Feminist Aesthetics in Music

feminist Aesthetics in Music

Recent Titles in Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance Otto Laske: Navigating New Musical Horizons Jerry Tabor, editor Perspectives on the Grateful Dead: Critical Writings Robert G. Weiner, editor The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter Domenico Cimarosa: His Life and His Operas Nick Rossi and Talmage Fauntleroy The Writings and Letters of Konrad Wolff Ruth Gillen, editor Nomai Dance Drama: A Surviving Spirit of Medieval Japan Susan M. Asai The Wind and Wind-Chorus Music of Anton Bruckner Keith William Kinder Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions: Hermeneutic Approaches to Wagner's Music-Dramas Mary A. Cicora Virtue or Virtuosity? Explorations in the Ethics of Musical Performance Jane O'Dea Beethoven in Person: His Deafness, Illnesses, and Death Peter J. Davies The Character of a Genius: Beethoven in Perspective Peter J. Davies Sing Sorrow: Classics, History, and Heroines in Opera Marianne McDonald

Feminist Aesthetics in Music Sally Macarthur

Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance, Number 61

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Macarthur, Sally. Feminist aesthetics in music / Sally Macarthur. p. cm.—(Contributions to the study of music and dance, ISSN 0193-9041 ; no. 61) Includes bibliographical references (p. ), discography (p. ), and index. ISBN 0-313-31320-2 (alk. paper) 1. Feminism and music. 2. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. I. Title. II. Series. ML82.M22 2002 780'.82—dc2I 2001023329 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2002 by Sally Macarthur All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001023329 ISBN: 0-313-31320-2 ISSN: 0193-9041 First published in 2002 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

Copyright Acknowledgments The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Excerpts from Ansturm by Richard Dehmel, translated by Margit Franklin-Spaeth and Jim Franklin, in Peter Platr "Love and Passion in Alma Mahler- Werfel's Ansturm!' Predictions and Inaccuracies: Collisions of Musical Histories and Futures Approaching the Millennium. Papers from the Sydney Music Research Symposium, University of Western Sydney, February 20,1999, Sydney Chapter of the Musicological Society ofAustralia. Translation by Richard Hobbs of Rimbaud's poem O Saisons, O Chateaux!, which appears on the sleeve notes of the CD entitled Red Leaves by Cala Records Ltd., 1996. Adaptation of Sally Macarthur's "Performance Rites: AMEB, or Not to Be?" in Sally Macarthur and Cate Poynton, eds., Musics and Feminisms. Sydney. Australian Music Centre, 1999. Figure 2.7, "Percentage of Australian Music Included in the AMEB Syllabuses for A. Mus. A. and L. Mus.A. in 1985,1990, and 1995" by Sarah-Grace Williams. Excerpts from Genefer Luff's unpublished interview with Moya Henderson, March 21,1989. Musical extracts from Moya Henderson's Sacred Site (1983) and Stubble (1975). Musical extracts from VierLiederNo. 3, Ansturm by Alma Mahler-Werfel. © Copyright 1915 by Universal Edition A. G. Wien. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes on behalf of Alfred A. Kalmus Ltd. (London). Musical extracts from Trio for Violin, Violoncello and Pianoforte by Rebecca Clarke. © Copyright 1928 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd. Musical extracts from Cycle of Love by Anne Boyd. © Faber Music Limited. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Pty Ltd. on behalf of Faber Music Limited. Musical extracts from Tast-en by Elena Kats-Chernin. © Boosey & Hawkes New York. Reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Pty Ltd.

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This book is dedicated with love and gratitude to my mother, Meryll Marion Macarthur, to my father, Robert James Macarthur, and to Rosemary Schaffler

The words the happy say Are paltry melody But those the silent feel Are beautiful. —Emily Dickinson (J.1750)

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Contents

Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: For Women's Eyes Only?

xi xiii 1

1 Feminist Aesthetics in Music

11

2 Music in Context and Practice

31

3 The Power of Sound, the Power of Sex: Alma Schindler-Mahler's Ansturm

63

4 Sexing the Subject of Musical Analysis: Rebecca Clarke and Elisabeth Lutyens

81

5 Meditations on Feminist Aesthetics: Anne Boyd's Cycle of Love

107

6 Framing the Case for a Feminist Reading of Elena Kats-Chernin's Postmodern Tast-en

129

7 Sexual Signatures: Feminist Aesthetics in the Music of Moya Henderson after the Death of the Author

149

8 This Music Which Is Between Two

173

Bibliography

185

Discography

197

Index

199

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Illustrations

FIGURES 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 5.1

Repertoire Findings for All Groups Surveyed, 1985-1995 Repertoire Findings for Music Reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald, 1985-1995 Repertoire Findings for Music Performed by the SSO, 1985-1995 Percentage of Australian Music and Women's Music Performed by Contemporary Music Ensembles, 1985-1995 Percentage of Australian Music and Women's Music Performed by Mainstream Ensembles, 1985-1995 Percentage of Australian Women's Music against All Australian Music Performed by All Groups, 1985-1995 Percentage of Australian Music Included in the AMEB Syllabuses for A. Mus. A. and L. Mus. A. in 1985, 1990, and 1995 Arc Structure of Cycle of Love Showing Tonal Centers for Each Movement

37 38 39 40 41 41 49 118

TEXT EXAMPLES 3.1 4.1 5.1

Ansturm (Assault or Uprush) by Richard Dehmel Poem O Saisons, O Chateaux! by Rimbaud Textual Analysis of Cycle ofLove

72 99 120

MUSICAL EXAMPLES 3.1

Alma Schindler-Mahler, Vier Lieder No. 3, Ansturm (Bars 8-14)

73

xii

3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

Illustrations Alma Schindler-Mahler, Vier Lieder No. 3, Ansturm (Bars 28-31) Rebecca Clarke, Music of First Three Bars of the Piano Trio Rebecca Clarke, Bugle Call in Bar 33 of the Piano Trio Series upon which O Saisons, O Chateaux! Is Based Quotation from the Dirge in Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings (Bars 4-6, Second Song, Cycle of Love) Boyd's Transcription of a Korean Sijo, Opening Flute Melody of Cycle of Love (Bars 1-2) Opening Bars of Cycle of Love (Bars 1 -6, First Song) Modes Used in Cycle of Love Opening Five Frames of Tast-en Bar 6 of Tast-en Opening and Closing Bars of Tast-en Bars 63-74 of Tast-en Melodic Line in Stubble, First Bars Following Initial Humming Opening of Sacred Site (Bars 1-2) Cyclic, Swirling Ostinato in Sacred Site (Bars 2-3) Prokofiev Theme from Three Sections of Sacred Site (Bars 30-34, Bars 138-142, and Bars 149-152) Volley of Car Horns (Bars 153-155)

75 94 94 100 117 118 121 123 141 142 142 143 162 167 167 168 169

TABLES 4.1 4.2 4.3 6.1 7.1

Clarke, Piano Trio, First Movement Ternary Structure of O Saisons, O Chateaux! High Points in O Saisons, O Chateaux! Macrostructural Plan of Tast-en Henderson, Sacred Site

93 100 101 139 166

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the contribution of a great many people. Above all, I would like to thank Rosemary Schaffler. The task of writing was made all the easier because of her loving and generous support for me as a person and as a writer. Her guidance was invaluable, as were her detailed reading and editing of the manuscript and her perceptive comments regarding the content and overall organization. I would also like to thank Susan Erickson for her patient and careful editorial work in the final stages of the book. I am indebted to Susan for the musical expertise and specialist knowledge of the field that she brought to bear on the project. She gave her support with unbounded generosity. This was also the case with Gretchen Poiner, to whom I express sincere thanks for her reading and rereading of the entire manuscript at every stage of its writing. She offered thoughtful, practical, and conceptual criticism along with much encouragement. This book has been a long time in the making and bears indebtedness to many other people. There were those who supported and encouraged me in the early stages of the research. I would like to thank Anne Boyd and Terry Threadgold, both of whom were unstinting in their generosity of time, offering the greatest assistance and encouragement with infinite patience. I thank them both for their enthusiasm,and for guiding the direction of my thought with insights that have been inspirational. In many ways the book owes its existence to Susan McClary. Susan's courageous and pioneering work in the area of feminist music criticism has been visionary and is an exemplary model for this project. From the time of my first encounter with Susan McClary at the Gender and Music Conference in London in 1991 to the completion stages of the book, she has been extremely generous with her knowledge. I have benefited enormously from her comments, suggestions, and encouragement given during some of the written and oral presentations

XIV

Acknowledgments

of my work. I would also like to thank Marcia Citron and Nicola LeFanu, both of whom gave valuable feedback in the earlier stages of the research. To Moya Henderson I owe a great deal of gratitude. First, she provided me with unlimited access to her private letters, manuscripts, tapes, and unpublished writings and allowed me to use the scores and recordings of her works. Second, she was always willing to answer my questions in numerous interviews and personal communications. Third, she read parts of the book and made some extremely useful and practical suggestions. I am grateful to Moya Henderson for permission to include musical extracts from Sacred Site (which also appear in an anthology of Australian organ music by Currency Press) and Stubble. I also thank Elena Kats-Chernin, who kindly made time available to discuss her music with me. I have benefited from the help and guidance of my friends Idena Rex and Patsy Short, with whom I had many fruitful conversations and who read portions of the book in earlier drafts. I express gratitude to Caitlin Rowley for her support and assistance and to Alan Walker for his careful compiling of the index. To Eric Levy and his predecessor, Pamela St. Claire, editors at Greenwood Publishing Group, I owe special thanks for their patient assistance and help along the trajectory of the book's writing to its publication. To Deborah Whitford of Publishing Support Associates, I owe special thanks for her meticulous care of the manuscript. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to my colleague Julian Knowles for reading early drafts of the manuscript and for contributing very special insights with respect to contemporary performance practice in Australian music. Thanks are due to my colleagues David Hull, Michael Atherton, Diana Blom, Jim Franklin, Kim Poole, Ian Shanahan, Andree Greenwell, and Jean Callaghan for their moral support and encouragement of my work. My students at the University of Western Sydney have provided me with consistent feedback by helping me over many years to develop and refine my ideas. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the contributions of Adrian Renzo, Corrina Bonshek, and Lara Biernoff. I thank the School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney for providing me with time release and six months' study leave during 1999 and 2000.1 also thank the Research Project Unit of the School of Contemporary Arts for production support. My thanks are extended to the following music organizations in Australia whose staff so generously provided me with access to program information and other data used in the book: the Australia Council, ABC Concerts, Sydney Symphony Orchestra (now Sydney Symphony), Musica Viva Australia, the Australian Opera (now Opera Australia), Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australia Ensemble, the Song Company, Sydney Alpha Ensemble, Australysis, Synergy, the Seymour Group, Sydney Spring Festival of New Music, SBS Youth Orchestra, the Sydney Youth Orchestra, the Australian Youth Orchestra, and Camerata Australia. The development of the theoretical model in this book owes much to important feedback that I received from presenting portions of this research at international

Acknowledgments

xv

conferences (especially the Gender and Music Conference, Kings College, London University) and at national musicology and interdisciplinary conferences (especially Word-Voice-Sound: Interactions around Musics, Artspace, Woolloomooloo, Sydney 1996; and Resonances, the Australian Women's Music Festival Conference, University of Sydney, 1997, the latter of which provided me with an opportunity to discuss my work with the eminent scholar Suzanne Cusick). A special thanks to Trish Pearse, who listened patiently in the early stages of the research. Special thanks are also due to my dear friend Helene Trocme-Fabre, who nourished my thinking over a period of some 20 years; to Deborah Hayes for her very careful reading of the manuscript and helpful guidance; and to Therese Radic, Cate Poynton, Maree Macmillan, Peter McCallum, Linda Kouvaras, and Helen Rusak, who were always willing to share ideas with me. My thanks to John Phillips for uncovering some valuable material on Alma Schindler-Mahler and passing it on to me. I give thanks of a personal sort to myfriendsMarcia Perry Jones, Christopher von Keisenberg, Michael Farrell, Toni Kram, Ron Wilson, John Terry, Nigel Smith, Lyndsey Paget-Cooke, Rachael Hainsworth, Kylee Stevens, Lorna Lander, Bernadette Herzig, Sharon Goldenberg, Christine Kelley, and Amanda Zappia and to my brother John Macarthur. I wish to acknowledge the special role in my life during the book's gestation of Genefer Luff (now deceased) and my former high school music teacher, Marianne Helm (nee Rosenberg) (now deceased). Marianne's enthusiasm and encouragement triggered my desire to learn more about music, providing a starting point for what has since become a long, ever-changing journey through the kaleidoscopic realm of musical knowledge.

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Introduction: For Women's Eyes Only?

There aren't many women in this book, and most of the ones I do include are teachers. ... Do I dislike women because I dislike ecriturefeminine—or bad ecriturefe inine? —Kevin Kopelson, Beethoven's Kiss Taking my cue from Kopelson,11 could begin by stating the obvious. There aren't many men in this book, and most of the ones I do include are theorists. Kopelson's book is an exploration of gender and sexuality (with an emphasis on homoerotic desire) in relation to pianism in the Romantic period. The women whom he includes are "maiden" piano teachers; a number of the men whom he includes are virtuosos. He asks why he does not write about female virtuosos—for example, "Martha Argerich, who's sexier than Horowitz and whose Tchaikovsky Concerto is the best on record"2—and concludes that it is because he (Kopelson) is "phallocentric." He says, "I prefer men—in bed. And yes, I'm phallogocentric. I prefer to argue—in print. But does that make me misogynistic?"3 On reading a book that boasts about being "a vivid (and startling) example of the 'new musicology,' "* I admit to being unnerved by Kopelson's up-front declaration about his preference for men, his apparent dismissal of women (with the implication that he is being misogynistic), and what seems like his loathing of Vecriture feminine (women's writing). My book wants to celebrate Vecriture feminine. It wants to celebrate women's music. Yet if I were to begin this book by adopting a tone similar to Kopelson's—declaring, for example, that I prefer women, that I am gynocentric (or "gynologocentric"), and that I dislike masculinist aesthetics (for want of a better complement to the term / 'ecriturefeminine)—it would be more than likely that I would alienate the vast majority of my readership, feminists included.

2

Feminist Aesthetics in Music

Feminist Aesthetics in Music is one of a number of recent books that focus exclusively on music by women composers. In dealing only with women composers, however, it runs the risk of being seen as a separatist publication (in some ways like Kopelson's) with something of a covert message that reads: "Open only if you are a feminist." But its intention is not to antagonize men, or women, for that matter, whether or not they wish to identify themselves as feminists. This book invites readers of all kinds to read what is written here, for I believe its message is important to all who enjoy music and to all who are concerned with the politics that divide women from men. In some ways, it is a book that adds to the remarkable array of information that has already been assembled concerning women composers of the past and present.5 Like its antecedents, it draws attention to the fact that women composers have always existed and continue to exist and that their music is deserving of attention. The problem with much of the work on women's music to date, as Susan McClary observes, is its failure to deal critically with actual music.6 In this respect, Feminist Aesthetics in Music fills an important void, for it deals in depth with a number of concrete musical examples. Careful analysis is undertaken of each piece of music chosen to demonstrate the theory being proposed. I want to show how understanding actual music provides insights into the social world that it inhabits. I contend that music is, in fact, profoundly implicated in the transmission of social knowledge. Almost by way of retort to Kopelson and others like him, I want to say that there are many women composers (professional composers) whose music is worthy of discussion. I want to assert that it is worth leaping into print and even arguing about this subject. That the music establishment has not taken women's music seriously (as Chapter 2 demonstrates) is a monumental mistake. There is no denying it, however, for women's music is not discussed in mainstream history of music texts as a matter of course, nor has it been analyzed to the same extent as men's music. In short, it has not been given the same kind of attention, including performances and broadcasts, that has been afforded men's music. The label "women's music" is a problematic one, for it immediately conjures up the idea that it exists in a domain separate from men's music. In fact, it could be argued that the category "women's music" has been brought about by the fact that men's music is simply music; women's music, to follow this line of thinking, is understood as something else. Perhaps women's music is not understood as music at all? But if it is music—as the vast amount of work by feminist musicologists since the 1970s has been at pains to illustrate—then the label "women's music" draws attention to the idea that there are divisions to be drawn not just between women's music and men's music but between men and women themselves. According to Elizabeth Grosz, Western culture is founded upon hierarchies that resolve into opposing terms. Inherent in these oppositions is the sanctioning of one term by defining the other through its negation.7 In this book I argue that men's music has always been highly valorized. Women's music has always been defined in relation to men's and has thus been devalued. This division between the two, with its negative connotations for

Introduction

3

women's music, underscores a fundamental problem that I encounter in this book. Put simply, it is this: How do I avoid reinforcing the distinction between men's and woman's music while at the same time drawing attention to the fact that women's music is deserving of serious attention? Dichotomies have the function of making distinctions mutually exclusive. Even worse, as Elizabeth Grosz states: "Dichotomies are inherently non-reversible, non-reciprocal hierarchies, and thus describe systems of domination."8 So if I were merely to reverse the dichotomy of women's music and men's music—to imagine women's music as the taken-for-granted norm and men's music as something else—I would be doing something quite counterproductive. Terry Threadgold points out that merely reversing the terms and leaving the dichotomy potentially intact do nothing to rescue women's music in terms of its specificity, its difference, or, indeed, its autonomy. Nor does this dichotomy allow for the fact that there may be more than two terms to be considered, that this binarism, as Threadgold puts it, "might be a quite arbitrary division into two of what is actually a continuum."9 In order to overcome this difficulty, which emerges wherever I find myself almost inevitably wanting to construct a dichotomy, I attempt to slip into the interstices that separate men's music from women's. I want to think about women's music as being part of a continuum encompassing men's music while at the same time, as contradictory as this idea may seem, separating it from men's music. On this last point, the surface ground suddenly becomes very slippery, for in order to come to grips with the idea that women's music may be different from men's music, it has become necessary to construct an arbitrary distinction between them. I want to make it clear, however, that these exclusive terms are not meant to represent the reality, but rather they are employed as the only useful way of thinking about the inherent differences. It is not useful, for example, to explain the differences that I have discovered in women's music with reference to what they are not (or what they are lacking) in relation to men's music. Nor is it useful to reverse the binary divisions so that women's music suddenly appears as a site of privilege over men's, the latter by implication thus viewed as inferior. For the reasons that I have outlined, it is not useful to set up mutually exclusive categories, the idea of the exclusivity of each category in this sense being ultimately unhelpful. In addition, the sample of women composers who are represented in this book is very small, making it impossible to generalize my findings. Furthermore, except in the instance of Alma Schindler-Mahler and Alexander Von Zemlinsky, I avoid making direct comparisons between women's music and men's. Based on the research presented in this book, I cannot make grand claims about women's music, regardless of its sociohistorical context, as being different from men's music. Rather, my aim is to demonstrate that women's music, which has a long history of being neglected, is deserving of the same kind of lavish attention that has been showered on men's. Throughout the book, however, I appear to be on something of a seesaw on the dichotomy issue. On the one hand, it may appear that I am, indeed, setting forth an

4

Feminist Aesthetics in Music

argument that women's music is different from men's. Moreover, it becomes obvious that I want to demonstrate its difference in order to celebrate its worth. On the other hand, it is apparent that I am painfully aware of the deficiencies involved in such an argument. The contradictory nature of these differing positions resurfaces over and over again in the book and is linked to the related issue of how to draw attention to women's music without becoming entangled in a web of dichotomous relationships. To complicate the problem further and in an effort to dispel the myth that women's music is inferior to men's, I draw connections between different kinds of music composed by women in different contexts. My purpose is to show that their music, linked as it is by some of these connections, has perhaps been denied because it has been misunderstood. When we speak about women's music, we invariably find ourselves using the problematic, but frequently bandied-about, term "woman composer." As readers of music histories know, the noun "man" is never used to describe men in composition. They are simply composers. This labeling "woman composer" is the other half of the dichotomy "(man) composer," yet the word "man" is always just implied. Women composers are thus defined in relation to a generic term grounded in masculinity with an implication based on a deep-seated belief in hierarchical difference. As Susan McClary puts it, " 'different from' implies 'inferior to.' " To avoid being tarnished by this difference and following suit more generally with the women's movement of the 1970s, women composers began to push for equality. This, however, was often misread as, and collapsed into, sameness. Thus, women composers preferred not to draw attention to their difference from men and stressed their sameness, that is, their ability to compose as well as men. As McClary continues: "Whatever differences existed were demonstrated to be relatively trivial, up against the ways in which the sexes shared the same capabilities. Because women had been excluded from composition longer than the other arts, many female composers have maintained this position of 'sameness' to legitimate their presence in what is still somewhat alien territory."10 There are many problems inherent in maintaining a position of sameness. As I have already suggested, the word "composer," for example, while seeming to be inclusive and neutral, registers as an exclusive term that is synonymous with men. The word "composer," used in abundance in history of music texts, corresponds to the idea that the history of music is actually a history of music by men. The majority of books dealing with music and composers thus discriminate against women composers on the grounds of their sex. In this view, the way the term "composer" is used in these books is neither innocent nor neutral. It goes without saying, of course, that the term "woman composer" is not innocent or neutral either. But it does not pretend to be, and this is the important difference. The problem is that use of the word "woman" tends to have a negative effect here, implying that music by women composers is of poor quality. For good reason, then, many composers who are women will often prefer not to draw attention to their gender, choosing to call themselves simply composers. This is where they find themselves in something of a catch-22, for being subsumed under the um-

Introduction

5

brella term "composer" means that women, in effect, are required to operate according to the rules of the category, to become like (or the same as) their male composer colleagues. Given that men have dominated the category "composer," it is not difficult to arrive at the conclusion that the norms and conventions that have been established in music are male. Having no alternative but to operate according to these norms, it is not surprising to discover that women's music has frequently been castigated because it does not measure up to these norms. It has certainly been shown to fall short in terms of the standards of excellence that have been seen to characterize men's music, at least that which has been canonized. As Susan McClary puts it: "The music that has been composed by women (despite all odds) has often been received in terms of essentialist gender stereotypes ascribed to women by masculine culture; it is repeatedly condemned as pretty yet trivial or—in the event that it does not conform to feminine propriety—as aggressive and unbefitting a woman."11 Women's music is frequently accused of lacking aesthetic taste, the implication being that it does not conform to particular ideas about taste. This is because the dominant aesthetic paradigm under which Western art music seems to be measured, even today in some quarters, has roots in 19th-century Romanticism. But how appropriate is this paradigm not only for judging music by composers more generally in the 21st century but also for assessing and determining the worth of women's music? It is widely acknowledged that 19th-century aestheticism is biased in favor of men's music. Yet, scholars such as Marcia Citron and Susan McClary are now showing that women's music has much to offer. Citron and McClary would argue that women's music is aesthetically pleasing, even when it apparently fails to conform to reigning paradigms.12 In this book I want to put a name to the different aesthetic criteria that inform women's music, calling it, perhaps somewhat problematically, "feminist aesthetics."13 In Chapter 1,1 dwell on the term "feminist aesthetics" in some detail, resuming my discussion of it throughout the book and in particular, showing that there are multiple ways to conceive of this term. The composers and musical examples chosen for in-depth discussion are used to demonstrate the idea that there is no single, universal, guiding principle that underscores the analytical strategy. The most important concept that I wish to convey is that there be a fluid relationship between the music and the analyst. I argue that this approach stands as a dramatic contrast to the majority of analytical methods used in music academies throughout the world. In Schenkerian Analysis and Forte Set Theory, for example, the opposite frequently tends to happen, and music is forced into the mold of the analytical system. In Chapter 2,1 explore the contexts in which women make music, suggesting that particular kinds of music become self-perpetuating because of prevailing ideologies. While the Australian context is used as a specific example (a convenience since I am located in that country), I am mindful of the fact that music practices in Australia are part of a much larger, global picture. The discriminatory practices identified are understood as being, in part, a consequence of the difficulties that

6

Feminist Aesthetics in Music

music organizations have when negotiating with a hegemonic European canon. If Australian composers as a group have difficulty in having music performed in the concert hall, then it is even worse for Australian women. The data reported in this chapter are read against a set of political and discursive practices that include vocabularies of excellence and nationalism in the domain of Australian art music. These, it is argued, function to reinforce and reproduce the music that has dominance. Discussion follows on institutionalized learning processes and practices, in particular, the Australian Music Examinations Board (AMEB). Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of the habitus and the field, I argue that the structures that generate the music hegemony that I identify in the first part of the chapter are traced back to the concertgoing music lover's early childhood and adolescent musical training. I suggest that the habitus in the field of art music is collectively orchestrated to maintain and perpetuate this hegemony, leaving little or no room for women's music to make its presence felt. In Chapter 3,1 undertake a reading of the song Ansturm by the composer Alma Schindler-Mahler (1879-1964). In his book The Power of Sound,14 Edmund Gurney suggests that the presentation of music as motion corresponds to sexual (e)motion. It could be argued that the sexual metaphor invoked by Gurney draws on a conception of sexuality that is male in orientation. In addition, Gurney's sexual metaphor for music could be seen to have resonance with a number of analytical models that have been developed to study music, including Schenkerian Analysis and those that draw on the so-called divine ratio, or golden section. In this chapter, I suggest that these analytical models tend to have the function of revealing music to be great (and worthy of canonization) if it conforms to a notion of the so-called ideal structure, which, in turn, is based on a male/masculine sexual stereotype. I interrogate some of the assumptions behind analytical models that correspond to a male sexual metaphor (but which, nonetheless, invoke the notion of the ideal in music) and question their usefulness in relation to women's music. I argue that it is possible to identify difference in music based on a notion of a female/feminine sexual stereotype. I deliberately invoke these stereotypes because they have wide currency, but it is not my intention to leave them intact. Alma SchindlerMahler's music is used as a demonstration of the idea that women's music may operate according to aesthetic criteria that are different from those for men's music. In Chapter 4,1 continue this theme by examining the music of two English composers, Rebecca Clarke (1886-1970) and Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983). This chapter is in two parts. In Part 1,1 outline the debate concerning music and meaning, positioning myself somewhat problematically on the side of the argument that claims that music has meaning beyond its formal system. In Part 2, the first movement of Clarke's Piano Trio (1921) is discussed in relation to the theories that are concerned with the gendered nature of sonata form. I show how Clarke subverts the conventions inherent in sonata form, despite choosing to write in this so-called masculine genre. The aesthetic that underpins serialism could be argued to be the most alienating territory of all for a woman to enter. It is a system that has often been regarded as highly mathematical. Some have even thought it antimusical.15

Introduction

7

Susan McClary makes the point that serialism can produce sounds like the dissonant discourse of a madwoman. Yet, as she also reminds us, its major proponent, Arnold Schoenberg, was anxious to rid the music of its feminine associations. Drawing on Adorno, she says that having created his madwoman's discourse in his earlier expressionist works (McClary examines Erwartung [Expectation] in detail) he emerged [from a period of silence] with a systematic theory that permitted him to have it both ways: his technique of serialism succeeds in underwriting what sound like dissonant ravings with supreme control... . From this moment on, the rational frame guaranteeing social order comes to permeate the dissonant discourse of the madwoman, and the chromaticism of feminine sexual excess no longer poses a threat: henceforth it is appropriated—even generated—by the highest achievement of intellectual discipline.16 Thinking about the issues raised by McClary, I explore the ways in which Lutyens deals with the serialist aesthetic, focusing on her cantata O Saisons, O Chateaux (1943). I contend that this work can be read in terms of feminist aesthetics. In a similar vein to Clarke's Trio, this work is viewed as subversive in terms of its structure and its steady stream of gestural syntax. Chapter 5 begins by recalling issues raised in the first chapter, canvassing the philosophical positions that have been adopted by feminists as well as dealing with the problems raised by the concepts of equality and difference. Whereas the preceding chapters may have painted a gloom and doom picture for women in music, this chapter opens up possibilities for the theory proposed, drawing as it does on the work of McClary and feminists situated outside musicology. This is then put into practice by undertaking a close textual and score analysis of Australian composer Anne Boyd's work Cycle ofLove (1981). The theories discussed in the first part of the chapter are mapped onto the work itself. I view Anne Boyd's Cycle of Love as a process of semiosis in which I identify a fluid movement between the body and the score, the woman writing (from) the feminine (body). Rather than looking for the difference of who she is as a contrast to who she is not, I envisage her sounds to fall somewhere within the cracks, unable to be contained and constrained, occupying something of a different space. By proposing feminist aesthetics along these lines, I move into the realm of the elusive, positing the idea that woman, in contrast to man, defies definition. I am attracted to Alice Jardine's construct of woman as process which "is neither a person nor a thing . . . [but] is a reading effect, a woman-in-effect that is never stable and has no identity."171 argue that the stylistic properties of Boyd's work can be read as an exemplar of feminist aesthetics in these terms. A musical work such as Elena Kats-Chernin's (b. 1957) Tast-en for piano (1991) is frequently labeled postmodern, however that term is defined. It seems a useful label for works that are self-referential, use parodic techniques, and are liberally sprinkled with quotations of music by other composers and other sound worlds. Feminist and postmodernist theories, however, have frequently charted

8

Feminist Aesthetics in Music

similar, if not identical paths, undermining and deconstructing the principal tenets of modernism. In Chapter 6,1 make the point that deconstructive feminisms have much in common with deconstructive theories that have emerged out of postmodernist thought. Given that Kats-Chernin is a woman, it might be argued that a feminist, rather than a postmodernist, reading of Tast-en is more appropriate. But is a feminist reading legitimate if the composer is not a feminist? If a woman produces music, may it automatically be considered feminist? Kats-Chernin refuses identification with the feminist movement, so, on the face of it, the answer is perhaps self-evidently no. However, because postmodernist discourses tend to ignore feminist agendas, I argue that not only is it possible, but it is useful to read a postmodernist work using feminist theoretical tools. Thus, it is possible to lay claim to feminist, rather than postmodernist, aesthetics. Furthermore, postmodern theories of readership invite multiple reading positions. As in the previous chapter, the theoretical models outlined in the first part of the chapter are mapped onto Tast-en (in particular, Elizabeth Grosz's model of the Mobius strip for theorizing the mind-body relation). Chapter 7 follows with an analysis of composer Moya Henderson's (b. 1941) music in relation to its intertextualities. It explores the ways in which discourses of excellence, national identity, environmental issues, racism, and religion impact on the composer's life. These are then further scrutinized in her textual practices. It may seem that among the composers cited, more attention is given to Henderson. This is deliberate, for in the wake of the "death of the author,"18 this chapter posits the division between composer and analyst as a problematical one. In the second part of the chapter I undertake close readings of two very different works by the composer—Stubble (1975), an early music theater work created while she was a student with Mauricio Kagel—and Sacred Site for grand organ and tape (1983). I argue that it is possible to read her works using the theory proposed. I draw on philosopher Elizabeth Grosz's work to demonstrate the theory. As the countersignature to Henderson's own signature, I read her music, even if provisionally, against the dominant patriarchal paradigm of modernism. Both signatures, however, can never tie her texts to any fixed origin or provide them with a definite destination. It is never possible to fix and control meaning or to know in total the author's intentions. Nor is it possible to know the details of the reception of her works in all contexts of their performance. I illustrate in this chapter that feminist aesthetics become possible when we engage with the elusive qualities that exist both inside and outside the text (in this case, music) and with the themes that become enfolded from the context onto the text, and vice versa. This is the theoretical model, I believe, that gives birth to the notion of feminist aesthetics in music but one that is constantly changing, always fluid. The final chapter draws together the threads of the arguments of the book. It also draws attention to the fact that women composers have not, by and large, been viewed as being at the leading edge of stylistic development. Yet, as I indicate in this chapter, they have been at the forefront of genre development.19 In making this claim, I refer to the work of American performance artist Laurie Anderson and

Introduction

9

Australian composer Andree Greenwell who have been branching out to explore different concepts of genre (indeed, inventing new ones). Most genres operate according to male conventions and are thus governed by a male aesthetic. With the development of these new ways of creating music/art, I ask if we are now beginning to see the emergence of genres that exemplify feminist aesthetics. If this is true—and only time will tell—then it may be that, for the first time in the history of Western art music, women have come into their own, on their own terms. Perhaps they will be seen to be at the forefront of artistic creation. This is a startling thought that I hope will become the subject of some future investigation. The book as a whole ambulates from the general to the particular, from context to text, from the objective to the subjective, and from the impersonal to the personal, but the movement between these things is always fluid. Along similar lines to conceptions of music by Susan McClary and Lawrence Kramer, I regard the music itself as a site not where the context vanishes but where it appears. 20 In conclusion, I suggest a movement in the direction of both a feminist politics and a feminist aesthetics of music simultaneously. I uncover the ways in which politics and social practices operate in music to marginalize women composers, including the ways in which their textual practices are often misunderstood on the grounds of their difference. By using Judith Butler's notion that gender is performative, together with strategies of subversive repetition, I argue that entrenched attitudes will change. If alternative repertories are repeatedly presented, they will begin to assume the status of the norm. NOTES 1. Kevin Kopelson, Beethoven's Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery ofDesire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). See, in particular, "Music Lessons," 117-136. 2. Ibid., 117. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., back cover. 5. An excellent review of the literature appears in Susan McClary, "Reshaping a Discipline: Musicology and Feminism in the 1990s," Feminist Studies 19.2 (Summer 1993): 399-423. This review updates that by Elizabeth Wood, "Review Essay: Women in Music," Signs 6 (Winter 1980): 283-297. 6. Susan McClary, "Different Drummers: Theorising Music by Women Composers," in Sally Macarthur and Cate Poynton, eds. Musics and Feminisms (Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 1999), 79. 7. See Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen andUnwin, 1989), xvi. 8. Ibid., xvi. 9. Terry Threadgold, "Introduction," in Terry Threadgold and Anne Cranny-Francis, eds., Feminine/Masculine, and Representation (Sydney: Allen andUnwin, 1990), 1. 10. McClary, "Different Drummers," 79-80. 11. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 18-19.

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Feminist Aesthetics in Music

12. See McClary, Feminine Endings; Marcia Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 13.1 use the plural "aesthetics" in this book deliberately for two reasons: first, to suggest the possibility of there being multiple ideas about "beauty" in music; second, in the spirit of postmodernist discourses, to avoid making universalist claims such as those that seem to issue from 19th-century aesthetic theory. 14. Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (London: 1880; reprinted by Basic Books, 1966). 15. Here is not the place to discuss the merits, musical or otherwise, of serialism. I touch on this issue in Chapter 4 in relation to my discussion of Elisabeth Lutyens' music. 16. McClary, Feminine Endings, 108-109. McClary refers to Theodor W. Adorno, "Arnold Schoenberg, 1874—1951," Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 147-172, making the point that Adorno does not construct his argument in terms of gender. 17. Alice A Jardine, Gynesis, 25. 18. See Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1979), 142-148. 19. This idea has some historical precedents. Susan Erickson points out that while Giulio Caccini in the 17th century is credited with the early development of the monody and with opera (Florentine opera), his daughter Francesca Caccini's monodies are highly regarded by scholars who have studied the genre. She was among the first to compose them. As Erickson reminds us, the 17th century was truly a revolutionary era with the advent of figured bass, monody, and opera, and Francesca was on the cutting edge of writing in these new genres. Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre was among the first to compose cantatas and sonatas in France. While these genres had existed for a while in Italy, they were new to France, and Jacquet de la Guerre was in the forefront of their composition there. Hildegarde of Bingen is a major composer of medieval monophonic composition. She did not invent it, but as recent scholarship has shown, she carried it to new heights. As Erickson remarks, however, despite the remarkable achievements of these composers, who made significant contributions to the development of new genres, they have not always been recognized for their efforts by mainstream musicology. My thanks to Susan Erickson for these observations (Personal communication, October 2000). 20. See, in particular, Susan McClary's reading of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 and Cantata 140 Wachet auf'm an essay entitled "The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year," in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds. Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13-62. McClary provides a very clear demonstration of what I mean here, reading both these works as exemplars of the society in which they were produced. See also Lawrence Kramer, "The Musicology of the Future," Repercussions 1 (Spring 1992): 8.

1 Feminist Aesthetics in Music

[T]he question asked of woman "What does she want?"—is a question that woman asks herself, in fact, because she is asked it. It is precisely because there is so little room for her desire in society that, because of not knowing what to do with it, she ends up not knowing where to put it or even if she has it. This question conceals the most immediate and most urgent question: "How do I pleasure?" What is it—feminine jouissance—where does it happen, how does it inscribe itself—on the level of her body or of her unconscious? And then, how does it write itself? —Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement1 The codes marking gender difference in music are informed by the prevalent attitudes of their time. But they also themselves participate in social formation, inasmuch as individuals learn how to be gendered beings through their interactions with cultural discourses such as music. Moreover, music does not just passively reflect society; it also serves as a public forum within which various models of gender organization (along with many other aspects of social life) are asserted, adopted, contested, and negotiated. —Susan McClary2 The idea that artistic forms can accommodate a woman's perspective or that there is such a thing as a feminist aesthetic has a history that goes back to the second-wave feminist movement of the late 1960s and earlier. Referring to an example of this idea that predates the 1960s, Janet Wolff points out that "Virginia Woolf suggested that there is such a thing as a 'woman's sentence,'3 to be found in the work of women modernists like Dorothy Richardson."4 Since the 1960s, however, the most influential work to embrace the idea of feminist aesthetics—or, at least,

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Feminist Aesthetics in Music

the idea that there is such a thing as a "woman's writing"—is found in contemporary French feminism, particularly that of Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous. Taking the body as their reference point, they argue for the notion of Vecriture feminine, a French phrase that loosely translates to mean "writing (from) the feminine (body)."5 The concept of Vecriture feminine has also been extended to the visual arts. As Wolff reports, "Nancy Spero's work has recently been discussed as an example ofla peinture feminine."6 Wolff goes on to say: "That women can write, paint and produce culture which is no longer constrained within forms alien to their experience has proved an attractive and a liberating one for many artists and critics."7 She then discusses some of the problematic issues that are raised by the concept of a woman's art. Music has been slower to take up the idea that women's music adopts aesthetic strategies different from those in men's music. The major stumbling block, it would seem, has been the widespread belief that music—that is, "pure music"—is the most abstract of the arts. As a consequence, it is thought that meanings that reside in music itself can never be decoded in terms of the social and political contexts in which it is produced. In this view, music is seen as autonomous and disassociated from the social context. The idea that meanings are embedded in music itself, including meanings concerning the sex of a composer, was not really given serious attention until the decade of the 1990s. Speaking in the early 1990s about the possibility of feminist aesthetics in relation to music—that music may be marked by the gender of the composer—musicologist Julia Moore suggests that "men composers demonstrate their sociallyestablished ability to compel events, whereas women composers inject a more egalitarian perspective into patriarchal discourse."8 Moore's paper is furnished with examples of women Romantic composers, including Clara Schumann, who, she says, "made strategic moves to the submediant, while others favored continual modulation, thus avoiding any 'binary harmonic opposition.' "9 Several other music scholars have indicated the presence of feminist aesthetics in music. In an essay published in 1985, Eva Rieger alludes to this idea by pointing out that women have contributed in ways different from men in the various branches of music but that these have changed over time. The implication is that if their contributions have been different, then it stands to reason that their compositions, as part of that contribution, will also have been different. Rieger suggests that contemporary female composers may sense that there is a quality of flexibility in women's music from the past and absorb this.10 More recently, Rieger has argued that there are a number of similarities to be found in the music of 20thcentury women even while taking into account the specific social and historical contexts in which their music has been composed. She lists these as follows: 1. Many women composers have a special ability to create a maximum amount out of a minimum of material, a sort of "restricted aesthetics." 2. Many have a special preference for functional music. 3. Communication is of primary concern to them.

Feminist Aesthetics in Music

13

4. Women composers are more interested in constituent substance than in compulsive innovation. 5. They often strive to overcome binary contrasts. 6. The aspect of Ganzheitlichkeit means that they wish to combine not only various fields of art, but also the whole human being, body and soul, Mankind (or Womankind) and Nature. 7. They relate closely to their own bodies and the human voice.11 Rieger argues the merit of each point, providing numerous examples by way of illustration. For example, she says that although women have composed in all forms and genres, their social status in the 19th century meant that they were largely confined to writing parlor music. As Rieger says, they became skilled in writing music that could be easily performed—songs, and piano and chamber music predominate—and were less experienced in writing music for its own sake. Rieger suggests that this has meant that women have had a tradition in making the most out of limited circumstances. In turn, this gives rise to what she describes as a "restricted aesthetics" in the music itself. She goes on to suggest that a number of 20th-century composers—including Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, Anne Gillis, and Joan La Barbara—have perhaps subconsciously been drawn to write with a kind of restricted aesthetics by working with a minimum amount of material to create maximum effect. Rieger makes the point that in striving to overcome binary contrasts, women blur the past and present, creating music that is cyclical and thereby avoiding relationships in the music that are hierarchical. Lists of this kind, of course, are problematic because they entail drawing on stereotypes. But another problem with Rieger's list is that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that men will also exhibit the same kinds of characteristics in their music. I take up this issue during the course of the book. Nonetheless, Rieger claims that "gender is one of the most important determinants of human behavior."12 Since composing may also be viewed as a behavior, it logically follows that gender will influence the way in which men and women compose music. This, I believe, is a useful starting point for thinking about the question of feminist aesthetics in music. Another musicologist who takes up the possibility of feminist aesthetics in music is Marcia Citron. Her close reading of the first movement of Cecile Chaminade's Sonata for piano, op. 21 argues that the composer was possibly tampering with the norms of Germanic sonata form.13 Susan McClary also supports the idea of feminist aesthetics in music. In Feminine Endings1* she shows how the tonal system encodes the values of the dominant social class, which she identifies as patriarchal. Undertaking close readings of a wide range of music, covering most of the significant historical epochs in Western art music as well as dealing with some popular music representations, McClary shows how these values are inscribed in music that is taken to be absolute or value-free. Moreover, she suggests what a feminist intervention on behalf of a composer might be like.15 McClary's readings can be interpreted as offering the idea of feminine aesthetics that emerges

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Feminist Aesthetics in Music

from, and is part of, a specifically feminine habitus, which also produces these performances of femininity. The notion of feminist aesthetics has been rejected by a number of scholars. Rita Felski, for example, suggests that it is ultimately unhelpful to insist on sexual difference as a means of projecting a positive identity for women.17 Felski claims that it is impossible to speak of a feminine or feminist nature of a text without investigating the social conditions of its production and reception. She argues that the value of the text can be determined only as an effect of the particular historical context in which it is created. She suggests that it is more useful to think in terms of a feminist politics of literary practice rather than a feminist aesthetics of literature. I agree with Felski that the politics of literary practice (and, for that matter, any practice) are crucial, for politics have an uncanny way of determining what finally becomes accepted. I do not concur, however, with her view that such discussion should exclude the text itself and its aesthetic properties. Felski's argument seems to be dependent on an assumption that there exists a set of rigid separations. She draws distinctions between the political context and the literary text and between politics and aesthetics, as if each of these excluded the other. These kinds of separations are arbitrary and as such are problematic when they are invoked for arguments of this kind. I view the text as having a fluid and dynamic relationship with the context. Indeed, the text cannot be separated from the context. The term "feminist aesthetics" is deliberately ambiguous. In feminist literature it seems to have defied rigid definitions. Luce Irigaray, for example, identifies the ways in which the production of discourse, texts, and representations are sexualized, and she seems to want to find "a space for women as women''' Thus, as Elizabeth Grosz puts it, Irigaray sets out to introduce "a genuine plurality into the monosexual [male] model."18 Discussing women and femininity leads Irigaray to affirm women's sexual identity as follows: "woman" is not one, is not an essence, but multiple, fragmented, polyvocal.19 This idea gives rise to a concept of feminist aesthetics that is highly elusive in nature. Yet, I want to suggest that the elusiveness of the term "feminist aesthetics"—that is, its deliberate resistance to concrete definition—is the very thing that makes it possible to imagine. Furthermore, I argue that it is possible to develop a theory of aesthetics that relates to women's textual (musical) processes and practices while at the same time it uncovers and reveals the patriarchal nature of the contexts in which they are produced. Indeed, it might be said that such theorizing is born of these revelations. This preliminary discussion begins to open up a theoretical minefield. On the one hand, it will lead to a deconstruction of the modernist conception of music, which situates it in the realm of the sublime and the transcendental. This conception of music, as I argue later, ignores the role of the body in the musical experience. On the other hand, I find myself embracing a feminist/postmodernist view that relegates music to the realm of Other and as a metaphor for the feminine. In this view, music is intimately connected to the body of its creator. Yet, as Linda Kouvaras points out, in both the modernist and feminist/postmodernist conceptions of music, notions of the ideal are questionable. Both imagine it to be beyond

Feminist Aesthetics in Music

15

signification: "Music is for both groups the ineffable, untouchable, sublime and, for the feminists' viewpoint, Utopian, being outside patriarchy."20 Aside from its resistance to definition, the term "feminist aesthetics" invokes at least two different kinds of meaning. First, it refers specifically to cultural artifacts created by women, including the ways in which these are created as a means of articulating a different voice within the fields of literature, art, and music. Second, in some ways linked to the first meaning, it refers to the feminine or to the female body itself. In other words, it is not simply a matter of the female body being different. It is also an issue of how female bodies function, how they are expected to function, and how they function socially. These issues underpin the work of the French feminists (particularly Irigaray and Cixous and Clement), who, as I have already pointed out, speak of Vecriture feminine. Influenced by psychoanalysis and semiotics, they contend that if a woman's body is different from a man's, then it follows that her textual practices will also be different. Although this is an essentialist formulation, it is nonetheless important to embrace it in this preliminary discussion. The distinction invoked here between men's and women's textual practices is an arbitrary one, yet necessary in that it is the only useful way to begin thinking about the differences implied. SOME MODERNIST CONCEPTIONS OF AESTHETICS There are several meanings for the word "aesthetics" given in The Oxford English Dictionary. It has come to be understood in the following ways: "Of or pertaining to the appreciation or criticism of the beautiful or of art.... Of a person, etc.: having an appreciation of the beautiful; refined. Of a thing: in accordance with the principles of good taste; beautiful. . . . Designating of, or pertaining to a 19th-cent. movement of artists and writers who advocated 'art for art's sake.' "21 This dictionary definition stems from the 19th-century view that works of art are autonomous and/or that the beautiful in art needs no bodily mediation for its understanding. This is an important point, for although the word "aestheticism" is a late 19th-century coin, aesthetic theory has roots in the foundational philosophy of the Greeks in which the body was seen as the enemy. As Anne Cranny-Francis points out, the notion of the body as enemy is demonstrated very clearly "in the Christian theology that was based on that earlier Greek philosophy."22 She continues: "In the writings of St. Augustine the body is presented unequivocally as the deadly enemy of the mind, will, spirituality and intellect. The body holds us back from spiritual apotheosis; it is torn by physical temptations which must be resisted if the pure self is to ascend to another, higher (than bodily) state."23 Drawing on Susan Bordo,24 Cranny-Francis notes that in this formulation the body is "the site of'slimy desires of the flesh' . . . that 'Plato, Augustine and, most explicitly, Descartes provide instructions, rules or models of how to gain control over the body, with the ultimate aim of learning to live without it.' "25 It is not surprising, then, to find that dictionary definitions of aesthetics tend to ignore the role of the body in the appreciation of art and that they thus assume that the artwork is

16

Feminist Aesthetics in Music

autonomous. Indeed, acting on the assumption that the artwork is autonomous, in the decade prior to the 19th century, Immanuel Kant developed a systematic theory of aesthetic judgment. As Lydia Goehr writes, Kant "intended to give to aesthetic judgement (contemplation and evaluation) an autonomy and uniqueness that would separate it from moral reasoning, i.e. from the rules both of theoretical and practical understanding."26 Goehr sketches the "four moments or desiderata" for what Kant described as the fundamental principles for "pure judgements of taste": 1. Such judgements should be held universally for all persons, such that all private points of view are suspended. 2. They should be derivedfroma disinterested attention, such that the viewer takes no interest either in the existence of the object or in the particular concept under which the object falls (what kind of object it is). 3. Aesthetic judgements should be purposive yet without specific purpose, for beauty is absolute and not instrumental. If an object looks as if it were designed for a moral, practical, or scientific end, and the viewer takes account of that end, then the viewer is not contemplating the object aesthetically. 4. Aesthetic judgements should depend upon a modality of satisfaction or sympathy, a reconciliation of all our mental faculties.27 The significance of Kant's work, as Goehr continues (and I paraphrase her), is that he was able to guarantee the autonomy of the fine arts by separating the work from its external utilities, giving rise to the notion that the true value of art lies in its transcendence. The experience of the transcendent in art is enabled only by pure contemplation.28 Kantian aesthetics became firmly entrenched in the 19th century, spawning a number of permutations. For example, the complex relation between art and nature, in turn, presupposed a range of other separations, including form from content, music from nature, and the distinction between the musical and the extramusical, thus legitimating the idea of music's autonomy from the natural world of mundane phenomena.29 All of these ideas were kept alive and well in the 20th century. Another leftover from 19th-century aesthetic theory is the assumption that it is not enough to separate moral and rational thinking from emotional experience with its bodily associations. In order to appreciate the work of art fully, the disinterested viewer (or reader or listener) must also be able to transcend the mind and enter the world of the sublime. As Eva Rieger writes: "The speculative philosophy of German Idealism attributed transcendence and the power of revelation to the musical work and preached the doctrine of eternal beauty. This ahistoric aesthetic . . . was similar to the cult of the genius. The composer was worshipped as a 'divine genius' . . . [and] the work of art was seen to be a timeless document of divine perfection."30 The rhetoric of pure contemplation, pure reason, impartiality, objectivity, and transcendence bound up with 19th-century aesthetic theory, then, ignores the im-

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17

portance of the self, the body, and sexuality in the making and appreciating of art (and music). The experience of art is thus constructed such that it lacks a body for its mediation. FEMINIST AESTHETICS: EMBODIED OR DISEMBODIED? The notion of art without body in 19th-century aesthetics contrasts with a notion of art with body in a feminist conception of aesthetics. Feminists claim that the role of the body is crucial in the making and appreciation of art. In contrast to 19th-century (modernist) aesthetics, feminist aesthetics are seen to be profoundly embodied. Yet, it is useful to draw attention to a contradiction that emerges from French feminist theory on this point, for while proposing that feminine writing is an embodied writing, it also wants to imagine that the feminine itself functions beyond patriarchal inscription. To have it both ways would seem to be impossible in practice, for to function beyond patriarchal inscription is to function beyond social signification and thus beyond the material world and beyond the body. On this conception, French feminist aesthetics begins to resonate somewhat awkwardly with 19th-century aesthetic theory in which the body is viewed as inferior to the mind. What seems to emerge from this discussion of feminist aesthetics is a conundrum, for how can embodied practices be simultaneously disembodied? I return to this question in due course. Another problem that emerges in any discussion of feminist aesthetics viewed as embodied is that it is necessarily posited as an opposite to the disembodied aesthetics of 19th-century aesthetic theory. Such a separation between the two relies on a binary division that ultimately yields to what is, in effect, a flawed philosophy. As a consequence, it is ultimately unhelpful to insist on this division for projecting an alternative, positive view of art (and music) from a feminist perspective because binarisms are set up according to principles of hierarchies in which one of the opposing terms has dominance over the other. When stated within a system of binary logic, as Elizabeth Grosz argues, one of the terms has a positive, independent status from the other, which is defined as negative.31 In this formulation, "feminist aesthetics" would be defined as negative against the positive, independent status of the term (modernist) "aesthetics." To the extent that a substantial body of feminist literature argues that all textual practice is embodied practice, I argue that aesthetics (including modernist aesthetics) can never be seen as innocent or disinterested or, indeed, as sublime or transcendental.32 In other words, the feminist work to which I have been referring shows that all textual experiences operate on behalf of particular social interests—interests that are intimately connected to bodies—to sustain prevailing power relations. To return, then, to the conundrum that I posited earlier: How can embodied practices simultaneously be disembodied? I want to suggest that bodies as producers and consumers necessarily mediate all experiences of art, and, to that extent, art exists not in the transcendental realm outside signification but, rather, in the physical, material world.

18

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In addition, it appears that embodied practices, frequently originating in childhood, though often forgotten as such, to invoke Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the habitus here, are molded over a long period of inculcation and become durable and reproducible in adulthood.33 Bourdieu maintains that aesthetic taste is not a static, immutable, ahistorical, disembodied concept but, rather, is acquired, taking form in adulthood after the long gestation period of childhood and adolescence. We form distinctions between things without realizing it and without recognizing that by the very act of classifying, we are also participating in the creation of unequal relations. Along the lines of feminist theorists who are critical of the ideal of impartial reason and while not specifically undertaking a gender analysis, Bourdieu demonstrates that it is futile to insist on the possession of a centered and autonomous human subject. EMBODIED AESTHETICS: MUSIC AND WRITING For the sake of this preliminary inquiry into notions of feminist aesthetics, however, it is useful to deal with the concept of a centered, autonomous human subject that is variously labeled "male" or "female" in order to ground what is being spoken about. This is a deliberate ploy and adopted for convenience, but as the book proceeds, it will become clear that identity can never be understood as a singular construct. It is always open to multiple and provisional readings, and wherever it is realized and/or enacted and/or performed, it is always and at all times different; it is never reducible to oneness and sameness. What, then, constitutes feminist aesthetics in music? I have already noted that feminist aesthetics is something elusive and ambiguous. Yet, when theorists first began to think about this idea, they did not always describe it as something intangible or indefinable. For example, a number of feminist scholars in the fine arts frequently discussed the work of female artists in terms of archetypal feminine symbols and forms.34 Cyclical patterns such as mandalas have, for example, become associated with the female or the feminine. Later in the book I explore some of the work in music analysis that draws on ideas about female or feminine archetypes. Two musicologists who are inclined to analyze music in these terms are Marcia Citron (with her reading of Cecile Chaminade's piano sonata in C minor, op. 21, referred to earlier)35 and Susan McClary (with readings of works by Laurie Anderson, Madonna, and Janika Vandervelde, as well as her brief discussion of Diamanda Galas).36 Both theorists arguably draw attention to feminine stereotypes.37 They do not shy away from the idea that the music evokes and invokes feminine metaphors that might be associated with the female body. They are, however, careful not to generalize their findings as if these would apply to all women composers. Perhaps, more importantly, they are careful not to claim that feminine metaphors belong exclusively in the domain of women. Both theorists would acknowledge that men and women alike have access to feminine images in much the same way as they have access to masculine images.

