Feminist Theory and Music 6 Abstract:  “Modal Alternation, Subjectivity, and Hildegard’s Sequences”

Hildegard von Bingen is the first female composer for whom we have a large body of extant works.  Scholars have noted her difference from other composers of the Middle Ages, that her works are difficult to analyze since they do not always match with our conceptions of medieval music.  In particular, her sequences are a place in her oeuvre where she articulates her own unique theology and use of modes.  This paper will argue that Hildegard’s sequences, while atypical, do fit into the sequence genre and adhere to many of its characteristics, including modal alternation.  The sequence as a genre was one that incorporated unusual use of mode and in its text connected themes from the Old and New Testaments.  After a brief comment on Hildegard studies, I will also show how Hildegard uses the conventions of the sequence genre to link Biblical concepts and characters to saints and events that would have been important to Hildegard and the nuns under her care.

Maus, Fred Everett, University of Virginia

Submissive Listening

Writers and educators use a distinction between "passive" and "active" listening. In a culture where normative listening involves immobility and silence, such "activity" must be, if anything, mental activity. But that "activity" consists primarily in attention to actions that originate outside the listener.

Edward T. Cone’s The Composer’s Voice states frankly that listeners are in a relatively powerless condition. A listener imagines an all-powerful agency, the persona, who controls the music and the listener. The listener identifies with the power of the persona, even though that power includes control over the listener. Cone treats this configuration as a norm for classical music, the framework for pleasurable experiences.

Cone’s account of listening resembles accounts of the masochist’s role in sado-masochism. The masochist seeks a polarized power relation, desiring to occupy the submissive position while also feeling empowered by identification with the "top’s" dominance. In both cases, participants regard the play with polarized power relations as consensual, imaginative, and framed.

Masochism diverges from widely-valued norms of agency, masculinity, and heterosexuality. Ambivalence about listening can be understood partly through its resemblance to masochism. This may help explain why theory and analysis often take on the "active" position of a composer or persona, rather than assuming a listener’s position.

McKeage, Kathleen, University of Wyoming

“Where are all the girls?”  Women in Collegiate Instrumental Jazz

This qualitative study was undertaken in answer to a question posed by a visiting high school musician who, after sitting-in with a college jazz ensemble, noted that she was the only girl in the room. For this study, three undergraduate women music majors were selected.  Each was an instrumentalist, had an extensive background in jazz at the high school level and had withdrawn from college jazz bands after the freshman year. Individual and focus group interviews with the participants revealed that each of the three had made conscious choices that lead to their withdrawal from the jazz program.  Those choices were based on the following themes:  (1) a lack of female role models and mentoring in jazz; (2) pressure to perform exerted by non-jazz studio teachers; (3) a sometimes negative environment associated with jazz ensembles; and (4) self-assessment and choosing career paths based on gendered expectations for success.

Women, especially music education majors, may limit their career options by opting out  of jazz ensemble opportunities at the undergraduate level. Considerations for modifying collegiate jazz programs to enhance participation by women students are also discussed.

Mockus, Martha, San Francisco City College

How Do I Sound?  Lesbian Subjectivity and the Music of Go Fish

When feminist film critic B. Ruby Rich declared in 1992 that "new queer cinema" was a film genre politically and aesthetically distinct from "gay and lesbian cinema," queer filmmakers and scholars alike have continued to theorize queer cinema's interventions into the realm of contemporary visual culture. Lesbian film studies in particular--especially the work of Teresa de Lauretis, Chris Straayer, and Patricia White--has emerged as one of the most prominent sub-fields in queer theory. However, like most film theory and criticism, their work relies heavily on psychoanalytic models and does not engage adequately with music and sound. My project takes up where lesbian film theory leaves off. I will offer a close reading of Go Fish (Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner, 1994), a lesbian feature film that enjoyed wide critical acclaim and cross-over success. By taking sound as my central concern, I want to argue for the ways Go Fish uses music to create a space for lesbian subjectivity, both on-screen and at the level of spectatorship. The highly imaginative relationships between sounds and images invite me to listen to the tensions and pleasures of lesbian sexuality in this film and allow me to challenge the visually constructed limits of lesbian film theory. Several short clips from Go Fish will be included in the presentation.

