Like many adolescent girls in the 1960s to 1970s who played the piano and studied classical music at school, I was as much insecure as fascinated in the realm of rock music. I perceived my insecurity as the result of a split between classical and popular music, reflected in the parallel discrepancy between school and subculture: I had been classically trained at school, and this was why I could not understand the technicalities of rock. What I was unable to entertain was the additional possibility that my insecurity was a product of gender: that the problem was not so much to do with technical differences between classical and rock music themselves, as with the cultural ownership of rock by boys. I want to suggest that there is a peculiar difficulty about questioning one’s own gender- position in relation to music, a difficulty which arises from a specifically musical factor: that we learn our gendered relationships with music, not only from wider historical, political and educational contexts, but also through musical experience itself. The operation of musical meaning as a gendered discourse occurs poignantly in the school classroom as a microcosm of the wider society.
I wish to sketch a theoretical distinction between two virtual aspects of musical meaning.1 The first operates at the level of musical materials, the syntactical organization of which gives rise to the listener’s sense of whole and part, opening and close, repetition, difference and all other pertinent functional relationships. I call this ‘inherent meaning’, not to indicate that there is anything essential or ahistorical about it, but rather that both the materials which form the signifying part of the process of identifying structures, and those which are being signified as structures in some way, are made up of musical materials: inherent, then, in the sense that they physically inhere. The materials of music are not just heard as random sounds, but they have relationships which can be perceived as such. These relationships can be said to have meaning in terms of each other, but without any symbolic content. Listeners’ responses to and understanding of inherent meanings are dependent on the listeners’ competence in relation to the style of the music. A piece of music whose materials are highly meaningful or very rewarding to you, might be relatively meaningless or lacking in interest to me.
This aspect of musical meaning is only partial, and can never exist on its own. We have become accustomed to the idea that the social or cultural images of performers make an important contribution to their commercial survival. It would be surprising, for example, to see a record cover of Schubert songs depicting the soprano Kiri Te Kanawa in bondage with purple hair; and if we see Madonna in a respectable suit we interpret this as postmodern dressing. But the manipulation of performers’ images is not a mere marketing strategy, for clothes, hair styles or posturing on the sleeves of recordings are all details of a broader, necessary aspect of any music: its mediation as a cultural artefact within a social and historical context. This context is not merely an extra-musical appendage, but forms an intrinsic part of the music’s meaning during the listening experience. Without some understandings of the fact that music is a social construction, we would ultimately be unable to recognize any particular collection of sounds as music at all. When we listen to music, we cannot separate our experience of its pre-symbolic, inherent meanings entirely from a greater or lesser awareness of the social context and symbolic content that accompany its production and reception. I will therefore suggest a second category of musical meaning, distinct from the first, and called ‘delineated meaning’. By this expression I wish to convey the idea that music metaphorically sketches, or delineates, a plethora of contextualizing factors. As with inherent meaning, listeners construct the delineated meanings of music according to their subject-position in relation to the music’s style. Delineated meanings are at some levels conventionally accepted, and at others, personal.
Whenever we hear music, we are affected to some extent by both types of meaning, and both must always be present in all musical experience. But each type of meaning operates very differently, each acting in various ways upon the other, to affect our total musical experience, our musical practices and the construction of our discourses on music. It is through the mutual interaction of the different aspects of musical meaning that we learn, among other things, our gendered relationships with music.2
I have used the examples of Kiri Te Kanawa and Madonna to indicate that the manipulation of their images contributes in part to the delineated meanings of the music they perform. I now want to suggest that, in much more complex ways than through clothes and hair styles, something fundamental about their femininity itself also forms a part of their music’s delineated meanings. The female singer in a public arena performs on an instrument which is her body, without recourse to the manipulation of any palpable physical object in the world. She enacts a scenario which affirms an enduring patriarchal understanding of woman as both in tune with, and subject to, the natural givens of her body; while at the same time being alienated from, and needless of, technology. In this highlighting of the body away from technology, vocal performance is akin to a type of display, and indeed, the singing woman has been associated in most cultures with the sexual temptress or harlot.3 But the woman singer not only appears sexually available, for in her private capacity she conjures up an
inversion of this public image, that of the idealized mother singing to her baby. Pivoted upon the binary division between whore and madonna, harlot and virgin, the woman singer re-enacts some of the fundamental patriarchal defining characteristics of femininity. When we listen to a woman sing, we do not just listen to the inherent meanings of the music, but we are also aware of their position in this nexus of definition. Her femininity becomes a part of the music’s delineations. This affirmation of femininity and its delineation in music is one of the reasons why, throughout the history of music, women have been more abundant and successful in singing than in any other single musical role.
In the case of instrumental performance, the presence and manipulation of the instrument itself to some extent interrupts the appearance of the woman’s natural in-tuneness with and susceptibility to her body. The more unwieldy and loud the instrument and the more technologically demanding for the performer, the more problematic is the construction of an apparently feminine bodily display by the performer. The woman instrumentalist challenges the binary characterization of woman as either sexually available or maternally preoccupied.
There was this young girl on stage, and this enormous drum kit. I couldn’t believe that she was going to play it; but she walked across the stage and sat down behind it, and she did play it—and she played it well too!