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Citron and McClary toy with the idea that certain stylistic features of the music being analyzed may be available for reading in feminist terms. Yet, in the spirit of postmodernism, neither McClary nor Citron pins down in absolutist terms what characterizes the works that they choose to analyze. They recognize that identity, reflected here through the music "is not one', that it is a network of multiple positions, constructed in and through many chains of signification," to borrow Terry Threadgold's words.38 McClary and Citron also know that it is futile to suggest that women's music will sound like women's music as separate and distinct from the sound of men's music. Eva Rieger concurs with this idea, making this point: "When discussing the subject of women aesthetics, someone is bound to protest and say, 'Oh, but I know a male composer who composes exactly that way,' or T know a female composer who composes exactly the opposite.' "39 As Rieger continues: "This level of argument leads nowhere, as it is confined to personal experience."40 Nonetheless, Rieger, Citron, and McClary want to claim a space for their women subjects, to suggest that even while working with inherited paradigms and stylistic norms, women compose music differently than men do. Embracing this idea, McClary chooses to analyze music by contemporary women composers and performance artists who are concerned with their own representations as women in the music that they write and/or perform. It is important, however, to note that though all of McClary's subjects are women, each is uniquely different in her approach. She is the first to recognize that when considered as a whole, their music cannot be said to represent a unitary style. Rather, they represent a plurality of styles. In this view, then, the idea of an aesthetic broadly brushed across the range of these differences is impossible to sustain. In the 1990s, there was a shift away from some of these earlier essentialist formulations of feminist aesthetics. Scholars are now reluctant to define a text rigidly as feminine or feminist. This is because the characteristics that constitute a feminist or feminine text are unclear, not least because the subjectivities of these texts are viewed as multiple and fluid. Furthermore, it is apparent that a uniform set of distinguishing features will not apply to all feminist or feminine texts in all contexts. The complexity of the argument is beginning to be exposed. These ambiguities and contradictions have roots in the work of the French feminists (in particular, Irigaray, Cixous, and Clement, and, for different reasons, Kristeva) and, in different ways, in the work of the American theorists, including Alice Jardine and Teresa de Lauretis.41 Another anomaly that arises from theorizing feminist aesthetics is that women are compelled to work within the framework of inherited male styles. On the face of it, then, it would seem impossible to theorize women's music in terms of difference, for it might be said that women's styles are no different from men's. Yet, it is possible to detect an array of differences that exist between composers who are said to work in similar styles. It follows on this logic that while women's music may, perhaps, share features in common, it also displays many differences. Complicating this is the idea that women's music necessarily shares features in common with men's music. The critical point that needs to be considered here,

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however, is whether there are more differences between men's and women's styles than there are within each of them. This point is important, for if it is the case that women work with male styles (a well-traversed terrain and one that French feminist theorizing, in particular, would corroborate42), then it would seem logical to conclude that it is impossible to distinguish the presence of a pure female or feminist style. Despite this, I argue that it does exist, however elusively, nonessentially, indefinably, intangibly, or ambiguously. For all the slipperiness entailed in the notion of a feminist style, it is also imperative to conceive of feminist aesthetics as being grounded and embodied. Thinking, then, that feminist texts exist in some transcendent or disembodied space is not helpful, for in its (negative) association with 19th-century aesthetics such a notion gives birth to the composer who can be only male. As Rieger says, the composer, "who was able to communicate the metaphysical through his music and who was venerated as one of creation's exceptions, as the human incarnation of the 'absolute,' could only be male."43 So, it would seem that the only possibility for the entry of women into composition is through the socially grounded material world. But then, as I have already pointed out, notions of transcendence, composer, feminists, women, feminine principle, and so on are all constructions of a real, material, social world. CONCEPTIONS OF DlFFEKENCE/DIFFtiRANCE AND MUSIC AS FEMININE Crucial to thinking about notions of feminist aesthetics is the idea that the body itself—the signifying practice of a real, situated body in the real, material world— is available for reading in aesthetic terms. This follows from the argument that bodies are themselves marked by gender, sexuality, race, class, and so on and that these same bodies make and produce texts, whether, to use Threadgold's words, "enacted and performed, read and written, heard and spoken, in verbal, visual, graphic, photographic, filmic, televisual and embodied forms, to name some."44 Part of Threadgold's own project is to trace the feminist concern with subjectivity and with identity and location and to examine the ways in which texts are discursively constructed in "complex dialogic and institutional contexts."45 Contrary to patriarchal views that insist on impartiality and objectivity, Threadgold attempts to demystify these in order to demonstrate that all textual practice is embodied practice. That is also a project for this book. Notions of identity, embodiment, and subjectivity inevitably give rise to notions of difference or, in Derrida's sense of the word, to differance, which simultaneously suggests both difference and deferral.46 Derrida's conception of differance is useful, for if the word suggests constantly and also simultaneously differing and deferring, then the implication is that it can never be static. As Sue Best writes on Derrida's view: "Meaning is an historical product that is subject to change. There is no final truth, no resting-place for meaning."47

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While often accused of being essentialist, the French feminists (conveniently but inappropriately grouped together), particularly Irigaray and Cixous, open up spaces for women by proposing, though differently from each other, the idea of a female/feminine language. In the case of Irigaray, feminine writing is intrinsically related to women's bodies: "Women must allow their bodies to speak through those spaces"; women must write their bodies.48 I am a woman. I write with who I am. Why wouldn't that be valid, unless out of contempt the value of women or from a denial of a culture in which the sexual is a significant subjective and objective dimension? But how could I on the one hand be a woman, and on the other, a writer? Only those who are still in a state of verbal automatism or who mimic already existing meaning can maintain such a scission or split between she who is a woman and she who writes.. .. Not to contribute to making language and its writings sexed is to perpetuate the pseudo-neutrality of those laws and traditions that privilege masculine genealogies and their codes of logic.49 Cixous also locates the feminine in the body—/ 'ecriture feminine, the familiar slogan of all three French feminists—but conceives of it as something that is possible for both female and male experience. Yet, echoing Irigaray, and together with Catherine Clement, she writes: "A feminine text cannot be more than subversive: if it writes itself it is in volcanic heaving of the old 'real' property crust. In ceaseless displacement. She must write herself because, when the time comes for her liberation, it is the invention of a new, insurgent writing that will allow her to put the breaks and indispensable changes into effect in her history."50 According to Judith Still, the writing and speech of Cixous as they refer to woman raises "the twin spectres of ahistoricism and biologism."51 Certainly, it is true that this has been one of the major criticisms of French feminist theory. I would argue, however, that while popular in contemporary, critical feminisms, this is not the only interpretation that might be offered. It is possible that Cixous is taking a relativist stance on this issue, that she is proposing a new mode of writing for women while at the same time offering a recovery of their history from the standpoint of her own specific historical context and her own conception of what constitutes a female body. In this case, a tension is produced between a modernist versus a postmodernist interpretation in which a theorist adopts either an essentialist or a relativist position or, indeed, a position that lies somewhere between these two poles. It seems more useful to conceive of the spaces between polarities such as these than it is to buy into the notion that one mutually excludes the other. Furthermore, I would argue that those theorists who view Cixous' work as being ahistorical and essentialist are themselves seeking universalist answers to the problem. Julia Kristeva's notion of the feminine is interesting but perhaps the least helpful for the postulation of feminist aesthetics that relate specifically to women's bodies. Of the French theorists, Kristeva insists on attaching the feminine to the male body. Elizabeth Sayrs notes that both Kristeva and Irigaray seem to be seek-

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Feminist Aesthetics in Music

ing a return to a female essence that is preoedipal, prediscursive, prelanguage. Irigaray's conception is of a return to a "pre-discursive, woman-identified womanhood." "For Kristeva, it is a return to a pre-repressed/preoedipal maternal essence."52 As Janet Wolff points out, however, Julia Kristeva's analysis "explored the possibility of subverting the patriarchal order in representation by writing from the 'semiotic chora'—the preoedipal (and therefore . . . the pre-Symbolic) moment."53 Wolff is not concerned with the fact that Kristeva attaches the "semiotic chora" to male poets, for what she claims is important is her examination of "the origins, in modernist literature, of a type of writing which escapes the confines of the predominating patriarchal culture."54 Wolff goes on to suggest that such writing is also available for a feminist cultural politics, a point with which I agree. My particular interest in Kristeva's work, however, lies in its analysis of language as music. She draws a connection between music and the musical, with the rhythms and sonorities of language, in turn, associated with the feminine. Kristeva views music as positioned as language's "other," indeed, as Leslie Dunn puts it, as "melos vs. logos," "sound vs. sense," "music vs. meaning."55 MUSIC AS FEMININE According to Kristeva, the feminine principle, the semiotic, is distinguished from the masculine principle, the symbolic order of representation, language, and social organization. As the negative Other to the symbolic, the semiotic functions, particularly in poetic language, as the transgressor of symbolic order: "Language tends to be drawn out of its symbolic function (sign-syntax) and is opened out within a semiotic articulation; with a material support such as the voice, this semiotic network gives 'music' to literature."56 In arguing for the distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic, Kristeva makes it clear that both modalities are inseparable within the signifying process: "Because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he produces can be either 'exclusively' semiotic or 'exclusively' symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both."57 A number of writers have criticized Kristeva's model, because they seem to think that she insists on a rigid distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic. They argue that she is, in fact, reinforcing the binary separation between these modalities. For example, Linda Kouvaras remarks: "Such apparently innocent, usually celebratory metaphors of 'musical' language reveal how music, whether as discourse or in discourse, becomes implicated in the binarisms that organise patriarchal thinking, and thereby associated with the unconscious and the irrational as well as with the feminine."58 On this formulation, it could be that the distinctions between language and music arerigidlyopposed, even to the point of, as Kouvaras suggests, recalling Dunn, who, in turn, recalls Carol Flinn: "In blurring the distinction between music and musical metaphor, they essentialize music itself; it becomes the discursive Other

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through an act of linguistic appropriation." Yet I would want to disagree with this interpretation and, notwithstanding the problems with Kristeva, return to what Kristeva herself says. The modalities are inseparable—Kristeva argues, indeed, for their inseparability—and it is thus never clear where the separation between the modalities begins and ends. Viewed from this angle, the binary division between the semiotic and the symbolic is more inclined to be dissolved. Like Wolff, then, I find Kristeva's model a useful one to theorize women's writing, art, and music, despite her resistance to the notion of feminist aesthetics or a woman's writing. As I pointed out earlier, Kristeva's conception of a feminine (rather than feminist) aesthetic, that is, the appropriation of the feminine principle, describes male literature.60 A number of music theorists have noted that music is intimately connected with the feminine, as Other to the masculine world of language and visual representation. For example, by showing how the body is linked to music (the body is positioned as feminine Other to the masculine mind), Richard Leppert reveals how music, in turn, is positioned as Other to the world of sight. Leppert's argument is interesting, for he shows that the body is both sight (and site) and sound.61 On a different tack, John Shepherd remarks, "The existence of music, like the existence of women, is potentially threatening to men." 62 Susan McClary amplifies this idea: Music has been coded throughout all Western history as a feminine medium that is in danger of escaping language, in danger of escaping our control. It is seductive, yet causes the body to move. It arouses emotions. It even arouses sexual passions and imitates them. We are reluctant to talk about it because it's scary stuff.... If s the fear of the presumably feminine qualities of music and our need to control these that keep it under patriarchal lock and key.63 Conceiving of music as an elusive medium, Jacques Attali argues that the whole of human society is constituted by the sounds of its makeup. "Because music is produced by," and here I quote directly from Elizabeth Wood's paraphrasing of Attali: and as a mirror reproduces or echoes, the complexity and circularity of the movements of history, it reflects a fluid reality. Music is prophetic . . . for it can provide us with a "rough sketch of society under construction" and can prefigure social change, which may be inscribed faster in sound than it transforms society. Music is political... for its appropriation and control is a reflection of power and the political hierarchy that is inscribed with precision into social systems of power. Listening to music, then, and thinking the social organization or composition that bears the marks of its time, we ought to be able to theorize, in a sense to "hear," the crisis of society in its sounds and noises and vibrations.64 Attali identifies a two-way fluidity between music (noise) and society; the sounds of society both constitute and are constituted by the particular societies that they inhabit and of which they are made. To extend this idea, it is useful to refer to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who read music's narrativity as being in a con-

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stant state of becoming. In this view, it is argued that music is both separated from, and contained within, the socius. As with Attali, Deleuze and Guattari recognize that there is a constant fluidity of movement between culture (noise/silence) and music, which, in a sense, is itself in a constant state of flux, in a constant state of varying the cultural theme while simultaneously appropriating from it. The sounds of culture become a musical variation, and vice versa. Every musical text is a variation of another musical text. Everything contained inside the framing contours of one musical composition is a variation of other musical compositions, themselves variations of others and of the sounds of culture. The territory of culture folds onto the musical text, which, in turn, folds back on its own musical territory when the theme embarks on its many variations. In the act of becoming deterritorialized, the theme sets up the possibility of becoming reterritorialized, and so on. It is never afinishedproduct. Constantly becoming, constantly shifting, unable to be pinned down, it ruptures the system. It has been important to lay out this theoretical groundwork, for it effectively informs the various readings of music undertaken in this book. Before concluding this chapter, however, it is useful to undertake a preliminary investigation into the problems that are potentially posed by postmodernist discourses to feminist theories. FEMINIST OR POSTMODERNIST, OR FEMINIST POSTMODERNISM? Feminism's challenge to patriarchal knowledge has been to destabilize and denaturalize categories of gender and sexuality, providing deconstructive readings of cultural contexts and texts to expose the assumptions and values that are held implicitly in themt. Postmodernism, too, uses the tools of deconstruction to undermine modernist, universalist values and to decenter the human subject, among many such things. As Linda Kouvaras writes: Postmodernism's challenge to modernism achieves two major reassessments in cultural perception. Firstly, it enables the realisation that "our culture is neither as homogenous or as monolithic as we once believed it to be,"66 and secondly, that Western representational systems (and music ... to be included in these) admit "only one vision—that of the constitutive male subject—or, rather, they posit the subject of representation as absolutely centred, unitary, masculine."67 The postmodernist work seeks "to upset the reassuring stability of that mastering position."68 It would appear that postmodernisms and feminisms are charting similar paths. The chief differences between these two approaches, both of which ostensibly deconstruct the principal tenets of modernism and its attendant ideologies, are, however, as follows. First, as a number of feminists have argued, feminism's modus operandi has been colonized by postmodernists.69 Second, in becoming principally the stamping ground of the male theorist, postmodernism has tended to ignore feminism. One of the few books to deal specifically with postmodernism and mu-

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sic, a publication by Lawrence Kramer,70 would tend to support this idea. Aside from brief mention of the work of Susan McClary and Rose Subotnik, as well as Carolyn Abbate's discussion of the language/music division in which she brings techniques of narratology to bear on music,71 he glosses over, by virtually making invisible, the significant work that has been undertaken by feminist musicologists since McClary's Feminine Endings. This glossing over woman in postmodernist discourses is significant, for music "is so manifestly not a single universal language," to borrow Don Michael Randel's phrase.72 As Randel speculates, not only might listening as a woman expand the canon specifically to include music by women, as "the product of composing as a woman," but listening as a woman might offer something quite different from the existing, male-dominated canon and challenge "the canon of music theory."73 It is all too easy to gloss over woman and ignore the difference that might be thrown up by the female subject. The music analyst might be inclined to adopt the tools of postmodernism to elucidate music, especially if the subject claims that she is not a feminist. I believe, however, that a feminist postmodernist analysis of such music is warranted on the grounds that postmodernist theories of readership, for example, Derrida and Barthes,74 permit multiple reading positions. Once the text leaves the author's pen, it can be read in multiple ways in new contexts. Its very iterability produces the possibility of different readings from somewhere else. The author's intention has nothing to do with the reading position that I take up. I argue that attention is deflected from the author while elevating the status of the reader (performer, listener, analyst). Yet, it is important to draw attention to the question of reversing the authorship/readership dichotomy, for what we inevitably have when identifying a work from a composer's pen is only the trace of the composer. The composer's signature is countersigned by that of the analyst (performer, listener). The relationship between composer and analyst, like other dichotomies discussed in this book, is never rigid; the distinction between an authorial and readership position is inseparable, and it is never clear where the distinction begins and ends. An author can never be separated exclusively from a reader, and vice versa. NOTES 1. Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, "Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays," in The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Manchester: Manchester versity Press, 1986), 82. 2. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minnesota an ford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 7-8. 3. Virginia Woolf, "Women and Fiction," Collected Essays, vol. 1 (London: Hogar Press, 1966), cited in Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and C (Cambridge: Polity Press in assoc. with Basil Blackwell, 1990), 67. 4. Virginia Woolf, "Dorothy Richardson," Collected Essays (see "Feminism and Mod ernism" in this collection), cited in Wolff, Feminine Sentences.

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5. This term is defined differently from theorist to theorist. 6. Wolff, Feminine Sentences, 68. 7. Ibid. 8. Julia Moore, "The Social Construction of a Feminist Aesthetic," paper presented at the American Mus icological Society Conference, Pittsburgh, November 1992, cited in Peter J. Martin, Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology ofMusic (Manchester and N York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 153-154. 9. Ibid. 10. Eva Rieger," 'Dolce semplice?" On the Changing Role of Women in Music," in Gisela Ecker, ed., Feminist Aesthetics, trans. Harriet Anderson (London: Women's Press, 1985), 135-149. 11. Eva Rieger," T Recycle Sounds': Do Women Compose Differently?" Journal ofthe International League of Women Composers (March 1992): 22-23, reprinted in a shortened version in Leo Treitler, gen. ed., Source Readings in Music History: The 20th Century, Robert Morgan, vol. 7 (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1998), 147-149. 12. Ibid., 25. 13. Marcia Citron, "Music as a gendered discourse," in Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 132-135. 14. McClary, Feminine Endings, passim. 15. See, in particular, "Readings of Janika Vandervelde's Genesis II and Madonna's Live to Tell and Like a Prayer," in McClary, Feminine Endings. 16. See Chapter 2, where I discuss the notion of the habitus in relation to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of the term. 17. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Chang (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 18. Elizabeth Grosz, "Feminist Theory and the Politics of Art," in Catriona Moore, ed., Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1979-90 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin in assoc. wit Artspace, 1994), 151. 19. See, for example, Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 20. Linda I Kouvaras, " 'Sweet Death': Strategies of the Feminine Grotesque in a Contemporary Australian Chamber Opera" (Doctoral dissertation, Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne, June 1996), xviii-xvix. 21. Lesley Brown, ed.The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Prin ples, vol. 1, A-M (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 34. 22. Anne Cranny-Francis, The Body in the Text (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 4. 23. Ibid. 24. Susan Bordo, "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Nature," in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, eds., Feminism andFoucault: Reflections on R sistance (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 93. 25. Ibid., cited in Cranny-Francis, The Body in the Text, 4. 26. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum ofMusical Works: An Essay in the Philoso of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 168. 27. Ibid., 168-169, paraphrasing Immanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgement, trans, with analytical indexes by James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 6-16. In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Goehr notes that "Kant further divides aesthetic judgements into the beautiful and the sublime" and that he also "assigns music a low place in the classification of the arts." Apparently this is because "music is transitory rather than lasting" (N.36, 169).

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28. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 169. 29. Ibid., 165. 30. Rieger, "Dolce semplice? " 138. 31. Two particularly clear accounts of this phenomenon are given by two Australian feminist philosophers as follows: Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989), xvi; and Moira Gatens, "A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction," in Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 3-20. 32. See, for example, Janet Wolff, "Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics," in Wolff, Feminine Sentences, 120-141; Helen Wilcox et al., eds. The Body and the Text: Helene Cixous, Reading and Teaching (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990); Cranny-Francis, The Body in the Text. 33. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic ofPractice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press in assoc. with Basil Blackwell, 1990), 56-57. The word habitus is derived from Latin, meaning "bodily constitution;" it is associated with "condition, state, dress, get-up, expression, character." 34. An excellent book that analyzes the "feminine" stereotype imposed on women's art is Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). Griselda Pollock in Vision & Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988) explores the idea of a feminist intervention into art, taking the idea of a feminist aesthetic beyond the limitations that arise from simplistic sexual stereotyping. Also see Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art (New York: Dutton, 1985). 35. See Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 120-164. 36. See McClary, Feminine Endings, 132-147, 148-166, 112-131, 110-111. 37. For example, McClary reads Janika Vandervelde's sonic image of childbirth, which begins with a clockwork ostinato, as an example of "writing as a woman." See McClary, Feminine Endings, 112-131. "[A] woman's voice can at least be heard as a woman's voice1' (123). I discuss this more fully in Chapter 5. 38. Terry Threadgold, Feminist Poetics: Poesis, Performance, Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 5. 39. Rieger, "I Recycle Sounds," 22. 40. Ibid. 41. In Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), for example, Jardine views woman as a process. Teresa de Lauretis also views woman as a process. She argues that for all social beings, subjectivity is constructed, and for each person "subjectivity is an ongoing construction, not a fixed point of departure or arrival from which one then interacts with the world. On the contrary, it is the effect of that interaction—which I call experience—and thus it is produced not by external ideas, values or material causes, but by one's personal, subjective, engagement in the practices, discourses and institutions that lend significance (value, meaning, and affect) to the events of the world." See Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn 't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 159. 42. See, for example, Luce Irigaray, "Questions," in This Sex Which Is Not One, 119-169. 43. Eva Rieger, "Dolce semplice!" 138. 44. Terry Threadgold, Feminist Poetics, 5. 45. Ibid.

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46. Jacques Derrida, "The Question of Style" in B. Allison, ed. The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, trans. R. Berezdivin (London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 176. 47. Sue Best, "This Style Which Is Not One," in Catriona Moore, ed. Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970-90 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin in assoc. with Artspace, 1994), 164-165. 48. See Jardine, Gynesis, 262. 49. Luce Irigaray, "Writing as a Woman," in je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 53. 50. Cixous and Clement, The Newly Born Woman, 97. 51. Judith Still, "A Feminine Economy: Some Preliminary Thoughts," in Wilcox et al., eds. The Body and the Text, 51. 52. Elizabeth Sayrs, "Deconstructing McClary: Narrative, Feminine Sexuality, and Feminism in Susan McClary's Feminine Endings," College Music Symposium: Journal the College Music Society 33.34 (1993-1994): 48. 53. Wolff, Feminine Sentences, 67. 54. Ibid., 67-68. 55. Leslie C. Dunn, "Ophelia's Songs in Hamlet," in Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, eds. Embodied Voices Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (London: Ca bridge University Press, 1994), 54. 56. Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 113. 57. Ibid., 93. 58. Kouvaras, "Sweet Death," xix. 59. Dunn and Jones, Embodied Voices, 55; Carol Flinn, "The 'Problem' of Femininity in Theories of Film Music," Screen 27.6 (1986): 58. Also see 56-72 for further discussion of the maternal voice and theories of nostalgic lack. 60. For example, Kristeva discusses the "semiotic" in relation to Mallarme, Joyce, Beckett, and Kafka, among others. 61. Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music Representation, and the History of t Body (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993). See, in particular, "Introduction: Music, Representation, and the Scandal of the Body," xix-xxix. 62. John Shepherd, "Music and Male Hegemony," in Leppert and McClary, Music and Society, 158. 63. Susan McClary, Interview with Sally Macarthur, broadcast on The Score, ABC Radio National, 13 August 1991; cf. Sally Macarthur, "Celebrating Difference in Music at the 1991 Gender and Music Conference," Sounds Australian 33 (Autumn 1992): 9. 64. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 4-9, paraphrased by Elizabeth Wood, "Performing Rights: A Sonography of Women's Suffrage," The Musical Quarterly 19A (Winter 1995): 608. 65. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 299-309. 66. Kouvaras, "Sweet Death," xiv, cites Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism" in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmoder Culture, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: Bay, 1987 [1983]), 58. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. See, for example, Patricia Waugh, "Modernism, Postmodernism, Feminism: Gender and Autonomy Theory," in Patricia Waugh, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (London, New

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York, Melbourne and Auckland: Edward Arnold, a Division of Hodder and Stoughton, 1992), 189-204. Also see Meaghan Morris, The Pirate's Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London and New York: Verso, 1988), particularly the "Introduction: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism," 1-16. 70. Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1995). 71. Kramer references his discussion to Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Moreover, Kramer is concerned with applying his insights to music of the past; he ignores contemporary music. Another book, by Michael Chanon, Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1994) as Kouvaras in "Sweet Death" points out, "astoundingly, despite the title, does not mention feminism and only allots two sentences to two women composers (Fanny Mendlessohn, to whom he does not even grant the preferred nomenclature of Mendelssohn-Hensel, and Clara Schumann) in the book's 287 pages, covering seven centuries of Western music-making," xxxix. 72. Don Michael Randel, "The Canons in the Musicological Toolbox," in Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 18. 73. Ibid. 74. See Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," in Peggy Kamuf, ed., A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 80-111, especially "Signature," 106-109; Barthes, "The Death of the Author," 142-148.

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Music in Context and Practice

Music by women heard en masse confused me by jumping the barrier of scholarly detachment that I was expected to keep around me. It left me feeling awkward, both at home and not at home. This was music coming from the same general experience of life as mine. I began to realise that to grasp its meaning a whole new set of analytical tools and a new perspective on its context was possibly necessary. The tools to hand were plainly not fitted to the task. They were devised by men for men's music. The place women's music occupied within music and society seemed to be more subtext than context. —Therese Radic1 This chapter is in two parts. The first explores the conditions under which composition and performance operate, using the Australian context as a case in point— and for convenience, given that I am located in that country. Statistical data are included to support the claim that women's music occupies a vastly inferior position when compared to music by men. This finding is explained, in part, by the dominance of the hegemonic European canon on concert platforms. In Part 2 the data reported in Part 1 are read against a set of discursive practices that are ideological in nature. These include vocabularies of "excellence" and nationalist agendas that, I argue, function to reinforce and reproduce the music that has dominance. I examine institutionalized learning processes and practices, taking the Australian Music Examinations Board (AMEB) as a particular example. The central question framing this part of the chapter is: To what extent do the social, pedagogical, and political practices that constitute musical performance and composition become durable and self-perpetuating?

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PARTI Feminist critiques of music point to the dominance of male traditions and practices.2 An emergent branch of musicology, feminist work has identified the almost total maleness of music's public image, from the occupation of senior positions in university music departments,3 to the overwhelming preoccupation by scholars and practitioners with music composed by men. Along the lines of feminist work in other disciplines, much of the feminist work in musicology begins with, but seeks to go beyond, concerns that tend to emphasize equity within the profession. Yet, as a way of establishing what it means to be men and women participants in the context of Australian composition, it seemed useful to begin with a basic survey of major music organizations that commission and perform Australian music. While I make use of quantitative information to give a rough indication of what is happening on Australian concert platforms, I more importantly allude to the ways in which participants locate themselves in contemporary music culture. Moreover, in Part 21 raise questions about the descriptive statistical information presented in Part 1 by situating the findings within a much broader, critical line of inquiry. I argue that the concertgoing music lover's early childhood training is profoundly implicated in perpetuating the kind of music that has dominance on Australian and, by inference, world concert platforms. In making this claim, I am not suggesting that mainstream concert music does not have value. On the contrary, it is music to which I was, and continue to be, deeply attached. I raise the point, however, for what I have found is that there is a virtual exclusion of women's music from the concert hall. As Australian feminists working in the social sciences have shown, women's participation in the workforce at large has improved since the late 1970s, but, as Gretchen Poiner points out, there is still a long way to go.4 Nonetheless, the small improvements that have been made can be attributed to a number of factors, including the implementation of legislation by the Australian government aimed at improving the position of women in the paid workforce.5 Consistent with these improvements, it would seem that women working as professional artists are a well-represented group. The Australia Council report But What Do You Do for a Living? highlights the fact that there has been a notable increase in the number of women working as professional artists, stating that in 1993 women constituted 50 percent of this group. The report also acknowledges that most of these women are visual artists, actors, and writers. Composers make up the smallest group: 3 percent of all artists surveyed, while musicians and singers account for the largest proportion, 29 percent.6 The report also demonstrates that professional artists in general are a valued sector within the workforce. Artists contribute around 3 percent of the gross domestic product and 5 percent of employment. Yet, as the National Agenda for Women states, "Women have been traditionally active in all the arts, but their contribution to Australia's artistic and cultural heritage has been largely unrecognised."7

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Despite the steady increase in women's paid employment, the report also noted that women artists earn significantly less than male artists do.8 Because of this difference in income, it would seem that a large number of aspiring women artists take up positions as arts administrators in the hope of gaining access at a later time to a more sustainable arts practice. Other women juggle household and family needs with their work and find that they have significantly fewer hours in the day to create their art. It is almost impossible for women to gain entry in some fields of art. For example, there are very few women who are directors in subsidized theater companies, and very few succeed as conductors of professional orchestras. In addition, the sheer struggle for recognition by Australian women composers, who occupy a significantly inferior position to their male counterparts, signals that there are structural barriers within the world of the professional arts.9 The national data show that approximately 20 percent of Australia's composers are women.10 This percentage taken from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), loosely accords with the figure of approximately 17 percent released by the Australian Music Centre in July 1996 (an organization that introduced composer representation in 1988). The message from these statistics is that women composers are an underrepresented group, falling well short of the figure of 50 percent calculated for all artists working professionally in Australia. Since 1982 the Australia Council, the federal government's funding body for the arts, has spearheaded a number of studies on women in the arts.11 The conclusion to be drawn from these studies is that while some improvements are noted, especially in the area of the funding of women composers by the Australia Council itself, little has changed over the decade (1985-1995) to improve the circumstances for women composers in Australia. In fact, not one of these studies is particularly concerned with the plight of women composers. Moreover, it would seem that when women constitute the focus of some of these studies, it is as arts administrators rather than arts practitioners. In their pilot study Paths to Performance: Gender as a Theme in Professional Music Careers,n Mira Crouch and Jenny Loveric examine women's participation in two prominent Sydney orchestras, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) and the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO). This is a study aimed at addressing issues of equity between the sexes, focusing on the conditions that affect their progression to professional status in music and including a brief analysis of the psychosocial variables involved. Many of the findings in this study correlate with those of similar studies of women's workplace conditions in fields other than music, showing prejudice based on sexual stereotyping and highlighting conflict between paid work and career and the demands of motherhood and child care. Moreover, the findings in this study can be correlated to statistical data for women in American orchestras. Conclusions from a survey conducted in 1995-1996 by the Women's Philharmonic of orchestras throughout the United States established that women conductors, composers, and performers are still significantly disadvantaged in America's concert halls.13 While the situation may seem dismal for women musicians in America and Australia, it is even worse for

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women whose aspirations are to perform in some European orchestras. According to data obtained by Varda Ullman Novick, women's participation in Austrian and German orchestras is 16 percent. When this statistic is compared with women's participation in orchestras in the United States (36 percent) and the United Kingdom (30 percent), there would seem to be a significant difference, indicating a more equitable policy in those countries.14 Particularly resistant to the notion of including women among its ranks at the time when I conducted my own study of Australian music was the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which until very recently had a policy of categorically excluding female membership. The harpist of that orchestra, who was a full-time paid member, was the exception to this rule.15 It would seem that women are a marginalized group within the music profession as a whole. Their most conspicuous absences are in positions commanding power and prestige, particularly as principal players in orchestras and as conductors and composers. British composer Nicola LeFanu would seem to have supported this view, for while she claimed that in 1987 women composers in her country constituted 15 percent of the composing population (compared with approximately 13 percent in Australia at that time16), the Arts Council of Great Britain awarded only 4 percent of major bursaries, 5 percent of minor bursaries and 6 percent of composer commissions to women between 1983 and 1987.17 Commiserating with her British colleague, American-born Australian composer Mary Mageau notes in 1991 that during the 1988 Australian bicentennial celebrations no woman received a federal bicentenary commission, and she goes on to state: Not one of some 40 opportunities from the Bicentenary, the ABC-sponsored Musica Nova Festival of 1990 or the ABC Classic CD collection has been given to a woman during the past few years. The January 1991 Sounds Australian Update states that 41 Austral symphonic works will be performed by the six state orchestras during the current concert season. The 41 works are composed by 22 composers. All but one of these (Anne Boyd) men.18 Of 175 Australian composers working in 1991, 154 were men, and 21 (12 percent) were women.19 For the quantitative observations being made here, it would seem that women composers were discriminated against during the Australian bicentenary. Mageau's numbers thus flag a serious problem. To date, no proper study has been conducted to investigate the particular situation for women composers in Australia. Musicologists specializing in Australian music studies have been preoccupied with the music of male, elitist composers situated in "high culture."20 Australian music within musicology as a whole, as Bruce Johnson points out, is an underresearched area due to the importance attached to European Western art music by Australian academies. When it is studied, the preponderance of work produced is concerned with Australian male composers.21

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As a consequence, I carried out my own investigation of women composers in the context of Australian performance practice in general. National music companies operating from Sydney in the decade 1985-1995 were selected. I hypothesized that Australia's art music companies are thoroughly unified in their programming in four respects, that is that the concertgoing public hears music that is: • predominantly composed before 1900 • predominantly composed before 195022 • weighted toward music by non-Australian composers (in particular, European composers) • gender-biased toward men's music Before presenting my findings, it is important to make clear that I view the descriptive statistics presented in this part of the chapter as neither a demonstration nor a proof of the problem. Rather, they are used to raise a problem, and I use them to add to the qualitative argument that I develop in Part 2. Second, I did not calculate the total number of works that exist for the concert hall, thus providing a general context in which to situate my findings. Such an undertaking would have been a monumental task in the present work. I did, however, provide a context for all the Australian music performed, including that by women. By and large, the majority of women's music performed was Australian. Approximately 6,575 works are available to concert programmers, as compiled from catalogs provided by the Australian Music Centre. Of this number, women's music amounts to 1,212 works, or about 18 percent of all Australian music written.23 This roughly accords with their representation as a group by the Australian Music Centre (in June 1996, women constituted approximately 17 percent of the composer population). Another important point to be made in the context of this study is that it might be argued that the pool of women's music from which music programmers select works in each of the canonical periods of music represented on Australian concert platforms is significantly lower than that of men's. This is, of course, the case. As Australian musicologist Therese Radic writes: "The encyclopedist. .. Aaron Cohen has calculated that there are or have been some 70,000 composers of European high-art music, not all living in Europe. 92 percent are male."24 Women's music, according to Cohen, then, constitutes only 8 percent of all high-art music. Yet, as Mary Mageau, writing in the same issue of 24 Hours as Radic, notes from Cohen's two-volume, second published edition of the International Encyclopedia of Women Composers?5 there are more than 6,200 entries of women composers from 72 countries (including 630 from behind the Iron Curtain), and more than 4,000 of the women composers listed were from the 20th century alone.26 While I have not counted the number of women composers listed in a more recent source, The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers?1 which used Cohen's two-volume tome as a starting point, it can be safely assumed that the number of women composers recovered from history as well as those repre-

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sented in the 20th century is more than the number listed by Cohen. I thus argue that women's music does exist as an alternative to the usual "malestream" music and could be programmed should companies wish to do so. Moreover, the alternatives are often very attractive when considered against the usual music selected by programmers. For example, should music companies consider performing high Renaissance and early Baroque music, they would be rewarded by including a selection of madrigals by Barbara Strozzi or some of the instrumental music of Francesca Caccini. Should they decide to program a selection of French baroque music (e.g., Couperin or Lully), they would find the highly innovative music of Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre an irresistible companion. While there is less, perhaps, from which to choose in the Haydn/Mozart era, the 19th century's offerings include high-quality music by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Clara Schumann, Louise Farrenc, Carlotta Ferrari, Louise Adolpha Le Beau, Cecile Chaminade, Josephine Lang, Ethel Smyth, Amy Beach, and many others. Moreover, the approach taken to music programming by key national music companies in Australia produces a cumulative effect. Those institutions that are primarily concerned with mainstream repertoire (music composed prior to 1900 and music composed in a post-Romantic idiom before 1950) are also less likely to perform Australian music and music by women composers. Those institutions that perform contemporary music are more likely to include more music by Australian composers and also tend to include a higher proportion of music composed by women than mainstream ensembles. Of the groups surveyed, 69 percent were mainstream ensembles; fewer contemporary performance companies were represented, owing to the financial constraints that result from the difficulties of attracting audiences to concerts.28 The findings of my study seem to support the suppositions of my hypothesis.29 A rough calculation of descriptive statistics for all music groups surveyed in the decade 1985-1895 revealed the following: • from a total number of 15,301 works performed, 8,688 (or approximately 57 percent) were composed before 1900 • from a total of 15,035 works performed, 10,840 (or approximately 72 percent) were composed before 1950, much of it in the post-romantic tradition • from a total of 14,995 works performed, 12,794 (or 85 percent) were composed by non-Australian composers • from a total of 15,216 works performed, 14,892 (or 98 percent) were composed by men I have deliberately documented the statistics on men's music because they compellingly highlight women's music as being virtually absent. This is the case for all the statistics presented in this chapter. Figure 2.1 presents a graph of the percentages for all groups surveyed. Similar findings to those above are reflected in the data for the Sydney Morning Herald (see Figure 2.2). The statistics for music reviewed in the Sydney Morning

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Figure 2.1 Repertoire Findings for All Groups Surveyed, 1985-1995

Herald for the decade 1985-1995 do not seem to be significantly different from those presented in Figure 2.1: • from a total of 9,363 works reviewed, 5,549 (or approximately 59 percent) were composed before 1900 • from a total of 9,471 works reviewed, 6,882 (or approximately 74 percent), much of it in the post-romantic tradition, were composed before 1950 • from a total of 9,363 works reviewed, 8,036 (or approximately 86 percent) were composed by non-Australian composers • from a total of 9,363 works reviewed, 9164 (or approximately 98 percent) were composed by men The marginalization of more radical forms of music is not an uncommon phenomenon in the 20th century. For example, the Schoenberg school has never had wide acceptance from concertgoing audiences. Yet I would argue that an important reason for the dominance of conservative music on Australian concert platforms is that art music audiences prefer to hear familiar "museum" music. While most music organizations might suppose that they have autonomy over the selection of repertoire performed, I suggest that this is not the case. There is a circular dynamic between the market and music organizations in which organizations are reactive to, and reproductive of, the market, and vice versa. For example, from 1985 until 1992, the chamber music organization Musica Viva relied on the general manager (and on an artistic director from 1993) to select repertoire and create concert programs in conjunction with those groups, mostly from abroad, that it had selected to undertake Australian tours each year. By and large, Musica Viva's programs reflect the conservative tastes of its market, which tends to demand the inclusion of the obligatory Classical, Romantic, and early

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Figure 2.2 Repertoire Findings for Music Reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald, 1985-1995

20th-century work in a typical concert program. Safe, familiar music appeals to mass audiences for high art music. Despite its attempts to introduce 20th-century music to its audiences, the data presented for the SSO show overwhelmingly that the bulk of repertoire that it performs on the concert platform is as I have previously described. Figure 2.3 presents a graph of percentages of a total of 1,447 works performed: • • • •

841 (or approximately 58 percent) were composed before 1900 1,245 (or approximately 86 percent) were composed before 1950 1,335 (or approximately 92 percent) were composed by non-Australian composers 1,441 (or approximately 99.5 percent) were composed by men

Women's music, as clearly illustrated in all three figures, would seem to be a much less desirable commodity on concert platforms, for, as the descriptive statistics suggest, it is barely heard, a situation that is especially exemplified in the data obtained from the SSO concert brochures. To a certain extent, these findings are self-evident but are nonetheless worth spelling out. Concert hall music in late 20th-century Australia is dominated by male composers of European descent whose music was composed before 1950. No doubt concert managements would argue that this phenomenon is attributed to the fact that the largest proportion of repertoire available for programming belongs in the Western art music tradition and, by comparison, the pool of Australian works is relatively small. Given that 6,575 Australian works are available for performance on concert platforms, I would estimate that Australian music constitutes approximately 15 percent of all the available concert hall music. Yet it needs to be pointed out that many of the non-Australian works analyzed in this study (a total of 12,794 performed) probably received multiple performances over the decade. On the other hand, Australian works (2,201 works performed) probably received only one performance each over the 10-year period surveyed.30 This would significantly skew

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Figure 2.3 Repertoire Findings for Music Performed by the SSO, 1985-1995

the findings for the representation of Australian music. On this observation, it is highly likely that Australian music is discriminated against on concert platforms. I have dwelled on this point for two reasons: first, with few exceptions, most of the Australian repertoire performed was composed after 1950 and is thus situated in the unpopular category of contemporary music; second, most of the women's music performed in the decade was by Australian women. I suggest that women are disadvantaged for two reasons: because their music is situated within the unpopular category of contemporary Australian music and because they are women. My findings also show that contemporary music performance in Sydney is subordinated to the performance of "museum" music. It is thus argued that within the network of musical power in Sydney, the larger ensembles, with their emphasis on music from the past, have a virtual monopoly over contemporary performance practice as a whole. This is a self-evident phenomenon. The contemporary music groups, all drawing small audiences to their concerts, struggle to survive financially. Performing music composed in the 20th century and regularly commissioning and premiering works from composers based in Australia and abroad, they operate precariously on the edges of the larger and more popular companies. Figure 2.4 illustrates the percentage of Australian music performed by contemporary music ensembles against that of women's music.31 The groups shown in Figure 2.4 are as follows: Song Company (SC), Sydney Alpha Ensemble (SAE), Sydney Spring Festival of New Music (SSFNM), Australysis (AUS), Synergy (SYN) and the Seymour Group (SEY). It might be expected that if an ensemble performs a large proportion of Australian music, it might also perform more music by women. This is not always the case, however. Sydney Alpha Ensemble is the exception to this rule, for while almost half its repertoire is by Australian composers, it also performs the greatest proportion of music by women. In contrast to this, well over half of the repertoire of the percussion ensemble Synergy is by Australian composers, and yet it in-

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Figure 2.4 Percentage of Australian Music and Women's Music Performed by Contemporary Music Ensembles, 1985-1995

eludes significantly less music by women composers. This is not an unusual finding, however, for women are not as visible as men are in the area of percussion performance. The logical expectation, therefore, is that women will compose less music for a percussion ensemble than men will. The descriptive statistics for contemporary ensembles, while reflecting a commensurately smaller proportion of women's music performed in comparison to the total percentage of Australian music performed, starkly contrasts with the significantly lower percentages of Australian music performed by mainstream ensembles, where, in turn, women's music is virtually invisible. Figure 2.5 below shows that the percentage of Australian music performed by mainstream music ensembles is greater than that for women's music. The groups represented in Figure 2.5 are as follows: Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO), Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO), Australian Youth Orchestra (AYO), Camerata Australia (CA), Sydney Youth Orchestra (SYO), SBS Youth Orchestra (SBS), Australia Ensemble (AE), Song Company (SC) and Australian Opera (AO).32 By and large, all groups surveyed in this study, both mainstream and contemporary, perform a greater percentage of music by non-Australian composers. The exceptions are two groups: Synergy, a contemporary percussion ensemble that includes Australian music in a little more than half its repertoire, and Australysis, which devotes half its repertoire to Australian composers. If the representation of Australian women's music is examined against Australian men's music, thus separating Australian music from all other music, a healthier picture begins to emerge. In Figure 2.6, Australian women's music is analyzed as a percentage of all Australian music performed by all groups. The organisations and music groups represented in Figure 2.5 are as follows: Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), Musica Viva (MV), Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO), Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO), Camerata Australia (CA), Sydney Youth Orchestra (SYO), SBS Youth Orchestra (SBS), Australian Opera (AO), Australia Ensemble (AE), Song Company (SC), Sydney Alpha Ensemble (SAE), Sydney Spring Festi-

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Figure 2.5 Percentage of Australian Music and Women's Music Performed by Mainstream Ensembles, 1985-1995

Figure 2.6 Percentage of Australian Women's Music against AH Australian Music Performed by AH Groups, 1985-1995

val of New Music (SSFNM), Australysis (AUS), Synergy (S YN), and the Seymour Group (SEY). Not surprisingly, when compared with all Australian music performed, Australian women's music constitutes a greater proportion of music in contemporary music ensembles than it does in mainstream ensembles.33 In this part of the chapter I note that a significant problem exists in the context of Australian music for the performance of women's music. Thus, a number of structural barriers need to be removed before female composers can enjoy the same exposure on Australian concert platforms as their male colleagues. Of course, this is not the sole responsibility of those music companies that have resisted including women's music in their concert programs, since they are obliged to perform music that satisfies the tastes of their paying consumers. In tandem with music companies, audiences play a significant role in determining repertoire. PART 2 Most of the mainstream national music companies based in Sydney appear to be heavily influenced by notions of music that are framed in dominant discourses associated with Western high cultural forms as well as in economic discourses of

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what sells. Music is regarded with suspicion if it has not had the seal of approval from the dominant music organizations, which, in any case, are heavily influenced by market forces. Vocabularies of Excellence A notion of excellence is among many key terms that have come to guide much public (government) and private (corporate) activity in the arts, particularly, as Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope note, "[w]hen it comes to what is funded and what is not funded."34 While it is an intangible concept, it is nonetheless assumed to be recognizable in its manifestation as art or, as Kalantzis and Cope put it, in its application as "excellence-in-action": the finished product of the musical performance, the published book, the art exhibition. The first objective advanced by the Australia Council is "to promote excellence in the arts."35 Yet a paradox emerges, for "excellence" as a quality and as value is never defined. It is simply assumed that it can be identified wherever and whenever it exists. As Kalantzis and Cope put it, whatever it is, it is never applied rigorously: "Deciding what excellence seems to be, much of the time, is a matter of social, political and moral contingency."36 A disturbing finding to emerge from Kalantzis and Cope's investigation is that excellence is very often used as a tool for discrimination against art produced by particular groups of artists. As Australian composer Moya Henderson puts it, "Excellence is used as a tool of oppression."37 In this book I argue that women's music suffers from discrimination by excellence in the negative sense; in other words, the taste system discriminates against women's music. Kalantzis and Cope identify three uses of the word "excellence" often used in arts policies. The first is a "discriminating excellence," which has strong connections with universalist values in high art, rooted in 19th-century aestheticism. The second is "excellence as discrimination," which is disassociated from the canon of high art and used to discriminate in the negative sense against artists and art. The third, a more desirable type, is a "discriminating excellence without discrimination."38 Arts policies in high art organizations generally tend to apply the first kind of excellence to the identification of worth in music. While it is not spelled out in these terms, it is nonetheless implicitly embedded in the rhetoric of music companies promoting their products to their prospective audiences. Most music companies seek Australia Council funding and, if already beneficiaries, are anxious to stay on the public payroll. As a consequence, they tend to mimic the discourses that filter down through the system from the council. Thus, if the council states that it promotes excellence in the arts, then those music organizations seeking funding will follow suit and state that they, too, promote excellence. This, of course, is an obvious statement yet an important one, because the musical product being sold to audiences in Sydney by most of the music companies is music composed predominantly before 1950 by male composers. Since this music, together with the ideologies that circulate in and through it, is rooted in 19th-

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century aestheticism, we can therefore assume that excellence used as a criterion in this manner will be discriminatory. The Rhetoric of Diversity and Nation in Australian Music The commodification of art music and its programming alliance with marketability have meant that the Australian government has projected issues such as the promotion of an Australian identity and the promotion of equal access to the arts as cultural imperatives. Yet how diverse is the Australian art music culture with respect, for example, to sex and race? In other words, is the habitus associated with the field of art music as diverse with respect to the people who populate it as it purports to be? The annual report of 1992-1993 of the Australia Council states that the members of the council: "are selected to ensure relevant expertise in the arts and regional, gender, non-English speaking and Aboriginal community representation."39 Yet an analysis of the composition of the boards and music committees for the decade 1985-1995 reveals a male bias with a mean representation of 67 percent. Unraveling the way in which a particular notion of "Australian" is constructed by the council "to foster the expression of a national identity through the arts,"40 Bruce Johnson points to a number of contradictions between what the council says and what it does in practice. He inspects a passage under the heading "Arts for a Multicultural Australia" in the Australia Council Annual Report 1993-1994, which states: It is increasingly acknowledged that Australia derives enormous pleasure from its cultural diversity. Advantages include the rich, challenging and exciting contribution that difference makes to art making in all its guises, including developing new forms, expanding audiences, and increasing international cultural exchanges. The Council's Art for a Multicultural Australia policy recognises and encourages this.41

According to Johnson, the council "takes control of the meaning of Australia, ironically, in the very moment it proclaims democracies."42 Its meaning is constructed by a privileged minority group in the Australian community that does not reflect anything like an equal representation according to race, including nonEnglish-speaking communities, and I would add gender, with specific reference to musical composition.43 According to Johnson, however, the notion of cultural diversity is not reflected in practice. He continues: "Presumably the Council itself is not part of the 'diversity' which it recognises. Rather, it is moved powerfully but unconsciously by the conviction that it is the centre from which and by which diversity is constructed and defined."44 Johnson argues that the selection of people for the Australia Council boards should be a two-way process involving suggestions from the community as well as invitations from the council. As Johnson observes, at the time of the publication of the Australia Council Annual Report 1993-1994, the council consisted of nine

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women and seven men who, with the exception of two members (an Indian-born academic and an Aboriginal performer), were all of white Anglo-Saxon background. Much the same composition existed for the council during the financial year 1994—1995 (six women and nine men, two of whom were of non-AngloSaxon background). Johnson's point is important, for it seems that the membership of the council is not diverse at all. In this view, there is something of a contradiction between practice and theory: the notion of cultural diversity promulgated in the annual reports is not reflected by the council in practice. Yet, these discourses are powerfully persuasive and lead people to believe that what is being proclaimed is true and is being adopted in practice. On the particular point of diversity, the council gives the impression that arts practice in Australia is diverse. Moreover, its reports project an image of art that proclaims it to be "Australian," "excellent," "cultural," and representative of all, all having equal access to the arts. As Bruce Johnson illustrates, however, this is not the case, not least because of the predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon membership of the upper tier of the council, which, in turn, constructs a notion of Australia that reflects the values of this minority white, Anglo-Saxon group. According to Johnson, the notion "Australian" thus becomes an ideologically biased construct with a very narrow focus in relation to the broader context of Australia. The notion of "diversity" is thus a "truth-effect." The agenda in the rhetoric surrounding diversity, it would seem, is to make people believe that diversity exists. The Social Engineering of Australian Music45 The music market in Sydney, able to be generalized on a global level, shows preferences for a particular repertoire that is rooted in the Western art tradition of the 19th century. This, in turn, impacts on discourses that permeate the policies of arts funding bodies, since funding bodies are conscious that the needs of the music market must be satisfied, driven essentially by economics as they are. What seems to be occurring is a mutually reinforcing dynamic of circular simplicity. Conscious that a particular mass art music market exists for a particular music, as described in Part 1, the federal government funding body for the arts (the Australia Council) has an important impact on music programming. In tandem with music organizations and the mass market to which it is catering, the Australia Council imposes particular imperatives on performance groups, shaping repertoire, taste, musical value, and performance standards. The funding body is profoundly implicated in this process, regulating, controlling, and determining which music is performed/ not performed, heard/not heard, and where and by whom it is performed and heard. As a consequence of this fluid relationship between the market for music and the body that funds it, a particular kind of performance practice becomes constituted, regulated, and maintained. In order to understand how the social engineering of music comes about, it is useful to refer to some of the theoretical work of French cultural theorist Pierre

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Bourdieu. Bourdieu's work has been concerned with the relationships between social institutions, systems of thought, and the way in which power relations are embedded in social structures. Significant among his theories is that all practices are embodied practices.46 An important underlying argument is that the sexed body is a crucial factor, though not the only factor, in the production and reception of music. It is incontestable that men have dominated art music practices.47 It is important to understand how particular individuals come to occupy prestigious positions in music. How is it that long after the advent of the second wave of the women's movement of the late 1960s, women still constitute only about 18 percent of the composing population in Australia? Why do we continue to hear relatively more music from the 18th and 19th centuries and Romantic 20th century on Australian and, by inference, on world concert platforms? A number of factors contribute to these phenomena, not least of which are the ways in which political and discursive practices in music function to reinforce and reproduce music that has dominance. Marcia Citron discusses a number of factors that have hindered women's participation in music, including access through education and training, critical and audience reception, print and electronic publication of works, regularity of performances and broadcasts of works, and written critiques of music in both the popular and academic presses. She goes on to suggest that these mechanisms are the obvious ways in which compositions are brought to the public's attention. Moreover, she continues, the complex interaction of all these components creates the aura of the professional composer. This, in turn, opens doors for particular works to become canonized.48 Institutionalized learning practices such as those constituted by the AMEB are profoundly implicated in the canonization process. The AMEB adopts practices that I believe are exclusionary in nature, despite its attempts more recently to include popular forms of music. There appears to be a demonstrable correlation between concerthall repertoire and the repertoire of the AMEB. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of the habitus and thefield,it appears that the structures that generate the music hegemony (identified in the study undertaken of art music performance practices in Australia, some of the results of which are reported in Part 1) can be traced back to the concertgoing music lover's early childhood and adolescent musical training. The habitus in the field of art music is collectively orchestrated to maintain and perpetuate this hegemony, leaving little or no room for women's music to make its presence felt. In addition, I draw on Lydia Goehr's assertion that concert hall music has been modeled on the "work concept," in turn giving rise to hierarchies in which particular music is privileged.49 The work concept is bound up with the idea that musical works are coherent entities comprising a complex structure of sounds intimately connected to the composer, to the score, and to a given set of performances. Goehr maintains that each of these cannot be understood in isolation but must be understood in relationship to each other.50

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It might seem obvious that present-day audiences attend concerts to hear musical "works." Goehr, however, points out that the phenomenon of the work concept is relatively new, dating from 1800 onward. Music that was composed for purely functional purposes, such as entertainment music and therefore "without the work concept," predominated during the 17th and 18th centuries. In contrast, music composed under the paradigm of the work concept from the beginning of the 19th century is often composed for its own sake (art for art's sake) and requires the performance of whole works, all movements intact, in one concert sitting. The paradigm shift to the work concept, argues Goehr, gives rise to the "genius" in music (and all the associated notions of individualism, including the notion of the "great" work of art).51 So entrenched is the Romantic aesthetic of the work concept in late 20th-century music practice that it regulates all music into the work paradigm, including music composed before 1800 and music/composers who supposedly broke with that tradition in the mid-20th century (e.g., John Cage).521 argue that the work concept, together with the perpetuation of AMEB repertoire in the Australian concert hall, is implicated in the exclusion of women's music. Bourdieu: The Habitus and the Field of Cultural Production In announcing, "In each one of us to varying degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday . . . that our pastpersonae predominate in us,"53 Pierre Bourdieu locates the body as being particular to its history. Yet because life's experiences are "internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history,"54 the habitus—"the active presence of the whole past of which it is a product"55—molded over a long period of inculcation and becoming formed and durable in adulthood, accounts for why we take the world for granted. In childhood and into early adulthood, we form distinctions between things, classifying according to our tastes. The dispositions that we form during this long period of conditioning, becoming part of a collective unconscious, are durable and will probably last for our entire lifetimes. The habitus, then, is unconsciously generative.56 What is ignored, however, as Bourdieu notes, is that "taste classifies, and classifies the classifier."57 This point is important, for Bourdieu claims that we are not conscious that we are making distinctions between things, nor are we, in making these distinctions, aware that we are participating in the creation of unequal relations in society. In all forms of cultural production and practice the principles of domination and subordination are in operation. While Bourdieu is not suggesting that the classifications themselves cause class divisions and inequalities, he is, nonetheless, contending that "art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences,"58 and this contributes to the process of social reproduction. According to Bourdieu, any social formation is structured into a hierarchically organized series of fields. These include, for example, the economic, educational, political, and cultural fields. To enter afield,one must possess a habitus that is particular to that field.59 The field of cultural production (which includes music pro-