Modern Times, Modern Women: Redefining the Boundaries of American Musical Modernism

American Modernism had many manifestations during the first half of the 20th century.  The sense of "newness" dominated almost every facet of society and culture, from technological  advances, to sexual mores to music.  New musical approaches were developed by composers like Ives, Cowell and Copland who sensed the historical moment.  The study of women and modernism, however, has focused on misogyny -- the public antiwoman discourse in which many male composers and critics participated.  The story of modernist female composers thus has been one of struggle and ultimate defeat against the forces of misogynist rhetoric and masculinist ideals.  Such arguments, however, use as their examples only a few women working as composers, such as Ruth Crawford Seeger, and rely on formulations that exclude various different kinds of participation or influences in American musical culture of the early 20th century.

The purpose of this panel presentation will be to rethink the dialectics of gender and American musical modernism.  The panel will consist of three presentations that address different aspects of American music and the ways in which they represent modernism. The first will examine gendered discourse, standards of masculinity and fundamental questions of gender identity.  The second will address the gendering of ethnicity and the relationship between Asian American music and American modernism.  The third will discuss popular music and the ways in which it reflects modern attitudes about gender and sexuality.  Each will attempt to redefine the boundaries of modernism by incorporating diverse categories of musical activity and recognizing the larger historical contexts in which modernism was formed, allowing for a broader view of the relationship between modern music, gender and women.

Penberthy, Debra, University of Washington

Performed Autobiography: Unveiling the Fact, Fiction, and Ideology in My Song Cycle The Weaver

I will be performing my song cycle, The Weaver, for solo, a cappella voice. These songs incorporate my original story-like texts informed by a critical feminist standpoint. The music draws heavily on elements of various Western folk styles within a more chromaticized framework and employing extended vocal technique.

The song, "The Ballad of Peppy and May," is a miniature based on the style of a Southern Ballad. It is semi-autobiographical and about the loss of my Father and the banishing of his sister due to her supposed mental imbalances. "Jeannie's Song" relates my internal dialogue about my feelings of friendship for a seemingly odd woman who I often see on my travels about town, but who is in fact a stranger to me. "A Modern Tonal Parable with No Discernible Moral" plays with the New Age tendency to seek wisdom from various "gurus".

I am a classically trained singer with a strong interest in Popular Music. In these songs and other works I am exploring ways of using the voice that draw upon elements of Popular Music so that they are accessible to audiences of pop and "art" music. Through these forms I wish to reach a broader audience and inspire critical thought on questions of gender and the defining elements of high and low art.

Pleasure and Performance

How can feminist theory, reception theory, and critical examinations of the body open up new ways of taking musical pleasure seriously? What are the politics of writing pleasure, performatively or otherwise, into our scholarly work? Acknowledging pleasure in performance is risky—it potentially feminizes the critical gesture because it resituates meaning in the body, the senses, and the emotions even as it problematizes all three spheres.

This panel will address both the cultural construction of pleasure and the critical possibilities for negotiating the space between the interpretive/analytical and the complex of desire, erotics, and adrenaline that together create pleasure in music. We will explore the following issues:

What is the place of authority in pleasure—i.e., how are certain kinds of pleasure situated in particular kinds of bodies as authoritative domains? How is pleasure always linked to power?  How is race, ethnicity, class, etc., associated with certain forms of musical pleasure?

What does ethnography specifically bring to theories of musical pleasure?

What are the ranges and scopes of musical pleasures—how widely or narrowly are such possibilities defined?

Are there guiltless musical pleasures?

We will focus on real practices in real lives but will reach for new critical language that may include the pleasures of theorizing.

