Customer Reviews

Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

In FEMININE ENDINGS: MUSIC, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY, Susan McClary applies the insightful and provocative approach to music and its meanings that has made her one of the most widely read music scholars of the twentieth century, and for which she earned the prestigious MacArthur Award in 1995. McClary argues that music, being a fundamentally social phenomenon, constitutes a particular mode of social discourse. Music can articulate social meanings in various ways, and like any semiotic system it uses a defined, yet flexible, repertory of codes -- gestures, rhetorical devices, narrative strategies, associations with and allusions to extra-muical events or phenomena, and so on. While this would seem obvious to anyone who has ever heard a horn call, a funeral dirge, a national anthem, or a distinctive bolero, scholarly writing on music has until recently been reluctant to assess critically how meanings are inscribed, circulated, and mediated through musical practices. As McClary explains, the process by which musical sounds, phrases, and gestures assume meanings is complex and is open to modification, challenge, and redefinition. Therefore, critics who portray McClary's rich hermeneutic interventions as reductive or essentialist grossly misrepresent her line of argument. For as she demonstrates, there is nothing essential about musical meanings -- they are subject to the contingencies of time and place; they are shaped by contemporary social and historical realities; and they rely upon the formal and stylistic conventions specific to the musical traditions in which they participate. McClary brings these factors to bear on musical practices, and in so doing she engages music to perform a powerful cultural critique.

It seems reasonable to me to suppose that in certain cases music can be (in some way or other) an expression of sexuality, but it seems no less reasonable to me to suppose that human sexuality can be (in some way or other) an expression of musicality--for human sexuality is, after all, and by design, pliable and subject to fixation. This book does not truly concern itself with the possible relation of music and sexuality; it wishes, rather, to reduce music to sexuality, to deny music its musicality. It fails on the one hand because whether or not music is an expression of sexuality, it is also much more, it is also music. It fails on the other hand because its author is no more able to divine a composer's sexual impulses from examining his compositions than an astrologer is able to divine a man's fate from drawing up his horoscope. In short, this is not a work of scholarship; it is a puerile indulgence in solipsistic fantasy

It's not a bad thing to invent fantastical narrative glosses for musical forms. The composer and pianist George Antheil imagined the first theme of a sonata form movement to be his wife and the second theme to be his more alluring mistress. By the recapitulation his mistress becomes as familiar as his wife and hence is represented in the tonic key. George Antheil's sonata form story helped him to perform sonata form movements. I, in contradistinction, think of Hansel and Gretel to help me compose sonata form movements. Susan McClary's sonata form story goes like this: The first theme is the male repressing the female second theme--he gets to go first. Then in the recapitulation he forces her into his own key, which to McClary's mind makes him--and his composer--a rapist. If Susan McClary can get something out of her story, that's fine--for her. Just let's not call her book a sociological or musicological critique. Let's call it making up foolish stories. By the bye, "gender" is a grammatical term only.

At a time when feminist scholars the world over are making valuable contributions to music studies, McClary's attempt at a feminist musicology in this volume (and for that matter elsewhere) stands out as an example of how not to do it. Blandly reductive, nothing if not essentialist, and hoping to make up for its lack of theoretical sophistication by a tone of shrillness and violence, this book is everything that feminist musicology must try to avoid if it is to be taken seriously, not just by the "establishment" but by other feminists and even by undergraduates. Music and musicology, including the very concepts and "feelings" that they rely on and convey, ARE related to gender and sexuality, but not in the unmediated, simplistic manner that McClary espouses. Instead of clarifying the complexity of the matter, McClary has managed to give us something that resembles Stalinist versions of Marxism: your "social position" (read: gender, sexuality), is a direct, unmediated determinant of your music. The cultural politics this implies ought to be obvious to all. For a more enlightened approach to music and gender, read most of the studies included in the book "Rediscovering the Muses," a volume which actually deals with non-western music. (Unlike McClary, whose concerns with the "Other" and the "marginalized" simply function as academic straw men--sorry for the gender-specific metaphor).

Having looked at the every so slightly damning reviews on this so far I felt the urge to put this book into some context.

Susan McClary writes extremely well and informatively. The book presents some interesting viewpoints and is undoubtedly a great contribution to gender studies in musicology. I would know, I'm writing my dissertation on this area.