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duction) is independent and autonomous of other fields of production in that it has its own laws of functioning, yet it is homologous in structure with others. The field is determined at any given moment between the various positions that "cultural agents" (artists) occupy in the field. Agents (or artists) in the cultural field, as in any field, constantly engage in competition for dominance, which, as Bourdieu points out, is predicated on the amount of economic and/or symbolic wealth or capital that they can summon. This is important, for Bourdieu argues that symbolic capital, or wealth, is more desirable than economic wealth. Bourdieu explains the legitimization of high art forms on these grounds. Economic capital is associated with cultural production aimed at the mass market (e.g., popular music). In other words, while symbolic capital may imply the possession of economic capital, it is more importantly associated with prestige and celebrity or with public recognition for one's work. Cultural capital, then, is wealth that is acquired through education and training, which is particular to a given cultural field. Economic capital is associated with the dollars and cents obtained for services rendered (the amount of money that art attracts). Symbolic capital is the value that an individual accumulates in the social system in terms of both economic and cultural capital. According to Bourdieu, symbolic capital locates its agents as valued members of the society. Bourdieu's conception of symbolic power, then, while possibly connected to, and enmeshed in, economic and political power but not reducible to it, has the function of legitimating unequal power relations. Indeed, one of the central arguments in Bourdieu's work is that social structures produce unequal power relations, but because these are unrecognized as such, they are accepted as being legitimate.60 Bourdieu goes on to suggest that the field of cultural production is structured by an opposition between two subfields, the field of restricted production ("high" art), where the competition between agents is for symbolic capital (in which art production is invariably for art producers rather than for society at large), and the field of mass production, that is, popular culture, where economic capital is the dominant principle of hierarchization and involves economic wealth. Within the field of cultural production, art music tends to be located in the subfield of restricted production, for it does not cater to the mass music market.61 To enter the field of restricted musical production, agents must possess the appropriate habitus, undertaking training that leads to composing and performing high art music. Bourdieu's Model and the AMEB The rituals of art music performance practice in the 20th century, dependent upon the solid training ground of a good musical education, give rise to a particular literate, musical body, which, in turn, produces a particular musical habitus. The rite of passage, for example, through the AMEB,62 a system of private musical training, produces a particular musical subject. On entering the system (or what Bourdieu calls the "game," in this case, the AMEB game), the subject takes on all that is involved in playing this particular game, acquiring, as it were, a "feel for the

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[AMEB] game." The earlier musicians enter the AMEB game, the less aware they are of all that is entailed in learning it, the greater their ignorance of all that is tacitly gained through their investment in this particular music and the greater their ignorance that they are, indeed, interested in its very existence and perpetuation. Not realizing what is involved in learning under this particular system of musical training and yet realizing that it did procure them a music education, the likelihood is that they will go on to reproduce the system, so that it becomes self-perpetuating. On this proposition, I argue that there is a direct link between systems of musical training., such as that provided by the AMEB, and the repertoire that constitutes the music performed in the concert hall. At this point it is useful to provide a concrete illustration of how the typical AMEB habitus comes to be formed. If we were to conceive of a typical music lesson, we would find that the teacher invariably asks the student to perform standard warm-up exercises and studies, all designed to produce technical agility on the chosen instrument. More importantly, however, these tasks also reinforce all that is involved in learning the greater portion of AMEB repertoire. As an analysis of this repertoire shows, the greater portion of works included in the various lists A, B, C, and D (especially in the higher grades) of the syllabuses, is tonal. This music thus relies on the major/minor system and its associated rules of Western, functional harmony, the foundation of typical practice exercises for music students. Music lessons aimed at preparing the student for the AMEB examination also include a series of value judgments made by the teacher about the music being studied. It is assumed, for example, that any choice of music from all the possible selections of works by Bach will be acceptable. Since he is generally viewed as a towering composer from the high baroque era who produced consistently great music, the assumption continues that there were no troughs and peaks in his output. Another tendency by the AMEB instructor is to avoid choosing works from the 20th century unless they are tonal. There also seems to be a bias against choosing works from the little Australian music that is listed, usually in list D of the syllabus. In the last 10 years, the amount of Australian music included in the associate (A. Mus. A.) and licentiate (L. Mus. A.) syllabuses of the AMEB might well be described as tokenistic. Over the decade 1985-1995, its representation has increased by very little. In 1985 there were only 18 Australian works of a total of 1,282 (or approximately 1.4 percent) included in these syllabuses. In 1990 this rose to 48 of a total of 1,557 works (approximately 3.1 percent), and in 1995 it climbed to 91 of a total of 1,992 works (4.6 percent).63 (See Figure 2.7.) It is worth noting, however, as Monique Geitenbeck does, that during the 1930s quite a different situation prevailed with respect to the inclusion in the syllabuses of Australian music and, in turn, women's music. As Geitenbeck points out, by 1938 of the 42 Australian instrumental and vocal compositions included in the syllabuses, 20 percent were by women, and by 1949 works by women represented 36 percent of the total of Australian works in the AMEB syllabuses.64 In contrast to these earlier trends, on the present-day training ground of the AMEB,65 the student learns to play without question a repertoire that is predomi-

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Figure 2.7 Percentage of Australian Music Included in the AMEB Syllabuses for A. Mus. A. and L. Mus. A. in 1985,1990, and 1995

Source: Sarah-Grace Williams nantly drawn from the Western art music tradition of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. It should be noted, too, that in its 79 years of operation, the repertoire and instruments examined have not altered significantly.66 The Foreword to the 1996 AMEB syllabus states: While one of the chief functions of the Board is to set examination standards of the highest order, more importantly it strives to offer all students access to some of the best repertoire for study purposes, whether they subsequently sit for examinations or not. .. . The Board has a commitment to including compositions by Australian and New Zealand composers in its publications and syllabuses.67 While it may be the case that the board includes some Australian- and New Zealand-composed music in its syllabuses, a search through the seventh-grade piano syllabus, for example, produces eyestrain in the attempt to locate the Australian content. New Zealand music, too, is conspicuous by its virtual absence: one piece by New Zealand composer Douglas Lilburn is included in list D of the eighthgrade 1996 syllabus. There is clearly a bias of the AMEB syllabuses toward the repertoire previously described, with women's music, 20th-century music, and Australian and New Zealand music being represented as a token. It would seem that the assumption upon which the AMEB operates is that "best music" equates with a particular kind of "old" music. This assumption produces another: "best music" produces "good," if not "best," musicians. The way in which students are trained through the AMEB produces subjects who go on to reproduce endlessly the very same kind of music in adult life. This method includes repeated performance of the exclusive repertory of Western tonal music, as well as adoption of attitudes and value judgments toward this music similar to those of their teachers. Having had it ingrained from an early age by their teachers that there exists predominantly only one kind of music, musical subjects trained in the AMEB system, without realizing it, tend to regard Australian music and even 20th-century music with a certain amount of suspicion. These attitudes

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may be formed for life. Moreover, that there is an even smaller amount of music composed by women in the syllabuses of the AMEB means that it barely signifies, and, on this observation, it would seem that this is a crucial reason for their invisibility on Australian concert platforms. What emerges is that representation is an important issue, for the way in which Western, tonal music comes to assume priority over all other music that might be included in (but is, in fact, excluded from) the syllabuses of the AMEB bears a strong resemblance to what comes to be understood as musical knowledge in later life. The rigid definitions of "fine" music formed by unsuspecting AMEB candidates, gradually perfected through the long rehearsal period from early childhood to adolescence, are so powerful in their effect that versions of the same repertoire in the AMEB syllabuses flood the music of the concert hall, served up in highly refined performances to audiences who choose to attend concerts in their adult lives. I thus argue, along Bourdieurian lines, that the AMEB is a self-perpetuating system with far-reaching effects. During the extended process of training, the AMEB "civilizes" its musical subjects (providing them with a feel for what is deemed to be proper music by "playing the AMEB game"), and the AMEB student complies with, and, in turn, reproduces, the process, conditioned into thinking that the AMEB repertoire is superior to any other kind of music. Goehr's "Work Concept" In her book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Lydia Goehr describes the "work concept," a notion that would support the idea that the history of music consists of great musical works. She argues that all concert hall music is modeled on the work concept and that all contemporary performance is regulated by this concept.68 Briefly, she invites her reader to explore, both historically and analytically, how the work concept came to be constructed, locating the moment for the paradigm shift that saw a transition from music created without the work concept to music composed with the work concept at around 1800. The work concept is therefore rooted in 19th-century ideologies and practices, and Goehr suggests that we see the world's music, even today, through romantic spectacles, packaging all of it in terms of "works." She says: "The phrase 'musical work/ like 'work of art,' is used with evaluative as well as classificatory sense. What we see under imperialistic influence is a conflation or contamination of the two senses."69 Goehr argues that all Western music (whether composed before 1800 or since 1900) is colonized by the work concept. According to Goehr, musicians do not speak of music in terms of "occurrences," as they might have prior to 1800. Instead, they conceive of music as a set of "works," using all the attendant terminology to describe these works. At every level, musicians engage in practices that are associated with the "work production." Taken for granted in such institutions as the AMEB, those engaged in music practice are ostensibly tamed and civilized, molded and regulated by the work concept. Music that does not fit the work para-

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digm, for example, popular musics, improvised musics, non-Western musics, jazz, and women's musics, is relegated to the borderlines, where it is, by and large, ignored; it is as if these musics did not exist. In this view, it might even be the case that women's music is being treated as an entirely different genre rather than as a category offering different kinds of possibilities in terms of aesthetics. The sheer force of the work concept in contemporary performance practice spawns a series of related concepts, including that of the virtuoso performer, whose claim to fame is the exhibition of mastery over the music performed. Another is the "conductor syndrome," in which the conductor is seen as both master over, and servant of, the music (he must be faithful to the score) while at the same time exerting his individual authority and control over the collective body of the orchestra,70 which, in turn, is often viewed paradoxically as a single instrument. Goehr argues that the work concept is difficult to shift for two important reasons: "First, those who wish to challenge a concept's regulative force usually find themselves paradoxically situated in a practice that is regulated by the very concept they want to challenge; second, that a regulative concept's alteration or demise is no less complicated a process than its emergence."71 Taking John Cage as an example, Goehr points out: What he and other avant-gardists demand in theory [namely, to eliminate themselves from their work and simply let the work happen] has to be contradicted by practice, if that practice functions with ideals one opposes in theory, yet, for whatever reason and however reluctantly, one accepts in practice. It is difficult to challenge in practice in a radical way that [which] one at the same time participates in.72 Given Goehr's elucidation of the work concept and Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, it is not surprising to find that concert hall music in Australia is undifferentiated by repertoire. While I have not covered every possible reason for this phenomenon, I have argued that among the most potent is that the early musical training likely to have been received by these audiences in childhood and adolescent years, notably through the AMEB, is self-perpetuating. Audiences feel safe with the music that they know. Thus, the familiar in art music, correlated with mass audience appeal, means that even the bureaucrats in the administration of art music institutions, such as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, are destined to program according to their audience's tastes for particular music. If they did not, they would not survive financially. Demographic Profile of Audiences Data made available to me by three music companies based in Sydney73 on audience demographics for mainstream art music support my argument that the AMEB is implicated in the perpetuation of music associated with 19th-century ideologies on Australian concert platforms. It is interesting to discover that there was not a significant difference between audiences who attended mainstream concerts and

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audiences who attended new music concerts in terms of suburb, class, educational background, and age.74 Audiences for mainstream art music are predominantly from the affluent areas of Sydney's north shore, eastern suburbs, and inner west, are what might be loosely described as middle- to upper-class, are predominantly tertiary-educated and in full-time employment, and are aged 40 years and over. There are some similarities between this audience and that for new music in that the latter audience is also predominantly well educated and drawn from the wealthier suburbs. According to Allen, audiences for new music, however, are younger than audiences for old music, and many are themselves musicians.75 Based on this evidence, it would seem that in Bourdieurian terms, the economically/symbolically empowered music institutions dominating the music scene in Sydney derive audiences from a very exclusive group. The profile for art music audiences (mainstream and contemporary music concerts) is remarkably similar. It is important to remember that all the music institutions that I examined in an earlier study76 receive substantial subsidies from the Australian government through the Australia Council and are thus indirectly subsidized by all taxpaying Australians. On this basis we might perhaps question why such an exclusive group of the population, which already tends to be biased by social class and age, comes to be given preferential treatment. While there is no concrete evidence available to link the demographic profile of the AMEB candidature with audiences for concert hall music, I conjecture, nonetheless, that those who study under the AMEB in early life are among those—in all probability constituting a large proportion of those—who in later life attend mainstream concerts. Studying music privately is a costly exercise: there is considerable financial investment in learning music through the AMEB. While it is something of a myth that the wealthy classes in Sydney are confined to the north shore, eastern suburbs, and the inner west, I contend, nonetheless, on the basis of economic capital alone, that a direct link can be made between audiences for concert hall music and those who received training in the AMEB system. I would also say that those who invest financially in the AMEB acquire educational capital. The concert hall repertoire analyzed in my study and that of the AMEB syllabuses are remarkably similar. Indeed, further support is given to this supposition from the findings of the study "What Are Music Students Really Being Taught?—Music Education in Sydney," by Nicole Donald, who found in her survey of the SBS Youth Orchestra that its members were from predominantly middle-class families and undergoing private training through the AMEB.77 Moreover, to get an idea ofjust how pervasive the AMEB training ground is, I was overwhelmed by the numbers of candidates reported as having sat for examinations in New South Wales alone. In 1988 the New South Wales office for the AMEB reported that a total of 33,025 candidates sat for practical and written examinations; in 1990 this figure increased to 35, 963; and in 1995 it was 43,648.78 Given the empirical evidence in my own study,79 and the ways in which particular music becomes self-perpetuating, it is not surprising to find that women's mu-

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sic has been positioned on the fringe of mainstream art music. The AMEB is profoundly implicated here, for students seldom come across the names of women composers in the list D of the syllabus, if at all. Even then a contradiction often arises, for what they are being taught about women's music (without being conscious that this is happening) is that music by women is romantic in style. Much of the music by Australian women included in the AMEB syllabus is written in a romantic idiom (e.g., Dulcie Holland, Miriam Hyde, and Marjorie Hesse). Names such as Anne Boyd, Moya Henderson, Elena Kats-Chernin, Mary Finsterer, and Liza Lim—five among Australia's contemporary composers, each of whom is in vogue, writing in individual, idiomatic musical styles (some hard-edged and modernist, others postmodernist)—tend to be omitted. Australian men's music that is in-vogue also tends to be omitted from the syllabuses, but the names of composers such as Peter Sculthorpe and Ross Edwards do appear occasionally. Lydia Goehr does not delve specifically into an analysis of the exclusive nature of the work concept in relation to women's music, making only brief mention of this fact.80 Marcia Citron,81 however, covers this point in exemplary detail. Illustrating that the musical canon is gender-biased toward men's music, Citron examines the practices and attitudes that have led to the exclusion of women's music from the received canon. Among the issues covered by Citron are the paradigm of "greatness" (associated with the male "genius"); the "test-of-time" syndrome— the idea that music is transcendent (beyond the body, to which women, but not men, are supposedly tied, into the mind, and into the realm of the spiritual, which can be accessed only by men); and the concept of "originality." In practice, argues Citron, "works of art perform 'cultural work' that makes them effective and successful in the context in which they existed."82 But it is through repeated practice—a necessity in musical training—that such ideas become ingrained. CONCLUSION Concert hall repertoire shapes and is shaped by the market, and by and large, this repertoire is undifferentiated. This means that a particular repertoire, namely, that from the Western art music canon, is privileged over a variety of musics that, if not omitted altogether, do not have a strong presence. Musical tastes formed at an early age (e.g., through "playing the AMEB game" and joining youth orchestras) are sustained and maintained into adult life, by which time the particular disposition for AMEB and youth orchestral music has become durable. It is not surprising to find that music in Sydney is biased toward the Western art music canon, results that can be generalized to include Australia as a whole and other countries where similar practices occur, for the assumption underpinning institutions such as the AMEB is that music by men is superior to all other music. The AMEB candidate, civilized and cultured through the lengthy rehearsal period of AMEB training, reinforces the choice of this music, adhering to early experience in exercising taste judgments in the Australian concert hall in adult life.

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Moreover, it is common for the former AMEB candidate to ensure that her or his own progeny receive private music lessons through the AMEB. Practices of early training function to produce, reinforce, and perpetuate truths that have a normalizing and regulatory effect on the music culture as a whole. In effect, and I tend to agree with Lydia Goehr on this point, this is impossible to shift unless all practices, mainstream and marginal (for marginal practices, including those that marginalize women's music, are contained within the dominant field of mainstream practices), are overthrown and replaced with something different. Goehr makes a case for revisiting those practices that were in existence prior to the 19th century, composed under the without the work concept paradigm. I wonder, however, if a return to former practices would rescue women from their present low status in the music world and afford them the right to an equal hearing on their own terms. I suspect not, given the fact that no women from previous historical epochs have gained entry into the music canon, with the exception, perhaps, of Hildegarde of Bingen. The wealth of historical evidence that has surfaced in feminist musical research for a good three decades now supports the fact that the musical past for women in music, while better in some epochs than in others, has always peripheralized their activities, if not excluded them entirely. The AMEB is so well entrenched in Australian culture that it is certain to endure at least for the foreseeable future.83 It is also a paradox that the AMEB would not survive without the work of the many women who populate the AMEB system as teachers and examiners.84 That a system so well populated by women as teachers/performers is so lacking in support for, and representation of, women composers would seem an anomaly but, since the role models of musical composition are almost exclusively male, not surprising. While I may have seemed to paint a bleak picture for women's music, I believe, nonetheless, that when we know how structures operate to exclude particular people and particular music, then, and only then, can we do something about the matter. NOTES 1. Therese Radic, "Past Imperfect, Present Indicative, Future Tense: The Repercussions of the Australian Composing Women's Festivals," in Sally Macarthur and Cate Poynton, eds., Musics and Feminisms (Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 1999), 10. 2. See Elizabeth Wood, "Review Essay: Women in Music," Signs 6 (Winter 1980): 283-297, and Susan McClary, "Reshaping a Discipline: Musicology and Feminism in the 1990s," Feminist Studies 19.2 (Summer 1993): 399-423. The earliest contributions in fe nist musicology that also corroborate this claim were concerned with excavating a musical past for women composers, including Christine Ammer, Unsung: A History of Women American Music (Westport, CT, and London, England: Greenwood Press, 1980); Caro Neuls-Bates, ed., Women in Music: An Anthology ofSource Readingsfrom the Mid to the Present (New York: Harper and Row, 1982); and Jane Bowers and Judith Tick, e Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950 (Urbana and Chic versity of Illinois Press, 1986), among others. One of the first essays to examine music fro the perspective of a feminist criticism was Eva Rieger in Frau, Musik, un Mdnnerherrschaft (Frankfurt, Germany: Ullstein, 1981; reissued in Kassel, Germany: F

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rore-Verlag, 1988). Excerpts from the book were published under the title "Dolce semplice?" in Gisela Ecker, ed., Feminist Aesthetics, trans. Harriet Anderson (London: Woman's Press, 1985), 135-149. Two outstanding books that systematically examine the way in which music has been dominated by male traditions and practices are Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), and Marcia Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 3. See, for example, Women's Studies/Women's Status (Boulder, CO: College Music Society/CMS Report Number 5, 1988). 4. Gretchen Poiner, "Old Time Dancing: Affirmative Action for Women," in Jan Larbalestier and Denise Roberts, eds., Women and the Law: Working for Women? Anti-Discrimination, Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity (Sydney: Women's Studies Centre, University of Sydney, 1995), in particular, 70-72. Poiner's work shows that while proportionately more women are employed in Australia in the 1990s when compared with the 1970s, most are in part-time work, and few hold full-time managerial positions. 5. In Australia these include the Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act 1984, the Public Service Reform Act 1984 (amending Public Service Act 1922), the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986, the Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for Women) Act 1986, and the Equal Employment Opportunity (Commonwealth Authorities) Act 1987. 6. David Throsby and Beverley Thompson, But What Do You Do for a Living? A New Economic Study of Australian Artists (Sydney: Australia Council, 1994), 9. The occupations that the report identified as being arts-based were categorized as follows: writers, craftspeople, visual artists, actors, dancers/choreographers, musicians/singers, composers, and community artists. 7. Australia: Office of the Status of Women, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Women Shaping and Sharing the Future: The New Agenda for Women, 1993-2000, 2nd ed. (Canberra: Australian Government Public Service, June 1993), 124-125. 8. Throsby and Thompson, But What Do You Do for a Living?, 27, 46. 9. According to a 1990 U.S. study by Eleanor Dickinson (comp) Gender Discrimination in theArtfield (Sonoma: California College of Arts and Crafts, Artists Equity Association, 1990), these structural barriers appear to be universal. In parallel with the Australian experience, U.S. male artists made over 68 percent of the total U.S. art income while representing slightly less than 50 percent of ail artists and received 73 percent of all arts grants and fellowships. 10. See Australian Census, Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), August 1991. 11. These include Gil Appleton, ed., Women in the Arts: A Study by the Research Advisory Group of Women and the Arts Project (Sydney: Policy and Planning, Australia Council, December 1982); Women in the Arts: A Strategy for Action (Sydney: Policy and Planning, Australia Council, 1984); Women in the Arts: Submission to the Australia Council Arts Employment Inquiry (Canberra: Australian Government Public Service, 1985); Mira Crouch and Jenny Loveric, Paths to Performance: Gender as a Theme in Professional Music Careers: A Pilot Study of Two Orchestras (Sydney: Report to Australia Council, 1990); Victoria Rogers, Cora V. Baldcock, and Denise Mulligan, What Difference Does It Make? A Pilot Study of Women in the Performing and Visual Arts in Western Australia (Sydney: Australia Council, 1993). 12. Crouch and Loveric, Paths to Performance. 13. This information, cited in Women of Note (Fall 1996), published by the Women's Philharmonic, was posted to the International Alliance of Women in Music (IAWM) list on

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15 November 1996. The statistics presented in this posting were as follows: women's compositions accounted for only 3 of a total 1,530 pieces (approximately 0.2 percent) programmed in concerts for 21 of the highest budgeted orchestras; these 21 orchestras had no women music directors or conductors appointed to permanent positions; of the 75 orchestras sampled, only 5 have principal music directors or conductors who are women; community orchestras whose budgets ranged from $175,000 to $275,000 reported the highest percentage of women composers programmed (2 percent of all works performed). In this same group, 50 percent of the conductors and soloists were women. 14. Varda Ullman Novick, "Protest and Empowerment," posting to gen-mus@ virginia.edu., 13 November 1996. 15. Yet according to an article posted to the IAWM list on 23 December 1996 from the Santa Barbara News-Press (the Voice of Santa Barbara County since 1855) on 6 April 1996 written by George Jahn under the title "Without Harping: Philharmonic Female Finally Gets Her Due," the harpist, who is the only female member of the orchestra (since winning an audition for the post in 1970), did not have her name appear on the program along with all other members of the orchestra until March 1996. The article states: For harpist Anna Lelkes, the Vienna Philharmonic's latest tour at Carnegie Hall brought a bouquet few outsiders can appreciate. Finally—after 25 years with the orchestra—her name appeared on the program. .. . The Vienna Philharmonic's main harpist has never been on the program because she isn't a formal member. The problem? She's a woman. In its 153 years, the Philharmonic never has admitted women as member musicians who vote on setting Philharmonic policy. The orchestra wasn't swayed when the rival Berlin Philharmonic shattered tradition in 1982 by hiring itsfirstwoman.... Publicly, Lelkes, 56, says her "non-person" status is a small price to pay for playing in the Vienna Philharmonic. I am aware that the policy of excluding women in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has since changed due to the concerted efforts of a number of protest groups, including the boycotting of the orchestra's concerts. 16. Of 155 Australian composers listed by the Australian Music Centre in 1988,20 were women. See Directory ofAustralian Composers Represented in the Collection of the Au tralian Music Centre (Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 1988). 17. Nicola LeFanu, "Master Musician: An Impregnable Taboo?," Contact: A Journal of Contemporary Music 31 (Autumn 1987): 6. 18. Mary Mageau, "Australian Women Composers' Network: Aiming for Its Own Demise," 24 Hours (December 1991): 51. 19. It is interesting to compare this statistic with that of June 1992, when the total number of Australian composers represented by the Australian Music Centre increased to 228. Of this total, 33 composers were women, and 195 were men (women constituted 14.5 percent of the composer population). 20. The Register of Theses in Australian Music (Parkville, Victoria: Centre for Studies in Australian Music, University of Melbourne, 1996) points to a preoccupation by postgraduate scholars with "art" music by male composers. In the section entitled "Composer Studies" (meaning Australian composers) it is revealed that 81 percent of theses are concerned with music by male art music composers, 16 percent with music by female composers, and 3 percent with the music of both sexes (see 43-54). In the section on "Analysis," 69 percent of theses are devoted to music by male "art" music composers, 4 percent (one master of music thesis, in fact, written in 1984 on Margaret Sutherland's Sonata for clarinet and piano of 1947) to music by female "art" music composers, and 27 percent of theses to the analysis of music by Aboriginal Australians (see 38-40). 21. Bruce Johnson made this point in a paper entitled "Musicology in the 90s—Which Century?" presented at the "Musicology in the 90s" National Conference of the Musicolog-

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ical Society of Australia, School of Graduate Studies, University of Melbourne, 5 July, 1996. 22. I am making a distinction between music composed before 1900 and music composed before 1950 because Australian music really began to seriously signify on concert platforms only after 1950, especially in the 1960s. Moreover, much of the 20th-century music programmed for performance on Australian concert platforms was composed before 1950; the second half of the 20th century is underrepresented by comparison. 23. I used the Australian Music Centre catalogs for this purpose and included a broad range of genres such as vocal, chamber, solo chamber, piano, orchestral, and choral music. 24. Therese Radic, "Where Are the Women Composers?," 24 Hours (December 1991): 43. 25. Mageau is referring to Aaron Cohen's International Encyclopedia of Women Co posers, 2nd ed. (New York: Books and Music, 1987 [1981]). 26. Mary Mageau, "Australian Women Composer's Network," 50. 27. Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel, eds., The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers (London: Macmillan, 1994). 28. By "mainstream" ensembles I mean groups that perform the bulk of their repertoire from music composed prior to 1900 (or 1950 in a post-Romantic idiom). It is conceded, however, that some contemporary groups, while attracting smaller audiences to their concerts, might also be viewed as being mainstream in that they are consistently funded by the Australia Council. 29. The full data (raw figures and percentages) from this study are available in Sally Macarthur, "Feminist Aesthetics in Music: Politics and Practices in Australia" (Doctoral dissertation, Department of Music, University of Sydney, May 1997). 30. This is a typical phenomenon, and while I did not specifically calculate the number of performances for each work (an enormous task for the present study), I noticed that while there were many repetitions of works by 19th-century composers of European descent there were very few for works by Australian composers. It is rare for Australian works to receive more than one performance (unless it happens to be an operatic work that might run for a short season) because audiences are not favorably disposed to hearing Australian repertoire. I did not absorb the repetition factor into my analysis, for given that the emphasis of my study is qualitative rather than quantitative, I felt that by becoming overly concerned with the statistical evidence, I would deflect from the interpretation that I offer in the latter part of this chapter and in subsequent chapters. 31. From a total of 488 works, the Song Company (SC) performed 71 Australian works (or approximately 14.5 percent) and from a total of 478, it performed 11 by women (or approximately 2 percent); from a total of 70 works, Sydney Alpha Ensemble (SAE) performed 57 Australian works (or approximately 48.5 percent), and from a total of 63 works, it performed 10 by women (or approximately 16 percent); from a total of 374 works, Sydney Spring Festival of New Music (SSFNM) performed 116 Australian works (or approximately 31 percent) and 24 by women (or approximately 6 percent); from a total of 151 works, Australysis (AUS) performed 91 Australian works (or approximately 14 percent) and 18 by women (or approximately 12 percent); from a total of 194 works, Synergy (SYN) performed 113 Australian works (or approximately 58 percent), and from a total of 194 works, it performed 10 by women (or approximately 5 percent); and from a total of 211 works, The Seymour Group (SEY) performed 119 Australian works (or approximately 56 percent), and from a total of 201 works, it performed 22 by women (or approximately 11 percent). The full data (raw figures and percentages) are available in Macarthur, "Feminist Aesthetics in Music."

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32. From a total of 968 works, Musica Viva (MV) performed 56 Australian compositions (or approximately 6 percent), and from a total of 1,220 works it performed 11 by women (or approximately 1 percent); from a total of 1,447 works, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) performed 112 Australian compositions (or approximately 7.5 percent) and 6 by women (approximately 0.5 percent); from a total of 651 works, the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) performed 7 Australian compositions (or approximately 7.5 percent), and 4 by women (or approximately 0.5 percent);froma total of 41 works, the Australian Youth Orchestra performed 7 Australian compositions (or approximately 17 percent), and from a total of 40 works, it performed none by women (0 percent); from a total of 26 works, Camerata Australia performed 5 Australian compositions (or approximately 19 percent), and from a total of 27 works, it performed none by women (0 percent); from a total of 229 works, the Sydney Youth Orchestra performed 23 Australian compositions (or approximately 10 percent) and 2 by women (approximately 1 percent); from a total of 101 works, the SBS Youth Orchestra (SBS) performed 7 Australian compositions (or approximately 6.5 percent) and 1 by a woman (or approximately 1 percent); from a total of 458 works, the Australia Ensemble performed 57 Australian compositions (or approximately 12.5 percent), and from a total of 454 works, it performed 6 by women (or approximately 1.5 percent); of a total of 488 works, the Song Company performed 71 Australian compositions (or approximately 14.5 percent), and from a total of 478 works, it performed 11 by women (or approximately 2 percent); and from a total of 223 works, the Australian Opera (AO) performed 11 Australian operas (or approximately 5 percent) and none by women (0 percent). See Macarthur, "Feminist Aesthetics in Music," for raw data and percentages. 33. The breakdown of Australian women's music, when compared with all Australian music performed, is as follows: from a total of 50 Australian works, Musica Viva (MV) performed 6 by Australian women (or approximately 12 percent); from a total of 103 Australian works, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) performed 6 by Australian women (or approximately 9 percent); from a total of 49 Australian works, the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) performed 4 by Australian women (or approximately 10 percent); from a total of 7 Australian works, the Australian Youth Orchestra (AYO) performed none by women (0 percent); similarly, from a total of 5 Australian works, its affiliated orchestra Camerata Australia (CA) performed none by women (0 percent); from a total of 21 Australian works, the Sydney Youth Orchestra (SYO) performed 3 by women (or approximately 14 percent); from a total of 23 Australian works, SBS Youth Orchestra (SBS) performed 1 by a woman (or approximately 16.5 percent); from a total of 11 Australian works, the Australian Opera (AO) performed none by women (0 percent); from a total of 54 Australian works, the Australia Ensemble (AE) performed 2 by women (or approximately 3.5 percent); from a total of 75 Australian works, the Song Company (SC) performed 8 by women (or approximately 1.0.5 percent); from a total of 28 Australian works, Sydney Alpha Ensemble (SAE) performed 9 by women (or approximately 32 percent); from a total of 112 Australian works, Sydney Spring Festival of New Music (SSFNM) performed 25 by women (or approximately 22 percent); from a total of 151 Australian works, Australysis (AUS) performed 17 by women (or approximately 11 percent); from a total of 98 Australian works, Synergy (SYN) performed 8 by women (or approximately 8 percent); and from a total of 111 Australian works, the Seymour Group (SEY) performed 13 by women (or approximately 11.5 percent). See Macarthur, "Feminist Aesthetics in Music," for raw data and percentages. 34. Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, "Vocabularies of Excellence: Rewording Multicultural Arts Policy," in Sneja Gunew and Fazal Rizvi, eds., Culture, Difference and the Arts (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 13. 35. Australia Council Annual Report 1993-94 (Sydney: Australia Council), 4.

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36. Kalantzis and Cope, "Vocabularies of Excellence," 17. 37. Moya Henderson, personal communication with Sally Macarthur, 12 January 1995. 38. Kalantzis and Cope, "Vocabularies of Excellence," 17-21. 39. Australia Council Annual Report 1991-92, 8. 40. Section 5 of the Australia Council Act of 1975, published in the Australia Council Annual Report 1994-95, 4. 41. Australia Council Annual Report 1994-95, 25. 42. Johnson, uCreative Nation, Creating Nation: Issues in Cultural Policy and Popular Music," Paper presented at the IASPM Australia-New Zealand Conference, Melbourne, June 1995, 5. 43. On the statistical evidence reported in Part 1, it would be impossible to have an equal representation of composers on the basis of their gender. However, as Throsby and Thompson in But What Do You Do for a Living? point out, women constitute more than 50 percent of the overall artistic population; equal representation by gender should therefore be possible for representing women across all art forms on the boards of the council. 44. Johnson, "Creative Nation, Creating Nation," 5-6. 45. Part of what follows in this section of the chapter is an adaptation of a paper that I wrote entitled "Performance Rites: AMEB, or Not to Be?" which appeared in Sally Macarthur and Cate Poynton, eds. Musics and Feminisms (Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 1999), 19-34. It is reprinted here with kind permission of the Australian Music Centre. 46. For example, Bourdieu states: "The habitus—embodied history, internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history—is the active presence of the whole past of which it is a product." In Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press in assoc. with Basil Blackwell, 1990), 56. Refer to his whole discussion on the habitus, 52-65. 47. See, for example, Macarthur, "The Conservative Hegemony of Australian Art Music," in "Feminist Aesthetics in Music," 40-85. 48. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 80. 49. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum ofMusical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 50. Ibid., 20. 51. Ibid., 160-163. 52. Ibid., 245, 260. 53. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 56. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. For a further discussion of the habitus see also Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. and intro. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press in assoc. with Basil Blackwell, 1993), 29-73. 56. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 56. 57. Bourdieu , Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 6. 58. Ibid., 7. 59. See, for example, Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 29-73; see, in particular, 64-72 for a discussion on the relationship of the field to the habitus. 60. See, for example, the editor's discussion in ibid., 1-25. 61. Ibid., 40-45. 62. According to archival material available at the Sydney office of the AMEB, music examinations in Australia date back to 1887 and were initially conducted through the Universities of Adelaide and Melbourne. The Foreword, Australian Music Examinations Board: 1996 Manual of Syllabuses (Sydney: Australian Music Examinations Board, Aus-

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tralian Print Group, 1995) states that in 1918 the AMEB emerged "as a national body with the purpose of providing graded assessments of the achievements of music students." From the moment of its inception to the present day, the typical AMEB music lesson, geared toward the mid- or end-of-year examination, has concealed a number of important assumptions. 63. These data were taken from an undergraduate student paper written on the AMEB (unpaginated, 6) by Sarah-Grace Williams, University of Western Sydney, Nepean, November 1996, and used with permission. 64. Monique Geitenbeck, "The Role of Women in the Australian Music Examinations Board from 1930-1950," in Nicholas Brown et al., eds., One Hand on the Manuscript: Music in Australian Cultural History (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 1995), 195. 65. It is not my intention to investigate the reasons for differences that existed between the first half of the 20th century described earlier and those of the present time. However, one possible explanation, as Therese Radic points out, is that composers in Australia were invisible until Sculthorpe launched a national style in the 1960s. See Radic, "Where Are the Women Composers?," 44. 66. While in its early years the AMEB examined only piano, violin, organ, and singing, as the century progressed, it added the full complement of instruments that make up the symphony orchestra (including percussion) together with classical guitar, recorder, accordion, organ, and electronic organ. 67. Australian Music Examinations Board: 1996 Manual of Syllabuses, 3. 68. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum ofMusical Works. 69. Ibid., 249. 70. I have deliberately used the male pronoun here, for very rarely do women conduct orchestras. 71. Goehr, The Imaginary Museum ofMusical Works, 260. 72. Ibid., 261. 73. See market surveys carried out for Musica Viva, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as follows: 1994 Research Study ofMusica Viva Subscribers (Sydney: Marketing for Change, 1994); a survey conducted by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in conjunction with Yann, Campbell, Hoare, Wheeler and Carter James Associates, October 1995, in which it was shown that the audience was skewed to the wealthier suburbs, women, the well educated, and the financially well-off, and 89 percent were aged 40 and over; and the Australian Chamber Orchestra subscriber survey conducted in association with Yann, Campbell, Hoare, Wheeler and Carter James Associates, 1995, in which it was revealed that the audience was skewed to the north shore, the eastern suburbs, and inner west (wealthier suburbs, in that order), 69 percent hold a university degree, 53 percent are in full-time employment, and 79 percent of the audience is in the 36- and-over age bracket. Also see the study of contemporary music audiences by Fiona Allen, "Contemporary Music Audiences in Sydney," Sounds Australian 34 (Winter 1992): 5-7. 74. Allen, "Contemporary Music Audiences." 75. Ibid., 6. 76. See Macarthur, "Feminist Aesthetics in Music," 40-85. 77. Donald, "What are Music Students Really Being Taught?" 18. Donald found that approximately 82 percent of the members of the SBS Youth Orchestra were studying music through the AMEB system. 78. These data were obtained from the AMEB office located on Elizabeth Street, Sydney, May 1996. 79. See Macarthur, "Feminist Aesthetics in Music," 40-85.

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80. Goehr, The Museum of Musical Works, 260. 81. See Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon. 82. Ibid., 223. 83. Having made this point, it is important, however, to acknowledge some of the values of the AMEB, especially as it would be perceived by parents: first, the award of a graded certificate provides tangible evidence of a child's competence as she or he progresses to higher levels of accomplishment; second, the provision through the AMEB of structured goals in music learning provides some concrete means for parents to know the level of their child's achievement. 84. In her essay "The Role of Women in the Australian Music Examinations Board from 1930-1950," Geitenbeck laments that women were not accepted as examiners until 1942, long after the AMEB had been established, yet, as she points out, between 1917 and 1930, for example, approximately 85.5 percent of qualified teachers produced over 13 years (having successfully completed their licentiateships) were women. Similarly, she adds, approximately 92.5 percent of candidates who sat at the associate level (A. Mus. A.) were women (189). Geitenbeck argues that women were the invisible force behind the music education of the nation.

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3

The Power of Sound, the Power of Sex: Alma Schindler-Mahler's Ansturm

[T]he archetype of all fiction is the sexual act.. . for what connects fiction—and music—with sex is the fundamental orgastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and consummation. —R. Scholes1 In "Talking Like a Girl," Cate Poynton makes what would seem like an obvious point, that we have no difficulty accepting, even taking for granted, that "voice is profoundly gendered."2 It is an idea that seems to go without saying: women have high-pitched voices, and men have low-pitched voices. It is not obvious, by way of contrast, however, to suggest that music is profoundly gendered. Indeed, mainstream musicology has resisted this notion on the grounds that in its most abstract form music seems to be disconnected from the body and is thus unable to be read in terms of gender or, for that matter, in terms of any other kinds of social meaning. Of course, it would be problematic, not to say simplistic and foolish, to suggest, following suit with voice, that all high-pitched sounds in music are feminine and all low-pitched sounds are masculine. But if this idea seems nonsensical in relation to music, why does it seem to make sense in relation to voice? Indeed, how natural is the voice, really? Is it really true that all women have high-pitched voices and, conversely, that all men have low-pitched voices? In her paper, Poynton problematizes the essentialism that flows from thinking about the naturalness of the gendered voice—that "women and men speak differently because of different configurations of the vocal tract"—in turn, giving rise to the idea that "biology is destiny." As she puts it: "[T]he biological is the source of whatever differentiates women and men from one another—including, of course, the assumption that women are more different from all men than they are different from any of one another."3

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Poynton's own project is to "complicate this 'natural' story of the gendered voice" by attempting "to write a space for voice across the biological and the cultural."4 Using examples of the radio voice from two very different countries, Japan and Australia, Poynton demonstrates that the voice is very much a cultural phenomenon, that the gendering assigned to it is always arbitrary. In this chapter, I question the biological versus cultural argument in relation to music. But I also question the long-running, familiar, and natural story of music, which almost exclusively celebrates music by male composers. This story fails to tell other stories equally deserving of attention. Throughout this book I highlight women's music as a case in point. In the decade of the 1990s music scholars situated in the poststructuralist, feminist camp began to question the singularity of the narrative told about music within modernist frameworks and demonstrated that music operates to sustain unequal relations between the sexes. These scholars showed that institutional power plays a significant role in constructing and maintaining, among other things, the male bias of the musical canon.5 In this chapter, I aim to recover a space for women, focusing on the music of Alma Schindler-Mahler (1879-1964). This is a difficult task, however, for in the act of celebrating her achievements, I find myself becoming embroiled in a number of debates. One of these is the postmodernist view that to undertake close readings of musical works is to continue the modernist cause. As Gary Tomlinson puts it, "[I]t is the act of close reading itself that carries with it the ideological charge of modernism."6 Yet, as Peter McCallum sensibly points out, approaches that avoid close readings amount to a "musicology without music,"7 and this, of course, is problematical. Nonetheless, carrying out close readings of music could be something of a pressing issue, for, as Suzanne Cusick comments, in wanting to distance themselves from modernist frameworks, large numbers of North American musicologists, in particular, feminist and queer theorists, have been systematically moving away from, if not abandoning altogether, the explicit study of composers in the high art music tradition and their works.8 It would seem that it has become increasingly fashionable to be thinking about musics and musicians in terms of their contexts and to be thinking about music as being in a state of dynamic flux, never to be pinned down to analysis. Many scholars have actively avoided dealing with the music itself and have been reluctant to engage with music situated in the Western canon. If they have been concerned with the canon, it is from the point of view of rereading it in order to show how it operates to serve particular interests. There has been a tendency to focus attention on popular musics and musics that cross disciplinary boundaries such as performance art and music theater. I argue that the shift away from the study of art music has had a negative effect on women's music located in the Western art music tradition. From these reflections this present chapter is born. It is a chapter that is bound to sit quite uneasily, if not nervously, on the seat of postmodernism within current music research. Another difficulty for this chapter is that in order to celebrate the musical achievements of this most remarkable composer, Alma Schindler-Mahler, I al-

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most inevitably find myself wanting to recover an essential woman. Within the confines of the nature/nurture argument I might be tempted to use biology to explain her difference, for it is obvious that men and women have differences based on their biological makeups. But what this view does not take into account, of course, as my opening remarks make clear, is the significant impact of upbringing and social conditioning. So while it may be tempting to invoke the biological to explain this composer's difference, in the spirit of much of the feminist literature devoted to the body, I shall be required to tread the fine line between treating the body literally and biologically and treating it metaphorically and culturally. My argument in this chapter is situated against the backdrop of literature concerned with aesthetics in general and feminist aesthetics in particular. The central question asks: Does it matter if we fmd that women's music is different from men's music? If it does matter, why does it matter? To begin, then, I want to explore why it matters to view the sexes as separate categories. SEXUAL IDENTITY According to French feminist Luce Irigaray, the question of sexed identity is one of the most important of our time. She offers three reasons for this assertion. First, "Sexual difference is necessary for the continuation of our species, not only because it constitutes the locus of procreation, but also because it's here that life is regenerated. The sexes regenerate one another aside from any question of reproduction."9 Second, she suggests: "The status of sexual difference is obviously related to that of our culture and its languages. Our centuries-old sexual economy is so often cut off from all aesthetic, speculative and truly ethical elaboration that the idea of a sexed culture is astonishing to most people. Sex is said to be a matter separate from civilization."10 Third, she goes on to say that any inquiry would reveal that it is nothing of the sort, that "sexuality, though said to be private, cannot possibly escape from social norms," and she concludes that "what we need for our future civilization, for human maturity, is a sexed culture."11 Finally, she makes the point that the disappearance of a sexual culture gives rise to values that are supposedly universal but that, in fact, permit men to dominate women. I have traversed this ground in the Introduction and Chapter 1, ground that lends support to earlier work elaborated by Irigaray in "This Sex Which Is Not One" and "When Our Lips Speak Together."12 In these essays, Irigaray discusses the female sexual anatomy in quite explicit terms to advance the idea that women are different from men. In essence, she arrives at the conclusion that woman is multiple, yet denied. Irigaray's argument is firmly grounded in biology. But, I want to ask, is that such a bad thing? As an increasing number of feminist theorists are now recognizing, Irigaray's work breaks new ground, for it posits the view that identity and sexual difference are inextricably linked to the body. A number of theorists who have worked more recently in the spirit of postmodernism (and I situate my own work here) have tended to deny the existence of a stable, female self or subject. They argue that the polarization of

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the categories of sex into male versus female is problematic, for these categories are always in a state of flux and can be constituted only provisionally. I have sympathy with this idea, but it might be equally argued that the more fluid the subject and the more fuzzy the boundaries around the categories of male and female, the more difficult it becomes to say what or who is actually being discussed. What I do not wish to do in this chapter is to abandon my subject on the grounds that she is unable to be constituted as a woman who composed music as a woman. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF ALMA SCHINDLER-MAHLER (1879-1964) During the course of her long life Alma Schindler-Mahler had friendships and affairs with, and was married to, some of the most prominent artistic men in Europe. She was in love with Gustav Klimt and very close to Alexander Von Zemlinsky. Other friends included Max Burckhard, Hans Pfitzner, Franz Schreker, Paul Kammerer, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg. Berg dedicated Wozzeck to her and his Violin Concerto to the memory of her daughter, Manon, with the line, "To the Memory of an Angel." She allowed Hans Pfitzner to court her quite openly in front of Mahler, and there was a short-lived, harmless romance with the pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch, whom Mahler had brought to their house in New York in 1907. She married Gustav Mahler; Walter Gropius, with whom she also had an affair while married to Mahler; and Franz Werfel, with whom she had an affair while married to Gropius. Between her affair with Gropius in 1910 and marriage to Gropius in 1915, she was involved in a notorious love affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka. Following Mahler's death, Dr. Fraenkel, the physician who had looked after Mahler in America when he was stricken with the disease that killed him, proposed twice to Alma. But she had just gained her independence, and the thought of mothering another, older man, did not appeal to her. Men were constantly around her throughout all three of her marriages. They included the Roman Catholic priest and theologian Johannes Hollensteiner, a much younger man and, as Franchise Giroud notes, it was highly unlikely that this was a platonic relationship.13 The purpose of this chapter is not to present the biographical details of Alma Schindler-Mahler's life. This has been covered more than adequately by others.14 The brief opening sketch, however, points to a personality that was remarkably passionate and to a person who seemed to be constantly consumed by the pursuit of love. It is not surprising, then, that she should engage love as a theme in her music. Indeed, the "love interest" for this chapter materializes as a song. In Ansturm, composed in 1911 and published as the third of four lieder in 1915, the composer provides to a text by Richard Dehmel a vivid and sexually explicit musical account of erotic love, subject matter that would have been regarded by many as taboo for women at the turn of the century in Vienna. There has been some speculation that the numerous love interests that seem to have dominated Alma Schindler-Mahler's life acted as substitutes for the music

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that she yearned to compose. Edward Kravitt makes the point that to view Alma as no more than a woman who was sexually available to men is to ignore other important aspects of her personality. She was, for example, prone to depression. As he says, "Before her marriage [to Mahler], composition was her major interest. It served also as psychological support in periods of distress."15 Alma herself confided: "When I was on the verge of suicide I began to compose again, to seek some creative outlet for my grief."16 In this instance she was referring to her stepfather Carl Moll's interference in her relationship with Klimt when she was 18. Throughout her life, however, she was often seriously depressed, a condition that could have been exacerbated during her marriage to Mahler, since he forbade her to compose but, rather, told her to regard his music as hers. As he put it to her before they married, "From now on you have only one profession: to make me happyl"11 By the time she became engaged to Mahler, she had already produced more than 100 lieder, some instrumental music, and a sketch for an opera. All that remains of her entire output are 14 lieder.18 It may have been socially acceptable at the turn of that century to expect that a woman would obey her husband. It is difficult to fathom, however, given that she had already produced a substantial output and seemed intent on making composing her serious profession, why Mahler would have insisted on silencing her. During their marriage, Mahler became totally engrossed in his work and ignored and suppressed his wife's artistic aspirations. In the first five years of the marriage, she felt helpless and, writing in her diary, commented: "He lives his own life—and I must live it too!"19 He often admonished her, suggesting that his friends found her intelligent only because she was beautiful, and ridiculed her literary and philosophical tastes. With her artistic freedom severely restricted and becoming increasingly aware of her life's emptiness, she studied Greek and translated Plato to keep herself occupied. Not until the marriage came to a crisis point in 1910, causing Mahler to consult with Freud, did Mahler realize what he had done and encouraged her, out of fear of losing her, to resume her composition. He helped her to publish the first song cycle, Funf Lieder, in 1910. These were all chosen from her existing songs.20 Alma Schindler-Mahler's relationship with her father, Emile Schindler, who had died when she was 13 years old, is also worthy of comment. He was a landscape artist and had encouraged her creativity from a very early age and, as Kravitt remarks, "enkindled her love for the avant garde."21 Through him she was introduced to the important poets and philosophers of the day and, as a consequence, developed a deep love of literature, particularly poetry and philosophical writings. She loved her father, whom she described as "a knight in shining armour, unfettered by bourgeois convention."22 According to her biographers, the resemblance of Mahler to her father probably attracted her to him. As she said herself, "I really had always been looking for a short stocky man with the wisdom and intellectual superiority I had known in my father."23 There is no doubt that Alma Schindler-Mahler had an extraordinary musical talent. She was also seen as nonconformist. Indeed, to become a composer in a field dominated by men was already taking a step into territory that was officially taboo

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for women. At that time, however, her style was arguably at the vanguard. In company with her then-colleague, Arnold Schoenberg, who had also been under the tutelage of Alexander von Zemlinsky, her music was viewed as highly experimental. Like Schoenberg's, her music was daringly chromatic, and, in some of her songs, there is a tendency to drift away from keys and tonal centers altogether. Her accompaniments were regarded by some, such as Kravitt and Filler,24 as having the most interest, being likened to those of Brahms, with thick textured chords, sometimes broken and sometimes solid. Her style is seen to have its foundations in Wagner, whom incidentally, she had greatly admired when she was an adolescent. She has been variously labeled egocentric and arrogant, a siren, a devouring maenad, a nymphomaniac, a femme fatale. But, then, what were the options for women at the turn of the century in Central Europe? There was only a handful of roles for a woman to play and to be seen to play and among the artistic community, flaunting convention and viewing Victorian values as prudish, the femme fatale was certainly one such role. The German expression that sums up the most acceptable role for women was Kinder, Kirche, Ktiche: children, church, cooking. A woman was to be an adornment to the life of her husband. There were also, of course, a couple of other alternatives, the godly and devilish deviants: nuns and whores. It could be argued that 19th-century Europe was inscribed with a deep, soulful masculinity. Human subjects were men. Men were seen to be at the center of the universe and at the center of all artistic creation. In late 19th-century Vienna, it was not possible for women to follow their own creative urges. They were expected instead to live according to a masculine prescription. As Francoise Giroud writes: Girls were brought up to regard their virginity as something sacrosanct, prudery was the rule, hysterical breakdowns werefrequent.Men, single or not, went to obtain from actress or working girls what the women of their own milieu longed to give them but could not, fo their honor stood in the way. A respectable woman in Vienna, as elsewhere, did not posse a body. If she discovered she did have one, then the devil must have got into the holy wat Once her sexuality was aroused, the irrepressible violence of her instincts, her natural propensity to lewdness, would be unleashed. Women had to be defended against themselves, by education and constraint.25 As Giroud continues, a woman was deemed to be "the natural enemy of morality, reason, and creativity."26 But there are always exceptions to every rule. From an early age, Alma Schindler-Mahler was surrounded by artists, art and music, and numerous books. On a diet of the literary classics, poetry, and philosophy and having access to the avant-garde, it was not surprising that she saw herself able to become an artist in her own right. But it was not to be when she married Gustav Mahler, older by more than half her age. I am not the first to remark that had things been different, the course of music history might have changed significantly.

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Kravitt notes that for her songs she chose poets who were known as the radical intellectuals: Richard Dehmel (1863-1920), Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865-1910), Gustav Falke (1853-1915), and Franz Werfel (1890-1945). Through her father's stimulus, according to Kravitt, Alma Mahler had become fascinated with the mystic, the search for life's inner meaning. Her poets were similarly on that journey, expressing something of an inner or hidden reality beyond outer reality.27 Dehmel was a particular favorite of hers, possibly because he was viewed as a dangerous radical. As Wilhelm Kahle observes, this poet's struggles to express people's freedom brought him to a police court on charges of obscenity.28 Interestingly, 4 of the 14 songs that remain from Alma Schindler-Mahler's output are to Dehmel's poetry. In this chapter I posit the idea that it is possible to view Schindler-Mahler's music in terms of difference based on the particularities of her sex. In making this claim, I compare two contemporaneous settings of Ansturm: Alma Schindler- Mahler's setting composed in 1911 and that of her former teacher, Alexander von Zemlinsky, composed four years earlier in 1907. As a general rule, I do not regard comparisons of this kind as productive, forfrequentlythey serve the purpose of strengthening the negative associations made of women's music. Furthermore, it is difficult to find examples that make such comparisons meaningful. In this instance, however, I believe that a comparison is warranted. Both composers have chosen the identical genre for the expression of their chosen text, itself identical in both settings. In addition, Schindler-Mahler borrowed from the music of Zemlinsky's opening bars and radically transformed it into something else. Finally, the style of their music is similar, though it is arguably the case that Schindler-Mahler's style is far more adventurous in its use of atonality than that of Zemlinsky. NOTIONS OF THE SEXUAL IN MUSICAL ANALYSIS Marcia Citron suggests that Ansturm is possibly one of the earliest songs by a woman set to a text on sexual desire and release. In this respect it is extraordinarily daring and provocative. As Citron continues: Its brilliant musical contrasts would provide fodder enough for lively discussion of style. But arguably its frank expression of forbidden subject matter is much more important and opens the door to larger questions. What did it mean for women around 1900 to openly express sexual desire and release? How were women of her background and class conceptualized sexually?... What these queries suggest is that music as lived practice represents much more than style, formalism, and a succession of great names and works.29 Men and women alike, albeit in different ways from each other, have always known what it is to experience desire, love, passion, eroticism, sexual passion, climax and release. Moreover, although sex has tended to be a taboo subject—even today we are cautious about it—when it is discussed, it frequently draws on stereotypes.

