Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music

Sally Macarthur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317009092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music opens up a new way of thinking about the absence of women's music. It does not aim to find 'a solution' in a liberal feminist sense, but to discover new potentialities, new possibilities for thought and action. Sally Macarthur encourages us, with the assistance of Deleuze, and feminist-Deleuzian work, to begin the important work of imagining what else might be possible, not in order to provide answers but to open up the as yet unknown. The power of thought - or what Deleuze calls the 'virtual' - opens up new possibilities. Macarthur suggests that the future for women's 'new' music is not tied to the predictable and known but to futures beyond the already-known. Previous research concludes that women's music is virtually absent from the concert hall, and yet fails to find a way of changing this situation. Macarthur finds that the flaw in the recommendations flowing from past research is that it envisages the future from the standpoint of the present, and it relies on a set of pre-determined goals. It thus replicates the present reality, so reinforcing rather than changing the status quo. Macarthur challenges this thinking, and argues that this repetitive way of thinking is stuck in the present, unable to move forward. Macarthur situates her argument in the context of current dominant neoliberal thought and practice. She argues that women have generally not thrived in the neoliberal model of the composer, which envisages the composer as an individual, autonomous creator and entrepreneur. Successful female composers must work with this dominant, modernist aesthetic and exploit the image of the neo-romantic, entrepreneurial creator. This book sets out in contrast to develop a new conception of subjectivity that sows the seeds of a twenty-first-century feminist politics of music.

Chapter 1
How is Gender Composed in Musical Composition?

The feminist research on the composition of classical music, both that which takes a liberal feminist position and that which takes a radical feminist approach,1 tends to be empirical and to draw on the reasoning that is typical of empirical research. In doing so it takes up a realist approach, and it makes the assumption that the relevant factors are observable, understandable and measurable. Some of this empirical work is archival, involving the retrieval of forgotten names from music history. Some quantifies the extent to which women participate in the public world of music. This empirical research is conducted within the established, epistemological methods of observation, standardisation, probability, prediction, generalisation and explanation. Empirical methods are legitimated by a systematic engagement with the data and by their capacity to predict the future. Its methods are grounded on observations of an assumed ‘real world out there’.2 Its methodic practices turn data into facts, which are assumed to be able to explain the real world.

These facts and explanations have been accumulated in the radical feminist strand of research to build women’s music into a ‘field of knowledge’,3 which makes known the names of women in music that have been previously forgotten. It retrieves these names from history, producing dictionaries, biographies, bibliographies, anthologies, discographies and much else. It establishes the fact that the field of music composition is not solely a male domain. Women are not only present in that domain, but worthy of celebration within that domain. It maps the field of gender in music by filling in the missing information.4 This endeavour, as Pendle’s comprehensive research and information guide on women in music shows, is continued in the twenty-first century, methodologically intersecting with empirical research conducted elsewhere in musicology.5

A strand related to this historical recovery project can be described as liberal feminist, insofar as it works from the belief that we can and should live in an equitable world. It assembles empirical data to demonstrate that women’s music continues to be relatively absent in the public world of classical music performance. This work adopts a quantitative, descriptive approach. It uses numbers to determine who holds power, and to map the boundaries and internal characteristics of the spaces and populations in which the music by women is composed or performed.6 Evidence retrieved from sources, such as performance, broadcast and concert programmes, concert reviews, tertiary music curricula, CD catalogues, performing rights organisations and publishing houses, to name a few, is converted into numbers and percentages. The work in this strand periodically monitors this evidence to determine whether the numbers are rising or falling, or producing positive or negative patterns. It is a discourse which, to invoke Lather, is anchored in the liberal humanist belief ‘of knowledge as cure’.7 In doing so it relies on a liberal humanist commitment to equal rights: if there is numerical evidence that women are discriminated against, there will, in the name of justice and equity, be a move towards non-discriminatory patterns. But what is it that will generate this shift? It is important to examine how the various discourses work and to find why this empirical approach has not accomplished the changes it hoped for.

In this chapter, I will critique some of the work in empirical musicology. I will explore the usefulness and shortcomings of this research, asking what questions it leaves unanswered or unaddressed. I will consider how else we might view the question of women’s agency in musical composition. What might a non-reductive analysis of their representation look like? What kinds of thinking would be generated by utilising a Deleuzian-poststructuralist conception of difference? How would our understanding of women’s music be changed by refracting it through the virtual? Is it possible to bring the empirical domain into an encounter with Deleuze and for this encounter to have impact in other contexts?

In this endeavour, the Deleuzian concept of ‘event’ becomes useful, for it is a way of ‘theorising the immanent creativity of thinking, challenging us to consider things anew … to make thinking its own event by embracing the rich chaos of life and the uniqueness of the potential of each moment’.8 The ‘event’ in a Deleuzian conception is not an occurrence or a happening in the material world. It is not what evidently occurs. It is not a disruption of some continuous state, such as the disturbance of a negative slump in an otherwise positive statistical graph. Rather, the ‘event’ is conceived as a ‘potential immanent within a confluence of forces’.9 It is a dynamic attribution, constituted by events underlying it and marked in every moment as a state of transformation.10 Such thinking would not conceive the representation of women’s music in terms of fluctuating patterns of upward or downward shifts which are linked to specific causes. In Deleuzian thought, reality is not a given. The event is not a predictable set of outcomes which follow a logical sequence or which demonstrates a particular impact caused by an intervention into a particular situation. Rather, having no beginning or ending, constituted as ‘always in the middle’, the event is a moment of dynamic change – a ‘becoming’ – a moving through an event, ‘with the event representing a momentary productive intensity’.11