Rao, Nancy, Rutgers University

Gendered Ethnicity and American Music Modernism of the 1930s

The close relation between the American modernism of 1930s and music exoticism has been the subject of recent inquiry by John Corbbet (1999) and David Nicholls (1996).  While the former, suggesting that colonialist impulse underlined the modernists’ orientalism, stresses the binary oppositions between center and the margin, hence the sinister exploitation, the latter, using Lou Harrison’s notion of “transethnicism” to describe the composers’ evocation of differences, emphasizes a kind pluralism.  Neither, however, unpack the ways that the historical, political, and cultural nexus gives rise to American modernism’s association with the “orient.”  This paper, from a racial perspective, will draw from analyses of the impact of centuries of global encounter, the resulting incoherent traditions and racial imaginations, and finally the gendering of such racial imaginations. 

I will begin with three examples that illustrate the ways in which the gendering of the racial imagination of Chinese American was reflected in American music life of the first decades of the twentieth century.  The first example is taken from an American opera written in 1917, Fay en Fah; the second example from a 1927 report in the New York Times about performances of Cantonese opera in New York’s Chinatown; the third example from the reception of a famous Peking opera singer, Mei Lan-fang, during his U.S. tour in 1930.  I will then focus on Henry Cowell to show how American modernist’s connection to the “orient” emerged, and how the perception of it was gendered through certain racial imaginations. 

Raykoff, Ivan, University of California, San Diego

“Killing Me Softly” (Un)Covered: Sexual/Textual Violations

“Killing Me Softly With His Song” (Fox/Gimble) has been covered by over a dozen recording artists since Roberta Flack’s classic 1973 rendition. Typically sung by a female vocalist, “Killing Me Softly” narrates a masochistic confessional: a woman’s emotional impressions upon hearing a young man performing “his” song, which she cathects as an intimate expression of her own identity and experience. This imagined song provides a memory-script which exposes her passivity and psychological vulnerability. Its performance also enacts a form of submission, as the boy’s instrument becomes an extension of her own fragile body, empowering him to manipulate her physically as well as emotionally. At the climax, the narrator’s acoustic penetration is matched by a visual one (“he looked right through me”) which results in the ultimate erasure of her identity (“as if I wasn’t there”). The repeated chorus, eventually dissolving into moans and sighs, affirms a cycle of perpetual subjugation.

Part of a larger project on “cover” versions, this paper explores how the creative history of the song “Killing Me Softly” mirrors the problematic relationships of power and identity between originating author(s) and subsequent performer(s) in popular music. On semantic and stylistic levels, remakes of “Killing Me Softly” typically vary the song’s lyrics, composition, and performance, and thereby the complex psychology of the narrating singer-listener. Certain male crooners such as Perry Como and Andy Williams even change the pronoun (“... With Her Song”), which highlights—at times amusingly—the song’s gender-specific metaphors. Most recently, The Fugees, a hip-hop group featuring Lauren Hill, revise the concept of “killing” to refer to dubbing and the male D.J., a textual revision that transfers the song’s connotations of sexual and psychological violation to the technological domain.

Saunders, David, Boise State University

Innovative Compositional Techniques of the 1960s and 70s: Music for Horn and Piano, 1971, by Thea Musgrave

Performance/Discussion of the 1967 work for horn and piano by the British composer Thea Musgrave, entitled simply Music. It is a 10 minute work that is nevertheless packed densely with music that represents some of the concepts of the 1960's and 70's Avant Garde. The performers are not asked so much for "extended techniques" on their instruments, but the structural elements of the composition itself are unique. Much of the piece does not employ "normal" metrical notation, for example, but uses relative rhythmical relationships together with spatial and directional symbols to indicate the points of coincidence between the two instruments. The internal structure is based on intervallic relationships and musical "gestures" for its coherence. It is almost verbal in its expressive techniques.