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Representations of male desire and release are regularly discussed in terms of erection-penetration-climax-closure.30 Contrasting the stereotypical male experience of sex is the idea that women's sexual experiences are multiple and "indefinite, cyclic, without set beginnings and endings."31 These essentialist formulations have wide currency. Furthermore, to invoke the cliche "if art imitates life," then it is not beyond the realm of possibility that music should imitate the sexual act. Indeed, there has been a history of writing on this subject, including that by Edmund Gurney, who, writing in 1880, argues that the presentation of music as motion corresponds to sexual (e)motion.32 Drawing on Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, Gurney attempted to explain that the highly pleasurable characteristics of what he termed "impressive music" were, in Malcolm Budd's words, the "sublimated quintessence of primitive sexual passions."33 But to avoid these messy kinds of discussions and thus to avoid thinking about music's connectedness to the human body and to bodily behaviors, music theorists also have sought to explain music by using other kinds of analytical models. One such model is based on the notion that there exists a perfect or divine ratio.34 Studies using this model show that the great masterworks from the canon conform to the ideal proportion (or golden section). I would argue that such studies are used to justify and perpetuate the notion of the ideal in music. Analytical models such as these privilege a particular kind of music, disregarding musics of other cultures, popular musics,35 and, pertinently for this book, women's music.36 What is interesting, however, is that analytical models that explain music in terms of the divine ratio are not mutually exclusive to a model that uses the metaphor of analysis in which a stereotypical idea of male sexual desire and release is invoked. What we find with the divine ratio is that the climax tends to be positioned around two-thirds of the way through the music (or at the proportion 0.618). This corresponds to a stereotypical idea of male sexual experience in which erection and penetration leading to climax take longer than the aftermath leading to closure. In contrast to this, I would argue that models of analysis that invoke the divine ratio and models that explain music using a metaphor of female sexual desire and release are more than likely to be mutually exclusive. On a model of women's experience of sex, if we are to invoke the essentialist and stereotypical idea of this given earlier by Renee Cox,37 there are likely to be several climaxes instead of one major climax, and each climax, in all likelihood, will vary in intensity, perhaps avoiding closure altogether. If we accept this proposition, then, in all likelihood, the sexual metaphor for female sexual desire and release will not correlate with the "golden mean." I want to make it clear, at this point, however, that I recognize the fact that men and women alike have access to the feminine and the masculine. Thus, it is possible for men to appropriate the female metaphor for sex and imitate it, and, conversely, it is possible for women to appropriate the male metaphor and imitate it. Susan McClary, for example, provides an excellent account of Schoenberg's appropriation of the feminine. She suggests that his expressionist works sound like the dissonant ravings of a madwoman and infers that he has deliberately feminized his musical language.381 ex-

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pand on this idea in the next chapter in relation to my discussion of Elisabeth Lutyens' serial music. Nonetheless, the stereotypes for sexual behavior that I have discussed have wide currency, and, in effect, I argue that such notions of sex and the sexual have been appropriated as frameworks, albeit subconsciously, for a number of analytical models that have been used in music. I am, of course, all too aware that these notions are problematic. Sexual experiences by men and women cannot be reduced to such rigid, formulaic explications, an idea that resonates with other binary constructions such as male and female, masculinity and femininity. The boundaries separating male from female and masculine from feminine can never be defined categorically. Indeed, it is possible for both women and men to exhibit varying degrees of masculine and feminine traits. If we accept, however, that bodies mediate music and that the sex of a body, together with other aspects of identity, is likely to influence the way in which the music is written, then it is possible to imagine that music composed by a woman will reflect differences that are, perhaps, attributable to her sex. The male dominance of the canon, coupled with the dominance of music theory by analysts who have sought to explain greatness in music according to what I call male models, including analytical methods such as that of Schenker, where the notion of the ideal is implied and seems to correspond to a male sexual metaphor, has led to what feminist musicologists have suggested is an unbalanced view of music. If we accept that the stereotypical idea of male sexual passion and release is a metaphor for particular kinds of musical methods of analysis, then we might wish to ask why this metaphor is privileged over the female experience, which I suggest is conceivably different. Indeed, it would seem that in mainstream culture female experiences of the sexual are virtually ignored. While I do not go so far as to suggest that sexual experiences can be reduced rigidly to differences based on biological sex, I am nonetheless seeking some kind of explanation for the differences that I have found in music by women composers. ANSTURM (SCHINDLER-MAHLER'S SETTING, 1911; PUBLISHED 1915; ZEMLINSKY'S SETTING, 1907) In turning to Alma Schindler-Mahler's music in order to revisit her setting of the Dehmel poem Ansturm, I include a brief comparison of her setting with that of Alexander Von Zemlinsky. Zemlinsky was her composition teacher before she met and married Gustav Mahler, and it would be fair to say that he had a significant influence on her compositional style. Zemlinsky composed his setting of Ansturm in 1907, four years before Alma Schindler-Mahler's version. This song is one of the products of her later work and not the work that predates her marriage to Mahler. The poem Ansturm by Richard Dehmel is already, before its mediation into music by Alma Schindler-Mahler, a passionate outpouring. See Text Example 3.1.

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Text Example 3.1 Ansturm (Assault or Uprush39) by Richard Dehmel (Translation by Margit Franklin-Spaeth and Jim Franklin40) O zurne nicht,wenn mein Begehren dunkel aus seinen Grenzen bricht, soil es uns selber nicht verzehren, muG es heraus ans Licht! ans Licht! Fuhlst ja, wie all mein Innres brandet, und wenn herauf der Aufruhr bricht, jah tideinen Frieden strandet, dann bebst du aber du ziirnst mir nicht. Oh don't be wrathful When my passion darkly breaks its bounds, That it not consume us, It must come out Into the light! Into the light! [Mahler, significant musical climax; Zemlinsky, no climax] You feel, ah, how all my inner being surges And when the uproar breaks And strands itself abruptly on your peace, [Mahler, less-significant climax; Zemlinsky, significant climax] Then you tremble but without wrath towards me. [Mahler, final cadence open; Zemlinsky, final cadence closed] As the translators point out, this is a poem in which the lover (a man) is addressing his beloved (a woman). The opening line implies that there has been a sense of repression on behalf of the lover, that he has not been able to express his passion in the past. He asks his beloved not to be wrathful, for it is now time for his passion to break its bounds so that it does not consume both lover and beloved in flames. According to the translators, verzehren conjures up the notion not just of passion itself but of being burned by passion, consumed by it. It must come out into the light, and "light" here, as the translators point out, is a spiritual concept that has to do with liberation. In addition, light here also represents the idea of ecstasy. As Franklin-Spaeth and Franklin suggest, the key image in the first stanza is that of passion and fire. The second stanza, according to the translators, implies a release of the lover's passion through attainment of sexual climax. "When my passion darkly breaks its bounds" in the first stanza is resolved in the second: "and when the uproar breaks and strands itself abruptly on your peace." Here is a symbolic connotation or metaphor that "peace" is also the shore, the implication being that the shore is also a place of safety. The wrath—"O don't be wrathful"—in the first stanza is also re-

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solved—"but without wrath towards me." Moreover, "and you tremble," suggests the shuddering of an earthquake, but, as Margit Franklin-Spaeth suggests, this is an earthquake of ecstasy, not of anger. The metaphor in the second stanza is ocean and waves—conjuring up the idea of turbulence—and the shoreline, solid ground, representing the safe haven.41 Alma Schindler-Mahler's treatment of this text is evocative, a passionate outpouring. As Sarah Click says: "The challenge to match its erotic mood through musical expression is met quite aggressively by the composer."42 The composer avoids establishing a key or key center for the song and uses nonfunctional harmony extensively, thus indicating a move in the direction of atonality. The bass line underpinning the first section returns in the last and creates a sense of musical coherence for the song as a whole. It could be argued that the music makes explicit what is implicit in the words. There is urgency in the music from the outset. The first stanza, constituting the whole of the first section, begins with a declamatory, recitative-like style, with the words of the singer punctuated by sustained block chords. The first three declamations are rounded off dramatically with an abrupt tritone leap in the bass, B flat to E, suggesting something ominous, perhaps, at bar 7. This leads, with much more activity in the accompaniment, to a major moment of tension—a climax—on the words "ans licht\"—"it must come out into the light." This is the major climax of the song. See Text Example 3.1 and Musical Example 3.1. Musical Example 3.1 Alma Schindler-Mahler, Vier Lieder No. 3, Ansturm (Bars 8-14)

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The second stanza, the first line of which acts as a bridge between the first and second sections, is almost impressionistic in the Debussyian sense as its broken chords tumble out in descending patterns to evoke images of waves breaking. These descending arpeggios, it could be argued, contrast with the way in which arpeggios are employed conventionally in climactic passages. Typically, a musical climax is achieved by preceding it with a series of ascending arpeggios set against a rising bass line, a pattern that might also be understood to be ejaculatory. By way of contrast, descending arpeggios do not create the necessary tension for climax and may be understood, to continue with the sexual metaphor, as avoiding arousal. So while Alma Schindler-Mahler heads the music toward a second climax in this section (at bar 21), it is a climax that is not as intense or as dramatic as the first. Here, however, in contrast to the first climax, resolution can be attained only through release, suggested by the text (see Text Example 3.1). Yet I would argue that the music is less inclined to provide that release, even though, on the surface, it might seem that the descending, arpeggiated chords, which occasionally break into solid blocks, are suggestive of such release. In the final section, however, the music is quite unsettled. Whereas there is a sense of resolution, even finality in the final line of the poem—"but without wrath towards me"—this is not echoed in the music. Indeed, the whole song concludes on a dominant seventh chord over a root in the bass on A, thus avoiding closure altogether. I wonder, then, whether this woman composer was ambivalent about the closure implied by the poem? If it is agreed that the sexual stereotypes are different for women's and men's experiences, then it is possible to draw attention to the ways in which this song may be seen to be representing passionate love from a female perspective—even in its setting of the words spoken by a male. Indeed, I argue that the composer, whether consciously or unconsciously, has subverted the masculine stereotype. As I have already noted, the song resists closure. It is left hanging on a V7 chord, which is approached by a flat VI chord to heighten the tension of its nonresolution. By not ending on a tonic chord, she has violated both the requirement of the poem to attain closure and the musical framework within which she has chosen to work.43 See Musical Example 3.2. Moreover, the seventh (G) in the chord is doubled. It is set as the melodic note before leaping a tritone to rest on the third of the chord (C sharp). This creates a highly unstable feeling for the final chord. So, whereas the words of the text are arguably complete, conclusive, final, and resolved, the music, in stark contrast, lacks this sense of completeness and finality by blatantly resisting closure. Instead, the song hovers on a. dominant seventh chord, refusing to provide that sense of completion and fulfillment suggested by the text. The song is cast in a loose ternary shape. The first section takes up almost half the entire length of the song. The first 17 bars constitute section A; the next 6 bars make up section B; and the last 8 bars make up section A1. If we were to consider the musical balance of the setting of the first stanza to the second stanza, we would find that there is virtually an equal proportion of music allotted to both stanzas, yielding a ratio of approximately 1:1 (17 to 18 bars). The ratio of the three sections

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Musical Example 3.2 Alma Schindler-Mahler, Vier Lieder No. 3, Ansturm (Bars 28-31)

to each other, however, presents an entirely different sense of balance for the song. Using a beat-counting analysis—perhaps a more accurate way of looking at the overall architecture of the song, for it takes into account the tempo changes—we find that the ratios are 3:1:1, revealing that the song is top-heavy.44 This is already interesting when I recall other works by women that are proportioned in a similar manner. Moya Henderson's Sacred Site for grand organ and tape, for example, is divided into four sections with a ratio of 5:1:1:2. Marcia Citron's analysis of the first movement of Cecile Chaminade's Piano Sonata shows that it is also top-heavy with a ratio of 5:1:2.45 In stark contrast, the ratio of the three sections (stanza 1 -interlude-stanza 2) in the Zemlinsky setting of this poem reveals that his song is bottom-heavy. Using a real-time analysis, the ratios are 5:1:10. The climaxes of the song are particularly interesting. The first climax in Ansturm, arguably the most intense and dramatic moment, occurs at bar 15 to the words "into the light" (see Text Example 3.1). On a beat-counting analysis, this climax yields a proportion that is, surprisingly, close in proximity to the shorter section of the golden mean of 0.382. The proportion yielded by the first climax in Ansturm is 0.39. It is not usual, as Clive Pascoe's work demonstrates,46 for the major climax of musical works by male composers (he does not examine music by women) to occur in the earlier part of a work. In this song by Alma SchindlerMahler, the major interest is in its opening bars. It might be argued that there is little, if any, foreplay (to draw again on the sexual metaphor), and what is created instead, perhaps, is something of a premature ejaculation. Where we expect a major musical climax according to the male norm, however, is around two-thirds of the way through the music or at the longer section of the golden mean which is 0.618. While we get a climax close to that proportion in this song, its impact is not as intense (it occurs midway through bar 21 on the word strandet). A beat-counting analysis reveals that the second and less intense climax for the song, then, occurs quite close to the golden mean at 0.68. What is interest-

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ing for this analysis, however, is that the proportions have been placed in reverse order from what is arguably considered the norm in music. So, in this analysis, it would seem that the notion of the ideal, stemming from notions of male sexual passion (though often also discussed in terms of the transcendental or divine), is possibly subverted. Might it be that a woman would understand sexual love (even transcendental love) differently than a man would? Why has she given more emphasis to the first climax than to the second? Why does she not conclude the work, as would be expected from the poem—the words in the text imply that the woman understands this climactic difference between the sexes—with a tonic? Why does she end with the dominant seventh chord, leaving the last bar open and hovering, as if, in fact, all has not been resolved? In contrast to Schindler-Mahler's setting, Zemlinsky's (composed in 1907) is a complete understatement of the passion implied by the poem. The opening accompaniment figure in the piano part of the Zemlinsky setting is appropriated by Alma Schindler-Mahler for the voice part. Zemlinsky's setting, however, is much less adventurous harmonically than hers, and he adopts a more traditional approach to the structure of the song by inserting a short interlude between the two stanzas. Although the poetry calls for a climax on the words ans Lichtl, Zemlinsky does not provide a major climax at this point. Instead, he motions toward a climax, using a rising harmonic sequence in the second stanza, and while his positioning of the climax occurs at a greater distance from the golden section (0.618) at 0.828 on the word strandet, it nonetheless makes an attempt to model itself on the stereotypical male experience of sex. Zemlinsky also closes his song with the expected resolution of a tonic chord. The idea that Alma Schindler-Mahler's setting of Ansturm is a woman's piece, exhibiting aesthetic qualities that are particular to the sex of the composer, has been further reinforced by some observations made to me by a friend who happened to hear the song. Rosemary Schaffler remarked that Ansturm opens up a space that is between the male/female dichotomy for the following reasons. First, the text is the expression of a male persona, yet the woman sings. A further expression of the dichotomy is that the male poet writes, and the female composes. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially, it is unusual to find erotic poetry written by a man and set to music by a woman. The convention is rather that the male poet writes and the male composer creates the music. In the contemporary recital hall women frequently sing poetic texts by men set to music by men that express love toward a woman from a male perspective (thus, perhaps, seen to be producing a cross-dressing effect). Schaffler's observation is therefore pertinent, for in this instance the convention is transgressed. Second, as Schaffler points out, the male poet's feminine component shows in his placing of climaxes. Alma Schindler-Mahler's climaxes correspond with Dehmel's, but Zemlinsky's do not. It might be surmised, then, that Zemlinsky is seeking to satisfy his masculine side, that with masculine intuition he feels the music would become top-heavy if he were to place a major climax so early in the song. Such a consideration, it would seem, did not enter into the thinking of Schindler-

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Mahler. Finally, Schaffler observes that Zemlinsky's closure seems to be earthbound, while Schindler-Mahler's nonclosure or open-endedness has hovering, trembling effect. She suggests that where the male writes and the male composes, there is the potential for the doubling up of one-sidedness, leaving no space between the male/female dichotomy. Yet it seems that the poet here has provided an opportunity for the space because he is in touch with his own feminine side. As Schaffler concludes, Schindler-Mahler seized the opportunity to provide that space, while Zemlinsky missed it.47 Alma Schindler-Mahler would have been well aware of the accepted codes of behavior for both men and women in her day. In some respects, she was nonconformist. She did not adopt accepted behaviors for women, including, if we conceive of composing as a behavior, venturing onto the male territory of composing. But, as may be inferred from Judith Butler's work,48 she would also have rehearsed many behaviors that were deemed acceptable for women of her time. On the one hand, then, this particular composer may be viewed as one who, in her lived life, broke moral codes and other codes that were taboo for women, such as accessing the intellectual worlds of philosophy, art, and music normally reserved for men. But she would also have conformed in other ways, such as in bearing children (she gave birth to four) and in being a dutiful and obedient wife. It may also be useful to ask, as Suzanne Cusick before me has asked of a much earlier composer, Francesca Caccini,49 How did Alma Schindler-Mahler herself perform as a composer? Obviously, her role models in musical composition had been men. Indeed, as a child growing up, she was well acquainted with the works of Wagner and, as a highly competent pianist, performed the piano reductions of his operas, over and over again, until she knew them by heart. So Wagner's music, together with that of Brahms and her teacher, Zemlinsky, and others, would have been the repository from which she would have drawn for her own work. Yet (and here I borrow another idea from Cusick, whose work is based on that of Butler), She would have also rehearsed aspects of her gender into the music that she composed and performed.50 Thus, the body and the body as a mediator of music are strongly connected. Alma Schindler-Mahler accessed, rehearsed, and performed music, her own and that of others, becoming an accomplished composer and imitating the styles of her male role models. But also her sexed body, her female body, performed these acts of imitating, composing, and performing. It would seem, then, that Alma Schindler-Mahler was a composing woman—to invoke Irigaray again, ambiguous, and yet denied—whose music, while owing some allegiances to male models, is sprinkled with difference. What I seem to have discovered is that some of the normal conventions of musical behavior, in this instance, have been transgressed. NOTES 1. R. Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 19 26.

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2. Cate Poynton, "Talking Like a Girl," in Sally Macarthur and Cate Poynton, eds., Musics and Feminisms (Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 1999), 119. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Susan McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota a Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), and Marcia Citron's Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) provide vivid accounts of this phenomenon. 6. Gary Tomlinson, "Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies: A Response to Lawrence Kramer," Current Musicology 53 (1993): 22. 7. Peter McCallum, "The Analytical Significance of Beethoven's Sketches for the String Quartet in F Major, Opus 135: Vol. 1, Analysis" (Doctoral dissertation, Department of Music, University of Sydney, March 1994), 14. 8. Suzanne Cusick, "Performing/Composing/Woman: Francesca Caccini Meets Judith Butler," in Macarthur and Poynton, eds., Musics and Feminisms, 87-98. 9. Luce Irigaray ye, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 15. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 16. 12. These essays are published in Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 23-33, 205-218. 13. Francois Giroud, Alma Mahler or the Art ofBeing Loved, trans. R. M. Stock (Oxfor and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1. 14. See, for example, Susanne Keegan, The Bride of the Wind: The Life ofAlma Mahl (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1991); Walter Sorell, Three Women: Alma Mahler-Werf Gertrude Stein, Lou Andreas-Salome: Lives of Sex and Genius (London: Oswald Wolf 1975); Giroud, Alma Mahler or the Art of Being Loved. Alma Mahler herself contribute autobiographies as follows: And the Bridge Is Love (London: Hutchinson, 1959); Mein Leben (Frankfurt, 1960). She also provides interesting insights about her husband in Donald Mitchell, ed., Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters (London: Faber and Faber, 1973). 15. Edward F. Kravitt, "The Lieder of Alma Maria Schindler-Mahler," The Music /Review 49 (1988): 190. 16. Ibid. 17. From Mahler's letter to Alma in December 1901 before their marriage, quoted in Giroud, Alma Mahler, 37. 18. Susan Filler provides the publication details of the 14 lieder in "A Composer's Wife as Composer: The Songs of Alma Mahler," Journal of Musicological Research, 3.3/4 (1983): 429. They are as follows: 5 Lieder, Wien: Universal Edition, 1910: "Die stille Stadt," "In meines Vaters garten," "Laue Sommernacht," "Bei dir ist es traut," and "Ich wandle unter Blumen"; 4 Lieder, Wien: Universal Edition, 1915: "Licht in der Nacht," "Waldseligkeit," "Ansturm," and "Erntelied"; and 5 Gesange, Leipzig: Josef Weinberger, 1924: "Hymne," "Ekstase," "Der Erkennende," "Lobgesang," and "Hymne an die Nacht." 19. Sorell, Three Women, 14. 20. Keegan, The Bride of the Wind, 60. 21. Kravitt, "The Lieder of Alma Maria Schindler-Mahler," 192. 22. Keegan, The Bride of the Wind, 2. 23. Giroud, Alma Mahler, 87. 24. See Kravitt, "The Lieder of Alma Maria Schindler-Mahler"; Susan M Filler, "A Composer's Wife as Composer," 427-442.

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25. Giroud, Alma Mahler, 10. 26. Ibid., 11. 27. See Kravitt, "The Lieder of Alma Maria Schindler-Mahler." 28. Wilhelm Kahle, Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung (Munster, 1954), 338, cited in Kravitt, "The Lieder of Alma Maria Schindler-Mahler," 192. 29. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 111. 30. Elizabeth Sayrs makes this explicit in her interpretation of Susan McClary's analysis of Janika Vandervelde's Jack and the Beanstalk in "Deconstructing McClary: Narrative, Feminine Sexuality, and Feminism in Susan McClary's Feminine Endings''' College Music Symposium: Journal of the College Music Society, 33/34 (1993-1994): 45. 31. Adapting the work of the French feminists, Renee Cox uses this phrase in "Recovering Jouissance: An Introduction to Feminist Musical Aesthetics," in Karin Pendle, ed., Woman and Music: A History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 334. 32. Edmund Gurney, The Power ofSound (London: Basic Books, 1966 [1880]). The idea that music has resonances with the sexual and aspects of the sexual, such as childbirth, has been taken up by a number of feminist theorists. See, for example, McClary's discussion of Janika Vandervelde's Genesis //in Feminine Endings, 112-131. Suzanne Cusick, while not describing the music itself in these terms, nonetheless ponders on what a lesbian relationship with music would be like. See Suzanne Cusick, "On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight," in Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds. Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 67-83. 33. Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), 57. 34. See, for example, Clive Pascoe, "Golden Proportion in Musical Design," (D.M.A. dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1973). See also Erno Lendvai, Bela Bartok: An Analysis ofHis Music (London: Kahn and Averill, 1971); Roy Howat, Debussy in Proportion: A Musical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Barry Kenny, "Charlie Parker and the Golden Section: An Examination of Structural Unity in the Released and Alternate Takes of An Oscar for Treadwell" paper presented at the Musicological Society Conference, Perth, July 1999. 35. Kenny's paper cited in ibid, is the first of which I am aware that attempts to map the golden proportion onto jazz. 36. See, in particular, Sally Macarthur, "Music Analysis as a Pedagogical Practice," in "Feminist Aesthetics in Music." 37. As stated earlier, Cox views women's sexual experiences as "indefinite, cyclic, without set beginnings and endings." See Cox, "Recovering Jouissance," 331-340. 38. McClary, Feminine Endings, 106-109. 39. The word also conjures up the idea of storm, blast, and onslaught. Margit Franklin-Speath says that the word Ansturm is not used very often in the German language in the late 20th century and that it is difficult to translate. What seems to be implied by the word in relation to the poem, however, is a sense of turbulence in relation to passion. 40.1 owe gratitude to Margit Franklin-Spaeth and to my colleague Jim Franklin for this translation and to Margit Franklin-Spaeth for her insider-knowledge and insights, as a native German speaker, of the way in which the German language works to produce layers of meaning. 41.1 draw attention to some of the keywords of the poem (highlighted by the translators) that validate the interpretation offered for the poem: • Brandet—the waves come, breaks at the shoreline.

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Feminist Aesthetics in Music • Aufruhr bricht—a breaker, a big wave breaks. • Strandet—similar to brandet but implies arriving at the shore, in the meaning of being soothed (that is why there is the connection with Friede—peace). • Ziirnen—means being very angry. Here ziirnst (anger) is seen passively and is equated with the idea of someone who awakens emotions in response to someone who might be angry. • Friede—peace/the shore (Frieden). • Beben—shaking to the ground, an earthquake (very dramatic), but here it is a positive earthquake, as there is no wrath caused. It is more the earthquake of ecstasy.

42. Sarah Click, "Art Song by Turn-of-the-Century Female Composers: Lili Boulanger and Alma Mahler" (D.M.A. dissertation [partial fulfillment], University of North Texas, 1993), 60. 43. Alma Schindler-Mahler uses the strategy of nonclosure at the final cadence in two other songs, Laue Sommernacht (from FiinfLieder) and Licht in der Nacht (from Vier L der). 44. A, with the pauses added, comprises approximately 61 beats, B, with pauses added, comprises approximately 21 beats, and A1, with pauses added, comprises approximately 32 beats. My thanks to Ian Shanahan for his assistance with this aspect of the analysis. 45. See Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 149. 46. See Pascoe, Golden Proportion in Musical Design. 47. My thanks to Rosemary Schaffler for these observations. Personal communication, October 2000. 48. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (N York and London: Routledge, 1990). 49. See Cusick, "Performing/Composing/Woman," 87-98. 50. See ibid.

4

Sexing the Subject of Musical Analysis: Rebecca Clarke and Elisabeth Lutyens

[Music] is . .. pure form, liberated from any object or from matter. To this extent, music is the art that is least limited by physical considerations in that it represents pure motion as such, abstracted from any other object and borne on invisible, almost spiritual wings. —Friedrich von Schelling1 Far from setting the score aside and concentrating on extramusical issues, my work is always concerned with explaining how it is that certain images or responses are invoked by particular musical details. But as long as we approach questions of signification exclusivelyfroma formalist point of view, we will continue to conclude that it is impossible to get from chords, pitch-class sets, or structures to any other kind of human or social meaning. —Susan McClary2

This chapter is in two parts. In Part 1,1 outline the long-running debate over music's abstract nature: whether music has meanings only in and on its own terms or whether, like all other signifying systems, it is seen to reflect and be implicated in the social world that it inhabits, including that of ideology and politics. Set up on a binary model, the debate remains unresolved. In Part 2, I analyze music by two English women composers—the first movement of Rebecca Clarke's Piano Trio (1921) and the cantata O Saisons, O Chateaux! for soprano and strings, op. 13 (1946) by Elisabeth Lutyens—both of whose music would tend to be ignored in the disciplines of music analysis and music theory. Part of the reason for its absence in these disciplines is that these composers are women. But another part of the reason has to do with the fact that the conservative arm of music analysis and

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music theory tends to align itself with the view that music is a self-contained, fully autonomous system, complete in and of itself, having no connection or reference to its social context. This debate is founded on two mutually exclusive, opposing positions. As a consequence, I am mindful that by unpacking it, I face the danger of reinforcing the contradiction thrown up by the terms discussed. Yet it is a necessary methodological tool that cannot be avoided. In order to ground my own work—located between the cracks and slippages of the dichotomies discussed—it is important to engage with the debate and to discover its own sets of contradictions as they emerge. I have deliberately considered these two English composers in the same chapter in order to demonstrate that, despite their different engagements with musical techniques, styles, and genres, links between them can be established on the grounds of their sex. PARTI Music as Absolute versus Referential During the 19th century, music was abstracted and rationalized by a school of philosophical thought that argued not only for the superiority of the syntactical construction of music over its cultural references, thereby failing to account for a connection between the two, but also for the idea that music is able to transcend the mind itself. I discuss this idea in Chapter 1, but it is useful to reiterate it here, for in the context of the present debate, it was thought that the ultimate experience of music was a transcendent one, something akin to an out-of-body or out-of-mind experience. Music as transcendence—that is, the notion that a listener is taken outside reality to a world beyond music and beyond its formal systems where, perhaps, it is imagined to refer only to "the soul or spirit, to the very essence of the divine or the human mind"3—is prevalent in the writings of a number of 19th-century humanist philosophers. For example, Arthur Schopenhauer tells us: "Music, unlike all the other arts, does not represent ideas or phases in the will's objectification, but rather represents the will itself with nothing intervening . . . it is pure form without matter, like a world of spirits without material."4 Drawing a comparison between music and language, Nietzsche remarks that language "can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of Primal Unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and before all phenomena."5 Taking up a somewhat ambiguous position, Leonard Meyer, though he proclaims himself an absolutist, distinguishes between two kinds of meaning in music: absolute and referential.6 According to Meyer, "absolute meaning" in music is intramusical, solely concerning its grammar and the internal patterning of sounds and the effect that these relationships of sound patterns have on each other. "Referential meaning" refers to extramusical phenomena that inform the musical work.7 Recog-

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nizing that by necessity the intramusical to the extramusical is a codependent relationship—in other words, the full nature of music (the intramusical) can be understood only in relation to phenomena that exist beyond itself (the extramusical)—Meyer nonetheless tends to regard the intramusical as more important. Coexisting with the thinking that regards music as a system that is incapable of meaning beyond its own terms is an opposite view that "regards music as essentially a human, socially grounded, socially alterable construct."8 Siding with this view, Susan McClary comments that in the Republic, Plato's references to music are concerned with its ethical impact on people. In some instances music is seen to be socially beneficial, while in others harmful.9 This idea has resonance in the writings of the 19th-century philosopher Eduard Hanslick, who asserted that listening to music in a spontaneous manner is no better than taking drugs, for it "loosens the feet or the heart just as wine loosens the tongue,"10 thus degrading the listener; this kind of (dangerous) listening "may prevent the development of that strength of will and power of intellect which man is capable of."11 Hanslick's moralizing here, along similar lines to that of Plato, implies that music can have a corrupting influence. The general tenor of Hanslick's argument in The Beautiful in Music, however, is that the material object of music itself does not contain emotions. Rather, he suggests that emotions reside in those who listen to music and respond to it accordingly. Hanslick would thus tend to be aligned with the absolutists. Yet, as Malcolm Budd points out, Hanslick contradicts himself, for he attaches importance to the meaning of music, noting its capacity to have real effects—producing emotional responses or having degrading effects—on those who listen to it. Budd suggests that if music has these effects, then it would seem impossible for it not to have meaning. As Budd goes on to say, an acceptance of Hanslick's contention that music is "devoid of emotion" must, in the final analysis, render music meaningful, simply because of this contradiction.12 The idea that music has meaning beyond its formal system is taken up by a number of other 19th-century philosophers. In the previous chapter, I mention Edmund Gurney, who suggested that the presentation of music as motion corresponds to sexual (e)motion.13 The idea that music contains meaning continued to intrigue writers on aesthetics in the 20th century, including Deryck Cooke, whose view is that music is (in itself) an expression of the emotions,14 and Susanne Langer, who abandons the term "meaning" in favor of "symbolism."15 More recently, Stephen Davies insists that emotions are located within music itself and that the expressive power in music awakens emotions in listeners.16 Susan McClary's position is not dissimilar to some of these views. She states: Meaning is not inherent in music but neither is it in language: both are activities that are k afloat because communities of people invest in them, agree collectively that their signs serve as valid currency. Music is always dependent on the conferring of social meaning—as ethnomusicologists have long recognized, the study of signification in music cannot be undertaken in isolation from the human contexts that create, transmit, and respond to it.17

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McClary's point that music cannot be understood in isolation from its context is important, for music can be seen to embody the changing social values in the wider social context in the emergence of new styles in musical composition. For example, some parallels might be drawn between scientific and musical progress, thus connecting music quite explicitly to the social context in which it is produced. Newton discovered gravity in the 17th century at around the time that music established a gravitational center around the tonic in the major/minor system. Einstein developed the theory of relativity in the early 20th century at much the same time as Schoenberg created the 12-tone system, which organizes music so that all tones are relative to each other. A particularly compelling interpretation that links music to its sociohistorical context is Susan McClary's reading of Bach, whose music she argues is indelibly marked by the social order of his period.18 McClary's analysis of the Brandenberg Concerto No. 5 reveals that the interactions between the two principal forces (the ripieno and the concertino) are metaphorically—even visually—parallel to the interactions between the emergent middle class and the ruling class. The continuo, on the other hand, enacts a service role, which is not unlike the role of servants who would have been in the employ of the aristocracy of the day.19 The significance of McClary's reading of this work is its revelation of Bach in subversive mode, in which she shows him to create a "revenge of the continuo player." Normally an instrument performing a service (servant) role, providing necessary harmony and filigree, the harpsichord becomes the genius of the first movement, hijacking it in an extensive, wild, and frenzied cadenza. This reading is a graphic demonstration of how the internal workings of the hierarchical structure of early 18th-century German society are depicted in the music of the time. It is also a brilliant illustration of how a composer—who would have been regarded as not much above the status of the so-called slave class—whose favorite instrument was arguably the harpsichord, subverts the normal conventions for this instrument. It also needs to be said that this kind of reading, although disarmingly simple, would leave the absolutists—that is, the Bach purists in this case—completely bewildered. To ground Bach's music in the banality of its social context in this manner—music that would normally be regarded by the purists to transcend the context, not least because its composer is regarded as a genius, godlike figure—would be seen to be sacrilegious. Despite the persistence and unresolved nature of the autonomy/heteronomy debate, it is still the case that the majority of analysts in mainstream musicology tend to privilege the side of the argument that insists on music's autonomy. As a consequence, they tend to employ reductive, pseudoscientific methods with which to study music, which, in turn, ensures that there is a separation of music from its context. Such analytical strategies focus on the internal coherence of music. Furthermore, if works are found to be internally coherent, absolutist analysts can make another kind of claim with apparent certainty: that there exists a body of great masterworks produced by genius composers. In other words, those works that fit the ideal in terms of internal coherence can also be slotted into the canon of great music.

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Music as Score versus Sound Running parallel in a kind of supportive role to the autonomy/heteronomy argument in which music's autonomy is regarded as sacrosanct is a view from hard-core music theory that the score, the visual document of music, is the site where real musical meanings are made. Such a belief supports the notion that music is a nonreferential, fully autonomous system. It also generates another kind of debate, again set up on a dichotomy: the primacy of the visual score versus that of the auditory sound of music. As I have suggested, in this debate the score is the site of privilege. The score is visual. It can be contained. Analysts can look at it, study the musical notation embodied in it, and make observations about music's pitch and rhythmic structure. The sound of music, on the other hand, cannot be contained. During the course of a performance, music produces the effect of being here one moment and gone the next. It is highly elusive. In its performative context, music is reliant on the memory of listeners for its recollection. When the memory of a piece of music fades in time, it becomes reduced to something of a trace. Given this, it is not surprising, then, that the score in Western art music theory is treated as the object of study. Richard Leppert's formulation of this idea is that music as sight takes precedence over music as sound in the production of meaning.20 According to popular music theorist Richard Middleton, the superiority of the visual over the auditory in music explains why notation-centric approaches to musical analysis have been developed. The fleeting moment, the impermanence of music in its temporality, makes it vulnerable to the visual world that encapsulates its meaning in the printed score. Moreover, according to Middleton, this gives rise to very particular listening practices, for in the absence of a score, the conservatory-trained listener tends to imagine a score in order to make sense of the music. Part of this institutional musical training also involves being able to do the opposite. The conservatory-trained listener who has endured a typical analysis class will be asked to imagine the sound of the music in the mind while reading a score in the absence of its sound. As Middleton says, the score in Western musicology is reified: "It is 'seen' as 'the music' . . . In one stroke, this downgrades the 'vulgarities' of performance, the productive significance of variants, and the influence of performance context; practice is frozen in symbol. . .. The feelings and physical responses induced by music are obliterated."21 The idea that the score is supreme in the musical experience spills over into the writings of a number of 20th-century philosophers. While implicit to his theory and not overtly stated as such, Roger Scruton gives credence to the musical experience as a visual experience.22 Scruton's argument is based on Eduard Hanslick's notion that musical content is not attributable to the sounding medium of music, that is, to the material object of music, but rather it is attributable to the intentional (external) object. Scruton implies that the intentional object of music is the score. The distinction invoked by Scruton between the intentional and material object of music has a parallel in Saussure's notion that language is a system of signs that

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consists of a signifier (a sound image or a written shape) and a signified (a concept). As Catherine Belsey observes, the separation between the signifier and signified is possible only on an analytical level.23 Saussure himself puts the reason for this simply as follows: "Language c a n . . . be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sounds from thought nor thought from sounds."24 Of course, the separation between the signifier and the signified is not a fixed connection as perhaps implied by this quotation. There is always a space and therefore a certain amount of slippage between the signifier and the signified. The split occurs for convenience. It is not possible to determine where the separation between the two begins and ends. This is important because anything in representation, including music, to use Umberto Eco's words, "can be taken as substituting for something else."25 The musical score, for example, substitutes for the music. Yet, the fact that the score is only a substitute or a re-presentation of the music is somehow forgotten when the analyst begins to pull it apart. The score, which is really only a way of re-presenting music, a representation that, in effect, detaches music from its temporal context, comes to be construed as the reality or as the music itself. In turn, this leads to the idea that there is such a thing as an absolute truth, a preexistent reality that is mirrored in the score. The absolutist analyst thus proceeds on the assumption that not only is the score the music itself but that the score, if analyzed correctly—at least, a score that is deemed to be great—will reveal this inherent truth. It would be fair to say that the disciplines of music analysis and music theory are characterized by thinking, which, in its quest for truth, appears cool, rational, logical, and detached. It is the kind of thinking that forgets, in my view, that music arouses emotions and makes human bodies want to move, to dance, to tap their feet, and so on. The thinking that characterizes music theory forgets about the presence of the human body altogether—the fact, even, that a human body composed the music—for all that matters is the discovery of the absolute truth that, detached from the body, is revealed in the score. Out of necessity, the analyst must put himself (most of the disciplines of hard-core music theory and music analysis are populated by men) on a par with the genius composer. How could it be otherwise? He must be able to demonstrate that he is able to think like the composer, to get inside both his mind and music in order to discover its inherent truth. But, in order to do this, an even more startling phenomenon begins to occur, for instead of the music's becoming central to the analytical activity, the analytical apparatus used to unravel the music becomes its substitute, revealing a method (in place of a work) to be truly great and an analyst (in place of a composer) to be the true genius of music. Yet a paradox emerges, for in the world as we construct it, there is no such thing as absolute truth. Rather, to reiterate Eco's line of thought, everything in representation is a substitution for something else. We cannot know the things that exist beyond our world of senses, beyond the world of signification. It is thus problematic

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to assume that the score is music itself. Indeed, the score is only a substitute for the music, which, in turn, is itself a substitute for something else. To make claims that the analytical method has revealed an inherent truth, then, is highly contentious, for the re-presentation of a musical score in the form of an analysis is, in effect, nothing more than a substitute of a substitute of a substitute. As Eco points out, what is actually produced in representation is an effect or an illusion of the truth. Human bodies mediate signification. As a consequence, all experiences, whether they are truth effects or other kinds of knowledge effects, are inevitably tied to the human bodies who produce these effects. This view argues that because all experiences are mediated, all realities—whether they are imagined, illusory, or seemingly factual—are nothing more than constructed realities. There is no such thing as a nonconstructed reality. The canon of great masterworks is thus a construction. This is an idea that those of the absolutist persuasion who are deeply attached to this music may find unnerving. It is easier to ignore this idea and to pretend that this music is great on the grounds that it can be shown to conform to notions of the ideal in terms of structure and internal coherence, that an understanding of these things will reveal its truth. Yet, as Marcia Citron puts it: "Canonicity exerts tremendous cultural power as it encodes and perpetuates ideologies of some dominant group or groups. These exemplary norms establish norms for the future. Works that do not measure up are excluded or omitted and as a result potentially ignored. Canons are not intellectually pure but represent a variety of interests."26 The dichotomous formulations discussed—music as absolute versus referential and music as score versus sound—are problematic. It has been necessary to scrutinize these, however, because by so doing, I have demonstrated that interested groups represent both sides of the arguments discussed. Furthermore, the absolutist view, supported by the notion that music as score takes precedence over music as sound, has emerged as victor in this debate. This has meant that its effects have been far-reaching, having significant purchase in the arenas of music analysis and music theory, which, in turn, play a significant role in canon formation. The ideology at work here, though disguised as such, has had profound influence in determining the music that has been deemed worthy of canonization. As Citron remarks: "Women have had scant presence in the musical canon."27 Aside from the institutional obstacles that have impeded women, such as the lack of access or different kinds of access to musical training, I suggest that a very powerful tool used in the academy to increase the chances of a musical work's becoming canonized is that of the analytical method. But, as Citron would emphasize, this is nothing more than an ideological tool, despite its appearance to the contrary. As she has shown, music institutions have had much to gain by constructing, maintaining, and naturalizing this canon. Ian Bent's survey of music analysis shows that the predominance of methods used by analysts is of a pseudoscientific nature. He classifies these as follows: reduction and comparative methods, different types of segmentation, category measurement and feature counting, syntax formulation, probability measurement, and

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set-theory analysis.28 These methods give the impression of being neutral and unbiased. Yet they are derived from the score, and all are concerned exclusively with the music itself, having no interest in explicating the extramusical social context in relation to the music studied. To that extent, they are biased. Furthermore, men are shown almost exclusively to have invented these analytical methods,29 and the music studied is predominantly by men. Music as Absolute versus Referential and Its Relation to Feminist Analysis In light of the domination of music by men and the debate over music's meaning, Ifindmyself, a feminist music analyst, placed in the somewhat awkward situation of potentially presenting a methodological bias. In my desire to demonstrate that women's music is worthy of close analysis and therefore of being included in the canon of masterworks, I am confronted by a series of questions as to how I might go about achieving this. Do I use the tried-and-true reductive methods of music analysis and music theory in order to prove my point that women's music is equally deserving of attention as men's music? If I adopted a mainstream method, would this help me as an analyst to be taken seriously in the disciplines of music analysis and music theory? Or, would the fact that my attention is trained on women's music hinder my chances of being taken seriously as an analyst? Would it be useful, instead, supposing it were possible, to invent an entirely new system of analysis? Adding to these dilemmas is the fact that the analyses appearing in this book are entirely of music by women. This highlights an issue that applies to feminist work in general, for it comes down to a question put by Nicholas Cook as follows: "[D]o you attempt to position women's music within the mainstream, thereby risking its being swamped by a predominantly male tradition, or do you promote it as a separate tradition of its own, as women's music, thereby risking marginalization within a male-dominated culture?"30 According to Cook, the generally accepted answer is that you do both. He goes on to suggest that the most fruitful work to have emanated from the feminist arm of musicology has been that of critical work on the canon of masterworks in which it has been shown that this music operates according to particular interests. It is obvious that of the two options suggested by Cook, I have chosen to promote women's music as a separate tradition, which means that it could, in the context of this book, become marginalized within male-dominated culture. That is as far as I am prepared to accept that the peripheral nature of the book extends, for I am also addressing issues of concern in mainstream work. In light of the preceding discussion, however, I balance on something of a tightrope, for I draw on approaches in analysis that are reductive and score-dependent, on the one hand, and combine these with those that are referential, on the other. The latter have issued from the domain of the so-called new musicology, and, in particular, I am drawn to the kind of approach taken by Susan McClary. But even while I may seem to give

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credence to the score as the primary document, I also think about the music that I analyze in terms of its performance. Thinking about its performative context (the bodies of performers and listeners to whom it becomes attached, in particular), in my view, reveals different kinds of meanings than those derived exclusively from the score, including making sense of the music in terms of the feminist agenda proposed. Problems Raised by Comparing the Music of Clarke and Lutyens It is important to have raised these questions, for both pieces of music analyzed in this chapter could be analyzed along traditional (absolutist) lines; indeed, this has been done admirably in the case of Lutyens' cantata O Saisons, O Chateaux! for soprano and strings, op. 13.31 But, in my view, this would leave little or no room for making other kinds of connections of the music to its context, for extrapolating meanings from the work that are informed by the context, and vice versa. Still, some reductive work is necessary in my approach, for it is useful to know how a work is structured and what kinds of tonal, atonal, or modal systems it utilizes. To know, for example, that Lutyens' work uses the language of serialism and is cast into a ternary shape, A-B-A^A2, and that the first movement of Clarke's Piano Trio is in sonata form and uses a mixture of tonal and modal language, something akin to that of Ravel and Bloch, is a useful starting point for the analyses of these works proposed later. At the starting block, then, I have already revealed two significant differences that exist between these works. Yet as I also show, although they seem to inhabit completely different sound worlds (one is atonal, the other tonal/modal), they have some significant similarities. The first of these emerges from the compositional process, for what I seem to have discovered is that the overall structure of both works has been generated from a series of small gestures, creating a kind of start/stop effect in the music. Such an observation is not obvious from an examination of the scores in isolation to the work's performances. The second of these relates, as discussed in relation to Schindler-Mahler's song in the previous chapter, to the positioning of the climaxes of each work. I would suggest that the high points in these works are not necessarily located in the expected places. Notwithstanding that the two works discussed in this chapter are composed by Englishwomen, they are linked in a number of other ways. Both are arguably located in the domain of pure music, despite Lutyens' setting for soprano voice of a verbal text by Rimbaud. On the surface, there would be no argument with this idea in relation to the Clarke Trio, for it is written for three instruments, piano, violin, and cello. On a deeper level, however, sonata form has been shown to behave in a manner not unlike a narrative structure. It is thus possible—indeed, I adopt this strategy—to read sonata form as if one were reading a novel. If we substitute the word "character" with the word "theme," to all intents and purposes we have a story being told in music, where the protagonists become musical themes. The music may thus be seen to be anthropomorphic. Taking this idea a step further, the

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themes, if seen to be exhibiting human qualities, can also take on sexual qualities that are designated male and female or masculine and feminine, substituting, perhaps, for hero and heroine. As Marcia Citron and Susan McClary have both pointed out, the idea of gendered themes in sonata form goes back to A. B. Marx's treatise Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition (1845).32 In this work, Marx describes the first theme of sonata form as masculine and the second as feminine. His conceptions of masculinity and femininity are stereotypical. Thefirsttheme is more decisive, "the one constructed more energetically, more vigorously, more completely,"33 while the second, feminine theme "serves as contrast to the first, energetic statement, though dependent on and determined by it. It is of a more tender nature, flexibly rather than emphatically constructed—in a way, the feminine as opposed to the preceding masculine. In this sense each of the two themes is different, and only together do they form something of a higher, more perfect order."34 McClary and Citron discuss the ways in which the masculine is privileged over the feminine in the context of sonata form. More recently, Liane Curtis has weighed into this discussion in an attempt to deflect attention away from the negative implications of gendered readings of sonata form.35 While sonata form might be assumed to be an abstract or pure form of music, it can also be shown to exhibit qualities of sexual stereotypes. As a consequence, sonata form has meaning that extends beyond its pitch and rhythmic syntax, marked by the bodies that produce it. By way of contrast, Lutyens' work would, perhaps, already be thought to contain referential meaning because of its inclusion of a text sung by a human voice, thereby providing additional clues as to its meaning. As with much serial music that includes the voice, however, I suggest that it is also possible to regard this score as an example of pure music, for the voice in this music is treated more like that of a musical instrument. Furthermore, the singer is heard for less than a third of the time in this particular work. When the voice is heard (in sections B and A2), it performs a highly technical, difficult part, covering a wide register, and no mean feat to sing. The voice in this piece, like the other instruments in the ensemble, is woven into the overall fabric of the work as one of the many solo threads making up the whole. But, in the same vein as I suggested for Clarke's Trio, Lutyens cantata is full of other kinds of meanings that derive purely from the instrumental textures and sound world that it inhabits. I argue that the work's aesthetic qualities have to do with the woman who composed it, thereby signifying that gender is an important issue in the production of its musical meaning. Finally, both composers are linked by the fact that they have opted to work in the domain of masculine forms, styles, and compositional techniques, outside what would normally be regarded as typical female forms, such as parlor or salon music. Despite their adoption of masculine forms, styles, and techniques, however, I demonstrate that it is possible to recover feminist aesthetics from their music.