Many of the reviews here seem to have missed the point of this book entirely however. This is an aesthetical book, on music aesthetics, on musical aesthetics and criticism, it is one person's (accepted) viewpoint, it is one person's opinion. I can't emphasise this any more. When reading Eduard Hanslick's accounts on instrumental music, do we interpret what he says as merely opinion or do we assume he is stating facts? The latter would be ridiculous. His views, and the views in Susan McClary's book, are merely their opinions put on paper. Whether you agree with it or not is purely your opinion.

The fact is that women over the centuries have been at a clear disadvantage and it is visible everywhere; Clara Schumann, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke... the list goes on. If you would like to put this book into context (simply reading it on its own could result in confusion) I suggest you read '50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies' by Jane Pilcher and Imelda Wheelan, or perhaps Ruth A. Solie's 'Musicology and Difference' or even, Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas's 'Queering the Pitch'. All three would greatly enhance anyones understanding of gender studies in music. The first book mentioned give a fantastic explanation into the terminology used in gender studies.

It's not a load of 'poppycock', it is simply one person's hard work and personal opinion on what some of this music came to represent. Sure, you don't listen to Beethoven's 'Symphony No. 9' and start wanting to make women slave away in the kitchen, however, the musical canon did exclude women with its androcentric language, religion also played a major part, descriptions that were originally harmless ('masculine' and 'feminine' cadences) resulted in stereotyping women.... it goes on. Marcia J. Citron's 'Gender and the Musical Canon' is also very good.

I didn't agree with all of it but I still realised that their opinions were valid, that they had reserached and thought about their subject thoroughly. I would recommend this to anyone delving into MUSIC and AESTHETICS AND CRITICISM. Not recommended for light reading however.

In Feminine Endings, Susan McClary went "outside the box," critically examining a lot of the unquestioned conventions of traditional musicology. This was a groundbreaking book, attempting to talk about "the semiotics of desire" and how composers/performers construct meaning through the creation and manipulation of musical pleasure. McClary received extremely harsh criticism for her rethinking of "classical" composers and musicology, the vehemence of which was, at times, shocking. This in itself indicated that Feminine Endings had touched a sensitive nerve (McClary herself characterizes her inquiry as one of Bluebeard's wives daring to open the forbidden door). While the musicology establishment mostly viewed McClary as a misguided heretic, many other scholars and critics found Feminine Endings brilliant, liberating, and a breath of fresh air (I'd vote for all three). While criticism of this book, published in 1991, still hasn't stopped, McClary indeed opened a door with Feminine Endings, providing a critical space for a variety of subsequent music criticism, including even traditional musicology, which found Feminine Endings too important to ignore. This book is aimed at a scholarly readership, though undergrad students (music majors and non-majors alike) can also get a lot out of these essays, which are very readable considering the scholarly content.

This book changed me from a Stravinsky-like "music has no meaning" stance. I still don't think that music is sad or happy or like a day in the country, things are more complicated than that, but I no longer feel that music is an empty if beautiful vessel. Instead music, like all actions (and non-actions), is political. I only give it a four because I would recommend her next book far more.

I assigned this book to my WOMEN AND MUSIC class when I taught at the University of Tennessee. It opened their eyes and ears. They have an entirely new and valuable perspective. A must read for any musician! Dr. Benjamin Boone, California State University Fresno

Doubtless music has anthropological and cultural significance (but it has musical significance too). As far as I can tell, no one has ever disputed this. It's just that this particular set of essays happens to be vapid and ludicrous. Strange and reckless--yet not especially imaginative or interesting--assertions are tossed about wholly unsubstantiated.

(Beware of writers who use vague and slippery buzzwords such as "rich"--unless they're talking about money or food--and "engages"--unless they're talking about gears or marriage.)

sex: n. 1. The property or quality by which organisms are classified according to their reproductive functions. 2. Either of two divisions, designated "male" and "female", of this classification.

gender: n. 1. A subclass within a grammatical class of a language that determines agreement with and selection of words or grammatical forms. 2. Membership of a word or grammatical form in such a subclass. 3. An inflectional form showing membership in such a subclass.

Though I often wished she would pause more on her musical excerpts, this book is very wise, and anyone interested in understanding meaning in music intellectually must read this book.