Smith, Catherine Parsons, University of Nevada Reno

An Operatic Skeleton on the Western Frontier: Zitkala-Sa, William F. Hanson, and “The Sun Dance Opera”

The Sun Dance Opera had its premiere in Vernal, Utah, in 1913 and was revived several times, most recently in 1938 in New York City. Zitkala-Sa, a Sioux whose English name was Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was widely credited as William F. Hanson's "collaborator" in the opera's creation. The bicultural Zitkala-Sa, who later became known as an eloquent orator and activist in behalf of Native American rights, had studied at the New England Conservatory and was well established as an author at the time the opera was first produced. Yet there is nothing in her papers or writings about the opera. Written accounts are all either from Hanson or from white male observers.

The author set out to discover as much as possible about the nature and extent of Zitkala Sa's contribution. The scant musical evidence is supplemented by considering the circumstances of the collaborators, the participants in the production, and the audience. The findings form a unique commentary on the position of Indian people and the role of so-called "Indianist" opera in Progressive-era American culture.

Stapleton, Jo, University of Surrey, England

“A Room of One’s Own in Eden”; Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf and the Formation of a Female Creativity Aesthetic.

Within the context of popular Victorian scientific and cultural ideologies, the perception of woman as a biological totality was to provide a blanket explanation for the absence of women from the canon of high art genres. Virginia Woolf’s controversial study of the nature of female creativity ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1928) identifies cultural and particularly economic constraints as the major factor in the suppression of a female creative voice. However, the analogy of Woolf’s creative room, refers not only to the necessity for woman’s economic empowerment, but to the occupation of the creative self within a private and somewhat isolated world. A position which historically has represented the status of female creativity as a sub or counterculture, and therefore independent of mainstream intellectual and aesthetic constraints. This concept of isolation was of particular interest to composer Ethel Smyth, who within her own treaties on female creativity ‘Female Pipings in Eden’ (1933), sought to establish cultural gender constraints as a possible basis for compositional difference. For Smyth, woman is the innovator; in the garden of Eden the original woman Eve, displays creativity as both a practical and instinctive force; "one afternoon while Adam was asleep, Eve, anticipating the Great God Pan, bored some holes in a hollow reed and began to do what is called ‘pick out a tune." This paper shall explore the conflicts arising from woman’s position outside the mainstream high art canon, and the role of this disenfranchisement in the formation of a female creative aesthetic and compositional voice.

Suzuki, Yoko, City University of New York, Graduate Center

Masculinity in Jazz Saxophone Performance from the Perspective of Female
Saxophonists

This paper discusses the role of masculinity in jazz saxophone performance by focusing on how stereotypes about jazz saxophonists and their performance styles are founded upon gender assumptions in American society at large. From interviews with eight female jazz saxophonists and from my own experience as a jazz saxophonist, I have concluded that female saxophonists frequently have had to negotiate machismo in the jazz world. Interestingly, of the eight informants and myself, the four who were trained outside of the United States were less exposed to chauvinistic attitudes in jazz in their home countries. First, I will briefly examine how musical instruments have been associated with gender. Second, I will explore jazz as a masculine musical genre. Because jazz requires aggressive and assertive playing in certain situations (for example, in jam sessions), jazz constructs a masculinized space that is often prevent women’s full participation. Third, I will discuss how image and stereotyping of jazz and jazz musicians have affected actual performances and music making as well as the music business. It seems that masculine musical styles have excluded women and created masculine spaces in the jazz world. I suggest that masculinized musical spaces and performance styles provide the basis for the masculine aesthetic of saxophonists that is sought by audiences and rewarded by the industry.