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PART 2 Rebecca Clarke: Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello (1921) Space does not permit a biographical account of Rebecca Clarke and others have documented this elsewhere.36 Yet, I am not the first to discover,37 on searching for the name "Rebecca Clarke" in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, that her life is summed up with a one-liner as follows: "Clarke, Rebecca (b Harrow, 27 Aug 1886). English viola player and composer, wife of JAMES FRISKIN."38 Given that Clarke is not a household name in musical composition, it is surprising that she appears in Grove at all. Friskin is not a household name either, yet the reader is directed to Frisian's entry, where there is a far more serious and studiously respectful account of his musical career.39 We also learn more about the career of Rebecca Clarke under Friskin's entry. We learn, for instance, that Clarke began her musical studies as a violin student at the Royal Academy of Music. After three years, she transferred to the Royal College of Music and began to study the viola. At the same time she became the composition student of Sir Charles Stanford. Elsewhere, we learn that Clarke was thefirstwoman to have been accepted into the composition class at the Royal College.40 On completion of her studies she worked as a professional violist and performed with several internationally known chamber groups. Friskin, a Scottish pianist and composer, married Rebecca Clarke in 1944, when they were both aged 58. Friskin died in 1967. In the 93 years of Clarke's life (she died in 1979), she was married for a total of just 23 years. This is enough, it would seem, to subsume her identity under that of her husband, although by the time of her marriage to Friskin, she had, in her own right, already achieved a remarkable career as a performer and a composer. One of the leading exponents of Clarke's music, Liane Curtis, comments that of Clarke's total output (52 songs, 11 choral pieces, and 22 chamber pieces for various instrumental ensembles), the Viola Sonata (1919) and the Piano Trio (1921) are distinct, for they "are among her longest compositions, and together with the early Violin Sonata (three movements of ca.1909), they are her only multimovement works of absolute music."41 Curtis suggests that whereas the Viola Sonata and Piano Trio were composed for a competitive function, to be performed in a public forum (the Sprague-Coolidge Competitions), she composed most of her music for the private sphere. Some writers have suggested that the bulk of Clarke's music not only occupies a private sphere, intended to be performed in intimate surroundings by family and friends, but is feminine in nature. As Susan Rachel Mina remarks in relation to the majority of the viola and piano pieces: These personal pieces, many of which have titles affiliated with motherhood and possess a highly emotional inclination, demonstrate the characteristics of typically female works. Programmatic and often based on traditional folksongs, they routinely use song forms or other simple molds within their single movement structure. Like the stereotypical definition of feminine work, these pieces begin and end delicately and softly.42

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Far from exuding a feminine nature, the Piano Trio is described by Calum MacDonald as a "masterpiece," an "explosive and emotionally complex score . . . one of the outstanding utterances in British chamber music of the period."43 The work begins assertively and, overall, could be argued to exude characteristics that are typical of male works. Calum Macdonald's reading of this work describes it in just this manner, drawing on metaphors that, if not militaristic, have an aggressive edge to them: "uncompromising nature of the Trio"; "violent, tearing, fanfare motif; "nagging fanfare figure"; "a short, angry development section"; "the main themes are brought into strenuous contrapuntal combination"; and "the strings turn figure x's nagging sextuplets into a harsh fusillade of repeated notes."44 It was premiered in Wigmore Hall in 1921 and won second prize at the Coolidge Festival. In a completely different vein from the intimate music described by Mina earlier, the first movement of the Piano Trio adopts the so-called masculine genre of sonata form.45 It might also be argued that it operates according to the rules in a fairly straightforward manner, giving no signs that there are gender implications for this movement or, if there are, that they match those characterized by A. B. Marx as discussed earlier. In other words, Clarke may not do anything unusual in this work that would draw attention to her own gender. That is certainly an attitude expressed by Curtis in relation to its earlier companion, the Viola Sonata.46 Curtis' attitude arguably has the interests of the composer at heart, for as I suggest in the Introduction, when the word "woman" is attached to the word "composer," it can act as a signal that the music may not be up to scratch. So Curtis, while examining the implications for a gendered reading of the Viola Sonata, decides that it is not an important issue. Regardless of whether this is so or not, I agree with Curtis that it is possible to read the first movement of the Trio, as Curtis actually does with her opening description of the Viola Sonata, in a perfunctory, descriptive manner. I could, as she initially does in the Viola Sonata, describe what occurs in the Trio by providing a detailed report, matching bar numbers with all the significant musical events.47 Unless these events have significance to my overall interpretation, I do not see such an exercise as being useful, yet some discussion along these lines is necessary, for in order to elucidate the significance of the gendered reading that I propose, I need to know what the events are before thinking about how to interpret them. For the sake of convenience and for quick reference, I have chosen to represent some of these events (though events that, on a surface observation, would not draw attention to gender as an issue) in a table form (see Table 4.1). I have deliberately chosen to include a minimum of information in this table, for I want to demonstrate that this movement could be seen to conform to the conventional mold for the form, coinciding with its traditional textbook, dictionary, and encyclopedia definitions. The first movement of this Trio thus sets out two contrasting themes in the exposition. The first is forthright and rhythmical, having a motto function. It is based principally on E flat, but this is set a tritone apart from A, creating something of an ambiguity for the tonality of the opening, which is not, in fact, resolved until the end of the entire work. The second theme, to borrow from

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Table 4.1 Clarke, Piano Trio, First Movement EXPOSITION

DEVELOPMENT

75 bars (1-75)

41 Bars (76- 116)

RECAPITULATION + afterthought 82 bars (117-198)

first theme

second theme

first theme/ second theme

first theme

second theme

afterthought

40 bars

35 bars

41 bars

24 bars

30 bars

28 bars

rhythmic theme with "motto" function

lyrical, songlike theme

contrapuntal treatment of themes

Eb/A leading to-^B/B b leading to-^D-*- modulatory section leading to-'-E b /A-» leading to-»A MacDonald, "achieves a soaring lyricism"48 and, after being set against B natural, settles on the dominant of B flat. The exposition is followed by a development section that devotes its energy to developing the material from the first theme, at times in contrapuntal relation to the second. In the expected fashion, this is then followed by a recapitulation of the first two themes, both of which are shortened. Tacked onto the end of the movement is a coda (which eventually closes on E flat), which I have deliberately labeled an afterthought. In all but that one respect, Clarke's Trio adheres to the traditional mold. A closer inspection of this music, however, reveals some unusual characteristics. The first is that, on listening to the movement, one is struck by its start/stop nature, generated from musical phrases that behave like bodily gestures. The opening, a mottolike theme that reappears throughout the entire work in a variety of guises, is itself one such gesture. See Musical Example 4.1. This is repeated before another gesture emerges, this time in the form of a brilliant, cadenza-like passage given to the piano. Following this (at bar 9), the motto figure introduced at the outset reappears anchored on E flat but in conflict with A and is given a thorough, almost frenzied workout in the manner of a body flexing its muscles, limb by limb. The first theme then gestures toward a climax (at bar 26) but avoids making this a moment of real importance. After a gradual subsidence of these gestures, Clarke inserts another gesture at bar 33 in the semblance of a bugle call. Again, this gesture, as with the previous gestures, serves to interrupt the flow of the piece. See Musical Example 4.2. This interruption persists as the bugle motif is recalled twice more, effectively bringing the piece to a halt at the end of the delivery of the first thematic material. Over a pedal on B natural, the piano introduces the second theme oriented around B flat (at bar 41). What seems unusual here, however, is that instead of the second theme flowing on seamlessly from the first, it begins as if it were in an entirely different genre. Just as there is arguably some ambiguity surrounding the treatment of the first and second subjects in Chaminade's Piano Sonata—the first subject could also be described as a prelude to the second subject, which appears as a quasi

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Musical Example 4.1 Rebecca Clarke, Music of First Three Bars of the Piano Trio

Musical Example 4.2 Rebecca Clarke, Bugle Call in Bar 33 of the Piano Trio

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fugue—I suggest that the second subject in this sonata form movement is introduced as if it were an introductory passage to a self-contained song. At bar 49 the violin and cello enter, bringing their soaring, songlike, counterpointed melodies to a climax at bar 62, which, in a real-time analysis, occurs at 2'38" into the work. A cooling-off period follows to complete the expository material. However, at bar 75 at the end of the exposition, another gesturelike figure is introduced with what seems like the express purpose of bringing the work to yet another full stop: a ritardando and pianissimo dynamic are attached to the cello's solo line at this point. This is followed by a sudden and abrupt launch of the development section. The motto motif of the first theme is given another workout, which, at bar 89, is presented in complex counterpoint against gestures from the second theme until another climax is achieved at bar 104 (or at approximately 4*12" into the movement). This is arguably the most important climax of the movement. After a brief cooling down, the piece once again almost comes to a standstill with what seems like a short transition passage (at bar 112) in the violin part. This is followed by the recapitulation, presenting a truncated version of the first motto theme (from bar 116) and the second, which is introduced at what is arguably a third climax for the work at bar 140 (or approximately 5'41" into the movement). At the end of the recapitulation, not only does the work once again appear to come to a halt, recalling the earlier gesture of the bugle motif, but it also feels as if this should be the conclusion for the movement as a whole. Instead, we are taken by surprise, for the first theme is reintroduced, this time in a completely different mood. Presented in augmentation in a coda section that feels like an afterthought, the first theme is transformed into a mournful lament. At the close of the movement a struggle ensues between A and E flat, which is set up in the opening bars of the movement. Very fleetingly, this tussle between the two tones finds eventual resolution on E flat. It is as if the movement resists the closure that seems necessary for its completion. I have described the events of the piece in this manner to argue that, unlike a typical sonata form movement, this one's reliance on a stream of gestures has meant that its overall effect is that of a start/stop nature. It does not flow seamlessly, as we would find in Debussy, Ravel, or Bloch, composers who come close to the sound world that is evoked here by Clarke. It struggles at the end of the movement to settle comfortably on E flat, the tonal center around which the opening first theme seemed to gravitate. Furthermore, as I suggested earlier, its high points are not where one would expect to find them (at the end of the development section or, in the event of there being a lengthy coda, at the end of the recapitulation). The most important climax occurs toward the end of the short development section. If the golden section analysis is applied to the positioning of the climaxes for this movement, some startling results appear. Using a real-time analysis, the movement as a whole is of approximately 9'06" duration. The first climax occurs close to the smaller section of the golden mean (which is 0.382) at 0.362. The second and most important climax occurs at 0.455, well short of the larger section of the golden mean (0.618). The third climax, making itself felt with the reintroduction of the truncated second subject in

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the recapitulation, occurs at 0.597, again, well short of the golden section. In this analysis, the movement seems to make a feature of the halfway mark. I suggest, then, that it is possible to interpret this as having something to do with the sex of the composer. In other words, it is possible that a female composer, inhabiting a female body, conceives of her musical proportions differently than does a male composer. It would seem that Clarke, even if at a subconscious level, avoids creating those proportions that are idealized in musical form. In turn, she could be seen to subvert the sonata mold itself. The kinds of questions that have informed my analysis are different from those that might be found in the domain of mainstream music analysis and music theory in which there is a focus on the score and on internal coherence. Methods that derive from absolutist or feminist perspectives are equally ideological in their intent. The questions that I have posed in this analysis have enabled me to reveal a piece of music that seems to resist the conventions of the structure. These include the way in which the music is generated from a series of starts and stops (or a series of musical gestures), which, in turn, cause its high points to appear in unexpected places. In addition, the overall ratio of the three sections of the movement makes it seem bottom-heavy: 1:1:2.1 turn my attention now to a work that inhabits an entirely different sound world from that of Clarke to see if the links to which I alluded in my preliminary discussion of these composers can be established. Elisabeth Lutyens: O Saisons, O Chateaux, Op. 13 (1946) Unlike Rebecca Clarke, Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-1983) receives a substantial entry in Grove,49 explained partly, perhaps, by the fact that she devoted herself entirely to composition throughout her life. Another important factor attributing to her recognition, noted by Anthony Payne in Grove, is that Lutyens was Britain's first serialist composer. She was a pioneer of an important musical style that had hitherto been ignored in Britain. Given the preoccupation of musicology with stylistic innovation, it is not surprising to find that Lutyens' contribution in this important area of musical creativity is respectfully acknowledged, even though she was a woman. According to Payne, Lutyens arrived at "a personal brand of serialism" that was realized in the Chamber Concerto of 1939, following a slow and arduous process of evolution "worked out without knowledge of developments outside England."50 I show that Lutyens' "personal brand of serialism," which is certainly evident in O Saisons, O Chateaux!, can be read in terms of feminist aesthetics. I do not suggest that Lutyens herself was a feminist. Rather, as in my preceding discussion of Clarke's Trio, by applying feminist theoretical tools to my analysis, I propose that it is possible to uncover the ways in which this work, despite its adoption of an ultra-masculinist style, exudes qualities that have to do with the sex of the composer. Space does not permit me to provide more than a very sketchy biographical synopsis of Lutyens. In any case, there are, as with Rebecca Clarke, books that do this more than adequately.51

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Born in London in 1906, Lutyens was the fourth of five children of the distinguished architect Edwin Lutyens. After a brief period at the Ecole Normale in Paris, she entered London's Royal College of Music (RCM), where she studied with Harold Darke, who she thought, in retrospect, was a better formative influence than either Vaughan Williams or John Ireland (composers who were also at the RCM and whom she described as belonging to the "cowpat school of composition"). This would have been because Darke encouraged her to develop her own highly individual compositional style. An important early influence on Lutyens was Purcell's contrapuntal string fantasias, which led her to discover serial composition. It is useful to mention that during much of her composing career up until at least the 1960s, Lutyens was not a popular composer. The English establishment loathed serial music, and, as Susan Bradshaw writes: Apart from the disadvantage of being a woman in what is still predominantly a man's world, Elisabeth Lutyens has been dogged by the misfortune of always having been an unfashionable composer. Mocked for being far ahead of her time in the 1930s and 1940s, her works made little impact on a musical public conditioned to regard any deviations from tonal harmony as somehow un-English and not quite nice.52 The tables had turned by the 1970s, but, ironically, not for Lutyens. The English attitude towards the avant-garde changed, but the problem for Lutyens, as Bradshaw insinuates, was that she continued to be unfashionable by virtue of the fact that by then, she was no longer a young, fresh face. As a consequence, a degree of neglect has surrounded Lutyens' music. Tenant-Flowers, the most important writer, in my view, on Lutyens' music to date, says that "Lutyens' adoption of serialism represents, arguably, the most significant achievement of her musical career."53 Dubious of Lutyens' claim that she arrived at serialism in her own right by taking a detour through Purcell's string fantasias, Tenant-Flowers makes the point that Lutyens attended performances in London in the 1930s and 1940s of the Viennese composers Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Tenant-Flowers reports that, by her own admission, Lutyens was deeply impressed by Webern's music, though she claims not to have seen the scores.54 Whatever the case, her mastery of the style is, without question, exemplary. Yet, the aesthetic underpinning serialism could be viewed as the most alienating territory of all for a woman to enter. It is arguably the most rule-ridden, rational style of music to have emerged, despite, perhaps, sounding highly dissonant, chaotic, and disorganized. In her critique of Schoenberg, Susan McClary argues that Schoenberg's invention of serialism, an invention of the highest intellectual achievement, allowed him to continue creating what she describes as his "madwoman's discourse" of the earlier, atonal, expressionist works, such as Erwartung {Expectation), while at the same time ridding the music of its feminine associations.55 McClary suggests that while Schoenberg's music sounds like the ravings of a madwoman, it is legitimated in the academy because of the intellect involved in its compositional process. Indeed, it is possible that with its

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emphasis on the intellect (despite Schoenberg's claim to the contrary that his music appeals as much to the heart as it does to the mind), serial music has never gained wide acceptance by mainstream concert audiences, and is even intensely disliked by some audiences. It might even be supposed that a full appreciation of serial music can be acquired only from academic training in this music. It might even be suggested that it is impossible to enjoy listening to this music in a spontaneous manner, for its appreciation can be derived only from the intellectual grasp that one has of the musical language deployed. By the same token, there is considerable enjoyment to be had from cracking a serial score, from working out which version of the row and its permutations has been used by the composer. It is the kind of analytical activity that lends support to the notion that music is a fully autonomous, nonreferential system. Such analytical activity is far removed from the musical performance and from the bodies that create this music. This is an important point, for in stark contrast to a typical serial score by Webern, in particular, I argue that Lutyens' cantata is immediately striking as a work that does not embrace the alienating sound world of serialism as I have described it. It is an expressive, communicative work, despite being cast in the language of serialism, albeit a very personal conception of the style. I first heard Lutyens' O Saisons, O Chateaux! to a poem by the symbolist French poet Rimbaud in the early 1980s and was immediately struck by its soaring, lyrical, haunting beauty. Having no access to a score at that time, I was not aware that the work was serial but would have described it as atonal. I could hear that it inhabited the same kind of sound world as that of Lutyens' counterparts in the second Viennese school, but as with much of Berg's music, I would have suggested that it had a stronger affiliation with Romantic expressionism than with post-1923 Viennese serialism. I have not revised my view since that time. The work was premiered, like Clarke's Piano Trio (in 1921), at Wigmore Hall in 1947. Interestingly, both are postwar pieces, post-World War I and post-World War II, respectively. It is a single-movement cantata scored for mezzo-soprano and string orchestra with mandolin, guitar, harp, and solo violin, and, as TenantFlowers makes the point, its conception was possibly inspired by Benjamin Britten's Les Illuminations (1939), which also sets a Rimbaud poem and is also scored for high voice and strings.56 The poem (see Text Example 4.1), summarized by Tenant-Flowers, "expresses man's desire for that fleeting, elusive quality of happiness."57 Lutyens herself refers to her setting as a "soaring, lyrical lament,"58 which Tenant-Flowers suggests is an intertextual reference to the "lament form used by Purcell in Dido and Aeneas, a work which Lutyens is known to have been studying in the same year, 1946."59 Indeed, the descending melody of Dido's lament seems to have found its way into Lutyens' score, for in numerous passages the melody descends as follows: solo violin (bars 8-9), cello (bar 13-14), solo violin (bars 17-21), solo violin (bars 29-31), first violin (bars 35-36), solo voice (bars 4 2 ^ 6 , 49-51, 52-54), cello (bars 71-72), violin (bars 75-80), and solo voice (bars 91-95, 96-100).

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Text Example 4.1 Poem O Saisons, O Chateaux! by Rimbaud (Translation by Richard Hobbs) O saisons, 6 chateaux, Quelle ame est sans defaults? O saisons, 6 chateaux, J'ai fait la magique etude Du Bonheur, que nul elude. O vive lui, chaque fois Que chante la coq gaulois Mais je n'aurais plus d'envie, II s'est charge de ma view. Ce charm! il prit ame et corps, Et dispersa tous efforts. Que comprendre a ma parole? II fait qu'elle fuie et vole! O saisons, 6 chateaux.

O seasons, O castles, What soul is without weakness? 0 seasons, O castles, 1 have carried out the magic study, Avoided by none, of happiness. O long may it live, every time That the Gallic cock does crow. But I shall feel no more desire, It has taken over my life entire. This spell! it seized soul and body, And scattered any drudgery. What do all my words mean? It makes them fly away and flee! O seasons, O castles.

In some ways it is interesting to consider this poem in relation to its setting into music conceived on serial procedures, for the associations that one normally has of French symbolist poetry are particularly with French impressionist music. Equally, texted music in the serial music of the Austro-Germans is frequently drawn from German poets, especially those associated with German expressionism.60 What I want to suggest, however, is that in the hands of this Englishwoman, the French symbolist poem that she chooses and the music that she composes, with a serial procedure not obvious to the listener, are, in fact, in synchrony with each other. In a hypothetical situation, I would imagine that the same kind of compatibility would not be found between a serial score and a French text in the music of Schoenberg or Webern. In other words, Lutyens' "personal brand of serialism" is not alien territory for the Rimbaud poem. I argue that Lutyens' O Saisons, O Chateaux has immediate musical appeal to concerthall audiences. This is a value judgment that I am all too aware of making, but her unique version of serial language is the very thing that I consider to set it apart from a typical Schoenbergian or Webernian serial work. O Saisons, O Chateaux! is liberally splashed with tonal allusions. Far from sounding irrational and chaotic, then, as McClary implies is the case with Schoenberg's music, this work sounds coherent as if it has been logically organized. It is not necessary to check the score in order to appreciate its logical organization of musical material. It could even be the case that at a subconscious level Lutyens has made a deliberate choice to feminize her music, while Schoenberg's main project was to defeminize his music by shifting focus away from the sound of the music to the written particularities of the score. In contrast to the Schoenberg school, where much ink has been spilled arguing that its music was comprehensible, while its detractors accused it of being incomprehensible, there is no need for such argument in this present work by Lutyens. The important ingredient that sets it apart from Schoenberg

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and Webern is its liberal sprinkling of tonal language. In turn, this has an effect of taming the music, or feminizing it, for instead of sounding like the "rantings and ravings of a madwoman," it is lyrical, expressive, and structurally coherent. As Tenant-Flower observes: "[The] propensity for thirds, combined with an avoidance of semitones and preference for using semitone displacements such as sevenths or minor ninths where necessary, generates a sense of lush harmonic warmth throughout and demonstrates Lutyens's conscious choice to keep the level of dissonance as soft as possible, despite the serial context."61 We might speculate, then, that the particular use of tonal music in this score by Lutyens, its softening of dissonance, is an important key to understanding its composition by a woman.62 Another, as an adjunct to the abundance of tonal allusions described, is the frequency with which she provides a kind of tonal anchoring at numerous moments in the music by using the technique of pedal point. The proliferation of pedal points in this score—on C (bars 5-7), B flat (bars 14-16), inverted pedal in the guitar (bars 17-21), E (bars 38-41), C (bars 43-47), B flat (bars 59-63), F sharp (bars 87-91), C (bars 106-108), G (bars 108-111,) and Bflat(bars 117-119)—serve to ground the piece tonally. In some ways, these pedal points have caused Lutyens to break one of the cardinal rules of serialism, for by attributing importance to particular musical tones, she dismisses the notion that all tones are equal and relative to each other, that each has equal status and value. O Saisons, O Chateaux! is structured in a ternary shape, a similarity that may be drawn between it and much serial music in general (see Table 4.2). Like the Clarke work, however, O Saisons, O Chateaux! is constructed out of a series of gestures that emanate from the textural fabric of the work, in turn derived from the series upon which the work is based (see Musical Example 4.3). Gestures permeate serial music in general, but it is their particular treatment in this score that I argue provides a clue to its composition by a woman. Like the Clarke work, these gestures are frequently self-contained and give an overall Table 4.2 Ternary Structure of O Saisons, O Chateaux! A

B

A1

A2

Bars 1-41 Orchestra

Bars 42-64 Soprano and Orchestra

Bars 65-90 Orchestra

Bars 91-122 Soprano and Orchestra

Musical Example 4.3 Series upon which O Saisons, O Chateaux! Is Based

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start/stop feel to the music that is quite unlike that found in a typical serial score. Indeed, Tenant-Flowers notes that rhetorical gesture constitutes an essential part of Lutyens' makeup. 63 Unlike Clarke, however, whose music is garbed in tonal/ modal language in the context of a sonata form, Lutyens' gestures are not spasmodic and eruptive and consequently disruptive. They are subtle and nondisruptive, but I would argue that this does not lessen their effect. In some ways, these gestures seem like those found in much serial music, especially that of Schoenberg, for they operate according to the principle of variation in which the theme—the series itself—constantly undergoes a transformation process. Finally, the positioning of the high points in O Saisons, O Chateaux! is worthy of comment. There are six high points in this work, with the most important one placed at the beginning of Section B with the first entry of the voice delivering the opening lines of the text, " 0 saisons, o chateaux," an unusual placement for the most important climax in the work. See Table 4.3. The high points in this music as a whole are subtle, rising and falling in a manner not unlike Cixous' and Clement's metaphor of the sea used to describe feminine writing as follows: Unleashed and raging, she belongs to the race of waves. She arises, she approaches, she lifts up, she reaches, covers over, washes ashore, flows embracing the cliffs least undulation, already she is another, rising again, throwing the fringed vastness of her body up high, follows herself, and covers over, uncovers, polishes, makes the stone body shine with the gentle undeserting ebbs, which return to the shoreless nonorigin, as if she recalled herself in order to come again as never before. . .. She has never "held still"; explosion, diffusion, effervescence, abundance, she takes pleasure in being boundless, outside self, outside same, far from a "centre." . . . She doesn't hold still, she overflows.64 The music in O Saisons, O Chateaux! rises and falls, "is never 'held still' "; it overflows, exuding warmth and tenderness. The moments of its rising and subsequent falling are worked out, no doubt subconsciously, in proportions that are unlike those idealized in relation to men's music. Using a real-time analysis, the duration for the work is 6'12", which locates the major climax at section B at a proportion of 0.354 (below the smaller section of the golden mean, 0.382). This is not Table 4.3 High Points in O Saisons, O Chateaux! A

B

A1

A2

2 high points 2 high points 1 high point 1 high point bar 6 (0'2M); bar 25 (1'27") bar 42 (2.17; bar 58 (3*11") bar 83 (4'02") bar 108 (5'20")

r Important climax

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dissimilar to the position of the major climax in Alma Schindler-Mahler's Ansturm, discussed in the preceding chapter. None of the other high points in this work, in fact, conform to the ideal as follows: high point 1 is at 0.034; high point 2 occurs at 0.208; high point 4 occurs at 0.508; high point 5 is at 0.657 (greater than the larger section of the golden mean); and high point 6 is at 0.850.1 am aware that much music in the Schoenberg serial school contains multiple climaxes. However, as Clive Pascoe's study of this music shows, in particular of Schoenberg's Quintet for Wind Instruments, op. 26, there is a general tendency of the music to conform to the idealized structure of the golden proportion.65 From my own observations of Schoenberg's music, I would tend to agree with Pascoe, suggesting that its structural orientation is around a ratio in which a significant climax occurs around two-thirds of the way through the music. In contrast, Lutyens' work avoids a structural association with the golden section, with the exception of the second climax. Instead, its six high points are distributed randomly throughout the work. The overall ratios of the four sections to the music are beautifully balanced, with the inner smaller sections framed by two, larger outer sections as follows: 2:1:1:2. CONCLUSION I began this chapter by elucidating the ways in which the absolutist/ referentialist argument in music, set up on a dichotomy, has spilled over into the arena of musical analysis. Music analysis and music theory, avoiding the messy business of dealing with music as a sounding medium, have concentrated on the score, treating it as the primary document of music. In turn, this has led to score-centric approaches to music analysis, which, in their focus on the structural aspects of music and its internal coherence, side with the view that music is a fully autonomous, nonreferential system. Taking up the other side of the argument, I have provided examples of how music itself can be read in terms of embodiment as an illustration of the context in which it is produced. I have carried out analyses of two works, demonstrating that, with a different mind-set from an absolutist analyst, it is possible to read meanings into music that have to do with the composer's gender. It may seem as if I have adopted an ideological stance. My stance, however, is no more ideological than that of the absolutist analyst. NOTES 1. Friedrich von Schelling, Philosophic der Kunst, in Peter le Huray and James D eds., Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries (Ca Cambridge University Press, 1981 [1775]), 470. 2. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneso Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 20. 3. Barbara Engh, "Loving It: Music and Criticism in Roland Barthes," in Ruth A. Solie ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berk Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), 73.

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4. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966 [1819]) cited in Carl Dalhaus, Esthetics of Music, trans. William Austin (London & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 42. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music," in The Philosophy of Nietzsche trans. Clifton P. Fadiman (New York: Modem Library, 1954), 979. 6. Leonard Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 34. In 'The Analytical Significance of Beethoven's Sketches for the String Quartet in F Major Opus 135, Vol. 1, Analysis" (Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Music, University of Sydney: March 1994), 11-12. Peter McCallum says that Meyer's view of meaning is derived from Morris Cohen who says "anything acquires meaning if it is connected with, or indicates, or refers to something beyond itself, so that its full nature points to and is revealed in that connection" (Aaron Cohen, cited in Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music). 7. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music. Derycke Cooke, The Language of Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), concurs with Meyer. Both authors explain referential meaning in these terms. 8. Susan McClary, "The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year," in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 15. 9. See, for example, Oliver Strunk, comp. and ed., Source Readings in Music History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), "Plato: From The Republic," 4-12; and see Warren Anderson, "Plato: Mode and Rhythm," in Stanley Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. 14 (London: Macmillan, 1980), 854-855. 10. Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. G. Cohen (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1957 [1854]), 93. 11. Ibid., 94. 12. Malcolm Budd, Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), 20-36. 13. Edmund Gurney, The Power ofSound (London: Basic Books, 1966 [1880]). The idea that music has resonance with the sexual and aspects of the sexual, such as childbirth, has been taken up by a number of feminist theorists. See, for example, McClary's discussion of Janika Vandervelde's Genesis II in Feminine Endings, 112-131. Suzanne Cusick, while not describing the music itself in these terms, nonetheless ponders on what a lesbian relationship with music would be like. See Suzanne Cusick, "On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not To Think Straight," in Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 67-83. 14. Cooke, The Language of Music. 15. Susanne K. Langer, "The Work of Art as Symbol," in John Hospers, ed., Introductory Readings in Aesthetics (London: Collier Macmillan, 1969). 16. Stephen Davies, Musical Meaning and Expression (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). 17. McClary, Feminine Endings, 21. 18. McClary, "The Blasphemy of Talking Politics During Bach Year," 13-62. 19. Ibid., 23. 20. Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music Representation and the History of the Body (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993). Also see Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in 18th-Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Richard

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Leppert, "Music as a Sight in the Production of Music's Meaning," in Jamie C. Kassler, ed., Metaphor: A Musical Dimension (Sydney: Currency Press, 1991), 69-88. 21. Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990), 105. 22. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind, Art and Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). 23. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1980), 38. 24. Ferdinand Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (London: Fontana, 1974), 113. 25. Umberto Eco, A Theory ofSemiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 7. 26. Marcia Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9. 27. Ibid. 28. Ian Bent with William Drabkin, The New Grove Handbooks in Music: Analysis (Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1987). 29. Ibid. For example, among early theorists, Bent highlights the work of Jean-Philippe Rameau (and contemporaries), H. C. Koch, Antoine Reicha, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Carl Czerny, Carl Von Weber, J. A. P. Spitta, and others. Among late 19th-century and 20thcentury analysts, Bent includes Schenker, Adler, Jeppesen, Tovey, Meyer, Reti, Hans Keller, Cone, Babbitt, Forte, Boulez, Xenakis, Schaeffer, LaRue, Crocker, Nattiez, Ruwet, Lendvai, Cogan, and Escot. Escot, as far as I can tell, is the only woman mentioned in his book. 30. Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 111. 31. See Sarah Jane Tenant-Flowers, "A Study of Style and Techniques in the Music of Elisabeth Lutyens," vol. 1 (Doctoral dissertation, Department of Music, University of Durham, 1991), 164-217. 32. They cite A. B. Marx, Die Lehre von der Musikalischen Komposition, Part 3 (Leipzig: 1845). See discussions of this in McClary, Feminine Endings, 13-16, 68-71, and Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 134-135. 33.1 borrow these words from Liane Curtis, "Rebecca Clarke and Sonata Form: Questions of Gender and Genre," The Musical Quarterly 81.3 (Fall 1997): 398. 34. McClary, Feminine Endings, 13. McClary cites Peter Bloom, Journal of the American Musicological Society 21 (1974): 161 -162. 35. Curtis, "Rebecca Clarke and Sonata Form." 36. See, for example, the references in the bibliography for Clarke listed in Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel, The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers (London: Macmillan, 1994), 120. In addition, there is now a substantial biography of Rebecca Clarke (in German) by Daniela Kohnen entitled Rebecca Clarke: Komponistin und Bratschistin— Biographie (Hohenhausen, Egelsbach: Verlag Hansel, 1999). 37. See, for example, Nancy B. Reich, "Rebecca Clarke: An Uncommon Woman," Sounds Australian: The Woman's Issue 40 (Summer 1993-1994): 14. 38. Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 4, 448. 39. Ibid., vol. 6, 855. 40. See Reich, "Rebecca Clarke," 14, who quotes from Clarke's unpublished memoirs, 154 as follows: "that I was the only woman he accepted was a source of great pride for me." 41. Curtis, "Rebecca Clarke and Sonata Form," 407.

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42. Susan Rachel Mina, "Rebecca Clarke: An Evaluation of Her Published and Unpublished Viola Works in the Context of Her Life as a Violist and Composer for the Viola," http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~smiina/rc.html, 10 May 2000, 2. 43. Calum MacDonald, "Rebecca Clarke's Music (1)," Tempo 160 (1986): 20. 44. Ibid. 45. See ibid., 393-429. Curtis proposes that "for Clarke, the sonata genre (with sonata form as a necessary component of a multimovement sonata) was seen as a masculine domain and thus for her basically a foreign one," "Rebecca Clarke and Sonata Form," 408. 46. See ibid. 47. Ibid. Curtis goes on, of course, to provide an excellent critique of the Viola Sonata in terms of its context. 48. MacDonald, "Rebecca Clarke's Music (1)," 20. 49. Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 11, 374-377. 50. Ibid., 374. In "A Study of Style and Techniques in the Music of Elisabeth Lutyens," Tenant-Flowers challenges the view that Lutyens was unaware of developments in music outside England. See 5-6 and Chapter 2. 51. Elisabeth Lutyens, A Goldfish Bowl (London: Cassell, 1972). See also Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, A Pilgrim Soul: The Life and Work of Elisabeth Lutyens (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989). 52. Susan Bradshaw, "The Music of Elisabeth Lutyens," The Musical Times (July 1971): 653. 53. Tenant-Flowers, "A Study of Style and Techniques in the Music of Elisabeth Lutyens," 54. 54. Ibid. See 66-67, in particular, Lutyens' comments of the performance she heard of WebeirTs Das Augenlicht, 67. 55. See McClary's discussion in Feminine Endings, 104-109. 56. Ibid., 164-165. 57. Ibid., 165. 58. Lutyens in Brian Elias, Interview held at Finchley (London), August 1983, cited in ibid. 59. Ibid. 60.1 am making a generalization here that in particular instances would be shown to be incorrect. My point is that, typically, composers in France are drawn to French poetry, and composers in Germany, conversely, to German poetry. There will always be exceptions to this rule. 61. Tenant-Flowers, "A Study of Style and Techniques in the Music of Elisabeth Lutyens," 182. 62. It is important to make the point that, far from softening the dissonance in the bulk of her serial output, she could be seen to be doing the opposite. O Saisons, O Chateaux! is therefore viewed as being unique in this respect. 63. Tenant-Flowers, "A Study of Style and Techniques in the Music of Elisabeth Lutyens," 4. 64. Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 85; Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 90-91. 65. Clive Pascoe, "Golden Proportion in Musical Design" (D.M.A. dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1973), 199.

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5

Meditations on Feminist Aesthetics: Anne Boyd's Cycle of Lope

Must we say:

an other sex = an other writing an other sex = an other meaning? Why? —Luce Irigaray1

[Grathaway, 1993] begins with an arc and is followed by a spiral. The last movement is another arc and it ends a little as it began. The whole piece is shaped by curves, curves as symmetries through the music. In a graphic or visual sense, I think of that as almost being like a female body. —Anne Boyd2 In this chapter I draw on French theory, particularly French feminism, to uncover the ways in which the body and subjectivity mark the musical work. This is no easy task, for as with the preceding analyses in this book, there is the temptation to recover an essence from the category "woman," the temptation to invoke the biological to explain the composer's difference. Nonetheless, it is necessary to view the sexes as separate categories, for the disappearance of a sexual culture in music gives rise to values that are supposedly universal but that, in fact, describe a system of domination of women by men. The way forward is to explore the space between the male/female divide in order to begin thinking about what it means to be a woman who composes as a woman. In this chapter, I focus on a song cycle, Cycle of Love (1981), by the Australian composer Anne Boyd (b. 1946). It is worth reiterating that mainstream musicology tends to assume that the most important aspects of music "operate according to 'purely musical' procedures" (to borrow Susan McClary's words).3 This view, which I canvass in previous chapters, resists the idea that music performs cultural work. It is a view that assumes

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that music is fully autonomous and has no connection with the cultural context in which it is produced. Yet, as McClary demonstrates, it is possible to map cultural readings onto music without reinforcing the dichotomy between the purely musical and the referential. McClary shows that social meanings are actually inscribed in music, which is otherwise taken to be value-free. In Feminine Endings,4 her first major work dedicated to this cause, McClary undertakes a rigorous, systematic, feminist critique of music. As Elizabeth Sayrs says of Feminine Endings: "One of McClary's central arguments is that Western, common practice tonal music relies on transmitting semiotic codes of gender, sexuality, and sexual activity itself to produce effects on the listening audience."5 McClary argues that music is highly political, for it has the capacity to reflect, reproduce, and reconstitute the asymmetrical power structures that exist in the social world in which it is located. Until the publication of Feminine Endings, there had been a virtual absence of research daring to question the supremacy of the canon while at the same time reinstating the feminine/female in music as a positive attribute. But as with any courageous, new, and cutting-edge work—as I would argue McClary's is without doubt—there is always a cluster of people waiting in the wings to decimate it.6 Having dispensed with the niceties, Elizabeth Sayrs, for example, takes McClary to task on a number of counts. Among these she suggests that McClary actually replicates and reinforces the binary structures that she identifies as patriarchal in character. Sayrs suggests that by "ferreting out more straight narratives with which to compare gay narratives," McClary is "reinforcing the gay/straight binary that much gay criticism has focussed on deconstructing."7 Sayrs points out that it is one thing to deconstruct these binaries and to show how they are implicated as the foundation upon which theories about music have been built; it is quite another to build "new theoretical structures which require and replicate these same binaries."8 Another criticism that Sayrs offers of McClary's work is that she is essentialist. By way of illustration, Sayrs suggests that McClary has a vision of feminine/female sexuality that is stereotypical and that, while scattered throughout the book, is brought into sharp focus through the reading that she undertakes of Janika Vandervelde's Genesis II? Sayrs takes issue with McClary's view of male sexuality as well. She observes that the manner in which McClary maps her idea of male sexual activity onto an earlier work by Vandervelde, Jack and the Beanstalk, produces a stereotype of masculine sexual behavior understood as erection-penetration-climaxclosure. Sayrs sees McClary's book as positing female sexuality as the opposite of male sexuality. In addition, Sayrs takes issue with what she perceives to be McClary's use of the word "woman" as a universal category in which no thought is given to the differences inherent in the category, that woman is always a historically specific being who combines a number of intersections with race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. Sayrs also has problems with McClary's idea that

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particular pieces of music will invite different kinds of responses, depending on whether the listener happens to be a man or a woman. On this last point, Peter Martin agrees with Sayrs, highlighting some of the contradictions that he perceives arising from McClary's work. It seems that he wants to read McClary's book as a product of modernist thinking. Yet it would seem that in his quest to expose some of the weaknesses that he finds with the book, which in a postmodernist context might be viewed as strengths, Martin also portrays himself as an archmodernist. Scrutinizing McClary's book for its inconsistencies, then, he comes across what he perceives to be a contradiction: on the one hand, he notes, McClary views the conventions for the representation of gender in music as being culturally arbitrary, while, on the other, she suggests that "particular musical passages require certain responses from listeners."10 He goes on to provide examples from McClary's discussions of Orfeo,11 Carmen,12 Madonna,13 and rock music14 to support his view that McClary contradicts herself, making the point that she has abandoned a social construction approach. Martin's problem with McClary, it seems, is that she suggests: "firstly that musical texts have inherent meanings which impose themselves on passive listeners, and secondly that she has achieved some sort of final or privileged interpretation of what they are really about."15 Martin seems to imagine that McClary is adopting a universalist position and goes on to insist that the social construction perspective of music must depend on the "indeterminate and contingent nature of the relation between music and the meanings attributed to it."16 He argues that "listeners cannot be considered as passive recipients of non-conceptual messages"17 and makes the point that responses are not necessary or inevitable. Moreover, Martin says that not all people have much interest in music and therefore are incapable of absorbing its effects.18 On the face of it, many of these critical observations by Sayrs and Martin may seem valid enough. In different ways, however, I would argue that both have deliberately carried out misreadings of McClary's work. Like others of their ilk, Sayrs and Martin have posited their criticisms by lifting passages out of context and deliberately ignoring the overall effect of the book, which, in my view, is liberating. It would seem that McClary is not unused to having her work taken out of context and read in misleading terms, as Ruth Solie makes clear in her response19 to Pieter van den Toorn's highly inflammatoiy and somewhat irrelevant review of McClary's work.20 As Solie implies, van den Toorn's patronizing and disparaging remarks misfired. In the spirit of a true 19th-century aesthetician, he refused to come to grips with one of McClary's central arguments, that music, far from being a direct, unmediated aesthetic experience, is intimately connected to the bodies that produce it. In a fairly predictable fashion, van den Toorn resorted to 19th-century aesthetic theory in order, as Solie puts it, to "inhabit the secure, transcendent space of art."21 In so doing, he created a mutually exclusive position between himself as a modernist and McClary as a postmodernist feminist. By way of contrast to van den Toorn, Sayrs has attempted to engage with the important issues that arise from McClary's work. But Sayrs needs to be careful that she, too, is not reinforcing the binary relations that she criticizes McClary for rein-

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forcing. By discussing them at all, it could be argued, we all fall into the trap of strengthening them. Moreover, while it might be tempting to suggest that McClary seems to want to recover an essential woman from music, I would argue that she makes it clear that her perspective is not the only one on offer. Martin's view is more problematic, for by exposing the contradictions in McClary's work, he simultaneously uncovers some in his own. Significant among these is his polarization of the disciplines of musicology and sociology. In effect, Martin argues that the tension between each discipline arises out of the different interests that each has with the object of study. A self-proclaimed sociologist, it would seem that Martin wants to denigrate the musicologist on the grounds that the context is more important than the text. Intellectual power is often derived from constructions of, or subscriptions to, orthodoxy. Martin not only provides a particularly biased reading of McClary's work from a sociological perspective but, by so doing, reinforces the tensions between sociology and musicology. This is not a dissimilar crime to the one that he accuses McClary of committing. Further, I would argue that McClary does not necessarily insist on her readers seeing the musicosocial world from her point of view. Implicit in her work is that her readings are contingent in nature. Throughout Feminine Endings McClary offers readings that have multiple possibilities; she never insists that hers are the only interpretations of the music that she discusses. Furthermore, she highlights the fluid interaction between the sociological and the musicological perspectives and, unlike the musically untrained sociologist, is able to provide insights into the music itself. McClary does not set herself in opposition to the absolutist, universalist position that would be claimed by mainstream theorists, offering something, perhaps, of a counterorthodoxy. Rather, working in the spirit of feminist/ postmodernist analysis, she presupposes the idea of multiple standpoints. It is also important to view McClary's early work in Feminine Endings as a product of its time. It is possible to identify some contradictions in this work, yet I would argue that these very contradictions give rise to the ambiguous feminist subject. There is no such thing as an unambiguous subject in feminism, and I see this as a strength rather than a weakness. Moreover, what McClary offered then and continues to offer in her subsequent work is liberation for women who engage with music as musicologists, composers, and performers. She rescues the feminine from music and deconstructs it in the context of men's music and uncovers the way in which male and female subjects of music constitute, and are constituted by, the music itself. An important observation to be gleaned from her work is that the staple of most tertiary music courses is founded on a repertoire of music composed by male composers in the Western canon. REVISITING EQUALITY AND DIFFERENCE I have made the point that the subordination of women's bodies and experience in patriarchal Western culture has been a major preoccupation for feminist theory, a problem that has been examined from a variety of angles. One response has been

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to try to set the record straight by creating an equally valid, parallel woman's history alongside the revered history of men. The obvious stumbling block has been the question: "But where are the great women?" In her landmark essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"22 Linda Nochlin suggests that the rhetorical nature of the question serves to reinforce its negative implications. Nochlin's essay champions the notion that women's art is different from men's, and on that basis she claims that it is misunderstood by the male culture. In a similar vein to Eva Rieger, discussed in Chapter l,23 Nochlin identifies the ways in which women's art is different from men's. She says that women tend to choose different subject matter from men, subject matter that has principally to do with the private, domestic spaces of their lives. According to Nochlin, this contrasts with the male preoccupation with the world of public affairs. Conceding that women have never been great artists, Nochlin argues that they have not had the same access to art education as men. Writing around the same time as Nochlin, musicologist Judith Tick makes a parallel point in relation to women composers in her essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Composers?"24 She suggests that being deprived of social equality has had a profound effect on women's musical education, their freedom to perform, indeed, the instruments on which they have been permitted to perform, the type of music they that were expected to write, and the kind of recognition granted to them.25 According to Tick, before the Civil War in America, women were allowed to perform only on the harp, guitar, and piano.26 A remarkable book for its time, as Ruth Solie points out,27 is Sophie Drinker's Music and Women, published in 1948 by the author herself.28 Although viewed as unscholarly, it is one of the first in what now might be called a tradition of feminist musicology to ask unfamiliar questions and to assemble a set of unorthodox methods for researching and writing up the results. In some ways, as Solie observes, Drinker's methods are unschooled, but the book as a whole has some important contributions to make to feminist scholarship. Solie identifies one of these as Drinker's interest in the whole context in which music is produced, examining the communal, socially based aspects of music production. Solie notes that Drinker assumes that an individual focus is inappropriate for women's musical activities—unlike the preoccupation of mainstream musicology with individual composers and great works—and is therefore concerned more with cultural practices. So, as Solie says, Drinker's book "is a history not of works but of musical activities, of cultural practices."29 She continues: Her chapters concern themselves with the nature of participation in music-making, as differentiated in various types of social structures; with the effect on this participation of changes in religious thought and in attitudes toward women; and, most importantly, with the links between such participation and women's sense of power and authority within their given cultural frame.30 As a precursor to the feminist writings in music of the 1970s and 1980s, Drinker unwittingly, though it was then of no concern, draws attention to the distinctions

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between the individual and collective and between the professional and amateur musician. On Drinker's creation of these binaries, women are aligned with collective, amateur music-making. Furthermore, Drinker tends to essentialize women's experience in music by invoking the metaphor of the phases of the moon upon which to model her book.31 Two issues are highlighted by the writings of these early feminists in musicology and the fine arts: first, that women's art and music are different from men's and thus judged unfairly against the value system of patriarchy and second, that access to an equal education was an impossibility for women. The second of these issues has formed an important theme in feminist literature as a whole. Many feminists have been deeply committed to eliminating the sexist barriers that have prevented their entry into the public domain of the social world. Yet, as a number of feminists have noted, the problem that needs to be addressed is that the public social world, including music, is constituted as male. The logical extension of this idea is that for women to have equality and to succeed in a man's world, they must become like men.32 The hierarchical model that resolves into dichotomies sets up endless incompatibilities and contradictions. But what it effectively means is that women's participation in a public world that is constituted as male can only be on male terms.33 Given this, the quest for equality is a futile exercise. A much more strategic and beneficial approach, according to Elizabeth Grosz, is to analyze the institutional structures that act as barriers to women and to set about dismantling these structures.34 Flowing from this thinking in the 1980s, feminist theorists began to turn their attention to the notion of difference. It had become apparent that women's oppression was not just a matter of the way they were constituted within economic, political, and social structures, though this is the material evidence for the argument of oppression. Rather, as Grosz and others have pointed out, the roots of the cause are deeply embedded in the social constructions of the binaries of representation. A problem that arises from the binary paradigm is that it inevitably presents a unitary image of the human body. Women's bodies are defined in terms of male bodies. As Moira Gatens says: "Representations of the human body are most often of the male body and, perhaps, around the borders, one will find insets of representations of the female reproductive system: a lactating breast, a vagina, ovaries; bits of bodies, body-fragments."35 Such a construct does not allow for the recognition of difference or, as Gatens puts it, recognition that: "Images of human bodies are either images of men's bodies or women's bodies."36 Moreover, it does not allow for more than just these two possibilities. FRENCH FEMINISM AND DIFFERENCE An important theme that seems to run through much of French feminist work is the concept of difference. Lawrence Kramer summarizes Julia Kristeva's notion

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of the feminine principle as: "given by the experience of drive, or rather of the multiplicity of drives in collision and interchange; it is impulsive, rhythmic, dynamic, plural, untotalized, supercharged. In these respects it is very like music when music excites us most, and Kristeva in fact calls it musical."37 Central to Kristeva's theory is that male and female subjects articulate themselves through the symbolic and semiotic modalities, but because the semiotic is experienced as a threat to the logos, it assumes a negative relation to the symbolic. On this model, the semiotic must erupt into the symbolic in order to give rise to difference. Kristeva's conceptualization of the semiotic is that it is always repressed and oppressed and therefore not part of symbolic order.38 In contrast to Kristeva, Helene Cixous views feminine writing as accessible by both sexes and says that it is bisexual. Luce Irigaray posits the idea that feminine writing is specific to women.39 The work of Irigaray and Cixous and Clement is useful for conceiving of female difference in music, not least because their prose is more lyrical than traditional prose. Renee Cox argues that the portrayal of the feminine by both Kristeva and Cixous is "a mode that disrupts and explodes conventional culture and meaning, and can be found in the writing of either sex."40 Irigaray depicts the feminine as being specific to women's bodies, which, as summarized by Cox, suggests "that the continuity and openness of feminine writing also reflects women's sexual experiences [as] indefinite, cyclic, without set beginnings and endings."41 That the English-speaking feminists discovered the work of the French feminists is important, for it has had an important effect on thinking about the ways in which writing and style are linked. In turn, French feminist theory has influenced thinking about music and style. Such thinking arguably underpins much of Susan McClary's writing in Feminine Endings. While McClary does not replace the word "style" with what became the French counterpart to style in the literary and visual arts, namely, I'ecriture feminine, she nevertheless invokes the idea, especially in her reading of Vandervelde's Genesis II. It seems that McClary envisions a kind of difference in women's music that is similar to Irigaray's notion of difference in women's literary work. McClary imagines that Vandervelde's music is a kind of la musiquefeminine. She invites women to listen to this music in order to discover their feminine selves. Yet McClary is not insisting that the idea of the feminine self is the same for all women.42 She does not recover a feminine essence from the experience of this music. Indeed, McClary makes the point that some, not all, of the women in her class recognized in the clockwork an image of female erotic pleasure. As she continues, it is: "pleasure that is not concerned with being somewhere else, indeed, pleasure that need not even be thought of as tied specifically to sexual encounter, but pleasure that permits confident, free, and open interchange with others."43 McClary understands Vandervelde's piece as it would seem Vandervelde herself intended it to be understood,44 as constructing a female metaphor for birth and feminine sexuality through the sonic image of a clockwork, associated as it is with cyclicity.

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It is impossible to identify the purely feminine characteristics of a piece of music when, by necessity, all music circulates within patriarchy. It is futile for women to recover their true feminine selves from music, for to do so would mean imagining the existence of some "pre-discursive, pre-tonal music, as well as pre-nonphallic sexual experience."45 It would mean conceiving of a reality that exists outside signification, "a pre-discursive sexual/musical reality."46 Yet I would argue that this is not what McClary has in mind. Nor, indeed, does such a notion underpin my reading of Anne Boyd's Cycle of Love. An important reference for the French feminists is Derrida's argument that meaning is produced by difference, or specifically by differance. As Derrida writes: "Subjectivity—like objectivity—is an effect of differance." In this view, meaning is never static. It is a historical product that is in constant flux. In effect, this idea prompted Sue Best to revisit and to rethink the work produced by feminist artists in the 1970s like Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, and Laurie Anderson, the latter also claimed by music. Their work was said to have engendered a feminist aesthetic.47 This work came in for some strong criticism during the 1980s because, by then, feminist theory had decided that it was problematic to "see female difference or female identity in terms of an essence."48 In this view, biology is a cause; a style is feminine because of sex. Essentializing the female experience entails ignoring difference within difference. The notion that there is a composite, singular category called "woman" against a similarly unified and monolithic category called "man" contains a misrecognition of the numerous differences that exist between women themselves and, indeed, between men themselves. Aside from universalizing the female experience, women who make claims for difference are paradoxically also insisting on equality, since differences that take the form of A/B relations by necessity imply sameness; each relation is of equal merit. Thus, arguments for equality and/or difference are tautological and would seem to provide no solution to the subordination of women in culture. TOWARD THE NOTION OF FEMINIST AESTHETICS Where does this leave the question of feminist aesthetics, specifically in music? It would seem that it is impossible for women to produce themselves as positive agents in musical discourses, for these are already prefigured as male. The idea of a style that is distinctly female or feminine or feminist would seem to be impossible in practice. Yet to borrow the phrase, "a style which is not one," an adaptation of Luce Irigaray's "this sex which is not one"49 in which she celebrates feminine desire as being "plural, spontaneous, chaotic, and mysteriously 'other' " (to quote Rita Felski)50 has possibilities, despite the potential essentializing that flows from it. In dealing with this issue, Rita Felski argues that women's writing cannot be theorized a priori "by appealing to a relationship between gender and a specific linguistic or literary form."51 Her view is that women's writing can be understood only in terms of relating the "diverse forms of women's writing to the cultural and

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ideological processes shaping the effects and potential limits of literary production at historically specific contexts."52 By implying that women are shaped, disciplined, and produced differently in their social contexts, however, Felski appears to be alluding to the idea that women's textual practices will be shaped, disciplined, and produced differently. Indeed, this is the logical extension of that idea. It is useful, then, to identify the ways in which the practices of writing and music are deeply embedded in ideologicalframeworksand social institutions, since this inevitably leads to an understanding of how sexual difference comes to be shaped at the level of the text itself. In my analysis of Boyd's Cycle of Love I propose a notion of difference for women that imagines, even fantasizes about, a space that is separatefrommen while at the same time understanding that the reality is necessarily different from the fantasy. I draw on some of the theoretical work of the French feminists; in addition, I draw on Judith Butler's conception of gender as performance, showing that her model is thoroughly compatible with the ideas of difference presented in this chapter. In her view, gender is not a stable identity but rather is in constant flux, "constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts."51. She argues that "gender attributes . . . are not expressive but performative."54 As she continues: That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender's performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality ,55 If gender is performative, argues Butler, "then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured."56 In this view, gender identity is always provisional. It is never a fixed or static attribute. Butler's theory opens up possibilities for women in music, for if gender is conceived as a series of repeated performative acts that together establish normative behavior, then through repetitive performances women's music will in time become understood as natural. In the following section I use some of the ideas previously discussed to describe the aesthetic qualities of Anne Boyd's Cycle ofLove. In this reading I invite multiple spectatorship positions to be taken up by those who hear the music, but the purpose of my analysis is to demonstrate that it is possible to hear this work as a woman's work. FEMINIST AESTHETICS AND ANNE BOYD'S CYCLE OF LOVE FOR COUNTERTENOR, ALTO FLUTE, CELLO, AND PIANO (1981) I read Cycle of Love as a process of semiosis, drawing attention to the work's textualities and intertextualities. There are two of us who conspire in this venture, Boyd as composer and I as interpreter. Cycle ofLove is a musical representation of

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the poetic texts that it transforms into musical sounds. I argue that it is engendered with femininity and makes references to Eastern and Western sources as well as to Boyd's own unique music toolbox, her own repository of music resources that draw on a palette rich in color and high in decoration. Cycle of Love belongs in a continuum of works composed by Boyd but is unlike those earlier, static, meditative works in which there is a high concentration of energy riveted on a simple pattern that gradually transforms over an extended period of time, for example, / Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (1975) and The Book of the Bells (1980). According to Boyd, Cycle of Love is an interaction between Christian love and Buddhist silence,57 and the essence of these disparate philosophies is captured by Boyd in her fresh look at melody, rhythm, and timbre, parameters that she imbues with vitality, movement, and color. Perhaps surprisingly, there are moments in this score when references are made to the high Western art music tradition. I suggest that this might be surprising because until the composition of Cycle of Love, Boyd's preoccupation as a composer had been almost exclusively with Asian music. She was attracted to it for its melodic characteristics, excited by the differences that she observed between Balinese and Japanese music, the latter being slower and more ritualized, all of which seems a considerable distance away from the European music in which she was trained as a student. Nonetheless, references to Ravel, Britten, and Bartok figure prominently in this score, and, according to the composer, Mahler's Fourth Symphony was not too far away from her mind when she composed the work. Ravel's unusual instrumentation of low voice, flute (doubling with alto and piccolo), cello, and piano in Chansons madecasses was the catalyst for the work, which was commissioned by pianist Nicholas Routley and countertenor Hartley Newnham, who wanted a work of similar instrumental configuration to sit with the Ravel in a concert program. The reference to Britten's Dirge from the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings figures as a unifying device in the second song (see Musical Example 5.1). The overall design-shape of the work, an arc structure in which the central third song is framed by the songs and interludes on either side, owes something to Bartok, but this is where the comparison ends (see Figure 5.1).The glimmers of Mahler are there, too, both in terms of the work's clear instrumental sonorities and, as Boyd adds, "paradoxically in the opening pentatonic flute melody,"58 Boyd's own transcription of a Korean sijo (see Musical Example 5.2). Boyd's earlier compositions owed a great deal to her former teacher and subsequent colleague Peter Sculthorpe, traces of whose style can be found in her music. Boyd would argue, however, that by the time she came to write Cycle ofLove and the works that followed, she had eliminated these traces.59 Many discussions about Boyd's music invariably make a link between the two composers, including three honours theses and one master's thesis60 that compare her music with that of Sculthorpe. Boyd is interesting, for while successfully negotiating the patriarchal structures in which she currently works as professor of music at Sydney University,

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Musica] Example 5.1 Quotation from the Dirge in Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings (Bars 4-6, Second Song, Cycle of Love)

she also manages to circle around the patriarchy, entering it at strategic moments and avoiding other aspects of it altogether. This is no more evident than in the work she produces as a composer. Boyd quite openly admits to having sometimes to play the boys' games on the campus of the university. I would argue that this sometimes makes her ambivalent about feminism. Thus, in her personal world of composing, she seems to identify as a feminist; in the public domain of the university, however, she is less inclined to take up the feminist cause.611 have deliberately mentioned these extramusical considerations because they are the social codes that frame performances of gender and inform Boyd's work. They are, therefore, part of the means by which an identity, an interpretation of any of her musical texts can be given. The textualities and intertextualities commingle here. Cycle of Love is a heteroglossic text speaking/sounding in many voices. It would be foolish to suggest that the use of the word "cycle" in Boyd's title hints that the work might have something to do with a woman, for more men have written song cycles than have women. In addition, British-based Australian composer David Lumsdaine comes to mind for his Mandala series. Mandala is a term that might also be associated with the feminine as an archetypal female symbol; indeed, is associated with the work of Pauline Oliveros.62 Nonetheless, reiterating the French feminist perspective, in particular, that of Irigaray, it is possible to view "women's sexual experience [as] indefinite, cyclic, without set beginnings and endings."63 The lived, bodily experience of a woman, in this view, is cyclical. This leads me to ask whether the patterns in Boyd's score are cyclical or open, indefinite, nonspecific, without set beginnings and endings, compliant, gestural, rhyth-

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Figure 5.1 Arc Structure of Cycle of Love Showing Tonal Centers for Each Movement

Musical Example 5.2 Boyd's Transcription of a Korean Sijo, Opening Flute Melody of Cycle of Love (Bars 1-2)

mic, spasmodic, heterogenous, process-oriented, fluid, elastic, and circular. I believe that they are. Cycle of Love was composed in 1981, when the composer was based at Pearl Beach, north of Sydney. It is a setting of five aphoristic poems by anonymous Korean women, in all probability concubines, from the 15th century and translated into English by a Korean-born Australian writer, Don'o Kim. The texts are sijos, forerunners of the Japanese haiku, which, as Boyd says, "explore the nature of womanly love from personal and philosophical perspectives with which I felt real empathy."64 The musical source for the work, as illustrated in Musical Example 5.2, is based on the transcription by Boyd of a Korean sijo that has much in common, according to the composer, with the Vietnamese folk song Tu dai oan, which she used in the earlier song cycle My Name Is Tian, again to texts by Don'o Kim. The translations of the texts for this work have been mediated through the body of a male poet that is further extended through Boyd's deliberate casting of them into the voice of the countertenor, a male who sings like a woman, creating a crossvoicing effect. In a sense, there is something hermaphroditic about the work as it takes on the characteristics of both sexes through its transformation into sound. The two melodic instruments (alto flute and cello) mirror this effect. The piano is used as a percussive instrument throughout to punctuate and add color to the music.