Adapting this conception, we might consider a statistical ‘event’ as a dynamic intensity passing through other events. If women’s music is a destabilising force in the concert hall, as I will suggest was the case in the year 1994, it may be that it is connected to other productive intensities, such as the flow of feminist thinking into music. Or, conversely, the lack of women’s music in the concert hall may have something to do with post-feminism’s advent (which is also to say feminism’s demise) within neo-liberal thought. The historical retrieval project of women’s music might be viewed, to recall Patton, ‘as a political terrain opened to destabilisation or deterritorialisation’, a moment of dynamic change that forces us to confront new intensities, affects and possibilities.12

The philosophy of Deleuze opens up a new way of thinking which is often referred to in poststructuralist theory as the ‘Deleuzian turn’. It rejects the metaphysics of self and redefines the conscious, to quote Braidotti, ‘as a reproductive, forward-propelling force of flows and intensities’.13 Deleuze’s philosophy is seen as a radical departure from philosophy grounded in materiality and is often described as a philosophy of immanence: it is a philosophy which is interested in thought, or in the virtual world of possibilities. Paying attention exclusively to the material world in Deleuzian philosophy is limiting, for it confines knowledge to what is already known. Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence opens up possibilities for things that are as yet unknown, things or thoughts which are yet to become actualised. Deleuze’s philosophy eschews notions of ‘being’ and ‘meaning’. It is interested in the limitless possibilities uncovered by the mobilisation of concepts and in the unpredictable ways in which these have transformational effects. I will consider a different way of conceptualising music, the statistical data derived from empirical research and the subject (the composer and performer), viewing these as processes under construction over time, dynamic entities which have the capacity to undergo transformations.

Imposing Measurement on Women in Music

Generated out of the sphere of empirical research is a body of work that has painstakingly gathered descriptive statistics, on the one hand, to argue that women are present in the field of music, especially in performance,14 and on the other hand, to claim that the gender gap in music composition is widening rather than closing.15 It is a style of enunciation which produces truth claims about the world in which female composers work. It imagines it has the power to effect change, to set in motion a series of tangible improvements for women composers. In one example, the writer expresses herself in positive terms while presenting some less than positive news.16 This strategy is often utilised to avoid offending antagonists to the female-composer-cause and is steeped in the language of impartial reason. Hirsch draws on descriptive statistics acquired from a variety of sources – though these are not systematically detailed – and includes qualitative and anecdotal data from interviews with various composers. Her aim is to establish the case that things are improving. She heralds her report with the positive statement that:

women have made tremendous progress over the last 30 years … [they] make up about half of the string and woodwind sections in American orchestras, they occupy prominent administrative positions in major musical institutions and they are visible as directors and designers in important opera houses.17

She claims that women constitute approximately 30 per cent of composition students in American colleges but says that this figure does not translate into performances of their music by orchestras. She highlights as exemplars the University of California at Berkeley, from which about one-third of the current graduate students (2008) were said to be women, and New York’s Stony Brook, in which women apparently typically comprise 30 per cent of the composers. She also points out that half of the composition faculty at Stony Brook (from a total of six composers18) were women, and suggests that a link can be established between the number of female composers and the high numbers of women studying composition at that institution. Her data sourced from programmes of the 20045 concert season are not so positive, showing that works by women accounted for only 1 per cemt of all pieces performed by the 300 or so member orchestras who responded to a survey by the League of American Orchestras (LAO). Of the following year, Hirsch notes an improvement: ‘with a boost from Joan Tower’s widely performed Made in America’, the number rose to 2 per cent.19

Discussing the figures she gathered for ‘new’ music groups, Hirsch suggests that some are more sympathetic to women’s music than others. There is an implication that sexual discrimination is the underlying cause for women’s music being absent in the performances of two groups: in the 2007–8 season in North America, New York’s ensemble Either/Or lists no women composers among the works it has performed; and less than 0.5 per cent (one woman) is listed by the Cygnus Ensemble. In other groups, where the statistics are better, the discrimination is imagined to recede. According to Hirsch, the ensemble counter) induction performed 13 works by women out of a total of 80 (16 per cent), San Francisco’s Other Minds Festival presented 29 works by women out of 115 (25 per cent), and 8 women out of 36 composers (22 per cent) have been commissioned by the Bang on a Can People’s Commissions.20 On the strength of her evidence, Hirsch concludes that women composers today are in a much better situation than they were in the past. 21

In a similar vein to Hirsch, Adkins Chiti is interested in how visible women’s music is on concert platforms, particularly in Europe. Unlike Hirsch’s, the tone of her report is assertive. Her negative findings are couched in depressing language: ‘composers … men and women … are unable to earn a living only from their musical compositions and performing rights’, and ‘music-generated income is well below national poverty levels’.22 She says that ‘recent surveys carried out by music periodicals in France and Italy have underlined that only about 85 living classical music contemporary European composers live through commissions and Performing Rights – of these only two are women’.23 She unfolds what she describes as dismal statistics, reporting that the programming of major orchestras and festivals in member countries of the European Union, including thre...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Thinking with Deleuze
• 1 How is Gender Composed in Musical Composition?
• 2 How is the Composer Composed?
• 3 Composing ‘New’ Music’s Public Image
• 4 Feminists Recomposing the Field of Musicology
• 5 A Thousand Dissonances and Women’s ‘New’ Music
• 6 Women, ‘New’ Music and the Composition of Becomings
• Bibliography
• Index