15/10/19

#3 – Music and Gender

Polemic Statement: “Music has no gender and no sexuality (there’s no such thing as ‘gay
music’), therefore, feminism and queer theories are of dubious legitimacy.”

Gender

- Sex = biological property

- Gender = cultural property
- Gender is enacted through performance, which does not necessarily relate to a
biological property
- Gender is culturally constructed, but how?
- Is gender binary (SPOILER: it’s not)
- Is music involved with sexuality?

Women in Music

- Under-representation of women conductors

- Under-representation of women composers (historically and modern)
- Under-representation of women in music industry jobs (promoters etc.), even if
women as artists, managers tend to be male
- Part of more general issue of gender inequality, too

Social conditions and women making music

- Historical absence of women from art

- Denied musical training, except in domestic music-making and approved feminine-
associated ways
- Domestic piano playing allowed to accompany singing: home/private
- Singing more readily available due to the connotations of women in nature
- Associations beginning in school: composition/instrumentation gendering
- Publication
- Re-inserting/recognising gay people/women in repertory

Issues

- ‘If gender is understood as only incidental to musical, intellectual or cultural

practices, then the gender of the person embarking on a musical life of some kind
would presumably also only be incidental – marginal – to her success or failure’
(Cusick, 1999, 474)
- Sexuality traditionally side-lined in biographies where doesn’t fit ‘great’ masculine
musical model (Schubert’s sexuality, Maynard Solomon)
- Vladimir Mendinsky, Russian minister for culture says: ‘There is no evidence that
Tchaikovsky was a homosexual’… Film should be about his life as a ‘genius’ and a
‘great Russian composer’… ‘Sexual preferences shouldn’t be shown, shouldn’t be.
Discussed, not on television, not in parliament, not at a rally of 500,000 people.
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- "Cursed buggermania forms an impassable gulf between me and most people,"

Tchaikovsky wrote in the letters obtained by Wiley, according to The Independent.
"It imparts to my character an estrangement, fear of people, shyness, immoderate
bashfulness, mistrust, in a word, a thousand traits from which I am getting ever more
unsociable. Imagine that often, and for hours at a time, I think about a monastery or
something of the kind."

Women Composers

- Is this canon-building just reinscribing problematic power structures?

- Do we need alternative models?
- Women in opera; To be looked at (exploited for desire)? Feminised ‘melodramatic’
‘over the top’ surreal expression
- Highly constrained and trained
- Limitations of role and type
- Women die in opera a lot. Their death acting as a conclusion resolution, restoration
of order

Hermeneutic Tradition

- Constructions of gender and gender ideologies in music

- Musical materials can be heard in gendered terms
Role models of musical activity, discourse surrounding musical texts/lyrics within work, or
associated with culture, notions of ‘maleness; and ‘femaleness’ in musical terms (received
ideas of tempo, articulation, dynamics, orchestration, genres
- Culturally encoded

- Susan McClary’s feminist criticism: Beethoven’s masculinity and idea of tonal

closure can be read as a violent assertion of male power (Susan McClary, Feminine
Endings (Minnesota Press, 1991), 129-130
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Can Music Engage with Sexuality?

- ‘The implication of some of these analyses is that music not only provides
representations of masculinity and femininity, but that it can encourage listeners to
adopt a particular subject position’ (Dibben, 2000, 129)
- E.g. Beyoncé for black female space
- Bowie, Mercury for camp space
- Physical experience of music: Nightclub culture, Phillip Brett on Schubert piano duets
and personal intimacy
- Gender and age as highly correlative with genre (pop as part of culturalization and
engagement or value system: boybands vs heavy metal rockers)
- Sonically ‘queer’ – Androgynous voices (Marc Almond, Castrati, RuPaul). Voices that
reject supposedly masculine values

Genre: Disco and Sexuality

- Gay culture for development of genre

- Alternative culture: minority night club for queer communities
- Origins in gay clubs
- Disco as a way for mainstream ‘passing’ of queer culture, engaging in camp
behaviour

Adoptable Subjectivities

- Diana Ross – ‘I’m Coming Out’

- Gloria Gaynor – ‘I Will Survive’
- Camp as rebellion and rejection of modernist values of authenticity, progress,
autonomy etc.
- Wilful denial of value system
- Listeners ‘read’ music as meaningful in terms of identity and cultural relationships

Conclusions

- Role of women and gay people in musical practice

- Power structures in musical practice
- New ways of ‘reading’ music
- Connection to lived experience (and recognition of pleasure) and musical life
- Relation with wider culture (both influenced by, and influencing)
- Recognition of listener and performer
- How useful or realistic is it to attach musical characteristics to sexual preference?
- Disarming heterosexist historical narratives

Questions

- Does gender and sexuality inflect your understanding, and engagement with music?
- What might be the political results of understanding music in terms of gender and
sexuality?
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Example Material:

- https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tchaikovsky-biopic-homosexuality-
russia_n_3825861?ri18n=true&guccounter=1
- https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?
docId=ft7j49p1r5&chunk.id=d0e675&toc.id=&brand=ucpress
- Ghostbusters film score
- (Susan McClary, Feminine Endings (Minnesota Press, 1991), 129-130
- Believe – Cher
- (Dibben, 2000, 129)
- ‘The Village People’ (1978) – Playful portrayal of gay underground lifestyle: each
member costumed to represent ‘gay fantasy type’. YMCA, space for young gay men
to meet up