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The sonic image of the higher pitched alto flute might be associated with the relatively higher pitch of a female voice and that of the lower voice of the cello, as that of the male. Yet, from the appearances of both these instruments, there is something visually ambiguous, for the flute might be seen to resemble the phallus with its erect, singular shape, while the cello represents the curvaceous, female shape. While Boyd tends to use the cello in its higher register throughout this work, there is still something gravelly in the grain of its voice, offsetting the mellow, higher-sounding alto flute. There is a sense in which the distinctions between male and female are blurred here. The melodic instruments together with the voice of the countertenor could be viewed as combining the sexes of both female and male, metaphorically producing the sounds of a woman from the body of a man and the sounds of a man from the body of a woman. In the context of Boyd's piece, these ambiguities serve to blur the boundaries of sexuality, which are also echoed in the texts and the music, giving the whole piece a nonspecific identity. In her own analysis of this work, Boyd insists that the dualistic balancing of opposites in the words "Fire and water in one body," which is "the source of life, growth, energy," is typically Taoistic, producing a yin-yang duality. It also happens to coincide with the high point or the emotional center, which is located at 0.593 (see text of third song in Text Example 5.1). "In this context," says Boyd, "it is also a testament to the pain of the human condition, even the poet 'knows not how to go on.'" 65 The binary relationships in the work—"day/night" (first song), "bitter in the sweet" and vice versa (last song), "love/sorrow" (third song again)—are about as specific as the work ever gets. In Text Example 5.1,1 provide my own textual analysis ofCycle of Love, showing the vague sense of narrativity through songs II to IV (winter night—sudden gust—fallen) and the cyclic organization of the texts. What interests me is how the women who include these dichotomies ultimately dismantle them. The first and last songs of the cycle are quite nonspecific. Each begins with questions about time or as Boyd says, "timelessness"— yesterday, day before, day or night—and dreams and love. There is no real identity of person in either of these poems. The "I," the "you," the "few" could be male or female. There is a blurring of the present and the past, of sexual identity. There is a relation of the self, a sexually nonspecific being, to the Other. Like a dream, all is blurred. Yet it is precisely because of this that I suggest that a female energy permeates these texts. The woman here, to summarize Alice Jardine, does not represent something, she is not a distinct, defined personality. As Jardine continues, she is "neither a person nor a thing, but a horizon, that towards which the process is tending."66 Perhaps this is the Asian way, Eastern poets being different from Western poets. There are many meanings to be recovered from these epigrammatic texts; they are Oriental, different. Yet, this is precisely my next point. The East is positioned as Other to the West, which is, arguably, to designate femaleness (or femininity) to it. So we have an image of a female culture, and, within it, females have inscribed their own layers of meanings onto the texts that they have produced as gendered and sexed female bodies.

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Text Example 5.1 Textual Analysis of Cycle of Love

What does Boyd do in her music to encapsulate and echo this reading? While many male composers, such as Sculthorpe, also have a deep interest in the music of the East, Boyd's own relationship is particularly significant. She is a woman, and in the Australian culture that bestows outsider status on her to the extent that she is not a man. It seems that her deep interest in the music of Asia has as much to do with her passion for its music and music-making as it has for her identifying with other marginalized groups. Do we have the woman marginalized by her own

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culture identifying with an outsider? Does this fusing of two negatives in the binary sense produce something different? Overwhelmingly, I argue, it does. Cycle ofLove opens with a rapid, joyful Korean melody, aspects of which are taken up by the countertenor in bar 3. The melody transcribed by Boyd is to be presented initially on and through the breathy timbre of the alto flute, imitating the Korean flute on which it was initially produced, which, spanning an octave descent/ascent from e1 to e and back to e1, gathering all the notes of the E major scale (except for D sharp), sounding more pentatonic than major (G# is an added note), sounding Oriental and modal, emphasizing in its descent the minor third, E to C#, the perfect fourth, E to B, another perfect fourth, B to F#, a perfect fifth, B to E, and a fifth/fourth articulation, E, B, E1, as it climbs back to its starting point, unaccompanied as in the original, decorated with accacciaturas, is, to all intents and purposes, a piece of music that immediately locates the Eurocentric, white listener in the sound world of another/different culture (see Musical Example 5.3). This melody generates the material for the entire composition, creating a homophonic texture, as shown in Musical Example 5.3. In each section of the piece the opening melody is given a different identity, taking up the themes of each poem as they spiral more painfully toward the epicenter in which, as Boyd says, "the mode is permutated now into its sharpest and most painful form."67 Musical Example 5.3 Opening Bars of Cycle of Love (Bars 1-6, First Song)

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In Musical Example 5.4 (a) and 5.4 (b) the modes upon which the work is based are illustrated. The mode used in all movements (sometimes with an added G# and, very occasionally, with other added notes) comes from the Seoul region in Korea (i.e. the p'yongjo mode). The third song is based on what Boyd calls a permutation of this mode. It includes seven notes and it is highly chromatic. The nonspecific, noncadential openness, the gappings/gapings in the scalic descent/ascent of the Korean melody heard at the outset of the work are immediately answered by the countertenor initially singing solo, but not in the sense of the antecedent/consequent relationship. There is no relationship of that kind here, just a continuous unfolding of that melody heard in the opening two bars. The heterophonic texture, in which each melodic instrument elaborates upon the tune of the Other, gives the whole work a unidimensional quality, and it seems that Boyd here is searching for a sense of oneness. But Boyd's sense of oneness here is far removed from conceptions of cohesiveness in Romantic organicism. Indeed, her own paper, delivered at New Music Australia 1992 in Melbourne, was entitled "Cycle of Love—A Quest for Wholeness."68 The Western instruments in this work also create something of an ambiguity, for they are deliberately used to mimic the sounds of Eastern instruments. The free-floating, interweaving, and interlocking of instrumental lines that waft through the sound spaces of the first and last songs and the two interludes, in which the voice and piano are silent, serve to blur further the time/person/love identity, creating dreams that shift to realities that shift back to dreams. Boyd tells me that this music is like a looking glass: Boyd, looking at the Other, appropriating from the Other, is actually exploring her own identity of self, of femaleness, her own identity as composer. This identity of the composer, however, is never static, is always fragmented, provisional, and partial.69 The melodic source for the interludes, now anchored on the note B, also derives from the opening Korean melody. At the conclusion of the first interlude, a sustained B (a fourth below the opening tonal center, E) slides without a break into the second song, which, again, revolves around the note B and in which, again, there is a non-specific protagonist. Indeed, is the protagonist night, night that is a length of time? Is love a feeling of love or is it a lover visiting? Who, man or woman, is visiting/being visited? Apart from the echo of Britten's setting of the Dirge, to which I referred earlier, in the repetition of the words "Winter night" on the notes C#/D (see Musical Example 5.1), Boyd describes her setting of this song, in which the flute is silent, as follows: "The dissonant appoggiaturas interspersed in the piano are literally the crowing of the rooster, signalling the oncoming of dawn and the awakening and departure of the lover leaving the beloved in the state of ecstasy and pain described in the climactic third song."70 The abundance of cyclic patterns used throughout Cycle ofLove is a further indicator of the work's fluid, elastic qualities. In the third song this is especially so, for here the text, for the first time, makes a specific reference to the body—"fire and water in one body"—and in their musical realization these words form the high point for the work, occurring very close to the center in a bar-counting and

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real-time analysis. The high point is marked by a profound silence at bar 84, counting from the beginning of the work. There is also, as Boyd herself points out, an extension of the original mode "to include more harmonically tense and painful semitones in gapped scales in which major thirds also become prominent."71 See Musical Example 5.4(b). Gapped or gaping? According to the French feminists, the body of a woman is open, gaping, while that of a man, closed, erect. Are these painful gaping scales, created and heard with Western ears, then, resonances of this woman's body? The tension in the third, climactic song is finally relaxed in the fourth, which is now progressing back along a spiral to the starting point. In this song, the text is a metaphor for the end of spring with references to falling blossoms, and falling might also be a metaphor for the virginity lostfromthe night before.72 Indeed, the beautiful mimicry in the descending line that tumbles out of the flutter-tongue alto flute, literally, as Boyd says, depicts the images of the wind blowing and the peach flowers falling. But it also conjures up something of a flighty feeling, leaving the listener to ponder on whether a double meaning is, indeed, intended here. Like its predecessor, this song hovers over an ostinato figure in the piano, providing both mobility and centeredness to the song, while the cello's pizzicato bass, as Boyd herself makes clear, "represents the sprightly sweeping of the servant lad."73 Like the questions of the first and last songs, this one also comes to rest on something of a rhetorical question: "Though fallen are they not still flowers?" and the instrumental postlude leaves one to wonder (refer to the texts presented in Text Example 5.1). As further demonstration of the internal cyclic processes employed in Cycle of Love by Boyd, the second and fourth songs, which frame the central, painful third Musical Example 5.4 Modes Used in Cycle of Love 4(a) This mode is used in the two interludes and Song No. 5 without an added G#. In Songs Nos. 1,2, and 4, the G# is added

4(b) This mode is used in Song No. 3

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song, are almost a self-contained narrative, serving to reinforce the cyclicity of the work: "winter night," "sudden gust," "fallen" (again, refer to the texts in Text Example 5.1). Indeed, these outer songs are locked into a semitone relationship around B flat, the tonal center of the third song: the second song is hinged on B, while the fourth begins on A, moving upward to C sharp by the end (see Figure 5.1). Cycle of Love eludes any sense of closure. It begins and ends with questions, and, while occluding within the cycle a vague sense of narrative through songs 2 and 4, it generally avoids the narrative form, slipping in between and through the barriers of time, dreams, and love without ever establishing a firm identity for these things. Externally and internally, Cycle of Love is shaped by cyclic and circular patterns produced by heterophonic textures, permutations of the pentatonic Korean melody, which is given a different character in each movement, an abundance of ostinato figures, and the tonal centers that progress through E, B, B flat, A/C sharp, B/E, A/E, creating an overall cyclical structure for the work. Cycle ofLove comes full circle, as it were, ending where it began. I would argue that the female energy in Cycle of Love permeates every aspect of the work, not least because of its mediation into a score by a woman. CONCLUSION In this chapter I sail into treacherous seas, for while being buffeted from side to side by the many arguments that present themselves, despite the hazards, I become convinced that it is possible to postulate notions of feminist aesthetics. I deal with some of the most common objections to this proposition as follows: first, that a separate female difference cannot exist inside patriarchal, hegemonic structures and theoretically within the system of binary logic, which, in turn, rejects the notion of a female style; second, that it is impossible to conceive of a space for women beyond patriarchal inscription, not least, perhaps, because this, in turn, returns woman to the 19th-century conception of the transcendental where she never existed in any case; and, third, woman is not a stable category—there is no such thing as an essential woman—yet, in talking about woman as a category, we run the risk of essentializing her experience. A useful counterargument that has been employed to refute these claims is as follows. Within the system of binary logic it is possible to open up a space between the male-female divide while imagining or even fantasizing about what it means to have an alternative existence to that of men. By returning to the work of the French feminists and taking up Judith Butler's idea of gender as performance, I argue that it is possible to posit notions of feminist aesthetics, for whatever they are, they are never static or immutable. Yet, if we repeat these transgressive acts often enough, they begin to be read as if they were the norm. Moreover, whatever feminist aesthetics are, they may also take on different meanings through the multiplicity of listening/reading positions that are available or through the assortment of different habitus. Anne Boyd's Cycle ofLove was understood as a performance of

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the composer's gender. I detected a number of subversive strategies, not least, the difficulty of identifying the constituted subjects of her musical/verbal discourse. Boyd endorses the approach that I have taken to reading her work,74 yet my reading of the work is not the same as her own. NOTES 1. Luce Irigaray, "Questions," in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 130. 2. Anne Boyd, "From the 'Horses Mouths': Is There a Woman's Aesthetic? Yea or Neigh?," Sounds Australian: The Woman's Issue 40 (Summer 1993-1994): 30. 3. Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2000), 2. 4. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minnesota and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Her recent book Conventional Wisdom is a continuation of this idea. 5. Elizabeth Sayrs, "Deconstructing McClary: Narrative, Feminine Sexuality, and Feminism in Susan McClary's Feminine Endings," College Music Symposium: Journal of the College Music Society 33.34 (1993-1994): 42. 6. The earliest derogatory review of McClary's work was undertaken by Pieter C. Van den Toorn, who published an article entitled "Politics, Feminism, and Contemporary Music Theory," The Journal of Musicology, 9.3 (1991): 257-299. He has since gone on and produced a book entitled Music, Politics, and the Academy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). Ruth Solie responded to van den Toorn's initial criticism in "What Do Feminists Want? A Reply to Pieter van den Toorn," The Journal of Musicology, 9.4 (1991): 399—410. More recent reviews, many of which are negative, include Elaine Barkin, "either/other," Perspectives of New Music, 30.2 (1992): 206-233, to which McClary herself replied, "A Response to Elaine Barkin," Perspectives of New Music, 30.2 (1992): 234-239; Leo Treitler, "Gender and Other Dualities of Music History," in Ruth A. Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), 23-45; Paula Higgins, "Women in Music, Feminist Criticism, and Guerilla Musicology: Reflections on Recent Polemics," 19th Century Music 27.2 (1993): 174-192; Jenny Kallick, "Review," Journal of Music Theory, 37 2 (1993): 391-402; "Deconstructing McClary," 41-55; Mary Kay Temple, "War inna babbelogue," The Musical Times 135.1841 (July 1996). Also see Martin, Sounds and Society, 148-161, and a somewhat naive essay by Ben Watson, Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (London: Quartet, 1994), 48-61. 7. Sayrs, "Deconstructing McClary," 45. 8. Ibid. 9. See McClary, Feminine Endings, 112-131. 10. Peter J. Martin, Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 156. 11. McClary, Feminine Endings, 42. 12. Ibid., 59. 13. Ibid., 160. 14. Ibid., 25. 15. Martin, Sounds and Society, 155. 16. Ibid., 157. 17. Ibid.

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18. Ibid., 157-158. 19. See Solie, "What Do Feminists Want?" 20. See Van den Toorn, "Politics, Feminism, and Contemporary Music Theory." 21. Solie, "What do Feminists Want?," 400. 22. Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?," in Thomas B. Hess and Elizabeth C. Baker, eds., Art and Sexual Politics (New York and London: Collier Books, 1973). While positing the idea that women's art is possibly different from men's, Nochlin, however, rejects the idea that there should be a single style for women. 23. Eva Rieger, "I Recycle Sounds: Do Women Compose Differently?," Journal of the International League of Women Composers (March 1992): 22-23. 24. Judith Tick, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Composers? Or Notes on the Score of Sexual Aesthetics," International Musician 74.1 (July 1975): 6, 22. 25. Other books that identify similar problems are Carol Neuls-Bates, ed., Women in Music: An Anthology of Source Readings from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York: Harper and Row, 1982); Jane Bowers and Judith Tick, eds., Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition 1150-1950 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Karin Pendle, ed., Women and Music: A History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991); Marcia Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 26. For an insightful account of this issue, see Jamie C. Kassler, "The 'Woman Question' in Music," Sounds Australian: The Woman Composer 21 (Autumn 1989): 22-25. 27. See Ruth A. Solie, "Sophie Drinker's History," in Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23-43. 28. See Sophie H. Drinker, Music and Women: The Story of Women in Their Relatio Music (Washington, DC: Zenger, 1977 [1948]). 29. Solie, "Sophie Drinker's History," 29. 30. Ibid. 31. As Solie points out in ibid., the moon "has been associated with the female from time immemorial and in many cultures," 32. Drinker invokes the moon as an image associated with the female, presenting a biologically deterministic view of the female sex. 32. See, for example, Elizabeth Grosz, "The In(ter)vention of Feminist Knowledges," in Barbara Caine, E. A. Grosz, Marie de Lepervanche, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988), 92-104; Moira Gatens, "A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction," in Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 3-20; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). The notion that Western culture is founded on a male paradigm has already been discussed in this book. The point needs to be made, however, that it is not just women who fare poorly under the regime of dichotomies inherent in this paradigm. Men, too, are regulated and controlled by the structure as well. Thus, it would seem that both male and female subjects of patriarchy are subjected to the same codes and modes of behavior expected of them, over which they have little control. 33. See, for example, Grosz, "The In(ter)vention of Feminist Knowledges," 95-96. 34. Ibid. 35. Moira Gatens, "Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic," in Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell, eds. Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991), 82. 36. Ibid. 37. Lawrence Kramer, Classical and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1995), 19, who, in turn, refers to Julia Kristeva,

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Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 21-30; 43-71. 38. See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Polylogue, trans. Donna C. Stanton (Paris: Editions du Sueil, 1977) 75; Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, trans. A. Barrows (New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1977), 35; "Revolution in Poetic Language" in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 93. Kristeva denies that there is a specific female writing in "Talking about Polylogue," in Toril Moi, ed., French Feminist Thought: A Rreader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 111. 39. See Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 85; Luce Irigaray, Speculum ofthe Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). 40. Renee Cox, " 'Recovering Jouissance': An Introduction to Feminist Musical Aesthetics," in Pendle, Women and Music, 334. 41. Ibid. 42. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings, 123-124. 43. Ibid., 124. 44. Ibid, 116. 45. Elizabeth Sayrs, "Deconstructing McClary," 49. 46. Ibid. 47. See Sue Best, "This Style Which Is Not One," in Catriona Moore, ed., Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970-90 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994). 48. Ibid., 165. 49. See Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One. 50. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 37. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 140-141. 54. Ibid., 141. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Anne Boyd, "Cycle of Love—& Quest for Wholeness," in Sally Macarthur, ed., The Composer Speaks III: Proceedings of the New Music Australia 1992 Conference (Sydney: Sounds Australian, 1998), 52. 58. Personal communication with Anne Boyd, February 1997. 59. Ibid. 60. Deborah Crisp, "Elements of Gagaku in the Music of Anne Boyd" (Honours thesis [partial requirement], Department of Music, Sydney University, 15 October 1978); Kathryn Tibbs, "East and West in the Music of Anne Boyd" (Honours thesis [partial requirement], Department of Music, Sydney University, 30 October 1989); Joy Sotheran, "Concepts as Organising Elements in Selected Works of Anne Boyd" (Master's thesis [partial requirement], University of New South Wales, December 1992); Rita Williams, "Asian Influences Are Integral to the Music of Anne Boyd" (Honours thesis [partial requirement], Department of Music, Sydney University, October 1996). 61. In a personal communication with me in February 1997 Boyd remarked that on this point another paradox emerges because, as a single parent, she necessarily takes on the work of three adults (academic, composer, mother) without the support of a partner or an extended family.

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62. See, for example, Pauline Oliveros, Software for People: Collected Writings 1963-80 (Baltimore: Smith, 1984). Oliveros provides a definition of "mandala" on page 222 and goes on to describe how it is used in meditation and in her own work. 63. Cox, "Recovering Jouissance," 334. Here, Cox is encapsulating in a short phrase the essence of some of Irigaray's ideas. 64. Anne Boyd, "Cycle of Love—K Quest for Wholeness," 52. 65. Ibid. 66. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY, a London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 25. 67. Anne Boyd, "Cycle of Love—A Quest for Wholeness," 53. It is useful to point out that Boyd uses the word "permutation," which may not be the right word from a pedant's point of view. The reason I say this is that in this particular movement of the work, Boyd has added more notes to the mode, and, strictly speaking, this means that it cannot be a permutation of the original material. However, because there are those odd moments when Boyd allows some extra notes to enter the score, I have no problem with thinking of this as a permutation. The essential features of the mode are still retained. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. Subsequently, in a personal communication with me in February 1997, Boyd added that this is "also simply the betrayal of Christ—as Lover, perhaps." 71. Ibid. 72. Once again, in a personal communication with me in February 1997, Boyd suggested that this also has reference to Christ's words to the woman taken in adultery—"neither do I condemn thee." 73. Ibid. 74. Indeed, Boyd informed me that my analysis of Cycle of Love influenced the way in which she conceived a subsequent orchestral work entitled Grathawai for orchestra (composed in 1993 after she had read my paper, which I presented at a postgraduate seminar at Sydney University). The work, according to Boyd (and indeed, on my own inspection of it I concur with the composer), is structured in cycles and spirals.

6 Framing the Case for a Feminist Reading of Elena Kats-Chernin's Postmodern Tast-en

This permanent requirement—to distinguish between the internal or proper sense and the circumstance of the object being talked about—organizes all philosophical discourses on art, the meaning of art and meaning as such.. .. This requirement presupposes a discourse on the limit between the inside and outside of the art object, here a discourse on the frame. —Jacques Derrida1 Music unfolds in time. Time unfolds in music. Music .. . makes time audible. . . . [Music] becomes meaningful in and through time. —Jonathan D. Kramer2 For two decades traditional musicologists have been working blind to the emergence of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Yet, by refusing to let go of established paradigms of music research, they may find themselves once again at the center of attention. In his book The Illusions ofPostmodernism, Terry Eagleton argues that the contradictions of postmodernism cannot be sustained.3 The main consequence of this, he suggests, is the possibility of a return to modernism, which he believes never really disappeared from postmodernism, by way of a shift from postmodernism to post-postmodernism. In this way, Eagleton attempts to deliver a body blow to the postmodernist community, suggesting that the movement was a mistake and that it has failed dismally. According to Eagleton, the postmodernist paradigm is untenable, for the theories emanating from it are absurd if taken to their logical conclusions. In attempting to be inclusive, postmodernist approaches to knowledge, in Eagleton's view, are prone to ridicule when the questions raised by them become meaningless. The

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question, Are all views permissible, regardless of the knowledge from which they originate and in which they are based? implies the self-evident answer that, indeed, not all views are permissible. Pushing the point further, postmodernist skeptics like Eagleton would probably question the usefulness of theories that fragment the subject; purport to assert that everything is false; apparently believe that everything is imaginary; and declare that there is no such thing as truth. While postmodernism has "become the object of an exponentially increasing interest and speculation,"4 to quote Elizabeth Grosz from 1986, it has also given rise to a plethora of intellectual debates and controversies. Yet, many traditionalist musicologists remain defiantly ignorant of these debates. Despite this, it has frequently been the case that they have seen fit to hurl insults at those interested in these areas, reserving special displeasure for postmodernist feminists.5 In many ways, the problem is simply that for traditional musicologists to be able to engage properly in the arguments, they would need, as Susan McClary points out, to have a "grounding in critical theory and extensive knowledge of... political and cultural history."6 Few of them, it is worth noting, possess this knowledge or an inclination to acquire it. It is important to stress that most theorists who use poststructuralist theories do not reduce them, as Eagleton would suggest, to a series of untenable contradictions. Even if traces of modernism inevitably reside in postmodernism, the significance of postmodernist work cannot be underestimated. Indeed, as I unravel the discussion in this chapter on postmodernism and its relation to feminism, subsequently mapping a postmodernist, feminist reading onto Kats-Chernin's Tast-en, I argue for their significance in terms of the gender politics that underscore this book as a whole. POSTMODERNISM It is not my intention to take on the edifice of knowledge informing the critical debates around postmodernism. In the domain of musicology this has been done admirably by Lawrence Kramer.7 Kramer, in fact, begins his book by acknowledging that postmodernist modes of thinking in relation to music are under way, emanating from the so-called new musicology. In endeavoring to make sense of the term "postmodernism," however, he discovers that it is highly elusive in nature.8 In part, its resistance to definition explains its elusive nature. As Elizabeth Grosz9 points out, it is not simply a matter of defining postmodernism in chronological relation to modernism—beyond modernity or superseding modernism. It is also a term that designates a theoretical, political, or cultural shift. In this respect postmodernism seems to elude those who attempt to explicate it. Indeed, books on postmodernism frequently discuss it in terms of what it is not. According to Grosz, a definition of postmodernism by necessity entails a definition of its opposite, modernism. Yet even modernism, in Grosz's view, is slippery and elusive. As she continues:

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Depending on which version or definition of modernity one chooses, postmodernism will be seen either as a regression from or a supercession of the modern. If, for example, modernism is regarded as the rational, self-conscious use of scientific and technical development, it is likely that postmodern will be regarded as decadent, self-indulgent or fundamentally a conservative reaction to the modern. . . . If, by contrast, the modern is seen as a bureaucratised, sterile formalism, it is likely that the postmodern will be seen as explosive, dynamic (even if unpredictable) productivity. If the modern is seen—as Lyotard suggests—as a quest, not for pure form, but for an ineffable sublime, an experience for which there is no adequate representation, then the postmodern is not opposed to the modern, but is its logical conclusion.. .. Whether the modern and the postmodern are contradictory, complementary, consistent or mutually-implicating remains an open question.10 Adapting Jean-Francois Lyotard's use and understanding of the term, Lawrence Kramer notes that [postmodernism] designates a conceptual order in which grand, synthesizing schemes of explanation have lost their place and in which the traditional bases of rational understanding—unity, coherence, totality, structure—have lost their authority if not their pertinence. . .. Postmodernist strategies of understanding are incorrigibly interdisciplinary and irreducibly plural.11 Kramer's interpretation is important for this chapter, for it brings into question not just boundaries that separate one discipline from another but, within the sphere of modernist musicology, the boundaries that have been drawn around music in relation to culture. In this book I question the modernist project that assumes that there are self-evident boundaries between different kinds of knowledge and between music and its context. It is commonly recognized that musicology has always been intrinsically interdisciplinary, dipping into areas such as aesthetics, acoustics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and much else. What it tends not to do, however, is to put to the test the limits of the boundaries of the disciplines in which it does its work. I refuse to adopt a purely structuralist (reductionist) approach to the music that I analyze. This approach is limiting, for it views music as a self-contained, nonreferential, coherent system that has no overlaps and no fuzzy boundaries. A musical work such as Tast-en (1991) by Elena Kats-Chernin would automatically be assigned the label postmodern. It seems a convenient tag for works that are self-referential, use parodic techniques (these are often applied to their own generic conventions), and are liberally sprinkled with quotations of music by other composers and other sound worlds. Many composers reject the classification postmodernist (which is, perhaps, not surprising given that there has been a tradition by composers in the 20th century of resisting labels of any kind applied to their work 12 ). For instance, a whole edition of the journal Sounds Australian was devoted to debunking the term "postmodernism" by the mostly composing arm of Australian music. 13

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Rather than buy into that discussion, I assume, in much the same vein as Kramer and Grosz, that postmodernism, despite its elusiveness, does exist. It is a movement that has had a huge impact on critical thinking in the academy, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Methods emanatingfrompostmodernist thought, often lumped under the heading, "poststructuralism," are very different in nature and intent from positivist or structuralist methods that have accompanied modernism. In stark contrast to structuralist approaches, poststructuralism regards all boundaries as contingent. The idea that boundaries are contingent in nature and even in flux underpins my analysis of Kats-Chernin's Tast-en. My aim is to explicate this work in relation to its cultural context. Given, however, that postmodernism and feminism have had little to say to each other, one of the chief concerns of this chapter isframedas a question: Is it legitimate to interpret a postmodernist work as a feminist work when the composer does not identify herself as a feminist? On the grounds that postmodern (including feminist/postmodern) theories of readership invite multiple reading positions, such an approach, as I argue, is justifiable. Indeed, adopting this approach allows me to place more emphasis on the reader than on the author. FEMINISM VERSUS POSTMODERNISM There are intersections between postmodernism and feminism. While not pertinent to all frameworks with which feminists have been working (e.g., liberal and Marxist frameworks), both Grosz's and Kramer's interpretations of postmodernism have much in common with postmodernist, deconstructionist feminisms. In almost all respects the interpretations of postmodernism offered by Grosz and Kramer could be used to describe such feminisms. However, feminism and postmodernism part company when it comes to what each regards as the main impetus for her and his work. While acknowledging that sex, gender, and sexuality are contested sites within academic, theoretical frameworks, postmodernist discourses do not posit these as central concerns. By way of contrast, while using the tools of deconstructionist methodologies, feminisms are committed to making the subject "woman" central to their work. This is because women have traditionally been positioned on the fringes in both the public, social world of work and in the discourses of theory within the academy. So, in this respect, deconstructionist, postmodernist feminisms and postmodernism are at odds with each other. As a consequence, as Patricia Waugh points out, the discourses of postmodernist and feminist theories, both of which have ostensibly undermined the "Romantic-Modernist cultivation of the aesthetic as an autonomous realm,"14 have little to say to each other. According to Waugh, postmodern theory has drawn on "a highly idealised and generalised notion of femininity as 'other' in its search for a space outside the disintegrating logic of modernity."15 In contrast, as Waugh continues, feminism has provided its own original critique of modernity. This critique, by necessity, however, has had to draw on the postmodern aesthetic as a means of achieving this end. As she writes: "All along feminism has been engaged in a struggle to reconcile context-specific-difference or situatedness with universal po-

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litical aims: to modify the Enlightenment [Waugh locates the Enlightenment as the birth of modernism] in the context of late modernity but not to capitulate to the postmodern condition."16 Conspicuous by its absence from discussions in mainstream postmodernist discourses, women's art, by its very exclusion, as Sue Best points out, might be viewed as being not-postmodern. Best continues: "Women's art has become the veritable meat in the modern-postmodern sandwich. It has even, as Nicole Dubreuil-Blondin reports, been posited as the rupture or cusp between the two."17 This argument has a parallel in music. Women's music would seem not to figure prominently in postmodernist writing about music. Kats-Chernin's Tast-en draws on techniques that might be described as postmodern, but it is a work that would not automatically be discussed in postmodern theoretical discourses on music. As a consequence, it is situated outside the masculine paradigm that would be proposed by such an analysis, thereby, perhaps, teetering on something of a thin edge between modernism and postmodernism. On the grounds that Tast-en could be seen to occupy something of a middle ground between modernism and postmodernism (the site at which feminism itself might appear), it is more useful, in my view, to counter its obviously postmodernist characteristics with a subversively feminist reading. Theoretically, then, I argue that this work by Kats-Chernin invites a feminist reading that acknowledges the female body of its composer as an important factor in its composition. I use the metaphor of the frame to investigate the ubiquitous matter of this music. Yet, in the act of framing this work—putting a whole raft of contingent and fluid boundaries around it—I also invoke the image of the body, for the body (like the frame), physically delimited by edges and borders, acts on, and is enacted by, music. My reading of Kats-Chernin's work is framed by a beginning and ending. In the process of reading the work, I transform it into a text (an analysis), distinguishing the "text," in the Barthesian sense, from the "work" (in this case, Kats-Chernin's work). To this end I treat the text not as an object but rather, as Barthes puts it, as "an activity of production"18 or "a process of demonstration."19 The enigmatic spirit of music represented as body and as text is captured here in a postmodernist, deconstructionist, feminist frame, producing troubling and multiple questions of what it really is, about which I speak. MUSIC AND THE FRAME The lines of a frame surround, contain, and envelop. The frame is thus defining, static, rigid, and segmenting. It serves the purpose of delimiting the subject, dividing the inside from the outside, and distinguishing the important from the unimportant. The frame may also be conceived as an energy that is simultaneously liberated and emancipated (as it spills from the inside to the outside) and restricted and restrained (as it is drawn further and further into the inside). Music occupies frames. The beginning and ending of a musical work marked out by the time of its performance constitute its time frame. Other frames include

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registral dimensions that are given character by pitch, dynamics, and rhythm. Within these frames music is distinguished further by timbral textures, an infinite variety of tone colors. Myriad frames exist within the main frame of a musical work (defined by its beginning and ending), which is always determined by its outer limits (an imaginary silence on both ends of the temporal axis). Music is broken up further into frames within frames, into macro-, medial, and microframes situated on a continuum. Music always has the potential to spill out of its frame(s) in much the same way as the painted landscape is able to extend in the mind's eye well beyond the boundaries of the frame that encloses it. The frame serves the function of being inclusive and exclusive. By necessity the frame is exclusive, for not everything that is outside its borders can be contained and enveloped inside them. Yet, to invoke Derrida's "discourse on the frame,"20 the frame is always being framed while in the act of framing. While simultaneously framing the inside, the frame isframedby the outside. Lynda Nead summarizes Derrida's idea as follows: "The frame is the site of meaning, where vital distinctions between inside and outside, between proper and improper concerns, are m a d e . . . without the frame there can be no unified art object and no coherent viewing subject."21 Similarly, without the time frame, there can be no unified or coherent musical object and no coherent listening subject. Music is framed by an imagined silence. Yet, there is no such thing as pure silence; pure silence as we might imagine it does not exist. In this sense, then, the frame that surrounds music is contained by another set of frames that emanate from culture. Outside the musical frame the sounds of culture serve as a backdrop to music. Yet the sounds of culture also permeate the music itself, blurring the divisions between culture and music. Music is inflected quite specifically by its cultural context, and vice versa. Music is heard against the silent (otherwise noisy) backdrop of culture, which folds onto music. In turn, music folds back onto culture. The relationship between music and culture is always in dynamic flux; it is a fluid relationship that brings into question the point at which music ceases being music and becomes something else. It brings into question the limits of the frame itself. Tast-en, like any musical work, refers to, and is reflective of, sounds that are located elsewhere both within its immediate context and in the historical contexts that precede it. It is a keyboard composition belonging to a long line of writing for the keyboard and refers to that tradition of writing. For example, explicit references are made to Bach and Schumann, as well as to the scales, arpeggios, and chords that underpin the tonal system of Western art music. Its context for performance is the recital hall. It is highly virtuosic, commanding pianistic brilliance from its performer. It belongs in a repertory that emphasizes the dichotomy between the active performer and the passive audience. These are some of the frames that might be drawn around this work by Kats-Chernin. Later in the chapter I illustrate some of the ways in which the composer brings them into question. Now, however, I want to visit briefly the site of the body, for as I argue throughout the book, the body is crucial in the musical experience. Yet the body tends to be ignored in the main frame of musicology.

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THE BODY IN THE FRAME A history that stems back to the ancient Greeks casts the body as the enemy of the mind. From the 1970s onward, feminist work began to recognize that the mind/body dichotomy had far-reaching implications for women. The conception of the body in its association with woman and nature and the mind with man, culture, and reason, creates a frame around woman that objectifies her as the negative Other to man. This thinking about the mind/body duality in which woman is deemed inferior leads to a range of other negative associations that include not only a fear of the body but also a fear and loathing of women. This loathing and fear of the body and of women (originating in the philosophy of Plato) underscores Cartesian logic and has a trajectory that extends well into the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet, as Elizabeth Grosz and Moira Gatens have both shown, each in quite different ways, the body lends itself to alternative theoretical interpretations. These are interpretations upon which I dwell, for hierarchies that arise from the binarisms emanating from Greek philosophy are unhelpful in any project that might want to liberate women from their inferior status. As Grosz and Gatens show, it is possible to theorize the mind/body distinction in a manner that does not categorically polarize men against women. To this end, Gatens demonstrates that the mind/body distinction is not as straightforward as Western philosophy has characterized it. She draws on the experience of the amputee, who, she says, frequently talks about sensations in that part of the body that has been removed and no longer exists. On the basis of this, Gatens suggests that what the amputee imagines in the mind to exist and what in reality actually exists are two very different things. In this instance the mind seems to be playing tricks on the body. The imagined and the real are not necessarily correlated in the mind/body distinction. The situated body—lived and animate—is thus socially constructed, argues Gatens, or at least its social construction is as real as that of its predetermined biology.22 Similarly, Elizabeth Grosz, while reminding us that "[t]he body has remained a conceptual blind spot in both mainstream Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory,"23 argues that "bodies and minds are not two distinct substances or two kinds of attributes of a single substance, but somewhere in between these two alternatives."24 She invokes the image of the Mobius strip (an inverted three-dimensional figure of eight) to make her point. According to Grosz, this image has the advantage of showing the inflection of mind into body, and vice versa, "the ways in which, through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another."25 As she continues: "This model provides a way of problematizing and rethinking the relations between the inside and the outside of the subject, its physical interior and corporeal exterior, by showing, not their fundamental identity or reducibility but the torsion of one into the other, the passage, the vector, or uncontrollable drift of the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside."26 As Grosz suggests throughout her book, "bodies have all the explanatory power of minds."27 She argues that there are really only bodies. Yet, in making this argu-

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ment, she is doing something quite different from merely reversing the binary relationship that privileges the mind. Grosz's conceptualization is that of a fluid relationship between mind and body such that, in effect, there is little to distinguish onefromthe other. In my analysis of Kats-Chernin's Tast-en, I use Grosz's idea, together with Derrida's conception of the frame discussed earlier, to draw attention to the dissolution of the numerous binary divisions that the composer deliberately conjures up in the music itself. These include the tonic versus dominant, high versus low, loud versus soft, and popular music versus classical music, among many others. Kats-Chernin's project in this work seems to be one of systematically setting up a series of dualities within a series offramesthat she then proceeds to dismantle and dissolve. This has the effect of cleverly complicating what would otherwise amount to a goal-directed work leading to closure on the tonic chord. I have highlighted the fact that a number of women composers seem to want to avoid the usual form of closure with a perfect cadence. The first movement of Rebecca Clarke's Piano Trio only very fleetingly settles on an E flat major chord after tussling for supremacy with the note "A." Alma Schindler-Mahler's Ansturm ends on a dominant seventh chord, leaving its ending open and unstable, and, as I demonstrate in this chapter, Kats-Chernin also leaves her work hanging, suspended on a dominant seventh chord. Of course, there are numerous examples by women composers that adhere to the convention of closing a work with a typical V-I cadence. Conversely, there are examples by men composers who leave their music open-ended. I am not proposing a universal theory that says that women's music is different from men's music based on some of these observations, including the tendency to avoid closure. Rather, in making these observations, I am interested in thinking about the extent to which women's music conforms to accepted norms and the extent to which it deviates from these norms. This is significant, for I am suggesting that it is quite possibly the case that women's music is misunderstood and therefore ignored on the grounds that it does not adhere to normal practice. FROM WORK TO TEXT IN THE FRAME In the process of reading Kats-Chernin's Tast-en, I actively transform her work into a text. I produce, in the Barthesian sense, a readerly/writerly text. It is the kind of text that is formed as a process of reading (i.e., of analyzing her work). This idea gives birth to the reader, but to a reader who is always in the process of reading. It gives birth to a reader who has never arrived at a final destination. This, in turn, gives rise to the idea that multiple readings are possible. As Barthes writes of the literary work: The work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library, for example), the Text is a methodological field... the one is displayed, the other demonstrated ... the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules (or against certain

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rules); the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse ... the text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an acti production. It follows that the text cannot stop (for example on a library shelf); its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, it can cut across the work, several works).28 The moment that we begin to speak about music, any music, we begin to transform it into a readerly/writerly text. This is true for any discussion of the arts. The only way we are able to make sense of any art is to talk about it or to write about it. As Barthes says elsewhere: "Language . . . is the only semiotic system capable of interpreting another semiotic system."29 According to Barthes, the intervention of the reader by definition transforms the work to a text.30 As a text, the work becomes something else. Furthermore, according to Barthes, pleasure is derived from reading a work and transforming it into a text. As Patrick Fuery puts it: "It is in pleasure that so many of these other aspects become interconnected . . . through pleasure the text disrupts and challenges meaning . . . the pleasure of the text turns reading into a creative act and generates plurality in meaning."31 In the moment when the work becomes a text, it becomes inflected by desire, for "as the reader creates the text by making sense of it, and in doing so signals the 'death' of the author, so the reader is created by the text in this process."32 This is the impetus for my reading of Kats-Chernin's work. Earlier I suggested that Kats-Chernin's work, belonging to a history of keyboard performance that stems back to the earliest work ever written for the keyboard, more specifically, to the repertoire for solo piano performance emanating from the 19th century, would be performed in a manner that would see a passive audience polarized against an active, virtuoso pianist. I now want to suggest that my role as analyst—as reader who transforms this work into a text—is an active one. The work acts on me, and I act on it. There is a fluid relationship between me as active analyst and the work as active performance. My task is to transform Tast-en into a text, rewriting it by illuminating some of its meanings. My analysis is one of many that might be undertaken of this work. Above all, my reading and writing of this work derive from my desire to know it. In the moment when the work becomes a text, it simultaneously becomes inflected by desire. Now I move closer to the work by introducing its composer, Elena Kats-Chernin. A frequently posed question at the outset of any musical exploration is: Who is the author/composer of the work? Yet, as Barthes proposes with the death of the author, the author recedes into the background when the work leaves her or his pen, taking on multiple lives at the hands of the interpreter. Brief Biography of Kats-Chernin A short sketch of her life up to the time of her return to Australia in 1994 may appease some curiosity about her. Elena Kats-Chernin (b. 1957), of Russian ori-

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gin, spent her childhood and formative years as a musician in that country, first in Tashkent, where she was born, and later in Moscow, where she attended the prestigious Gnesian Musical College.33 In 1975 she and her family migrated to Australia, and she entered the Diploma Course at the Sydney Conservatorium, studying piano with Gordon Watson and composition with Richard Toop. Recognition came early for Kats-Chernin, for while a student in Sydney, she was a participant in the first Summer School for Young Composers convened by the Australian Music Centre. In the same year she was granted a national fellowship for composition studies with Richard Toop and a German Academic Scholarship (DAAD) to study with Helmut Lachenmann in Hanover, West Germany. She spent a number of years working as a composer in Germany and from 1985 almost exclusively as a theater composer. In 1994 she returned to Australia and has been based in Sydney ever since. Unlike some of her female colleagues, however, Kats-Chernin is highly successful when it comes to being commissioned and having her works performed. Despite the fact that musical composition in Australia is predominantly a male concern, Kats-Chernin has been successful in terms of commissions, performances, and recordings of her music. In a personal communication I asked her what made her a popular composer, given that she is a woman in the music world, which favors men. While she was unable to provide a definitive answer to my question—her first response was to say, "I don't know"—she went on to suggest that perhaps it had something to do with her foreign name.34 It is well known that early in her compositional career another Australian composer, Miriam Hyde, considered changing her name to Hydekovsky when personnel from the music publishing firm Allans suggested that she take a male pseudonym for the publication of Forest Echoes, her first volume of piano works in 1936. Hyde believed that a foreign name would have been just as appropriate as a male name, for in addition to discriminating against women, Australia has had a long history of shunning its homegrown talent.35 Elena Kats-Chernin is not one who balks at taking risks, even in the face of being reviewed unfavorably. She claims to be on a never-ending journey of seeking out new ways of making the old sound new. At the same time she likes to imagine the psychology of her audiences. She does this from the point of view of her own psychology, of her own responses to music. If a particular pattern or sound sends shivers down her own spine, she continues with the idea; if it does not, she discards it. Kats-Chernin told me that she keeps only her strong ideas. Part of the reason for this has to do with her being a single parent of three young boys. According to Kats-Chernin, she has to be economical with both her time and her use of musical ideas since her busy domestic life gives her little time to write. FROM WORK TO TEXT: TAST-EN FOR PIANO (1991) Tast-en, a modified German word that, when loosely translated, means "the keys" and at the same time "to feel with the fingers" (there is no exact translation

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for the word, according to the composer36), was composed in 1991 in the space of one week. The work represents a new beginning, for in the five years preceding its composition, Kats-Chernin had not composed any music whatsoever for the concert hall. According to the composer, the shadow of her former teacher, Helmut Lachenmann, had loomed large in the background, giving her a kind of writer's block. She felt that she was unable to add anything beyond the extant music of her teacher, and she simply had no incentive to write concert hall music. According to Kats-Chernin, Tast-en owes a small debt to Georgy Kurtak's Quasi Una Fantasia. Against the backdrop of high modernist music Kurtak's score is laid out somewhat daringly in the key of C major. Kats-Chernin saw this as a risk-taking strategy on Kurtak's part and admired him for it. But the greater part of Tast-en's inspiration is from Kats-Chernin herself. The time frame for this work of 182 bars is approximately 10' 23",37 The work divides further into two large frames of approximately equal duration, producing a binary structure. In section A, there is a further division into two subsections, which I label "a" and "b." Table 6.1 shows the macro-organization for the work. A conventional analysis of this work would probably view it as straightforwardly postmodern in style (thus refusing an analysis by gender to explain some of the unusual strategies deployed by Kats-Chernin). Its pianistic gestures and techniques parody and borrow from wide-ranging sources. These include relatively obscure quotations of Bach and Schumann in the choralelike sections (bars 154-164 and 177). There is a vague suggestion of a waltz in bars 49-52. The composer sets up a pseudoflamenco rhythm, which is stated at the outset of the work and reiterated in bars 60-61 and bars 87-89, thus making a subtle reference to popular music. There is an extensive use of added notes in a manner not dissimilar to that of Debussy and Messiaen (for example, bars 27-30 and bars 128-153). Sounds from culture find their way into this music in the form of bells (bars 58-61), which have already been presaged in bar 19. There the composer sounds the pitches "D" and "A" together to produce a stark tonal contrast to F sharp and C sharp, which had been explored extensively on the entire first page of music. The work is peppered with open fifth sounds as well as an array of dazzling, pianistic gestures such as brilliant arpeggios and scalar passages. Extensive use is made of registeral and dynamic extremes, many of which threaten to break out of the Table 6.1 Macrostructural Plan of Tast-en Section A (Bars 1-116)

Section B (Bars 117-182)

575' ' duration

4'98" duration

Subsection a (bars 1-57)

Subsection b (bars 58-116)

2' 14" duration

3'11" duration

Idea generated from subsection b in section A (bars 117-182) Climax area (bars 138-148) but dissipates Approximately 7,0M-7'30M duration

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frames in which they are contained. Interruptions to the forward motion of the music come in the form of chords based on harmonics, which, in turn, create a layering effect. Overall, the diatonic system (tonality), which privileges the tonic/ dominant relation, is set in opposition to atonality. Throughout, the music crosses between the boundaries of entertainment and serious music. To view the work as straightforwardly postmodern is to miss the important point of its composition by a woman. I would argue that the preceding subversive strategies could be read in feminist terms. In addition to providing a highly original critique of piano music, parodying the abundance of pianistic gestures that belong to a particular tradition of writing for the instrument, the composer continually undermines the hierarchies that emerge out of the binary relations that she creates in the music itself. She draws attention, for example, to the divisions between her particular cultural context for this music. Writing the work in Europe in the early 1990s, she would have heard the ancient sounds of bells ringing, sounds that are unavoidably heard in that part of the world. It is not surprising, then, to discover that these sounds are drawn into the work. Their first reference at bar 19 is ambiguous because of the simultaneous allusion made to the violin in tuning mode. It is also set as a highly dissonant (atonal) relation against an otherwise tonal context set up on a dichotomy between F sharp and C sharp. The bell sound here, momentary and abrupt, serves to interrupt the flow of music being explored in another key. I want to suggest that Kats-Chernin continually transgresses the musical conventions that she proposes, and this has as much to do with the fact that she, a woman, mediates her sound world to score as it has with her adoption of a postmodern mode of appropriating men's music and men's styles. Kats-Chernin maintains that she is not a feminist. Like many of her female colleagues, she prefers simply to think of herself as a composer. Her palette in Tast-en is rich in color, imbued with sounds that stem from a male tradition of music-making. Yet, in her search for new sounds or in her challenging of old sounds (e.g., bell sounds, quotations of Bach and Schumann, the use of the flamenco rhythm, and so on) to sound new, she also invites her feminist spectator/auditor who feels/hears/reads her work to join in the search, to join in her pleasure. I want to explore, now, the opening page of the music in more detail, taking a snapshot, as it were, of the first few frames of the piece. The work begins on F sharp (which has a tritone relationship—the devil's interval—to the key of Kurtak's piece) and samples this note in each register, ascending and descending at breakneck speed {prestissimo) in unison octave leaps. This pattern (see Musical Example 6.1), repeated over and over again, is relentless, refusing to give up in the some 20 seconds that it takes for its performance. At a microlevel, it consists of five frames, all of which are repeated. I have arbitrarily segmented the work so that each frame here equates with each bar of music. A single pitch, F sharp, is executed in unison octave leaps, ascending, then descending over the entire range of the keyboard (from F sharp an octave below the bass stave to F sharp an octave above the treble stave). During the course of this opening material a series of oppositional relationships is already advanced as fol-

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Musical Example 6.1 Opening Five Frames of Tast-en

lows: low versus high, ascent versus descent, soft versus loud, and accent versus nonaccent, the latter creating a pseudoflamenco rhythmic effect. In this last respect, a subtle reference is made to popular music, which becomes polarized against classical music during the course of the work. In these first five frames it is not clear whether there is an established key for the work, for as is well known, the major/minor relationship cannot be established in the absence of a third degree in the chord. Yet, in frame 6, following on from a brief, silent pause (scored as a minim rest over which is placed a fermata), Kats-Chernin provides some momentary relief from the F sharp tonal center around which there seems to be an obsessive preoccupation. Frame 6 blurts out a rapid ascent (which fails to descend) of octave leaps on C sharp (from an octave below the bass stave to C sharp, an octave above the treble stave). See Musical Example 6.2. On introducing C sharp in frame 6, the composer has unequivocally introduced the dominant relation to F sharp, thus adding to the array of binary relations already established (recounted earlier). This tonic/dominant dyad is to become a particularly significant feature in the entire work. Yet, as I show in my discussion of this work, Kats-Chernin seems deliberately to challenge this obdurate dichotomy by subverting the usual procedures of its resolution. As is well known in traditional, functional harmony, the dominant must resolve on the tonic (or its equivalent) to provide a sense of closure. I first heard Tast-en performed by Lisa Moore (the performance of which is included on Lisa Moore's CD entitled Stroke3*) at the Sydney Spring Festival of New Music in 1993 and was immediately struck by the relationship of the beginning to the closing bars. Not having seen a score of the work at that point, it was nontheless apparent that Kats-Chernin had ended on the dominant chord to the opening F sharp tonic. See Musical Example 6.3. In this particular context, it seemed to me to be unusual for the final, closing frame of the work to have been left unresolved, open-ended, and gaping. As I listened, I craved to hear the tonic, for that was what I had been trained to expect. But a tonic was not forthcoming. The C sharp dominant seventh chord, the flattened seventh in the chord, in particular, longing for resolution to the sixth degree over the tonic chord, was avoided. Instead, this chord, the C sharp dominant seventh, was left hanging at the end of the work, dying away in its own time, taking what seemed like an eternity to do so.

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Musical Example 6.2 Bar 6 of Tast-en

Musical Example 6.3 Opening and Closing Bars of Tast-en

The entire work thus sounds as if it has not ended properly. Yet in its deliberate resistance to end properly, it seems that the composer is signaling that the piece could begin again, that it does not want to end, that it could begin again and again, recycling itself without end, without closure. As she herself states in her rather cryptic program notes to the compact disc version of the work, she is interested in "the farewells to the sounds that don't want to end—thus a kind of funeral choral."39 Moreover, composed during the period when her father was ill with cancer, Tast-en also seems to embody those tensions that are associated with the life/death dichotomy.

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Throughout the work Kats-Chernin reacts against the proscenium arch of conventional musical containment, exhibiting herself on the less confining precinct of the thrust stage. The dominant chords, which proliferate in this work, refuse containment by succumbing to a tonic or equivalent resolution (e.g., to chord VI or vi), or if such a resolution is accomplished (as I shall demonstrate later), it is immediately undone by returning to the previous chord. In the passages in which a V-vi-V is sketched out, the music becomes "crablike" in its resistance to move forward to explore tonal territory, which would otherwise be demanded in the framework of standard functional harmony. It is as if the thrust stage lacks a catwalk to move the music onward. See Musical Example 6.4. In these measures there is the suggestion that a series of applied dominant chords might ensue, being organized in a traditional sequential arrangement, yet the composer completely upsets any possibility of this occurring. On a close inspection, it is found that these chords have not been arranged in typical pairings, consisting of an applied dominant chord followed by an automatic resolution to an intended tonic or equivalent. Instead, they are arranged into groups of three, some of which overlap with preceding and proceeding bars. As I suggested earlier, the dominant chords thus feel as if they are moving both forward and then immediately backward. This technique defies the rules of conventional harmonic procedure, for the goal of the tonic or its equivalent chord is obstructed. The composer avoids, even abandons the typical orthodoxy of hierarchical organization to structure her musical material. In her program note Kats-Chernin Musical Example 6.4 Bars 63-74 of Tast-en

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states that she is playing a game in this work. As she puts it: "I am interested in the game aspect of perception between the heard and the actually played tones."40 The game aspect in this work, however, goes beyond a simple reading on postmodern principles. As I suggested earlier, a feminist interpreter may read her game with the tonic/dominant relationship (to the extent that the entire work itself refuses closure by ending on the dominant seventh chord) as being a deliberate and conscious attempt to break down the hierarchical structure of traditional harmony (which may also be read as a male construct). Much feminist work, as I have argued, is concerned with eroding hierarchical principles of organization. The work divides into a perfectly balanced ratio of 1:1 (Section A to Section B). This, however, as I now argue, is upset by the way the composer treats her climax area for this work (see Table 6.1). At the beginning of the second half of the work (Section B), Kats-Chernin seems to indicate that a goal or climax is needed. Indeed, the climax area is positioned at approximately 0.684, which is close to the golden mean (0.618). On the face of it, the music would seem to conform to masculine notions of structure as discussed in the previous chapters. But in keeping with my observations about the climaxes for the works by Lutyens, Clarke, and Boyd, in particular, I want to suggest that Kats-Chernin does nothing more than allude to a climax in this section of the work. In what appears to be the climax area from bar 138 to bar 148, occurring in the right location according to convention, namely, at around two-thirds of the way through the piece, the composer, in fact, declines to provide a definite climax, once again subverting conventional practice. Beyond the likely place of its occurrence, the composer continues to quote the material that she used to achieve her climax, thus suspending its effect. Indeed, it would seem that Kats-Chernin persists with the climax material in the so-called aftermath of the work. As a consequence of prolonging the climactic material, dissolving it gradually, the climax itself evaporates. To invoke an analogy to Gatens' amputee discussed earlier, the music feels as if it should be climaxing—all the sensations for climax are in place, indeed, in the right place—but instead it turns out to be nothing more than an illusion. That part of the music, like a limb removed from a body, is felt only as a sensation. CONCLUSION Tast-en plays a number of mind games with its listening audience. Yet, as with the Mobius strip described earlier, a model that "has the advantage of showing the inflection of body into mind and mind into body, the ways in which, through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another,"41 this work by Kats-Chernin twists or inverts its material so that normal musical perception, experienced as a hearing/feeling/desiring of standard conventions, is disrupted. It is as if the piece is turned inside out. The composer does not offer a straightforward inversion of the dominant paradigms of musical composition by simply upending them and leaving their hierarchical structures in place. Instead, Kats-Chernin dissipates the boundaries around these structures. This, it could be argued, occurs even in the fi-

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nal dominant seventh chord. Because a resolution on the tonic is so strongly desired, the tonic (with only one note in common with the dominant seventh chord) begins to be heard in the dominant seventh, thus playing a game with the mind. On one level, Tast-en is typical of the postmodern idiom in which it is written. On the other, my feminist reading points to the subversive strategies employed that may have a connection with its female composer. Above all, Tast-en must be heard in order to appreciate the feminist position that I proclaim here, for much of musicology's work is concerned with the visual medium of the musical score. In tandem with traditional Western philosophy, which has privileged the mind over the body, music analysis has tended to gloss the sound of music as negative—indeed, as feminine Other—to the score. Elizabeth Grosz's metaphor of the Mobius strip for the mind/body relation (the idea of torsion of the psychical into the physical) can be mapped onto Kats-Chernin's piece. The sounds that make up its ephemeral existence in the short, 10-minute frame of time offered in this particular performance by Lisa Moore are as intellectually satisfying to the analytical mind as they are bewitching, taunting, and teasing to that very same analytical body. The music is full of excesses, threatening to break out of its frames. This particular music, heard and seen, is vulnerable at the margins, threatening to break through the barriers of register, pitch, dynamics, and time. Just as the boundaries in the postmodernist, feminist paradigm that exist outside this work have been challenged by theorists working with the knowledges that have emanated from it, so Tast-en, a product of this very context, challenges and subverts conventional practices in music composition. My reading has thus illuminated some of the ways in which this work can be read quite explicitly as a product of its cultural context. My reading of Kats-Chernin's work, a performance of sorts, itself framed by a beginning, middle, and ending, is, I believe, in the Barthesian sense, an activity of production that invites multiple interpretations in response to the one on offer here. This particular text is thus a farewell without an ending, signaling that it could begin again and again, recycling a stream of ideas without end, without closure. To that extent, it parallels the work upon which it is discursively dependent, for Tast-en is without closure; indeed, it seems to announce its rebirth at the moment of closure, thus recycling itself for eternity. NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 45. 2. Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities Listening Strategies (New York: Schirmer Books; London: Collier Macmillan, 1988), 1. 3. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 4. E. A. Grosz, "Introduction," in E. A. Grosz, Terry Threadgold, et al, eds., Futur*F Excursions into Post-Modernity (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of S ney and Futur*Fall, 1986), 7.