Tolbert, Elizabeth, Peabody Conservatory of Music, Johns Hopkins University

Theorizing the Musically Abject

To speak of musical pleasure is to speak of jouissance—or is it? Musical pleasure, indeed all pleasure, is necessarily implicated in that which lies beyond it. In this paper, I propose that Kristeva’s notion of the "abject", the unincorporable aspects of bodiliness, finds a counterpart in the notion of the excesses of music beyond language, i.e., music configured as feminine, bodily, and irrational. As the abject is that which cannot be incorporated into the socially constituted body, music is that which cannot be incorporated into language. For my case study, I will examine the "musically abject" as it appears in evolutionary proposals on the origin of language in ritual. In particular, I will explore Camilla Power’s and Chris Knight’s suggestions that language arose in the contexts of female gossip and female menstruation rituals. My analysis suggests that a dialectical relationship between the corporeally and musically "abject" underlies a broad range of academic discourses on music, and that this relationship must be addressed explicitly when attempting to theorize musical pleasure.

van Berlo, Angelique, York University, Toronto

The Accordion a Feminist Instrument?  Pauline Oliveros Negotiating Alternatives to European Modernist Ideologies

American composer-accordionist Pauline Oliveros wrote in 1957 “Concert Piece for the Accordion”, the same year Danish accordionist Mogens Ellegaard commissioned “Symphonic Fantasy and Allegro for Accordion and Chamber Orchestra”. Compositions that marked the entrance of the accordion in NewMusic and lead to European, North American and Asian accordionists commissioning during the 80's and 90's composers such as Luciano Berio, Sofia Gubaidulina, Toshio Hosokawa, Adriana Hölzky, R. Murray Schafer, Jukka Tiensuu and Isang Yun. This paper will address how in the case of composer-performer Pauline Oliveros, feminism has been a important factor in constructing and negotiating an identity for this musical instrument. Oliveros work has consistently challenged European modernist ideologies: her free-improvisations in the late fifties creating alternatives to western hierarchical performance conventions, her emphasizing the relevance of community, and exploring the synchronization of body and mind through sound. I will address how Oliveros constructs her feminism, how this impacts her use of the accordion; and trace a construction of what could be labelled as a 'feminine subjectivity' in an improvisation by Oliveros (accordion), Stuart Dempster (trombone) and Panaoitis (voice) titled “King Lear” (1988).

Wells, Elizabeth A., Eastman School of Music

Me and Velma Ain't Dumb: The Women of West Side Story

When West Side Story opened in 1957, it galvanized audiences and critics alike with its brash realism and integration of music, dance, and word. More than simply a new departure in musical theatre style, West Side Story spoke to post-war Americans about serious problems emerging in urban culture. Primary among them was the theme of youth violence, not just among male hoodlums but also among "girl gangs," a new and profoundly threatening phenomenon.

The character of "Anybodys" encapsulates gender struggles within West Side Story and the issues surrounding female delinquency. A tomboy who fits into neither male nor female worlds, this gender interloper is also the only character who has no precursor in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which the creators followed as closely as possible in their modern rendition. Added very late in the compositional process, the authors seem to have created Anybodys as both a response to female juvenile violence and as a foil to the other female characters in the work, who are also separated from their male counterparts through musical and choreographic means.

In this approach, an analysis of the treatment of gender from a theatrical and musical standpoint is combined with a close reading of two newly-discovered documentary sources: an interview from 1958 in which real juvenile delinquents discuss gender in West Side Story and in their lives, and a song written for Anybodys and two "Jet" gang members which was cut shortly before the show opened.

Whitesell, Lloyd, St Paul, MN

Strict Pedal Points in Early Joni Mitchell

Folk-rock star David Crosby has recently acclaimed Joni Mitchell as the greatest singer-songwriter of the late twentieth century. Since the 1990s, she has been marketed as a “classic” and confirmed in that status by a series of awards and tribute concerts. But Mitchell has become a cultural icon without the benefit of a detailed analysis of her artistic contribution. One of the songwriter's most distinctive achievements is in the realm of harmonic innovation. Mitchell's songs fall under five categories of harmonic organization: modal, polymodal, chromatic, polytonal, and pedal point.

In this paper I will examine the last of these categories. The numbers are limited, allowing for a comprehensive survey. The songs are concentrated in Mitchell's earliest style period (1966-1972), namely the first five albums. A study of these songs will show the composer's ambition to elevate the pop song to an unusual level of sophistication, her virtuosity in deriving expressive and structural variety from a single technique, and her conceptual depth in linking the technique to thematic dualities of freedom and constraint. I will focus on two well-known songs in particular: "Both Sides, Now" (Clouds) and "All I Want" (Blue). After 1972, Mitchell's interest in pedal points is abandoned save for one experimental, sixteen-minute song from 1977, "Paprika Plains," in which she brings the technique to a climax.

Wong, Deborah, University of California, Riverside

Anger and Erotics in Taiko

What happens when musical pleasures are disrupted? My ethnographic work on taiko (a Japanese drumming tradition) in Asian America has involved immersion in a multiethnic taiko group, and these activities have highlighted issues of gender, ethnic identification, political placement, and the pleasures of athletic musicality. For many Asian American women, the pleasures of taiko lie in the construction of a body redefined as strong, disciplined, and loud, thus working against overdetermined gendered orientalist tropes.

I explore the unspoken erotics of strength and noise that emerge via these gendered ethnic identity politics, and I take a close look at specific moments of anger and irritation that circulate around one member of our group, a White European man who periodically challenges the value system that maintains the terms of pleasure in our group. When he asserts virtuostic solo drumming over unison group drumming and when he refuses to be absorbed into the cooperative group aesthetic that de-emphasizes ego, some Asian American women in the group respond with frustration, irritation, and (in my case) fury that he messes with our pleasure. I argue that pleasure raises the stakes, and that this trouble some. White man’s resistance perhaps stems from his own awareness that the gendered and racialized terms of my/our pleasure define his exclusion from it—and that his pleasure lies at least partly in his rejection of our terms.

Wood, Eric, York University, Toronto

A Classically-Set Precedent? Gender-Bending, the Castrati, and Contemporary Artists

Capricious prima donnas, musical superstars, despicable, degenerate creatures, heaven's sweetest song; all descriptions given to the sometimes praised, sometimes ridiculed, but most consistently, intriguing castrati. To begin, the castrati have often been misunderstood by many, even within the music world. Thought by some to have been just asexual eunuchs, while others have believed them to have been capricious highly effeminate, gay men, one of the few constants in the castrati's social reception is that the castrati have been misunderstood by many. Through an examination of historical evidence detailing the castrati's social reception, the prevailing social conditions of the times, their musical training, their physical and behavioral characteristics, and other pertinent facts, I will attempt to indeed reconstruct the picture of how castrati were both received and perceived in parts of seventeenth through nineteenth century Europe. Furthermore, I will illustrate how they functioned as socially subversive figures in several regards and how they can in many regards be seen as "gender-benders" of their times, whilst ironically still maintaining the binary gender system largely in place in their times. Lastly, I draw parallels between the castrati and modern day-gender benders David Bowie and Boy George to illustrate how gender-bending has indeed seemed to continue in a similar fashion on many levels one hundred years after the castrati.

Wyers, Giselle, Boise State University

Contemporary Hildegard Settings: Collaboration or Appropriation?

The devotional Sufi music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is used to accompany a murder scene in Oliver Stone's movie Natural Born Killers.  Does sacred music survive a sacrilegious context?

Paul Simon uses the music of Ladysmith Black Mambazo in the recording of his landmark album Graceland.  Is this collaboration, or exploitation?

Richard Souther produces Vision, a commercial recording featuring revised and abridged chants of Hildegard, complete with sampled drum beats, synthesizer and multiple vocal tracks.  Is Hildegard’s music served well by this public exposure, or tainted beyond recognition?

Complicated issues arise when living composers attempt to incorporate the chants of Hildegard within their choral works. Composers must ride the balance between “rights” to alter and reinvent Hildegard’s music, and “responsibilities” to honor Hildegard with respect to her theology, feminism, and historical authenticity.  The purpose of this presentation will be to understand some of the issues involved with recasting Hildegard chant in contemporary settings.  Numerous choral works using Hildegard chants or texts will be explored, with an eye for discovering valid criteria for the evaluation of these works, keeping in mind that criteria may vary according to the performance conte