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5. See, in particular, the reaction to Susan McClary's work by Pieter C. Van den Toorn, "Politics, Feminism, and Contemporary Music Theory," The Journal of Musicology 9.3 (1991): 257-299. 6. See Susan McClary, "Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition," Cultural Critique (Spring 1989): 65. McClary makes this point in relation to a discussion on music analysis as it is traditionally carried out by theorists of complexist, modernist music of the 20th century. 7. See Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1995). 8. Ibid., xi. 9. Grosz, "Introduction," in Futur*Fall, 8. 10. Ibid., 9-10. 11. Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 5-6. 12. For example, Steve Reich disliked the label "minimalism," and Schoenberg refused the term "atonal." 13. Sounds Australian: Postmodernism: What Is It? 33 (Autumn 1992). 14. Patricia Waugh, "Modernism, Postmodernism, Feminism: Gender and Autonomy Theory," in Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, a Division of Hodder and Stoughton, 1992), 195. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Sue Best, "This Style Which Is Not One," in Catriona Moore, ed., Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts 1970-1990 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin in assoc. with Artspace, 1994), 154. 18. Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text," in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1979), 151. 19.Ibid 20. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 60. 21. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 6. 22. Moira Gatens, "A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction," in Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 3-28. 23. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 3. 24. Ibid., xii. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Barthes, "From Work to Text," 156-157. 29. Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice," in Image-Music-Text, 179. 30. Summarized by Patrick Fuery, Theories of Desire (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 65,68. 31. Ibid., 68-69. 32. Ibid., 71. 33. Kats-Chernin's biography is constructed from her curriculum vitae and from program notes written for the performance of various works. 34. From personal communication with the composer, May 1996. Moreover, in a personal communication with Anne Boyd in February 1997, Boyd added that Kats-Chernin's success might also be attributed to the fact that she is "a jolly good composer. Her music has presence, energy and a genuine sense of integrity."

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35. Personal communication with Miriam Hyde, June 1996. 36. See Kats-Chernin, sleeve note to CD recording of "Tast-en" in Stroke (Sydney: Tall Poppies, TP040). 37. The duration for the work is based on the performance of it by Lisa Moore on the CD Stroke. According to Kats-Chernin, however, Moore plays the work more slowly than she had intended. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, xii.

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Sexual Signatures: Feminist Aesthetics in the Music of Moya Henderson after the Death of the Author

I don't set out to write a woman's music specifically. How could a woman do this consciously? Surely, it is a quality of a woman's music that takes care of itself. The only way I see of nurturing it is to writefromthe deepest levels of my experience and personality. Hopefully this ensures that the work is profoundly human and therefore well able to speak to women and men alike. But does my being a woman, and consequently different in culture as much as gender, give idiosyncratic qualities to the work itself? We hardly know what we are talking about here. Western art music has been men's music for so long. It may take many years before women are able to exploit the richness of their difference; or maybe that is already happening and only the recognition of it is lacking. —Moya Henderson1 This chapter is concerned with the author (composer)/reader (analyst) dichotomy. I draw on the work of Elizabeth Grosz and Terry Threadgold,2 both of whom offer valuable insights to the debate concerned with feminist aesthetics, while at the same time positing the division between author and reader as a problematical one. Two musical works—Stubble, a music theater piece for soprano and talking table (1975) and Sacred Site for grand organ and tape (1983)—by Australian composer Moya Henderson (b. 1941) are analyzed later in the chapter to advance somewhat differently than in previous chapters the notion of feminist aesthetics in music. While understanding that the terms "female," "feminine," and "feminist" often overlap, I adopt Grosz's definitions of each of these in order to clarify what it means, in particular, to produce a feminist text. According to Grosz, a "woman's texts" are those "written by women, largely for women." "Feminine texts" are "those written from the point of view of a feminine experience or in a style culturally designated as feminine." "Feminist texts" are "those which self-consciously

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challenge the methods, objects, goals, or principles of mainstream patriarchal canons."3 I argue that Henderson's music exemplifies the notion of feminist aesthetics according to the definition postulated by Grosz. They can be understood to be self-consciously parodying, thereby offering a challenge to, mainstream patriarchal music. Yet it is also the case that Henderson is a woman who composes as a woman. Although her music may not have an exclusively female audience in mind, it is possible that it nonetheless offers a different perspective on music from that which might be offered by a man. Furthermore, in addition to being understood as female and feminist, Henderson's music theater piece Stubble, in particular, might also be understood as an exemplar of the feminine. This is a work in which the subject matter is presented from the point of view of a feminine experience. Henderson is a woman composer who is not afraid to acknowledge this fact. She also claims to be a feminist. In the spirit of much feminist work, I explore the extent to which her compositions challenge the conventions of mainstream music-making. I consider Henderson's life and works in terms of Threadgold's notion that as texts they "are constructed of other texts, other voices, the voices of the heteroglossia of culture and the social system."4 With Grosz I want to tease out answers to the questions: "By what criteria can we say that a text is feminist, or feminine? How is a feminist text to be distinguished from the patriarchal or phallocentric mainstream within which we locate it and where it finds its context? What is distinctive about it such that we can say that it is subversive or transgressive of its representational milieu?"5 SEXUAL SIGNATURES What does it mean to identify a text as feminist or feminine? According to Grosz there are at least four broad types of answers to the question of a feminist or feminine nature of the text.6 These are: "1) the sex of the author; 2) the content of the text; 3) the sex of the reader; and 4) the style of the text."7 Following a careful examination of each of these criteria, she concludes that none of these answers on their own are satisfactory. First, she notes that the sex of the author— that is, the idea that a text produced by a woman will automatically be feminist or feminine—is a common theme in feminist literature. Feminists who emphasize the sex of the author would argue that a text's feminine status is dependent on who writes it, so the author herself becomes the object of investigation. Grosz notes, however, that this kind of approach leaves the texts themselves largely unexplained. Moreover, as Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida would all argue,8 as summarized by Grosz: The author's intentions, emotions, psyche, and interiority are not only inaccessible to readers, they are likely to be inaccessible to the author herself... a text cannot be the expression of an individual's interior, nor simply the representation of some social exterior, for it is an act of writing, the material manipulation of signs, discursive structures, textual elements, an act of inscription, with its own protocols, modes of constraint and regulation.

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The author's signature, as Derrida argues, is not a full presence that somehow stands outside the text, while finding itself reflected inside the text as a mark of the author's propriety, ownership over, or singular connection with the text. Neither quite outside the text nor at home within it, the signature is a trace resonating and disseminating the textual exterior with its interior.9 Grosz argues that the signature of the author "is not self-contained and given, cannot be a presence to itself, for it always requires a counter-signature, a reception, an other to sign for it."10 Moreover, a female author may write like a man—according to prevailing patriarchal norms—so being a woman, argues Grosz, is no guarantee that an author will produce a feminine or feminist text. Second, Grosz suggests that some feminists have focused on the content of the text, what the text is about, or what it refers to as a clue to its feminist nature. In my discussion of Anne Boyd's Cycle of Love, I bordered on falling into this trap, for part of my interest in this song cycle to texts by five anonymous Korean women was the way in which the subject matter or content might be read as feminine. Yet, as Grosz points out, the problem with dwelling on the content of texts presumes "that women are a largely homogeneous group who share a number of experiences and perspectives that make the basis for representations."11 It is thus not feasible to argue that texts dealing with women's concerns are feminine or feminist, for there are as many topics or sets of objects that are available to women and that women might choose to use in their texts as there are women. Furthermore, as Grosz continues, even when women do identify a set of women's issues—as McClary did, for example, in her reading of Janika Vandervelde's Genesis II12— "there is nothing to prevent men not only from speaking about this experience, but also becoming experts regarding it."13 Focusing on the content of the text exclusively therefore reveals little, if anything, about its feminist persuasion. Third, Grosz notes that Barthes' "death of the author" gives birth to the reader, and, as a consequence, any text can be read from a feminist perspective. I argue that my feminist interpretation of Kats-Chernin's work is legitimate on precisely these grounds. The superiority of feminist readership positions may be liberating for feminist theory. Grosz notes, however, that the sex of the reader gives rise to an important problem. Whereas an author-centered approach privileges the author, the reader-centered approach merely reverses this dichotomy, privileging, instead, the reader. It does nothing to dismantle the binary opposition of author/reader. Moreover, Grosz suggests that the "ideal reader" replaces that of the multiplicity, that multiple readings of the text are possible.14 She suggests that "while there may be no singular or correct interpretation of a text, there can be inappropriate or incorrect interpretations."15 According to Grosz, then, the most important drawback with the reader-centered approach to the text is that it gives rise to a "knowing, controlling consciousness, a rational, intentional subject for whom language is simply a means of expression of ideas."16 The reader becomes the master of the text, able to reveal its true nature, and this paradigm resembles the author as master in reverse.

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Finally, much has been written about the style of the text, that is, not what is written but how it is written. As I have discussed in previous chapters, the French feminists, especially Irigaray and Cixous, have alerted their readership to what an antipatriarchal, distinctively feminist style of writing might be like as it relates specifically to women's writing, and, in my reading of the Boyd piece, in particular, I set about exploring their ideas in relation to music. In my stylistic analysis of Cycle of Love I showed how the work avoided closure, and used a stream of gestural syntax and cyclic patterns in a manner that, perhaps, only a woman might use them. I suggested that its appropriation of Eastern modes and style, the music of the Other as outsider to Western music, is an identification by the composer with another marginalized group. I went further to show that Boyd's piece was not structured according to the male ideal, for example, by adopting the golden mean proportion. I argued that Boyd was perhaps instinctively situating her climax closer to the center of the work than at the golden section. The fluid, ambiguous style of Boyd's musical language, then, was viewed as being feminine and feminist and thus subversive. The kind of experimentation that challenges stylistic norms is by no means confined to the work of women or feminists. As I have already noted, Kristeva identifies feminine writing in the work of a few male avant-garde writers—for example, Joyce and Kafka—and Grosz goes on to make the point that the avant-garde across a range of artistic media and genres is male-dominated. As she says, "many male writers, artists, painters, and film-makers also advocate subversions of textual norms."17 Grosz argues that feminism's alignment with the avant-garde to explore the potential of transgressive textual practices is in itself not necessarily feminist. These four broad areas in which feminists have attempted to recover feminist or feminine aesthetics from texts created by women are thus incomplete. As Threadgold puts it, while the masculine author may be dead, it seems that in the quest to identify a uniquely feminist language/writing, "the feminine embodied subject of liberal feminism threatens to usurp his place."18 Threadgold continues: "Women's language will be a language which does not observe the laws of syntax. It will be characterised by a plurality of meanings and a breaking down of the unity of signifier and signified, a subversion of the notion of the unique meaning of words."19 Along similar lines to Grosz's observation that transferring privilege from the authorial to the readerly position of the text maintains the distinction between the author and reader, Threadgold, too, recognizes that women's language, in its difference from men's, reaffirms and reproduces the dichotomies between speech and writing and between syntax/grammar and intonation. In turn, this would seem to reverse the binary distinction between male and female in a way that maintains a hierarchical "articulation of masculine and feminine in language."20 So why, as Grosz asks, do we need to distinguish between a feminist and a nonfeminist text? What is really at stake in making this distinction? Certainly, power is an issue here. But is it necessary, as Grosz asks, to make arigid,clear-cut distinction between a feminist and nonfeminist text? Because such a distinction maintains a

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hierarchical division between feminist and nonfeminist, Grosz argues that it is more useful to think through this issue in terms of what she calls "discursive positioning" whereby the complex relation between the text and the corporeality of the author and the reader comes to be understood as follows. The body of the author marks the text, leaving residues or traces of her or his body on the text. In turn, as a material object, the text produces effects in marking the bodies of both the author and readers. Grosz argues that there is, at all times, a complex, fluid relationship between the text and the author, the text and the reader, and the author and the reader.21 Drawing on the work of Emile Benveniste and Jacques Derrida,22 Grosz proposes a femininity applicable to texts that takes some of the elements from each position but also deals with what is left out. She notes that "every text exceeds its author," yet "there remains a process of inscription, some trace of the process of production on the text."23 The trace is important, for it allows us to identify an author while at the same time allowing the author to recede, as the reader becomes foregrounded. In other words, a fluid relationship or an enfolding process takes place between the author and the reader. According to Grosz (borrowing from Derrida), there are three modalities in the signature itself. The first of these is that the author signs the text with her or his proper name. The second deals with the question of style, for a text produced by an author bears marks of individuality, idiosyncrasy, distinctiveness, which, as Grosz says, "tie an individual not to the text's border or frame [as happens when the author signs her or his name] but to its interior."24 The third modality is concerned with "the text's outside with its inside, and of its inside with establishing its borders and thus its outside, in short, its fundamentally folded, 'invaginated' character."25 According to Grosz, Derrida's work has important implications for feminists, for it allows us to reinstate the feminist subject without necessarily falling into the traps of privileging the author. This also ties in well with Butler's idea that through a kind of iterative, repetitive process, again summarized by Grosz, "bodies and discourses produce and transform each other."26 I have dwelled at length on Grosz's treatment of the notion of feminist aesthetics, punctuating it with some pertinent observations by Threadgold, for it is the best analysis of the problem that I have found. It is critique that informs the analysis that I undertake of Henderson's music. It allows me to explore the relations between the texts that Henderson produces and the norms that govern their production in their particular contexts. I argue that Henderson is a composer who makes explicit her challenge to the patriarchal norms that govern the production of contemporary music in Australia today. While she does not necessarily set out to write in a deliberately different style, I argue that her idiosyncratic and distinctive musical language is nonetheless subversive. "SIGNING ON" THE COMPOSER: MOYA HENDERSON (B. 1941)27 Moya Henderson was bom into a large, Irish-descended, Catholic family in the New South Wales country town of Quirindi, near Tamworth, in 1941. Along with

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Anne Boyd and Elena Kats-Chernin (the two other Australian composers discussed in this book), she is regarded as one of Australia's leading art music composers. From an early age Henderson excelled in both piano and singing and entered the Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne in 1959, completing one year of the diploma of music course. To the surprise of friends and family, however, she decided to enter the Sacre-Coeur order as a nun in 1960, a decision that saw the end of her musical training for the next nine years. During these nine years of "doing time" as a nun (as Henderson frequently puts it these days), she became a school teacher and was sent overseas during 19671968 to France, Italy, and the United States to further her religious studies. Soon after her return to Australia she sought to resume her musical training. In 1969 she convinced her superiors to allow her to undertake part-time studies in French and musical composition at the University of Queensland. This led, in 1970, to the commencement of a full-time music degree. Studying with composer Colin Brumby and specializing in music education, Henderson graduated in 1972 from the university with first-class honors. It was then that she decided to embark on a career that has since seen her emerge as one of Australia's most prominent composers. Of her somewhat belated studies at the University of Queensland, Henderson remarked that these years "cemented my lifelong interest in writing music which (before) I had never taken seriously. I came to grips with the idea that I could be a composer. That was a reality for me."28 In 1973 she formally severed her ties with the Sacre-Coeur Order. Recognition came early in Henderson's career when, in 1973, she secured an unprecedented position as composer-in-residence in the inaugural season of the Australian Opera at the Sydney Opera House. The appointment with the Australian Opera provided an important training ground on which the composer was to build. Toward the end of 1973, Henderson was awarded a DAAD Scholarship (German Academic Exchange Student) and a Travel Grant from the then-Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. This enabled her to study new music-theater with its distinguished exponent Mauricio Kagel, as well as composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Cologne Musikhochschule. At the end of 1976 Henderson returned to Australia and based herself in Sydney, where she has worked as a freelance composer ever since. As she commented: "I felt that to produce insightful and relevant music-theater, I had to be back where I belonged."29 Henderson's engagement with the social world of Australian music is complex. An important theme running through the composer's life in the last twenty years is her feminism. Throughout two decades of managing a successful composing career in Australia, she has been a passionate champion of woman's rights in the sphere of musical composition. This has meant that, on occasion, she has found herself walking a fine line between balancing a positive relationship with the commissioning bodies and performance institutions on which she depends for a living as afreelanceartist, and criticizing these very institutions for their hostile attitudes toward women. Other significant themes are discourses of excellence, national identity, environmental issues, racism, and religion, specifically, Catholicism. In

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the following discussion I expand on Henderson's engagement with feminism and with her attitudes to the environment, Aboriginally, and national identity. HENDERSON AND FEMINISM Henderson views the attitudes of the musical establishment toward women as being "just a tiny notch further on from where the church is in its attitude to women." 30 On one of the few occasions that Henderson spoke about her convent experience she said: I'm not wildly religious at all. I think I'm spiritual. But I don't think the Catholic Church is it for spirituality. It's such a male-dominated terrain. . .. It's had a huge effect on me, probably on my ability to survive, and also because I've lived in a ghetto. I've been ghettoized and brainwashed.. . into something so totally other. It probably makes you more aware of how culture works [and] how society is set up to exert control.. .The artist, above all other people I think, has the function, even the duty in society to know all the pitfalls and traps and makings of what society is, and I think I'm . .. astutely aware of what that is. I think it's not surprising that there are a lot of artists [who] come from ghettos: there are lots of Catholics in the arts in Australia, there are lots of Jews in the arts, and we're finding already a cross-fertilization from people who have come here from other cultures more recently . . . there's going to be a fantastic flowering from what we've experienced in the 70s and 80s. And the people who are first or second generation from other countries will have their turn and make an extraordinary impact on the culture, and it's precisely because they have this advantage, that I have [had] by being ghettoized in a convent, that one culture kind of neutralises the effect of another, so you're free. You can be the real anarchist, and so the real artist.31 Henderson's sense of independence and subsequent alignment with feminism seem to have strong roots in her convent experience. The composer characterizes herself as a feminist who champions equal rights. On leaving the convent in 1972, she all too soon discovered that, as in the church, men dominated the world of musical composition. Embracing a liberal feminist version of feminism, she believed that if she were to succeed, she would need to compose music that was as good as, if not better than, that of her (male) colleagues. Moreover, having no female role models in music available to her at that time, Henderson, like many other women who have studied musical composition, had to accept male models because they were the only ones on offer. Among these are those who determine quality and standards. Henderson strives to meet the requirement of excellence in musical composition in her own music. Yet paradoxically, she is all too aware that the word "excellence," as it is frequently bandied about in musical (and other artistic and bureaucratic) circles, is used to privilege a masculine aesthetic that is rooted in 19th-century ideologies. So Henderson readily accepts the idea that there is a standard in composition, and she is happy to comply with it, but she also recognizes that standards of excellence are powerful constructions that can be used as tools of oppression.

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Henderson's musical models in her formative years, like those of other women, had been predominantly male models. Her teachers had been, respectively, Colin Brumby, Mauricio Kagel, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the latter one of the most celebrated modernist composers in the 20th century.32 Henderson's music, which in both process and product takes up the frameworks of her male models, might be regarded as being nothing more, in effect, than a reflection of the dominant (male) music that is heard everywhere. By and large, she has always used, and continues to use, conventional genres and instrumental/vocal forces, and her music, becoming increasingly more tonal (as the new tonality movement has asserted itself more and more), draws on all that surrounds her in the world of sound. It could be argued, on this point alone, that Henderson is indistinguishable from her male colleagues in the world of musical composition. It could be argued that she readily accepts and complies with male values and applies them to her music. Perhaps "she" does not have a style of her own; perhaps her style is a (poor) imitation of "his" style?33 To return to Grosz's "Sexual Signatures," however, I want to suggest otherwise, that, indeed, Henderson does have a distinctive style of her own. Yet, as Threadgold reminds us, Henderson's texts, like all texts produced by men and women alike, also bear the marks of many other texts,34 which sometimes are referenced and reflected quite explicitly, while at other times more obliquely. In other words, aspects of the styles, compositional methods, musical conventions, genres, and so on, all of which circulate freely in the contemporary musical milieu in which Henderson works, find their way into the music itself. Recalling Bourdieu's notion of the habitus, these texts and voices are part of the collective unconscious of the culture. Such a proposition might elicit the idea, then, that there is no such thing as an original, distinctive text. Yet, this proposition, as both Grosz and Threadgold would claim, is futile, for as Threadgold puts it in her discussion of language: "Language is not a straightjacket. This is precisely what Eco means when he speaks of every semiotic intervening in the universe of semiosis.... He is making new meanings not just by changing words but by changing whole patterns of lexico-grammar/semantics."35 As in language, composers (authors) and analysts (readers) constantly negotiate music, making new meanings from old meanings, changing meanings when old sounds are used in different contexts, and interpreting these meanings in many different ways. In short, new musical meanings do not come about by changing just the sounds themselves but by changing whole patterns of musical grammar/semantics. The relation between the interiority of Henderson's music with its context, and vice versa—that is, the trace from the inside, which bears the marks of individuality, to the outside (the context)—allows us, I argue, to locate Moya Henderson as an important subject of feminism. Furthermore, I would claim that in her textual practices, the composer abandons the straight, liberal approach to feminism, in which she champions equal rights, to take up a more complex position that has more in common with the deconstructive feminism discussed in the previous chapter.

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As 1 show in my readings of two of her works—Stubble and Sacred Site— Henderson's music is distinctive and is different in many respects from the dominant (male) music that surrounds her. Henderson has always worked as a subversive artist, writing against the traditional patriarchal paradigms or, to borrow the phrase from Roland Barthes, against "the grain of the [dominant] voice."36 Despite the fact that patriarchy constrains Henderson, then, she intervenes, using humor as perhaps her most potent device to undermine these structures. Men, too, as I have previously pointed out, use subversive and reactionary forms in the production of their music. Indeed, this was highlighted in my discussion of Julia Kristeva's version of feminism. I would suggest, however, that Henderson's subversiveness is not simply a matter of a self-reflexive response to dominant forms in which she offers alternatives to these forms, though it is partially that. It also challenges the oppositional, hierarchical relations that underpin Western culture and privilege the intellectual elite as a site for the reception of her music. Henderson consciously sets out to dismantle the binarisms inherent in her music, which, in turn, gives rise to a new and different kind of musical aesthetic. Henderson is all too aware of her difference in Australian composition. She recognizes that she is different because she is a woman in culture. She recognizes that this difference has had some negative effects on her career, for she has constantly had to struggle to maintain her professional practice. She also acknowledges that her music is different in some respects from that of her male colleagues because she is a woman. On this issue she says: I don't set out to write a woman's music specifically. How could a woman do this consciously? Surely, it is a quality of a woman's music that takes care of itself. The only way I see of nurturing it is to write from the deepest levels of my experience and personalit Hopefully this ensures that the work is profoundly human and therefore well able to speak to women and men alike. But does my being a woman, and consequently different in cultu as much as gender, give idiosyncratic qualities to the work itself? We hardly know what w are talking about here. Western art music has been men's music for so long. It may take many years before women are able to exploit the richness of their difference; or maybe that is already happening and only the recognition of it is lacking.37 Henderson has always been vocal with regard to the elimination of discrimination, and, in terms of professional opportunities, she seeks equality with her male peers. By championing equal rights, while simultaneously acknowledging that as a woman she is different in patriarchal culture, Moya Henderson presents herself as a paradoxical, yet by no means unusual, subject in feminist discourse. In other words, she knows that she must play male games if she is to succeed in gaining commissions, performances, broadcasts, and so on. But she must also be true to herself, to write from her heart, as it were, and this, it would seem, entails articulating something of a different voice through the texts that she produces as a composer.

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HENDERSON, THE ENVIRONMENT, ABORIGINALITY, AND NATIONAL IDENTITY Henderson is passionate about the Australian environment and the Aboriginal culture, which she perceives to be inextricably linked with the land and the environment. As she says, explaining why she felt she had to return to Australia following her period in Germany: "As soon as I was back here, all the other aspects of my Australianness began to assert themselves. Soon I was writing music that tied me in with Aboriginal culture and spirituality and that's increased and intensified over the years."38 By then Henderson had begun to identify with a kind of spirituality that was far removed from the church, instead being influenced by the Aboriginal culture and its intimate relationship with the Australian land. Like many other Australian composers, Henderson began to use this as a source of inspiration for her music. This might be seen as problematic, given that she has always principally been an urban dweller. This problem is often raised in relation to Peter Sculthorpe, who, when writing Kakadu, admitted that he had not been to that far northern part of Australia that was said to inspire the composition.39 Henderson is among a number of Australian composers who borrow from the indigenous music as a source of inspiration for their music. In recent times, however, attention has been drawn to the fact that when white Westerners appropriate from a subordinate culture, they are, in fact, disfranchising the subordinate culture. Those who see appropriation in this negative light would challenge the idea that equality can be achieved through mutual agreement from both sides. As Edward Said writes in his influential book Orientalism^ and borrowing from Said, Susan McClary observes in Georges Bizet: Carmen*1 that when a culture is Othered and made subordinate to a dominant culture, the dominant culture becomes empowered and legitimated. Borrowing from the Aboriginal culture, in this view, could be seen to further the cause of colonialism. On the other side of this argument, however, is the view that it is permissible to borrow from a subordinate culture when there is a mutual agreement or a contract given on both sides. This would seem to be in line with a contractarian model of social change. Basing her idea on Carole Pateman's work,42 Roslyn Diprose writes: Society is founded when an insecure natural freedom is exchanged for equal (although restricted) civil freedom, a freedom and equality which is supposedly reproduced when entering into particular contracts. . . . [T]hat contract is . . . the paradigm of free agreement.. . based on the atomised, disembodied concept of the individual. That is, as the individual is said to be the proprietor of his person, then relations with others must be created in such a way as to protect this property right. Contracts supposedly allow for the use of another's property by mutual agreement, to mutual advantage and with security of time.43 As problematical as this idea is, for the power relations between Aboriginal and white Australian culture have never been equal, Henderson has nonetheless al-

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ways been sensitive to the issue and has always made a point of contacting Aboriginal elders or spokespersons before embarking on projects that involve the use of their musical or sacred property. In these situations, Henderson has always tried to ensure that there is mutual agreement. There has been a long-standing tradition in white Australia to use particular cultural symbols and artifacts—the Sydney Opera House, the Sydney harbor bridge, Aboriginal art and music, kangaroos, koalas, Victa lawn mowers, Hills clothes hoists, Vegemite, and so on—as a way of rendering the nation with a unique and distinctive identity. This enterprise has had far-reaching benefits on an economic level. Used to create a market outside the nation, Australian goods, including its cultural goods, are used as bargaining forces around the globe. This has had real effects in constructing an Australian identity, whatever that really is. While not consciously caught up with the Australian identity barrow, Moya Henderson has been perceived by some commentators to be pushing something of the traditional idea of Australianness in her music. As Andrew Ford remarks: There is the abiding fascination for the non-conformist spirit of white Australia, which can be clearly discerned in works such as Larrikin's Lot (1982), her orchestral setting of poe by Patrick White in Six Urban Songs (1983), and her adaptation for voice and piano, of l from Dorothy Hewett's autobiography, Wild Card (1991). Running parallel to these wor is a series of pieces which celebrate Aboriginal Australia. These range from music inspire by Aboriginal mythology and music—such as The Dreaming (1985) for string orchestr and Waking up the Flies (1990) for piano trio—to overtly polemical pieces, such as t piano concerto, Celebration 40,000 composed against (rather than for) the Australi bicentenary.44 Henderson's appropriation of Aboriginal music can be read in terms similar to Boyd's appropriation of Asian music. As a white woman, already positioned on the margins of the masculine Australian music culture, it seems that Henderson identifies with another marginalized group in Australian society. Yet, I would argue that Henderson's version of nationalism, as it manifests itself in her musical compositions, is intimately connected to her feminist concerns. COUNTERSIGNING THE MUSIC OF MOYA HENDERSON In this part of the chapter, I "perform" readings on two works by Moya Henderson—an early piece for music-theater and a work for organ and tape—reflecting on how these works intersect with the complex intertextualities of her life. Henderson's music emerges as an invisible pathway that connects the composer to the environment in which she works. The themes that become her leitmotiv are mapped onto, and become embedded in, her music. In addition, her music is connected to the musical languages and practices of Australian music in general. It intersects with the compositions produced by her colleagues in the world of Australian music, and, to that extent, it shares features in common with their music.

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Yet, her music retains particular threads and characteristics that are distinctively and differently her own. In this sense, Henderson's style is unique. Far from being uprooted from the social and political contexts in which she works, the composer threads these concerns into her music. She is, as it were,framedby, and embodied in, the musical texts that she produces. Yet, to the outsider, only the trace of her signature remains on her music as it leaves her studio to be heard or read in multiple contexts by its many listeners or readers. My readings of Henderson's works, to quote Marcia Citron, "are not intended as an explanation that accounts for everything that goes on musically in the [music] . . . nor even everything that might be considered the most significant aspects of [it]."45 The readings are "an exploration of possibility."46 It is possible that Henderson's music subverts the dominant representational models that inform her music. There are many layers of meaning encoded in her musical texts. As an analyst who has complained that women's music has for so long been omitted from the discourses of music analysis and music theory, it is my intention to provide a different kind of framework that draws on feminist and postmodern theories. Along the lines of Citron, my readings are meant to add a layer of meaning to the many interpretations that are possible. I agree with Citron that it is possible, even likely, that my interpretation "may partially contradict important ways of viewing the work."47 But this is not necessarily a drawback. As Citron says, it can, in fact, "be an advantage, for it persuades one to view the work as a complex field of signifies, of diverse kinds: historical, stylistic, aesthetic, and ideological."48 At the same time, however, I am interested in how Henderson negotiates the established musical discourses in which she chooses to work. What tensions, even contradictions, emerge from the choices she makes? How is she, an embodied subject in musical discourse, represented in and by her music? What polarities emerge, and what are the tensions between them? Stubble for Soprano and Talking Table (1975) An early music-theater piece, Stubble for soprano and talking table (male voice), composed for the Second Kagel's Students' Concert presented at the Cologne Musikhochschule in 1976, might be viewed as a spoof on feminism as it was practiced in the 1970s. In this work Henderson creates the scenario of a young woman preparing for a dinner date with a young man. The piece opens with the young woman humming inconsequentially while applying makeup to her face. She stops humming after approximately 25 seconds and begins to sing: "He's taking me out to dinner." Soon she begins to shave her legs with an electric shaver, complaining: "If I didn't prepare myself I'd look like a gorilla! . . . Sometimes my mother calls me a grrrrilla." She shaves under her arms (each of which has been fitted with larger than life, black furry tufts). With a pair of tweezers she begins to pluck hair from her nostrils and eyebrows. At the very end of the piece she attacks her nipples. This coup de

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theatre includes a sight gag of real-looking breasts from which she extracts yards of black thread, cutting it off by the arm's length. In this work, the hair ritual may be viewed as important for two reasons. First, the ideal female body is supposed not to show any signs of maleness. It should be pure. It should not show aberrations of any kind from an idealized construction of it.49 Second, the presentation of the female body in an ideal state means that it has the potential to attract the opposite sex. The dinner date is not just a simple matter of eating a meal with a male companion. As Henderson puts it: "When the young male pays for the meal he automatically expects payback in the form of sexual favors."50 Since the second-wave movement of the late 1960s after an initial period of deconstructing the Western intellectual tradition, feminist theory has sought to reconstruct women as having agency and power. Women's bodies subordinated to men's intellects have been sites on which many feminist campaigns have been fought. As Moira Gatens says: "The right to autonomy of the female body has been argued in relation to abortion, contraception and birthing methods."51 Understanding the way in which the binary system operates is important in this reading of Stubble, since it is a work that plays with the stereotypes of femininity and masculinity. It potentially undermines the feminist ideology that was concerned with reconstructing women as important and forcible agents of discourse and she deliberately draws attention to the mind/body distinction, creating a musical narrative for her female character who is bordering on hysteria. In Stubble, the woman's intended male date does not actually materialize. Instead, he is portrayed as a rational mind and an authoritative counselor, a deep voice without a body that emanates from the woman's makeup table. The sight gag of the talking table is presented early on in the piece. In fact, there is an extraordinary incongruity presented here, for while the young woman sings almost hysterically about her hair—uttering lines such as, "If all of it were allowed to grow I'd look like an ape" and, "I'd look exactly like an ape just like a hairy monkey"—she begins working the mouth of the talking table in dexterous counterpoint to this discourse. The table becomes her ventriloquist doll, uttering random, but gory, quotes from cookbooks. For example, while she sings, "If all of it were allowed to grow I'd look exactly like an a-a-a-a," the man's voice from the table says, "Hold over an open fire, singe off remaining hairs." Other lines from the talking table include, "tastes good in a stew," "singe the bird, singe the bird," "cut off ear, cut out the brain," and "cut out eyes with a sharp knife." What is being projected, in effect, is the woman dancing to the male tune. The culture is a male construct, and women comply. The male in this piece, then, is a disembodied subject whose controlled, low voice emanates from a loudspeaker concealed inside the talking table. Ironically, while she controls the mouth of the disembodied male subject, he also controls her. She is anxious to please him, to make herself beautiful, to yield to the man. In contrast to the invisible, but audible, man, the woman in this piece is presented as embodied and awkward, a stereotype of femininity and mindlessness.

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She sings a disjointed melody that progressively strains for the higher register, which becomes excruciatingly shrill and incomprehensible toward the end of the piece. This clumsily embodied subject in Henderson's piece, the female singeractor, is a powerless hysteric who seems to be nothing more than a sexual object. Henderson's construction of the woman in Stubble has a resonance with Susan McClary's reading of the female protagonist in Arnold Schoenberg's monodrama, Erwartung (Expectation or Anticipation) of 1909, a work that, in a sense, invites comparison with Stubble, given Henderson's brush with the lineage of German formalism through her training with Kagel and Stockhausen. According to McClary, Schoenberg depicts a madwoman who has killed her lover and is raving and wandering around the landscape. The music is madwoman's music, atonal, dissonant, disjunct. There is no possibility here for grounding the pitch because she has killed it.52 Stubble is not a preserial, expressionist work; this description is, however, often tagged to Erwartung. This is an obvious observation, for it does not belong in that category of works by the Viennese triumvirate (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) that precedes serialism, a style of composition that has since seen each in the triumvirate admitted into the musical canon. Nonetheless, Stubble does deploy a similar musical language to that of the preserialists, using dissonance, disjunct melody, and atonality as shown in Musical Example 7.1. This kind of melodic language permeates Schoenberg's Erwartung. The text of Stubble is in everday language and preoccupied with the banal—"He's taking me out to dinner"—creating something of a rupture between the musical and verbal discourse. While the text of Erwartung also uses ordinary language, in comparison with Stubble it is fully encapsulated in, and reflected by, the dissonant, disjunct style of the music. As a monodrama, Erwartung is like Stubble in that it is a work principally for a solo female singing voice that often resorts to Sprechstimme. Yet, whereas Schoenberg's work has since come to be regarded as a masterwork, Henderson's as yet is not situated in the canon. It might be thought that Schoenberg's music is more substantial in content when compared to the fairly flimsy, though deliberately thinly woven, hysterical solo vocal line of the woman in Stubble, punctuated by the deep voice of the man. Henderson's style, while perhaps subconsciously Musical Example 7.1 Melodic Line in Stubble, First Bars Following Initial Humming

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borrowing from Schoenberg's, is unique, for it is as if she is deliberately poking fun at the male tradition in which she is located. Moreover, while Erwartung was not accountable in terms of a rational compositional method at the time of its writing, music theorists, in particular, Allen Forte, have rescued works of a similar ilk written in the style of German expressionism from their bodily associations by playing mind games onto their construction.53 The more interesting question when comparing these two theater works, however, is whether Henderson, like Schoenberg, portrays an entirely undisciplined, irrational, helpless, and powerless woman. Henderson describes her as being, "flighty, excited, happy and trapped."54 From a surface reading of Stubble, the indications might suggest that Henderson does portray her that way. It might seem that there is no attempt made by Henderson to rescue her female protagonist from the subordinate position that she occupies in relation to the rational, disembodied (transcendent) voice of male authority. Yet, I would argue that this work offers a critique of the plight in which women find themselves, including in works such as Erwartung. Erwartung is a serious, heavy, and emotionally disturbing piece of music. In stark contrast to this, Stubble is frivolous and funny. Schoenberg has no reason to liberate his female character singing the hysterical discourse of his monodrama, for he would see no reason to do so. Here I do not mean to particularize the composer, blaming him for not rescuing his female protagonist. Schoenberg is a product of his time, and, to that extent, he reflects the views of that time. But, on reflecting on Schoenberg in relation to his particular context, it is important to understand how his madwoman's discourse became rationalized by stylistic innovation and, to that extent, how Schoenberg himself became an epitome of this paradigm. In contrast to Schoenberg, it might be thought that Henderson would have every reason to rescue the woman in her drama, for even at the time of writing Stubble in the mid-1970s she described herself as a feminist. If we dig below the surface of this work, we will find that Henderson does, indeed, rescue her protagonist from her seemingly powerless state. Using sharp, satirical humor in this work, Henderson alerts her audience to the ridiculousness of the situation. Set up along similar lines to a situation comedy, Stubble uses two sight gags as a powerful means by which she humorously draws attention to the negative implications of the male/female stereotype. These grotesque representations are significant for, apart from making the audience laugh, they have a dislocating effect. On the one hand, the man is presented without a body. Yet it could be argued that when the toothy mouth opens to speak, the man is actually transformed into a body, an awkward and grotesque one at that. On the other hand, the two very unattractive, hairy breasts of the woman become the focus of attention. The woman appears as all body—a pretty, feminine one at that. Yet, the styrofoam breasts are unreal; they are not part of her material body. In their reconstructed state, the breasts could be seen to reduce the woman to a disembodied state.

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Depicted as unreal, the young woman in Stubble might be seen perhaps to transcend her body. In contrast, the male character who is not seen but heard, might be seen to do the opposite of this, for as the piece unfolds, he seems to become situated inside a real, but very grotesque, body. Yet, this is not what happens, for if the styrofoam breasts transform the female into an unreal state, then we can hardly argue that the "toothy mouth" transforms the male into a real state. In effect, then, what we have presented in this work are two unreal bodies. Instead of merely inverting the dichotomy of masculine virility and feminine beauty in this work, Henderson glosses over these stereotypes, creating a very humorous piece that effectively saves the woman from the unwanted outcome. A hit-and-run55 theater work, Stubble, written and dedicated to "All those emancipated in the Year of the Woman: 1975,"56 exudes a particular brand of feminism. This dedication, too, is a textual sign of the parody to follow. Feminism had not yet developed a coherent theory of the body, nor had feminist theorists begun consistently to dismantle the binarisms that permeate symbolic order and that constrain female subjects. If Henderson had merely inverted the masculine/feminine paradigm at the time of writing this work, it would have been consistent with feminist theory at that time, for then its concerns were about liberation achieved through equal opportunity. Henderson, however, has dissolved the binaries in this work and created a positive image for her female protagonist. Stubble is a reactionary work that destabilizes stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity. Furthermore, it is a work in which Henderson scoffs at the notion that everything will be made right for women in one year. Sacred Site for Grand Organ and Tape (1983) Composed in 1983 for the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Opera House, Sacred Site is a potentially grand piece for a grand occasion. In this work Henderson takes on a commission featuring one of the most revered icons in patriarchal music, the organ, but her interaction with this instrument is always ambiguous. She both marvels at it and pokes fun at it. She writes against the paradigms of the complex counterpoint tradition for the instrument57 and sends up the pomp and circumstance associated with it by introducing emu eggs, didjeridoo, and clap sticks from the Australian bush, as well as Jew's harps from European folk music, to sound just as imposing and mystical as the organ itself. She does this by tape-recording herself performing these instruments together with sounds of trams and tram bells and amplifying them electronically. The tape, an integral part of the overall conception of the piece, adds a dimension of multiple presence to the work, exploring Australian culture across a 40,000-year time frame. Yet, the work is not an appropriation in the postcolonial sense, for it is a collage that ruptures collocational norms and, I argue, offers its own critique of white masculinity. All the incongruities of the players—ancient, mythical, Australian Aboriginal culture; trams and car horns of industrialized, white, Westernized society; Western art music's forms and traditions; two of its

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composers, Prokofiev and Janacek; and even the most sacred of icons in Australian society, the Sydney Opera House itself and all its associated tourist trade—are thrown into relief by procedures that involve shifts from single to split focus in this extraordinary piece of musical narrative. The title is an intentional pun, and, in her preface to the work, the composer describes "three spiritualities of Bennelong Point": the time before 1770 and white settlement; the days of Sydney trams when Bennelong Point was a tram depot; and after 1973, when the Sydney Opera House became the cultural center of Sydney. Sacred Site is like a musical palimpsest, a juxtaposition of new elements on the old, and, resorting deliberately to a documentary style, the composer provides the widest possible coverage of her material (and here is the palimpsest in action), switching from sharp focus on one idea to split focus through a simultaneous multilayering of two or three totally different sound worlds. Henderson's feminism of equality in this piece is translated into a music that is shaped with hitherto unsuspected democracies. She takes all her sound sources back to the same starting line. All have the potential for an equal opportunity to participate in the discourse, with none being advantaged before others. Henderson makes the point that to put the Jew's harp on the same footing as the grand organ is to be poking fun at an instrument that is normally revered. The structure of Sacred Site is operatic, which, as David Kinsela notes, is "continuously evolving, kaleidescopic, multi-layered and ever-changing."58 There are four main sections, which, in turn, resolve into six smaller periods. The material for the entire work is generated from a steady stream of gestural syntax. In this respect it is not unlike Anne Boyd's Cycle ofLove, Rebecca Clarke's Piano Trio, or Elisabeth Lutyens' O Saisons, O Chateaux!, which also generate material from gestural syntax. The first three periods of Sacred Site, making up the first and longest section of the music, are connected thematically and, as Marcia Citron's reading of Cecile Chaminade's Piano Sonata also shows, contain all the important material for the work. Table 7.1 shows the basic organization of the work. What is interesting here, in terms of the work's structure, is that, like Chaminade's Sonata, Sacred Site is also top-heavy. In other words, the ratio approximates 5:1:1:2. Overall, the work is highly theatrical, speaking through declamation, dance, and song. It relies on interventionist strategies that constantly head the music off in ever-changing directions, yet a sense of unity is achieved throughout with recurring references to dance music, the sounds of tram bells and car horns, a waltz (a transcription of a Prokofiev theme from his opera War and Peace59), and a toccata. The discursive, improvisatory style deployed by Henderson plays humorously and cleverly with all its disparate sound sources. The work opens with an assertive, chromatic, embellished, earthbound melody, perhaps reminiscent of a typical Aboriginal tune (if only in the use of a stepwise, descending melody), which is set against a transparent, linear counterpoint (see Musical Example 7.2). In Musical Example 7.2,1 provide a skeletal outline of the melody below Henderson's opening two measures, depicting the chromatic descent. It is also interesting to note the tritone relationship between G and D flat in

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166 Table 7.1 Henderson, Sacred Site SECTION 1 121 measures Period 1 mm.1-37

Period 2 38-100

Period 3 101-121

linked thematically (ABA1)

t

SECTION! 34 measures

SECTION 3 23 measures

SECTION 4 57 measures

Period 4 122-155

Period 5 156-178

Period 6 179-235

lament/disruptions

dance/toccata

dance/disruptions

1

t (ABCB'A1)

1

1

t

T

reference to lament (109-111)

T

toccata (51-100)

1

T

1 t

.

1 1

1 1

f201-33) t

1

1

this melody. In much of her work, Henderson makes extensive use of the tritone, which is almost never used in a conventional manner. At the half-closure, Henderson intervenes with a symbolic gestural reference to the Aboriginal culture. The sound of the didjeridoo is heard, and this calls a temporary halt to the live performance only just begun. She then introduces a cyclic pattern, a swirling ostinato over the bass notes B flat and D flat, an intertextual reference by Henderson to Janacek's Glagolictic Mass. These two notes were played by her alemba (a percussion instrument invented by Henderson to simulate the sound of church bells) in a performance by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra of the Janacek work in the Sydney Opera House in 1983 (see Musical Example 7.3). The whole of the first episode unravels as a long and fragmented rhetorical statement. The progress of the opening theme is constantly foiled by gestural occurrences: interventions of cyclic patterns, Aboriginal sounds, excessive speed and dynamic (loud/soft) changes, pauses, and so on. Indeed, these gestures predominate throughout the work. Even potential climaxes are avoided in Sacred Site. The fast and furious toccata-like part in Section 1 subverts the traditional notion of climax by resisting the temptation to provide an ascending bass line (a rising bass line is used conventionally as a powerful device for building musical climaxes). Instead, Henderson opts for a static tonal plateau: the music feels as if it is rising (going somewhere), but for much of the time it remains firmly rooted upon an E flat tonal floor (bars 51-100). In Chapters 5 and 6, respectively, I note that both Boyd and Kats-Chernin also resisted using a climax in a traditional manner in their works. Henderson is another composer who, I would argue, subverts this convention. There are two potential climactic areas in Sacred Site, both of which are located in the toccata-like sections (mm 51-100, Section 1, period 2; and mm 201-235, Section 4, period 6). As in the

Sexual Signatures Musical Example 7.2 Opening of Sacred Site (Bars 1-2)

Musical Example 7.3 Cyclic, Swirling Ostinato in Sacred Site (Bars 2-3)

first toccata, the second also avoids climax in the same manner (see bars 201-235). Here Henderson grounds her material for much of the section to a static floor over the bass note E. By prolonging the climax, perhaps arguably even presenting it in the very last bar of the work, Henderson transgresses the conventions of climax. Henderson quotes a brief Prokofiev theme in three parts of the work (see Musical Example 7.4). The overall structure of Section 2 (period 4) is in two parts, the first of which (A) is a short dance of some 12 bars (bars 122-134). The second part (B) is an arc structure comprising 20 bars (bars 135-155) as follows: A

car horns (bars 135-137)

B

reference to Prokofiev theme (bars 138-142)

C

hurdy-gurdy losing speed (bars 143-148)

1

B

reference to Prokofiev theme (bars 149-152)

A1

car horns (bars 153-155)

As a clever, humorous strategy, perhaps used to send up the pomp and circumstance of Western art music, Prokofiev's theme is honked out of the way very smartly with a volley of car horns (see Musical Example 7.5).

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Musical Example 7.4 Prokofiev Theme from Three Sections of Sacred Site

While the devices that Henderson uses in this work are the same as those that might be used by men (e.g., cyclic patterns and appropriated and parodied music), they can be viewed here, I believe, as deliberately destabilizing the prevailing patriarchal orthodoxy of organ composition. This is why Henderson's status as a woman composer cannot be ignored in the way that the work is read/heard. CONCLUSION In this chapter I demonstrate that it is possible to work with a notion of feminist aesthetics by adopting Grosz's model, the idea of the enfolding process that takes place between author and reader and between the inside and outside of the text. I show that it is possible to read Henderson as a differentiated subject by undertaking a close reading of an early music-theater work Stubble and the later organ piece Sacred Site. As the countersignature to the signature of Henderson's proper name, I read these works, even if provisionally, against the dominant, patriarchal paradigm of music analysis and, in Stubble, against modernist music, specifically that of Arnold Schoenberg. Both signatures (Henderson's and my own countersignature), however, can never tie her text to any fixed origin or provide it with a definite destination. It is never possible, as Grosz points out, to fix and control meaning, indeed, to know in total the author's intentions or that of the work's re-

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Musical Example 7.5 Volley of Car Horns (Bars 153-155)

ception in all contexts of its performance. My reading has shown that Henderson's music challenges the patriarchal norms that govern and control it and, to that end, I argue that it is subversive. Other readings may place a different emphasis on this music. In this chapter, however, my readings of Henderson's music provide just some insights from all that are available and possible. Inevitably, my readings show only some of the possible effects of her music. It is argued within theories of difference that the most compelling solution for Henderson in resisting "subsumption as an undifferentiated universal subject" (to borrow from Ruth Solie)60 is to be a subversive artist. Moya Henderson's music has never been included in mainstream analytical literature. Some critics have referred to her music as naive,61 a term that can be taken on several levels, of course, including its connection with the late 19th-century-early-20th century art movement known as Naivism. Moreover, one reviewer made discriminatory remarks about her work Celebration 40,000 on the basis of her sex.62 Henderson's output is made up of an eclectic assortment of music, ranging from music-theater, song cycles, opera, and orchestral and chamber music, to radiophonic dramas. She is an original, idiosyncratic voice in Australian music. Hers is the kind of music that is accessible yet deserving of serious attention in the academy. NOTES I adapted the chapter title from Elizabeth Grosz, "Sexual Signatures: Feminism after the Death of the Author," in Space, Time and Perversion (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1995). 1. From an unpublished note by Moya Henderson, December 1990, reproduced in Sally Macarthur, "Music as Lifestyle, Politics as Music: Moya Henderson," Contemporary Music Review: Reclaiming the Muse 11 (1994): 141.

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2. Grosz, "Sexual Signatures," 9-24; Terry Threadgold, "Language and Gender," Australian Feminist Studies 6 (Autumn 1988): 41-70. 3. See Grosz, "Sexual Signatures," 11. 4. Threadgold, "Language and Gender," 42. 5. Grosz, "Sexual Signatures," 10. 6. Ibid., 11. 7. Ibid. 8. See Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1979); Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101-120; Jacques Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). 9. Grosz, "Sexual Signatures," 13. 10. Ibid., 13-14. 11. Ibid., 14. 12. See Susan McClary, "Getting Down off the Beanstalk," in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 112-131. 13. Grosz, "Sexual Signatures," 14. Many male medical practitioners, for example, would regard themselves as experts in the area of childbirth. 14. Ibid., 17. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 16. 17. Ibid., 17. 18. Threadgold, "Language and Gender," 62. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 65. 21. Grosz, "Sexual Signatures," 18. 22. Grosz refers to Emile Benveniste's work on subjectivity in Problems in General Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961) and Jacques Derrida's work on the signature in Signeponge/Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 23. Grosz, "Sexual Signatures," 19. 24. Ibid, 20. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 21. 27. Moya Henderson's biographical sketch is based on the composer's curriculum vitae, 1994 (three versions comprising a long version, 1994, an abridged version, 1994, and an abridged update, October 1994). In addition, I have written a number of biographical accounts of the composer as follows: Macarthur, Moya Henderson (unpublished 16 July 1990); Macarthur, "Music as Lifestyle, Politics as Music," 141-145; Sally Macarthur, "Moya Henderson in Profile," 2MBS-FM Programme Guide (January 1990): 7-9; Sally Macarthur, "Moya Henderson" in Brunhilde Sonntag and Renate Matthei, eds., Annaherung V: an sieben Komponistinnen (Kassel, Germany: Furore-Verlag, 1988), 43-52. This account is also based on information gleaned from personal communication with the composer. 28. Moya Henderson, quoted by Janet Donald, "Composers with Determination and Resilience," Women Australia (February-March 1986): 60. 29. Moya Henderson in Genefer Luff, "Moya Henderson," Sounds Australian: The Woman Composer, 21 (Autumn 1989): 20.

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30. Moya Henderson cited in Andrew Ford, "Up the Hilly End of the Playing Field," Australian Society (September 1991): 24. 31. Transcript of an interview with Moya Henderson by Genefer Luff, unpublished, 21 March 1989. 32. Henderson did not embrace Stockhausen's aesthetic, and, while she was exposed to his version of modernism, she was already questioning its relevance to her own music. 33. Sue Best makes this point about women visual artists in "This Style Which Is Not One," in Catriona Moore, ed., Dissonance: Feminism and the Arts (Sydney: Allen and Unwin in assoc. with Artspace, 1994), 154. 34. Threadgold, "Language and Gender," 42. 35. Ibid., 48-49. Threadgold's intertextual reference is to Umberto Eco's A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970). Threadgold underlines the importance of recognizing that language is not something that "means" in an unproblematic sense. Language is always mediated by human beings. 36. See Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice," in Image-Music-Text, 179-189. 37. From an unpublished note by Moya Henderson, December 1990, reproduced in Macarthur, "Music as Lifestyle, Politics as Music," 141. 38. Ibid. 39. See Sculthorpe, Kakadu: SSO Orchestra Kit (Sydney: ABC, SSO), where the composer reveals this fact. 40. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1978). 41. Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 42. See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 43. Roslyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 5. 44. Ford, "Up the Hilly End of the Playing Field," 26. 45. Marcia Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 145. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. See, for example, Lynda Nead's discussion of the way in which Western painting has regulated, controlled, and sealed up the female nude, representing it in an idealized, unreal state (devoid of unwanted hair) in The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and Mew York: Routledge, 1992), especially the introductory chapter. 50. Moya Henderson, personal communication, August 2000. 51. Moira Gatens, "Towards a feminist philosophy of the body" in Barbara Caine, E. A. Grosz, and Marie de Lepervanche, eds., Crossing the Boundaries: Feminisms and the Critique of Knowledges (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988), 59. 52. Susan McClary in an interview with Sally Macarthur, London 1991. For a further discussion by McClary on Erwartung, see, in particular, Feminine Endings, 107-109. 53. See McClary's discussion of this in Feminine Endings, 107-109. 54. Moya Henderson, personal communication, August 2000. 55. This is Henderson's term. Personal communication with Moya Henderson, 23 December 1994. 56. See score of Stubble (unpublished, available at the Australian Music Centre), 2. 57. What I mean by this is the tradition of organ music, which is conceived in evolutionary terms, tracing a trajectory from J. S. Bach through a series of composers to the

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19th-century and 20th-century grand masters of the instrument, for example, Cesar Franck, Gabriel Faure, and Olivier Messiaen. 58. David Kinsela, program notes at the premiere performance, 19 September, 1983. 59. War and Peace was the first opera performed by the Australian Opera in the Sydney Opera House in 1973 (the year the opera house opened). Henderson was composer in residence with the Australian Opera in that year (as pointed out in this chapter). Thus, to mark the significance of her earlier connection with the opera house and the Australian Opera, Henderson makes this intertextual reference to Prokofiev's opera in Sacred Site. The work was performed, as I have already pointed out, in 1983 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Opera House. 60. Ruth Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press), 6. 61. For example, see review of The Dreaming by Roger Co veil where, in a comparison between Alfred Hill and Moya Henderson (both composers were performed in the same program) he states: "Naivety is a quality that these Henderson and Hill scores have in common. It is quite differently expressed, but there is a link between them" (Roger Covell, "Idle ACO Spoils the Dreaming," Sydney Morning Herald, 21 October 1988: 18). 62. Writing a review of Henderson's Celebration 40, 000 in the Melbourne Age, Kenneth Hince stated: "In Australia during the 1930s, when women were not 'persons,' there were girls writing music which, give or take an odd dissonance was much at par with this Celebration 40, 000.... I find it grindingly depressing that music like this should turn up as a representative Australian composition in 1988" (Kenneth Hince, "Celebration: A Jarring Note in Summer Festival," Age, 22 January 1988): 12.

8

This Music Which Is Between Two

The natural is at least two: male and female. All the speculation about overcoming the natural in the universal forgets that nature is not one . . . it is two . . . The universal has been thought as one. But this one does not exist. —Luce Irigaray1 Musicology has been permanently transformed by its encounter with feminism. —Susan McClary2 Laquiem is not music-theater, nor is it concert music, nor is it a requiem, nor is it a cantata, and nor is it a song cycle; it is none of these things. It is something other. Laquiem is a self-defining genre that lies somewhere between these forms and speaks across them; between music-theater, concert music, requiem, cantata and song cycle. —Andree Green well3

The central argument of this book is that women's music operates according to aesthetic criteria that suggest differences from men's music. The focus of my investigation is to examine the effects of sex and gender on music, asking questions such as: How do (sexed) bodies intersect with music, and what are the effects of these intersections? I do not simply argue that women have a right to be included in the canon of great composers. Rather, I demonstrate that the sex of a composer influences the production and reception of her work. Similar projects have been undertaken in literary, film, fine arts, and performance studies in the last 20 years, but until as recently as the 1990s, critical work in musicology was virtually absent, be-

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cause, as I discuss in Chapter 4, there has been a long-standing assumption that meaning in music, especially in abstract instrumental music, is free from the constraints imposed by language or visual representation and is thusfreefromthe contamination of ideology and politics. Theorists have tended to regard music as a neutral, autonomous medium, incapable of producing meaning other than in and on its own terms. This, in part, is because Western art music has been judged on standards that are rooted in 19th-century aestheticism, where music is thought to transcend not only language (and the mind and body) but also social signification. In arguing for feminist aesthetics in music, I find myself involved in a series of complex negotiations between a number of antagonistic forces. One of these is the tension between postmodernist, feminist theories and other theories that arise out of postmodernism. In Chapter 6 I suggest that postmodernism regards feminist work as being of peripheral concern, despite the fact that each—feminism and postmodernism—has systematically sought to dismantle the principal tenets of modernism. As I have written with Cate Poynton, postmodernism "refuses the universalism of modernist knowledge—the claim of disciplines such as philosophy to have universal value."4 We went on to say: It refuses the singularity of the narratives told within modernist disciplines, asserting that there are many, not one story to be told depending on who is telling the story. And, of particular relevance to musicology, poststructuralism refuses structuralism—the systematic analysis of phenomena which assumes that all categories fit together into a coherent system, with no overlaps and no fuzzy boundaries.5 Poststructuralist, feminist work, like that of poststructuralism itself, then, is engaged in questioning boundaries wherever and whenever they appear. Furthermore, feminist work, like that of poststructuralism, has been concerned with issues around identity, emphasizing that an individual's sexual (or biological) and gendered identity must be read side by side with other crucial dimensions of subjectivity, including race, class, and sexuality. While I place emphasis on sex and gender in this book—given that my concern is to draw attention to women's music as a neglected category and to raise its profile—I am conscious that these dimensions are not the only ones that could be considered. Of the women composers discussed, all are white, of European background, middle-class, and, for the most part, heterosexual. Because the women discussed have these variables in common, I believe that my contextual readings of the music, with their emphases on sex and gender, are legitimate. As I note in Chapter 6 and as Patricia Waugh pointed out, the discourses of feminist and postmodernist theories have had little to say to each other despite the similarities of their endeavors.6 One of Waugh's reservations was that postmodernism has constructed a highly idealized and generalized notion of femininity, the kind that borders on being essentialist despite its claim to the contrary. Whereas postmodernist discourses posit the subject "woman" as one of many of its concerns—a view that is consistent with the idea that human agency can no longer be

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viewed as situated "in the conscious self-possession of a centered and autonomous human subject"7—feminism, determined to draw attention to, and give visibility to, women and women's issues, has done the opposite. Offering its own original critique of modernism while drawing on the postmodernist aesthetic, feminism, however problematically, has made woman its central concern. Feminism would argue that postmodernism has glossed over woman, even to the extent that she is seen not to exist. In addition to being marginalized and even excluded from the theories of postmodernism, women have barely signified as artists and composers in the worlds of art and music. A consequence, as I note in Chapter 6, is that feminism is sandwiched somewhere between modernism and postmodernism. Throughout this book, despite invoking the contrivance of the dichotomy in order to speak about women's music, I find myself drawn to the spaces between, to the cracks between things, to the liminal space. However problematically, I find myself occupying a position on both sides of a boundary simultaneously. I am involved in treading a fine line between a number of theoretical frictions that have originated from the dichotomy. While holding two concepts together, concepts that may seem to be theoretically contradictory—such as modernism and postmodernism, context and text, politics and aesthetics, male and female, masculine and feminine, visual and aural, language and music, author (composer) and reader (analyst), music as absolute and music as referential, music as score and music as sound, music as transcendence and music as embodiment, and woman as biological essence and woman as cultural construct—I deliberately avoid taking up one position or the other but rather am drawn to thinking about the space between the two. The idea that we can hold both concepts together allows me to move between them, occupying the middle ground and both sides of a boundary at the same time. At the threshold of the one Ifindmyself simultaneously located at the threshold of the other.8 To recall Derrida's work on the frame discussed in Chapter 6, the extreme limits of a boundary are where vital distinctions are made. These extreme limits give rise to difference. I suggest that the concept of feminist aesthetics in music—that women's music is perhaps different from men's music—is made possible only when we imagine or fantasize about the space between men's and women's music. Holding both musics together at some arbitrary boundary allows me to identify the features that women's music has in common with men's music while at the same time uncovering its difference from men's music. This is a complex idea, and in some ways it is an abstraction of the reality. Yet it is the only useful way to begin thinking about the issues raised by such a construction. Perhaps one of the most complex issues for the book is the question of the nature of women (and men) in relation to music. On the one hand, I find myself wanting to explain the differences I have observed between women's and men's music in essentialist, biological, and universalist terms, while, on the other, donning my poststructuralist, feminist hat, I want to resist such explanation. My resistance is stronger, I would suggest, than my compliance, yet through the writing process of this book I have found myself weighing up the ramifications in terms of benefits

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derived from using an essentialist explanation. It is certainly necessary, somehow, to make the distinction between men and women and between men's music and women's music. Without this distinction, as I point out in Chapter 4, we return to values that are supposedly neutral and universal but that, in fact, permit men to dominate women. The strategy of maintaining sexual difference is therefore an important one, for it allows feminists to contest patriarchal conceptions of women and femininity. In this book I challenge explanations of music that gloss over, ignore, and trivialize women's music. I am at pains to point out that the traditional view of Western art music is male. To draw attention to the absence of women from that history is important, and I argue that women's music is worthy of scholarly attention. Furthermore, I make claims for its worth based on the assumption of its difference. By suggesting this, however, I run the risk of being accused of being an essentialist. The very distinction that I am making cannot avoid the generalizations entailed. As a consequence, then, I am awkwardly balanced on a tightrope. Leaning too much to one side, I lose my footing and find myself climbing out of an essentialist abyss. In recovering from the slip, I tilt the other way, claiming that there is no such thing as an essential self but rather that the self is always in dynamic flux, always open to negotiation and change. To complicate my project further, I suggest that women do not necessarily compose music that is different from men's music. Indeed, it is impossible to make such grand claims, for men and women alike can imitate the masculine and the feminine; each has access to music and musical styles and genres that are already designated patriarchal. Thus, it is not possible to state that a particular music is distinctly feminine. Nonetheless, women's music has been sexually discriminated against. Among the many issues that have given rise to this discrimination is that women's music may not conform to aesthetic criteria that have been established for the assessment of men's music. Indeed, this idea is the impetus for the book. My hunch is that because women's music does not conform to patriarchal ideas about beauty, it is viewed as inferior. My aim, then, is to offer alternative ways of thinking about, and discussing, this music in order to show that it is possible to write about it in meaningful ways. Part of the process involves asking different kinds of questions in order to arrive at different kinds of conclusions. I explore the ways in which women composers transgress some of the musical norms that I identify. This is not to say, however, that men do not transgress these norms as well. Chapter 3, concerned with Alma Schindler-Mahler's Ansturm, concludes in the following way: "What I seem to have discovered is that some of the normal conventions of musical behavior, in this instance, have been transgressed." This, perhaps, is a remark that would apply to the close of each chapter in this book. Yet as Julia Kristeva pointed out, great literary works by their very definition must be seen to transgress the conventions of writing. In Kristeva's view, only men are capable of producing great works. The act of transgression—the eruption of the semiotic (feminine principle) into symbolic order (masculine principle)—gives

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rise to difference, thus setting the great work of literature apart from that which is hackneyed and cliched. While Kristeva's observations are pertinent and apt for the male writers whom she names—and, indeed, could be extended to include the great composers in the canon of Western art music—I would argue that such thinking emerges from the idea that aesthetic criteria are viewed as sexless and neutral. I would go so far as to say that Kristeva's reluctance to view women as great writers may have something to do with the fact that she has not questioned the criteria by which such judgments are made. The canon of Western art music consists of great composers who, as it happens, are men. Like the canon of literature, the musical canon has been constructed from an assumption that only men are capable of producing great music. Music scholars have been reluctant to question this assumption. Yet it has never been my intention to dismiss the traditional canon, offering in its place women's music as something of a countercanon. Rather, it has been my intention to suggest ways of expanding the canon, thus discouraging the notion of stasis in the field of music.9 The canon should not be considered closed, but rather as part of a dynamic process that is constantly open to negotiation and change. Indeed, I view the canon as an open-ended construct, a view that resonates with the feminist readings I carry out of the music in this book. Yet I suggest that the ideal in music is associated with a masculine aesthetic, otherwise disguised as a neutral aesthetic. Women have had to struggle against a sense of self-alienation because their music has seemed to be different from the masculinist aesthetic ideal. Women's music is not assessable in terms of that ideal. As a consequence, I suggest that their struggle, even if occurring on a subconscious level, has given rise to difference. It is my contention, then, that despite its difference from men's music, women's music offers alternative notions of beauty to the world of music writ large. Their struggle, which arguably gives rise to difference across the entire category of women's music, as I note in Chapter 1, lies partly in the fact of their exclusion from some areas of music-making. Historically, women have not had the same kinds of access to music education as men, nor have they had the same kind of public recognition, including commissions, performances, recordings, and broadcasts, for their music. I also ask whether this lack of exposure in the public world of music is attributed to its lack of conformity to patriarchal notions of aesthetics. While some would say that this is a moot point, given that such a claim cannot be definitively proven or substantiated, it is nonetheless the major idea on which the book's raison d'etre depends. The very question of sexual difference in music is the major preoccupation for the book as a whole. It causes me to ask whether any common threads link the music I have analyzed, despite the fact that each composer and her work are placed within different social, historical, and political contexts. While not wishing to make grand claims based on some of the observations that I have made, that all women's music is different, I believe that a number of threads link their music, giving rise to what may be labeled "feminist aesthetics." In a sense the analytical process is an exploration of possibility. This means, however, that I am unable to assert that there are such things as definitive conclusions. Even

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if future research were to examine a larger sample than what I offer in this book, I doubt that it would be possible, given the complex grid of variables at play in the analytical strategy, to do what Eva Rieger, as discussed in Chapter 1, for example, attempted to do: identify similarities between women's music by providing a definitive list of these similarities. Yet in some ways, by providing a list not unlike her own, it may seem that I am following suit with Rieger, whose work, incidentally, is pioneering in the area of feminist aesthetics in music, indeed, work that I hold in very high regard. In my own exploration of the possibility, I identify a number of similarities among the music I have analyzed. One of these is the tendency by all the composers highlighted in this book to deal with the structural elements of the music in ways that are different from those of male composers. Three structural elements on which I place particular emphasis are: the positioning of climaxes, the proportional lengths of musical sections, and the ways in which the music tends to be generated from a stream of gestural syntax, in turn, having an effect on the overall structure. Alma Schindler-Mahler's premature major climax, unusually positioned close to the smaller section of the golden section, resonates with the major climax of Elisabeth Lutyens' O Saisons, O Chateaux!, which also occurs at approximately a third of the way through the music.10 Rebecca Clarke's most important climax in the first movement of the Piano Trio motions toward a central location.11 This is not unlike the climax of Anne Boyd's Cycle ofLove, which is located virtually at the center of the work.12 In addition, Boyd's climax is marked by a profound silence. While Kats-Chernin positions her climax area in Tast-en close to the larger section of the golden section, she subverts it nonetheless by prolonging the climactic material well into the aftermath of the piece, gradually dissolving it until it evaporates.13 By way of contrast, Moya Henderson subverts her climaxes in Sacred Site by motioning toward them, giving all the signs that a climax will be forthcoming, but because she provides a static bass line (frequently in the form of a pedal point) at these moments, her music actually never manages to achieve a climax until, arguably, the very end of the work. I conclude from these observations that perhaps the moments of musical tension are uniquely feminine in the hands of these women composers when compared to the idealized masculine climax, which tends to be shaped by the golden section. The musical balances of the works of some of the composers discussed are another sign of their difference from men's music. The overall architecture of Alma Schindler-Mahler's Ansturm, cast in a ternary shape, yields a ratio of 3:1:1, revealing it to be top-heavy. Henderson's Sacred Site, set out in four sections, is similarly top-heavy with a ratio of 5:1:1:2, which, in turn, is similar to Marcia Citron's analysis of Cecile Chaminade's Piano Sonata, which has a ratio 5:1:2. By way of contrast, the first movement of Clarke's Piano Trio seems oddly bottom-heavy with a ratio of 1:1:2, which has come about because of the lengthy afterthought at the end of the movement. I would argue that the balance here feels decidedly different from the bottom-heavy proportions of Zemlinsky's Ansturm, which are 5:1:10. While greater than the golden section, Zemlinsky's climax nonetheless

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helps to establish a more typical balance for his song.14 The musical designs of Kats-Chernin's Tast-en and Lutyens' O Saisons, O Chateaux!—with ratios of 1:1 and 2:1:1:2, respectively—are not in themselves unusual. In these cases, however, their climaxes tend to produce structures that seem lopsided. This is also the case with Anne Boyd's Cycle of Love, which, while structured on a musical arc, revolves around a central high point marked by a silence. The structures of a number of the works discussed are also affected by the way in which the musical material is often generated from sometimes very small gestures, giving a jerky, start/stop feeling to their overall designs. This is the case in the works of Lutyens, Clarke, Henderson, and Kats-Chernin. Other interesting observations have to do with boundaries. In particular, I draw attention to the numerous dichotomies deliberately set up to be transgressed by Kats-Chernin in Tast-en. One of these is the tonic/dominant relationship, which is subverted by the end of the piece. The composer leaves the final, closing frame of the work unresolved and open-ended—like an open frame—by ending on a dominant seventh chord that is left to die away in its own time. It is as if the piece could begin again, recycling itself without end. This resistance to close the work off with a perfect cadence is echoed by Alma Schindler-Mahler in Ansturm. This song, like Tast-en, ends on a dominant seventh chord. Following suit with this idea, though expressed differently, is the tussle for supremacy between the notes E flat (ostensibly the tonic) and A (an opposition set a tritone apart from the tonic) at the conclusion of the first movement of Rebecca Clarke's Piano Trio. The E flat chord is given only a very fleeting chance to provide the resolution for the movement. Cyclical patterns also seem to abound in the music that I analyze. In particular, Henderson makes use of swirling ostinati throughout Sacred Site. The heterophonic texture of Anne Boyd's Cycle ofLove also produces a structure that is concerned with cyclical patterns. Finally, I suggest that the second subject of Clarke's sonata form could also be read as a song form in much the same way that Citron alluded to the way that the first and second subjects of Chaminade's Sonata could be read against sonata form as a quasi prelude and fugue. There seems to be a tendency in both these works to map one genre onto another. It could even be the case that Clarke and Chaminade are subconsciously pushing beyond the limits of the generic conventions in which they are working. In the Introduction to the book, I echo a view widely held by music scholars that women composers have not been at the forefront of stylistic development in the history of Western art music. I suggest that they have, however, been at the leading edge of genre development with historical precedents that include Hildegarde of Bingen, Francesca Caccini, and Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre. As Susan Erickson pointed out, these composers have not been given due recognition for their work. I wonder, however, if this situation will change for women composers working in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is certainly the case that, heralded by the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, there has been a profusion of work by women that is arguably at the cutting edge in terms of genre development. For example, Laurie Anderson, dubbed a performance artist, a term

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that she herself would want to question, is a self-contradictory, multiply constituted persona when it comes to thinking about how she is constructed in and through her work. But how do we describe her work? How is it best categorized? It seems that Anderson's work defies definition, despite such labels as postmodern, feminist, and political, which havefrequentlybeen applied to it. It is work that moves between being an exhibition of technology and live (bodily) performance, between being auditory and visual, between being authentic and inauthentic, real and unreal. It is work that shifts between the past and present. It constructs autobiographical narratives in order to examine tensions that are produced from thinking about causes and effects and the real and the imagined. It is work that challenges the borders that surround the active performer and the passive audience. It is work that cannot exist without the presence of Laurie Anderson. By definition, it lacks definition, yet it could also be viewed as a self-defining genre in every moment of its performance. It is new, imaginative, and innovative work that crosses disciplinary boundaries, constantly transforming genres that arise out of one discipline into genres that arise out of another so that they become barely recognizable. She slides from the visual arts into storytelling mode and from avant-garde art music into pop music. Her performances move between being highly technologized to being bodily and quirky and ironic. Her work arises out of her deep curiosity about life. Anderson's work is unique. Its originality is that it seems to be an art form that has no name. Perhaps Anderson's art can be described only in terms of what it is not. Since the 1970s a number of other women artists, though differently from Anderson, have challenged generic limits. Among these are American artists Diamanda Gallas, Pauline Oliveros, and Meredith Monk, whose Australian equivalents might be said to include voice artists Carolyn Connors, Jo Truman, and Michele Morgan and sonic or sound poets Amanda Stewart and Hazel Smith. Aside from the work of these women artists, some women composers working in the Western art music tradition have challenged the boundaries that separate genres in different ways. Among these is the highly original Australian composer Andree Greenwell. Greenwell works across a range of audiovisual electronic and acoustic media and frequently makes use of the trained and the untrained singing voice (set against each other in order to highlight the difference between them) together with the spoken voice. This composer is a kind of postmodern feminist, and it is arguably the case that her music eludes definition. For example, the composer describes her recent composition Laquiem (1999) in terms of what it is not. She says: "Laquiem is not music-theater, nor is it concert music, nor is it a requiem, nor is it a cantata, and nor is it a song cycle; it is none of these things. It is something other. Laquiem is a self-defining genre that lies somewhere between these forms and speaks across them; between music-theater, concert music, requiem, cantata and song cycle."15 According to Greenwell, Laquiem is "a new music performance work with lighting and audio design."16 The title, inadvertently coined by Richard Vella, is a reference to "lac" (lake), lacrime (lament) and requiem. It has the sense of being a

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requiem, but it is not a requiem. The text is multistranded, and the music is multireferenced, invoking multiple sound worlds from the past through to the present. At the same time the music tests the limits of the present, pushing from the past beyond the present to some imagined future. It has the sense of being a concert piece, but it is not a concert piece. The texts of Laquiem selected from Kathleen Mary Fallon's The Mourning of the Lac Women explore the grieving process through a narrative development that is not linear in its unfolding but, as Linda Kouvaras writes, "weaves in a more circular fashion over the span of the writ ing."17As the composer states, Laquiem "centers on a suicide drowning event and childhood experiences leading up to that event."18 Laquiem has the sense of being a song cycle, but it is not a song cycle. It has the sense of being a cantata, but it is not a cantata. Like much music that is classified postmodern, Laquiem, as Adrian Renzo writes, is "defined as that which it negates."19 He goes on to suggest that even if we are not entirely sure what it is, we know what it is not. It is not modernist. It is not a conventional theater work. It is not a concert work. By definition it is ambiguous. It negotiates generic boundaries and conventions, which, as Renzo points, out also "demarcate popular and contemporary art musics."20 As he continues: "In Laquiem there are extreme changes of musical ambience, juxtapositions of musical styles (early music, lieder, film music with narrative voice over), the text oscillating between light-hearted and grave tones."21 As I state in the Introduction, most genres have historically operated according to male conventions and are thus governed by a male aesthetic. By drawing attention to this new work at the conclusion of my own work, I want to ask if the development of these new ways of creating art/music is perhaps opening up the possibility of feminist aesthetics that have hitherto been obscured. Is it the case that with the emergence of these new genres in music there is an almost selfconscious attempt by these women composers to write deliberately (from) the feminine (body)? This is a remarkable idea that I believe opens up an exciting field for future investigation. Indeed, what I offer in this book is only a beginning. It is hoped that it will spark interest in others to investigate women's music further, opening up a much-needed space for this research in the academy as a whole. In this book I engage with, and build on, the new and inspiring scholarship in musicology that has been issuing forth with great fervor from the United States in particular. It is scholarship that acknowledges the important role that music plays in the construction of knowledge and meaning. Accompanying this research has been a proliferation of different forms of music criticism as powerful tools for music research. Such tools have provided important alternatives to the positivistic methods that dominated musicology throughout the 20th century. The profile of the field today, in stark contrast to that of the 1980s and in earlier times, when intellectual dialogue was severely curtailed under the paradigm of positivism, is remarkably heterogeneous. Projects as wide-ranging as reexaminations of the European tradition, to those projects that gather up feminist theories of performativity and apply these to real bodies that produce real music have begun to make a significant impact, permanently transforming musicology as a whole.

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I would argue that Feminist Aesthetics in Music fills an important niche, offering a unique approach to dealing with questions of women's representation in music. The contextualization model of analysis that I have proposed is, I believe, applied in a distinctive and different way to actual musical compositions. Some contextualization models, such as those developed within the spheres of music sociology and popular music studies, have tended to focus on everything but the music, contrasting with traditional positivist models of music analysis that have tended to focus exclusively on the music, ignoring the context in which it is produced. The analytic strategy adopted in Feminist Aesthetics in Music allows for context and text to share equal status. In addition, I unashamedly identify myself as a feminist who has analyzed the music included in this book from a feminist perspective, irrespective of whether the composer is a feminist or not. It may be the case that the composers may not agree with my readings. But do they disagree? Susan McClary made the point that "[mjusicology has been permanently transformed by its encounter with feminism." 22 I endorse her view wholeheartedly, adding that women's music—this music which is between two—should give cause for celebration. It is music that invites listeners to experience other kinds of beauty in music, music that is located perhaps somewhere between male and female, masculine and feminine. While the dichotomy has often been viewed as a scourge on the landscape of postmodernist thought, I use it in this book as a liberating device. Holding two seemingly opposed concepts together allows for movement to the space between. I view the dichotomy in this conception of it to be the only effective way to begin speaking about women's music: this music that is different, this music that is between two, this music, above all, that should be heard. NOTES The chapter title, "This Music Which Is Between Two" is a play on Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 1. Luce Irigaray, "Human Nature Is Two," in I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, trans. Alison Martin (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 35. 2. McClary, "Reshaping a Discipline: Musicology and Feminism in the 1990s," Feminist Studies 19.2 (Summer 1993): 420. 3. Australian composer, Andree Greenwell, personal communication, November 2000. 4. Sally Macarthur and Cate Poynton, eds., "Introduction," in Musics and Feminisms (Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 1999), 5. 5. Ibid. 6. See Patricia Waugh, "From Modernism, Postmodernism, Feminism: Gender and Autonomy Theory," in Postmodernism: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, A Division of Holder and Stoughton, 1992), 195. 7.1 borrow this phrase from Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1995), 6. 8. On quite an unrelated topic, yet one concerned with a dichotomy (autonomy versus determinism), Rosemary Schaffler drew my attention to this extremely liberating way of

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thinking about dichotomies in general. I thank Rosemary for this observation in her E-mail to me on 12 November 2000. 9. My thanks to Gretchen Poiner for drawing my attention to the fact that the canon should not be viewed as a static, immutable construction but rather one that is continually evolving and changing. Personal communication, November 2000. 10. Alma Schindler-Mahler's premature climax occurs at a proportion in relation to the rest of the work of 0.390 and in this respect is similar to the major climax of Elisabeth Lutyens' O Saisons, O Chateaux!, which appears at a proportion of 0.354 in relation to the whole. 11. Rebecca Clarke's most important climax occurs at a proportion of 0.455 in relation to the whole. 12. Anne Boyd's climax occurs at a proportion of 0.593. 13. The climax area in Kats-Chernin's Tast-en is at a proportion of 0.684. 14. Zemlinsky's climax occurs at a proportion of 0.828. 15. Australian composer, Andree Greenwell, personal communication, November 2000. 16. Ibid. 17. Linda Kouvaras, "Review: Laquiem," Sounds Australian 54 (1999): 37. 18. See Adrian Renzo, "Interrogating the Low/High Culture Split," Postwest 15 (1999): 62. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 63. 22. McClary, "Reshaping a Discipline," 420.

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Discography

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Index

Abbate, Carolyn, 25, 29 n.71 Aboriginal culture, 155, 158-59, 164-66 Absolute nature of music, 81, 82-84, 87, 90, 102, 174-75; feminist analysis, 88-89 Adorno, Theodor W., 7 Aesthetics, 10 n.13; restricted, 13; taste, 5, 16, 18, 53. See also Embodied aesthetics; Feminist aesthetics Allen, Fiona, 52 AMEB. See Australian Music Examinations Board American feminism, 19, 64 American orchestras, 33-34 Analytical models. See Musical analysis; Stylistic analysis Anderson, Laurie, 8, 18, 114, 179-80 Appropriation, 158-59, 164, 168 Argerich, Martha, 1 Art. See Women's art Asian music, 116, 118-24, 152 Atonality: Henderson, 162; Kats-Chernin, 140; Lutyens, 89, 97-98; SchindlerMahler, 73. See also Dissonance Attali, Jacques, 23-24 Audience, 109, 124, 140, 150, 180; demographics, 51-53, 60 n.73; Henderson, 160; taste, 98-99

Augustine, St., 15 Australia Council, 32-33,42-44, 52, 57 n.28, 59 n.43, 154 Australia Ensemble (AE), 40-41, 58 nn.32, 33 Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO), 33, 40-41, 58 nn.32, 33, 60 n.73 Australian composers: AMEB syllabuses, 48-49; concert hall repertoire, 6, 32, 34-41, 57nn.30, 31, 58 nn.32, 33, 138; postmodernism, 131. See also Australian women composers Australian context, 5, 31, 32-41 Australian identity. See National identity Australian Music Centre, 33, 35, 56 nn.16, 19, 138 Australian Music Examinations Board (AMEB), 6, 31, 45-46, 47-50, 51-54, 59-60 n.62, 60 n.66, 61 n.84 Australian Opera (AO), 40-41, 58 nn.32, 33, 154, 172n.59 Australian women composers: Boyd as, 34, 53, 154, 159; Henderson as, 53, 153-54, 157-59, 164-65, 169, 172 n.62; Kats-Chernin as, 53, 146

200 n.34, 154; participation in workforce, 32-34, 56 nn.16, 19; performance repertoire, 6, 34-35,40-41, 58 n.33. See also Boyd; Henderson; Kats-Chernin Australian Youth Orchestra, 40-41, 58 nn.32, 33 Australysis (AUS), 39-41, 57 n.31, 58 n.33 Author, 149-53, 156, 168, 175; death of, 137, 151-52. See also Signatures Bach, Johann Sebastian, 10 n.20, 48, 84, 134, 139-40, 171 n.57 Barkin, Elaine, 125 n.6 Baroque music, 36 Barthes, Roland, 25, 133, 136-37, 145, 150-51, 157 Bartok, Bela, 116 Beach, Amy, 36 Belsey, Catherine, 86 Bent, Ian, 87 Benveniste, Emile, 153 Berg, Alban, 66,97-98, 162 Best, Sue, 20, 114, 133 Bierbaum, Otto Julius, 69 Biology. See Body Bloch, Ernest, 89, 95 Body: Boyd, 107, 123; Clarke, 96; feminist aesthetics, 13-15, 17-18, 20-21, 63-65, 70-71, 86-87, 89-90, 109-10, 112-14, 126 n.31, 153, 173, 180-81; Henderson, 161, 163-64; Kats-Chernin, 133-34; Schindler-Mahler, 68, 77. See also Embodied aesthetics Bordo, Susan, 15 Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 18, 44-45, 46-50, 51-52, 59 n.46, 156 Boyd, Anne: as Australian composer, 34, 53, 154, 159; body, 107, 123; climaxes, 144, 152, 166,178-79, 183 n.12; Cycle of Love, 1, 114, 115-28, 151-52, 165-66, 178-79; feminism, 117, 127 n.61,152; on Kats-Chernin, 146 n.34 Bradshaw, Susan, 97 Brahms, Johannes, 77 Britten, Benjamin, 98, 116-17, 122 Brumby, Colin, 154, 156 Budd, Malcolm, 70, 83 Burckhard, Max, 66

Index Butler, Judith, 9, 77, 115, 124, 153 Caccini, Francesca, 10 n.19, 36, 77, 179 Caccini, Giulio, 10 n.19 Cage, John, 46, 51 Camerata Australia (CA), 40-41, 58 nn.32, 33 Canonicity: absolutist analysis, 84, 87; Australian performance repertoire, 5-6, 31; ideal proportion, 70, 87; male bias, 64, 71, 150; open-ended, 177, 183 n.9; serialism, 162; tertiary music education, 110; women's music, 25, 88, 108, 173 Chaminade, Cecile, 13, 18, 36, 75, 93, 165, 178-79 Chanon, Michael, 29 n.71 Chicago, Judy, 114 Citron, Marcia: feminist aesthetics, 13, 18-19,69,75,90,160,165,178; women's music, 5, 45, 53, 87 Cixous, Helene, 11-12, 15, 19,21, 101, 113, 152 Clarke, Rebecca: biographical details, 91; comparisons with Lutyens, 89-90, 98, 100-101; Piano Trio (1921),6-7,81,91-96, 136, 144, 165, 178, 183 n.ll Classical era, 36, 37 Clement, Catherine, 11, 15, 19, 21, 101,113 Click, Sarah, 73 Climaxes: Boyd, 144, 152, 166, 178-79, 183 n. 12; Clarke, 89,95, 144, 178, 183 n.ll; Henderson, 166-67, 178; Kats-Chernin, 144, 166, 178-79, 183 n. 13; Lutyens, 89,101-2, 144,178-79; musical analysis, 70, 108, 178; Schindler-Mahler, 73-76, 89, 102, 178, 183n.l0;Zemlinksy,76, 183 n.14 Closure, 108, 179; Boyd, 124, 152; Clarke, 179; Kats-Chernin, 136, 141_42, 144-45, 179; Schindler-Mahler, 74, 76-77, 80 n.43, 179

Index Cohen, Aaron, 35-36 Cohen, Morris, 103 n.6 Composers: environment, 159; genius, 46, 53, 84, 86, 177; history of music, 4-5, 64; readers and analysts, 149, 175; settings of texts, 76-77; standards, 155-56; tertiary music courses, 110. See also Australian composers; Women composers Concert programs. See Repertoire Conners, Carolyn, 180 Contemporary music ensembles, 39-41 Cook, Nicholas, 88 Cooke, Deryck, 83 Cope, Bill, 42 Counterpoint, 164-65 Couperin, Francois, 36 Covell, Roger, 176 n.61 Cox, Renee, 70, 113 Cranny-Francis, Anne, 15 Crouch, Mira, 33 Cultural context: analytical models, 70; canonicity, 87; frames, 134; Henderson, 149, 155-59, 161, 164-65; musicologists, 130-31; oppositions, 2; referential meanings, 82, 107-10; sexual difference, 6, 175; voice, 64. See also Aboriginal culture; Multiculturalism Cultural production. See Field of cultural production; Habitus Curtis, Liane, 90-92 Cusick, Suzanne, 64, 77 Cycles, 107, 117-18, 120, 122-24, 128 n.74, 152, 166-68, 179 Darke, Harold, 97 Darwin, Charles, 70 Davies, Stephen, 83 Death of the author, 137, 151-52 Debussy, Claude, 74, 95, 139 Deconstructive feminism, 7-8, 14, 108, 132,156,161 Dehmel, Richard, 66, 69, 71-72, 76 de Lauretis, Teresa, 19, 27 n.41 Deleuze, Gilles, 23-24 Derrida, Jacques, 20, 25, 114, 129, 134, 136, 150-51, 153, 175 Descartes, Rene, 15, 135

201 Dickinson, Eleanor, 55 n.9 Difference/differance: biology, 63-65, 107; equality and, 7, 110-12; French feminism, 21-22, 107, 112-14; Henderson, 149, 157, 169; Schindler-Mahler, 69, 77; women's and men's music, 4, 9, 12, 20, 175-77 Diprose, Roslyn, 158 Discrimination, 5, 34, 42, 157, 169, 172 n.62, 176. See also Equality Dissonance, 7, 100, 140, 162, 172 n.62. See also Atonality Diversity, 43-44 Divine ratio. See Ideal proportion Donald, Nicole, 52 Drinker, Sophie, 111-12, 126 n.31 Dubreuil-Blondin, Nicole, 133 Dunn, Leslie, 22 Eagleton, Terry, 129-30 Eco, Umberto, 86-87, 156, 171 n.35 Edwards, Ross, 53 Einstein, Albert, 84 Embodied aesthetics, 18-19,45, 152, 160-63, 175 Emotions, 83, 86, 91, 163. See also Sexual (e)motion English composers. See Clarke; Lutyens Enlightenment, 133 Environmental issues, 8, 154-55, 158 Equality, 7, 32, 110-12, 114, 155-58, 165. See also Discrimination Erickson, Susan, 10 n.19, 179 Erotic love, 66, 73, 76 European canon. See Canonicity European orchestras, 34 Excellence, 5, 8, 31, 42-43, 154-55 Falke, Gustav, 69 Fallon, Kathleen Mary, 181 Farrenc, Louise, 36 Faure, Gabriel, 172 n.57 Felski, Rita, 14, 114-15 Feminine, music as, 20-24, 150-52, 176 Feminine images, 18

202 Feminism: American, 19, 64; Boyd, 117, 127 n.61,152; genre development, 179-80; Henderson, 42, 149-50, 154, 155-57, 159-61, 164-65; Kats-Chernin, 132-33,140,144-45, 151; philosophical positions, 7, 112-14, 135,151-53; postmodernism and, 14, 19, 21,24-25, 64-65, 109-10, 129-33, 174-75, 180-82. See also French feminism Feminist aesthetics: Boyd, 115-25; Clarke and Lutyens, 7, 90, 96; Henderson, 8, 149-50, 153, 168; women's music, 5, 9, 11-29,65, 114-15, 174-75, 177-78, 181; women's writing, 11, 14,21, 114-15,152-53 Feminist musicology: absolute and referential meanings, 88-89; equity, 32; feminist aesthetics, 107-13, 145, 173, 177, 182; musical analysis, 2, 64, 71 Feminist politics, 9, 14 Ferrari, Carlotta, 36 Field of cultural production (Bourdieu), 6, 45, 46-47 Filler, Susan, 68 Finsterer, Mary, 53 Flinn, Carol, 22 Ford, Andrew, 159 Forte, Allen, 5, 163 Foucault, Michel, 150 Fraenkel, Dr., 66 Frames: body, 135-36; Derrida, 129, 175; Grosz, 153; Henderson, 160; Kats-Chernin, 139-41, 145, 179; musical analysis, 133-34; time, 129, 133-34, 139; work to text, 136-37 Franck, Cesar, 172n.57 Franklin, Jim, 72, 79 n.40 Franklin-Spaeth, Margit, 72-73, 79 nn.39, 40 French feminism: body and sexual identity, 65, 107, 117, 123-24; difference, 19-22, 112-14; women's writing, 12, 15,17,21-22,152 Freud, Sigmund, 67 Friskin, James, 91 Fuery, Patrick, 137 Gabrilowitsch, Ossip, 66

Index Galas, Diamanda, 18, 180 Games, 144 Gatens, Moira, 112, 135, 144, 161 Gay criticism, 108 Geitenbeck, Monique, 48, 61 n.84 Gender: as performance, 115, 124; music and, 63-64 Genius composers, 46, 53, 84, 86, 177 Genre development, 8-9, 10 n.19, 156, 173,179-81 Gestural syntax, 89, 101, 152, 166, 178-79 Gillis, Anne, 13 Giroud, Francoise, 66, 68 Goehr, Lydia, 16, 26 n.27, 45-46, 50-51,53-54 Golden section. See Ideal proportion Great women, 111 Great works, 178-79 Greenwell, Andree, 9, 173, 180-81 Gropius, Alma. See Schindler-Mahler, Alma Gropius, Walter, 66 Grosz, Elizabeth: cultural dichotomies, 2-3, 17, 126 n.32; feminist aesthetics, 14, 17, 149-53, 156, 168; institutional structures, 112; mind-body relation, 8, 135-36, 145; postmodernism, 130-32 Guattari, Felix, 23-24 Gurney, Edmund, 6, 70, 79 n.32, 83, 103n.l3 Habitus: Bourdieu, 27 n.33, 46-47, 59 n.46; cultural production, 6, 43, 45-48; feminine, 14, 18, 124, 156 Hanslick, Eduard, 83, 85 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 66 Haydn, Joseph, 36 Henderson, Moya: as Australian composer, 53, 153-54, 157-59, 164-65, 169, 172 n.62; biography, 153-55; environment, Aboriginality and national identity, 8, 158-59; feminism, 42, 149-50,155-57,159-61, 164-65; readings of music, 8, 153, 157, 159-60, 178-79; Sacred Site (1983), 8,75, 149-50,157, 159,

Index 165-69, 178-79; Stubble (1975), 8, 149-50, 157, 159, 160-64 Hesse, Marjorie, 53 Hewett, Dorothy, 159 Higgins, Paula, 125 n.6 Hildegarde of Bingen, 10 n.19, 54, 179 Hill, Alfred, 172 n.61 Hince, Kenneth, 172 n.62 Hobbs, Richard, 99 Holland, Dulcie, 53 Hollensteiner, Johannes, 66 Horowitz, Vladimir, 1 Humor, 157, 163-65, 167 Hyde, Miriam, 53, 138 Ideal proportion (golden section), 70-71, 75-76, 87, 95-96, 101-2, 152, 177-79 Ideology, 81, 87, 96, 102, 115, 155, 160-61, 174 Impressionism, 74, 99 Institutionalised learning. See Music education Interdisciplinary musicology, 131 Intertextualities, 8, 115, 117, 159, 172n.59 Ireland, John, 97 Irigaray, Luce: feminist aesthetics, 19, 77, 114, 117, 173; sexual identity, 65; women's writing, 12, 14-15, 21-22, 107, 113, 152 Jacquet de la Guerre, Elisabeth-Claude, 10 n.19, 36, 179 Jahn, George, 56n.l5 Janacek, Leos, 165-66 Jardine, Alice, 7, 19, 27 n.41, 119 Johnson, Bruce, 34, 43-44, 56-57 n.21 Joyce, James, 152 Kafka, Franz, 152 Kagel, Mauricio, 8, 154, 156, 160, 162 Kahle, Wilhelm, 69 Kalantzis, Mary, 42 Kallick, Jenny, 125 n.6 Kammerer, Paul, 66 Kantian aesthetics, 16, 26 n.27 Kats-Chernin, Elena: as Australian composer, 53, 146 n.34, 154; biography, 137-38, 146 n.33; Tast-en, 7-8,

203 130-34,136-45, 147 n.37, 151, 166, 178-79, 183 n. 13 Kim, Don'o, 118 Kinsela, David, 165 Klimt, Gustav, 66-67 Kokoschka, Oskar, 66 Kopelson, Kevin, 1-2 Kouvaras, Linda, 14, 22, 24, 29 n.71, 181 Kramer, Jonathan D., 129 Kramer, Lawrence, 9, 25, 29 n.71, 112, 126 n.37, 130-32 Kravitt, Edward, 67-69 Kristeva, Julia, 19, 21-23, 112-13, 126-27 n.37, 127n.38, 152,156, 176-77 Kurtak, Georgy, 139-40 La Barbara, Joan, 13 Lachenmann, Helmut, 138-39 Lang, Josephine, 36 Langer, Susanne, 83 Language: feminist, 152; Henderson's Stubble, 162; music and, 22-23, 25, 82-83,85-86,137, 156, 171 n.35, 174-75; sexual identity, 65; Schindler-Mahler's Ansturm, 72-73, 79 nn.39, 40, 79-80 n.41 Learning. See Music education Le Beau, Louise Adolpha, 36 LeFanu, Nicola, 34 Lelkes, Anna, 56n.l5 Leppert, Richard, 23, 85 Liberal framework, 132, 152, 155-56 Lilburn, Douglas, 49 Lim, Liza, 53 Listeners. See Audience Lockwood, Annea, 13 Love: Boyd, 116, 118; Schindler-Mahler, 66, 72-74, 76 Loveric, Jenny, 33 Lully, G.B., 36 Lumsdaine, David, 117 Lutyens, Edwin, 97 Lutyens, Elisabeth: biographical details, 96-97; comparisons with Clarke, 89-90, 98, 100-101; 0 Saisons, 0 Chateaux (1946), 6-7,

204 71, 81, 96-102, 144, 165, 178-79, 183 n.10 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 131 McCallum, Peter, 64, 103 n.6 McClary, Susan: criticisms of work, 108-10, 125 n.6; culture, 158; feminist aesthetics, 13,18-19,23, 25, 113-14, 173, 182; musical analysis, 2, 13, 81, 88, 146 n.6; serialism, 7, 70, 97, 99, 162; sexuality, 79 n.32, 103 n. 13, 151; social context, 9, 10 n.20, 11, 83-84, 107-8, 130; sonata form, 90; women's music, 4-5 MacDonald, Calum, 92-93 Mageau, Mary, 34-35 Mahler, Alma. See Schindler-Mahler, Alma Mahler, Gustav, 66-68, 71,116 Male sexual metaphors. See Sexual stereotypes Martin, Peter, 109-10, 125 n.6 Marx, A. B., 90, 92 Meaning, music and: Clarke and Lutyens, 90; debate about, 6, 81, 82-84, 103 n.6, 174; feminist aesthetics, 108-9, 114, 119, 134, 156, 168, 181; Henderson, 160; scores and performance, 85, 89. See also Absolute nature of music; Referential meaning of music Mendelssohn-Hensel, Fanny, 29 n.71, 36 Men's music, 1-4, 31, 36-40, 88, 110, 149, 156-57, 173, 175-77 Messiaen, Olivier, 139, 172 n. 57 Meyer, Leonard, 82-83, 103 n.6 Middleton, Richard, 85 Mina, Susan Rachel, 91-92 Mind-body relation, 8, 135-36, 144-45, 161,174 Mobius strip, 8, 135, 144-45 Modernism: aesthetics, 14, 15-17, 64, 109, 129-33, 146 n.6,174-75; Australian women composers, 53; Henderson and, 8, 156, 169, 171 n.32; Kats-Chernin and, 139; women's writing, 11,21 Modes. See Tonal/modal language Moll, Carl, 67 Monk, Meredith, 180 Moore, Julia, 12

Index Moore, Lisa, 141, 145, 147 n.37 Morgan, Michele, 180 Mozart, W. A., 36 Multiculturalism, 43-44,155 Music, as feminine, 20-24, 150-52, 176. See also Absolute nature of music Musical analysis: Boyd, 107, 115-24, 125; Clarke, 81, 89-90, 92-96; feminist, 2, 5, 64,110, 175, 178, 182; Henderson, 149, 153, 156-57, 159, 160-68, 169; Kats-Chernin, 131, 133, 136-37,138-^4; Lutyens, 81,89-90,98-102; Schindler-Mahler, 71-77; sexuality, 1,6, 63, 69-71, 79 n.32, 103 n.13, 114, 119, 162; traditional, 5-6,70,84-88,98,102, 146 n.6, 182 Musica Viva (MV), 37, 41, 58 nn.32, 33, 60 n.73 Music education: score versus sound, 85, 98; women, 87, 111-12, 154, 156, 177. See also Australian Music Examinations Board (AMEB) Music establishment, 2, 97, 155 Musicology, 63-64, 84-85, 96, 107, 110-11, 129-31, 134, 181. See also Feminist musicology Music organisations, 6, 32-54 Music theory, 81-82, 85-88, 96, 102, 160, 163 National identity, 8,31,43-44, 154-55,158-59 Nead, Lynda, 134, 171 n.49 Newnham, Hartley, 116 Newton, Isaac, 84 New Zealand, 49 Nietzsche, F.W., 82 Nochlin, Linda, 111,126 n.22 Novick, Varda Ullman, 34 Oliveros, Pauline, 13, 117, 128 n.62, 180 Orchestras, 33,40-41, 53, 56 n.13 Pascoe, Clive, 75, 102

Index Pateman, Carole, 158 Payne, Anthony, 96 Perfect ratio. See Ideal proportion Performance: gender as, 115, 124; Kats-Chernin, 134; musical analysis, 89. See also Score versus sound Pfitzner, Hans, 66 Philosophy, Western, 135, 145 Plato, 15,67,83, 135 Poiner, Gretchen, 32, 55, 183 n.9 Politics, 81, 108, 130, 160, 174-75, 177, 180; feminist, 9, 14 Positivism, 132, 181-82 Postmodernism: Australian women composers, 53; feminism and, 14, 19, 21, 24-25,64-65, 109-10, 129-33, 174-75, 180-82; Henderson, 160; Kats-Chernin, 7-8, 139-40, 144-45 Post-romantic music, 36-39 Poststructuralism, 64, 129-30, 132, 174 Power relations, 152, 158, 161, 163 Poynton, Cate, 63-64, 174 Prokofiev, S., 165, 167-68,172 n.59 Proportion. See Ideal proportion Purcell, Henry, 97-98 Queer theorists, 64 Racism, 8, 154 Radic, Therese, 31, 35, 60 n.65 Randel, Don Michael, 25 Ravel, Maurice, 89, 95, 116 Readership, 8, 25, 132, 149, 151-53, 156, 168, 175 Readings. See Musical analysis Real-time analysis, 75, 95, 101 Referential meaning of music, 82-84, 87, 102, 175; feminist analysis, 88-89, 108; Lutyens, 90 Religion, 8, 154-55, 158 Renaissance music, 36 Renzo, Adrian, 181 Repertoire, 32-41, 44-46, 53, 56 n.13, 110. See also Audience; Canonicity Repetitive processes, 9, 115, 124, 153 Resolution. See Closure Restricted aesthetics, 13 Richardson, Dorothy, 11

205 Rieger, Eva, 12-13, 16, 19-20, 111, 178 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 69 Rimbaud, Arthur, 89, 98-99 Romanticism, 5, 12, 36-37, 46, 98, 122,132 Routley, Nicholas, 116 Said, Edward, 158 Saussure, Ferdinand, 85 Sayrs, Elizabeth, 21, 108-9 SBS Youth Orchestra (SBS), 40-41, 52, 58 nn.32, 33 Schaffler, Rosemary, 76-77, 182-83 n.8 Schapiro, Miriam, 114 Schelling, Friedrich von, 81 Schenkerian analysis, 5-6, 71 Schindler, Emile, 67, 69 Schindler-Mahler, Alma: biographical sketch, 66-69; Ansturm, 6, 64, 71-77, 136, 176, 179; Ansturm climaxes, 73-76, 89, 102, 178, 183 n. 10; Ansturm compared with Zemlinsky's, 3, 69, 71-72, 75-77, 178, 183n.l4 Schnitzler, Arthur, 66 Schoenberg, Arnold: audiences, 37, 98; context, 84; feminine associations, 7, 70, 97; Henderson and, 162-63, 168; Lutyens and, 97, 99, 101-2; Schindler-Mahler and, 66, 68 Scholes, R., 63 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 82 Schreker, Franz, 66 Schumann, Clara, 12, 29 n.71, 36 Schumann, Robert, 134, 139-40 Scientific progress, 84, 131 Score versus sound, 85-88, 89, 96, 98-99, 102, 141, 145, 175 Scruton, Roger, 85 Sculthorpe, Peter, 53, 60 n.65, 116, 120, 158 Semiosis, 7, 22-23, 108, 113, 115, 137, 156, 176 Serialism, 6-7, 71, 84, 89-90, 96-101, 162

206 Sexual (e)motion, 6, 70, 83 Sexual identity, 65-66 Sexuality: musical analysis, 1, 6, 63, 69-71, 79 n.32, 103 n.13, 114, 119, 162; writing, 63, 113 Sexual signatures. See Signatures Sexual stereotypes, 6, 18, 63, 71, 74-76, 90, 108, 161, 163-64 Seymour Group (SEY), 39-41, 57 n.31, 58 n.33 Shepherd, John, 23 Signatures, 150-53, 156; Henderson, 153-55,159-68 Smith, Hazel, 180 Smyth, Ethel, 36 Social context: Boyd, 117; feminist aesthetics, 108-12, 115, 117, 132, 177; Henderson, 158-60, 165; musicologists, 64,81-84,88,174 Social engineering, 44-46 Sociology, 110, 131,182 Solie, Ruth, 109, 111, 125 n.6, 126 n.31, 169 Sonata form, 6, 13, 89-90, 92-93, 95-96, 101, 105n.45, 179 Song: Boyd, 107, 117-18; Clarke, 91, 95, 179; Henderson, 165; Schindler-Mahler, 66, 68-69, 73-77, 90 Song Company (SC), 39-41, 57 n.31, 58 nn.32, 33 Sound. See Score versus sound Spero, Nancy, 12 Spirals, 121, 128 n.74 Stanford, Sir Charles, 91 Stewart, Amanda, 180 Still, Judith, 21 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 154, 156, 162, 171 n.32 Strozzi, Barbara, 36 Structuralism, 131-32 Stylistic analysis: art, 126 n.22; Boyd, 116, 152; Clarke, 90; feminist, 19, 113-14, 124; Greenwell, 181; Henderson, 156, 160, 162-63; Kats-Chemin, 140; Lutyens, 90, 97-98; Schindler-Mahler, 68-69, 71; writing, 153 Stylistic development, 8, 96, 180 Subjectivity, 27 n.41, 107, 114, 174

Index Subotnik, Rose, 25 Sutherland, Margaret, 56 Sydney Alpha Ensemble (SAE), 39-41, 57 n.31, 58 n.33 Sydney Morning Herald, music reviewed in, 36-38, 40-41 Sydney Spring Festival of New Music (SSFNM), 39-41, 57 n.31, 58 n.33, 141 Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO), 33, 38-41, 51, 58 nn.32, 33, 60 n.73, 166 Sydney Youth orchestra (SYO), 40-41, 58 nn.32, 33 Symbolism, 22-23, 82-83, 113, 164, 176 Synergy (SYN), 39-41, 57 n.31, 58 n.33 Taste, 5, 16,18,53 Tchaikovsky, P. I., 1 Temple, Mary Kay, 125 n.6 Tenant-Flowers, Sarah Jane, 97-98, 100-101, 104 n.31 Text, 133,150-53,156,175; Henderson, 160, 162; Kats-Chemin, 136-44 Texrualities, 115, 117 Threadgold, Terry, 3, 19-20, 149-50, 152-53,156, 171 n.35 Tick, Judith, 111 Time frame, 129, 133-34, 139 Tomlinson, Gary, 64 Tonal/modal language: Boyd, 121-23, 128 n.67; Clarke, 89, 101; feminist aesthetics, 13, 108; Henderson, 156, 166; Kats-Chemin, 134, 140-41, 143; Lutyens, 99-100 Toop, Richard, 138 Training. See Music education Transcendence, 20, 82, 124, 174-75 Truman, Jo, 180 United Kingdom, composers. See Clarke; Lutyens; Orchestras Van den Toorn, Pieter C, 109, 125 n.6 Vandervelde, Janika, 18, 27 n.37, 79 n.32, 103 n.13, 108, 113, 151

Index Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 97 Vella, Richard, 180 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 34, 56 n.15 Voice, 63-64 Wagner, Richard, 68, 77 Watson, Ben, 125 n.6 Watson, Gordon, 138 Waugh, Patricia, 132-33, 174 Webern, Anton von, 97-100, 162 Werfel, Alma. See Schindler-Mahler, Alma Werfel, Franz, 66, 69 Western philosophy, 135, 145 White, Patrick, 159 Wolff, Janet, 11-12,22-23 Women composers: AMEB syllabuses, 48-49, 51, 53; American performance, 33, 55-56 n.13; Australian performance, 6-8, 32-41, 45, 53, 56 nn.16, 19, 57 n.31, 58 nn.32, 33; Australian theses, 56 n.20; Boyd as, 124; Clarke and Lutyens as, 81, 91-92, 96-97, 100; feminist aesthetics, 12-13, 20, 25, 71, 107,110-11, 175-76, 178-82; Henderson as, 149-50, 154-55, 157, 168-69; Kats-Chemin as, 137-40, 145;

207

musical analysis, 75, 88, 136; musicology, 2-5, 8-9, 29 n.71; Schindler-Mahler as, 66-69, 76-77. See also Australian women composers Women's art, 111-12, 114, 126 n.22, 180 Women's music: Australian context, 31-32, 35-36, 61 n.84; Henderson, 149, 157, 160; musicology, 1-6, 12,19,64,69-70,88, 110-12, 173-77, 182; postmodernism, 133; repetitive performances, 115 Women's participation in music, 32-34, 45, 55 n.4, 111 Women's writing, 133-15, 152. See also French feminists Woolf, Virginia, 11 Work (Barthes), 133; Kats-Chemin, 136-44 Work concept, 45-46, 50-51, 111 Yann, Campbell, Hoare, Wheeler and Carter James Associates, 60 n.73 Zemlinksy, Alexander von, 3, 66, 68-69,71-72,75-77, 178, 183 n.14

About the Author SALLY MACARTHUR is a Lecturer in Musicology for the School of Contemporary Arts at the University of Western Sydney in Australia. She is the editor of Proceedings of the New Music Australia Conference 1992 (1998) and co-editor, with Cate Poynton, of Musics and Feminisms (1999). She is the Associate Editor of the interdisciplinary visual and performing arts journal Posrwest.