These are the words of an astonished school caretaker at a recent concert. However familiar such incredulity is in so many walks of life, this should not distract us from the implications it raises for musical meaning. I would suggest that the idea of the girl’s femininity had fleetingly become a part of the music’s delineations in the experience of the caretaker. When he listened to the music, he was ‘listening out’ to discover whether she could play well. Not only for him, but for all of us, the gender of the female instrumental performer enters into delineated musical meaning, as an interruption to patriarchal definitions of femininity. This occurs to varying extents depending on the subject-position of the listener, the type of instrument, the musical style and the social context. The effects of this problematic relationship between femininity and instrumental performance are decipherable throughout the history of women’s musical roles, which reveals the fact that unwieldiness, high volume or technological complexity tend to characterize those very instruments from which women have been most vehemently discouraged or banned.
Femininity also enters delineated meaning through the composer. Clearly there is no display of the composer’s body, but composition requires a level of knowledge and control over technique, distinct from the physical motor-control of performance; and through this type of control, mind features in any composition-related delineations of music.4 As we listen to music, one of the elements of which we are more or less aware, an element that we are prone to marvel at in our best musical experiences, is the mind behind the music. ‘How could Beethoven have conceived of such a thing?’ we are prone to say. While we
listen, it is not just the inherent meanings that occupy our attention, but the idea of Beethoven’s mind. When it is not Beethoven, but the woman composer Louise Adolpha Le Beau to whom we are listening, such a response is liable to be marked by an even greater level of incredulity than that of the school caretaker above.
[The final variation] subsequently plunges passionately and boldly on and becomes so violent, that one has quite forgotten by the end that the composer is a woman; indeed, one could think that one were dealing with a capable man, who can truly strike earnestly and hard as here.
(The words of a contemporary critic, concerning Le Beau’s Piano Variations, Op. 3.)5
Like the display of body in performance, there is a metaphorical display of mind in composition, which becomes a part of the music’s delineated meanings. When the composer is known to be a woman, the fact of her display of mind conflicts with her ideologically constructed natural submission to the body, going so far as to threaten patriarchal definitions of femininity. This is part of the explanation of why it is that women have throughout music history been even more vigorously discouraged from composition than from instrumental performance.
The discourses which surround different styles of music place various emphases upon the relative importance of delineated or inherent meanings. If the music is serious, classical, and purported to be autonomous, then any delineations are often altogether denied by listeners. In the case of such music, listeners are not supposed to be looking at the woman player, or disturbed by the femininity of the composer because they are not supposed to be paying attention to the delineated meanings at all. If the music is less autonomous, more commercial for example, as with certain categories of popular music, listeners very often take any display of femininity as a legitimate and pertinent part of the delineated meanings, which are themselves celebrated. The delineations of femininity, their capacity to affirm, interrupt or threaten patriarchal definitions, thus vary in degree like all musical meanings, according to the music’s style, its historical context, and the subject-position of the listener. But even in the most supposedly autonomous music, the discourse surrounding which totally eschews the possibility of delineated meaning, femininity is none the less delineated to some extent. Otherwise, if I can put this in a nutshell, there would be no heat in the issue of women’s musical roles, and the whole history of music would be different.6
I have suggested some ways in which the femininity of the performer or composer enters delineated musical meaning. Clearly, by my definition of inherent musical meaning as purely to do with musical materials, inherent meaning itself can have nothing to do with gender. But the gendered delineation of music does in fact not stop at delineation: it continues from its delineated position, to affect listeners’ responses to and perceptions of inherent meaning. In
the realm of performance, for example, if the delineation of a piece of music involves overt sexuality on the part of the female performer, we are disinclined to pay much attention to her manipulation of the inherent meanings. This disinclination surfaces in the visual culture of much popular music today, when in videos or television programmes, producers substitute the real performers by women whose main function is to display their bodies. The more attention is paid to bodily display by the performer in such a context, the less likely do we find it that the woman is actually playing the instrument, or even actually singing.7 It is not only that a high degree of feminine display is in the delineations of the music, but that those delineations then cause us to hear and interpret the inherent meanings in a certain way.
In the case of composition also, once listeners are aware that the composer is a woman, a long history shows that they tend to perceive the inherent meanings of the music in terms of delineated femininity. For example, a Scandinavian music critic was in the habit of writing rave reviews about a particular composer. After many reviews, the critic found out that the composer was a woman. He carried on writing good reviews, but his language changed; his praise ceased to describe the music with words like ‘strident’, ‘virile’ or ‘powerful’, and began to include words like ‘delicate’ and ‘sensitive’. What had happened was that his new knowledge that the composer was a woman, or in the terms I am suggesting, the delineation of the femininity of the composer affected the way that he also heard the inherent meanings. One cannot help wondering whether, had he known the composer’s gender all along, he would have found any merit in the compositions to begin with. A great deal of music by women composers has been denigrated for its effeminacy; other music has been more favourably received as displaying positive feminine attributes such as delicacy or sensitivity; and a tiny amount of music by women has been incredulously hailed as equal to music by men. History gives us due cause to assume that the composer behind nearly all the music that most people hear, is a man; or to put this another way, part of all musical delineation contains the notion of a male mind. When we discover a woman’s mind behind the music, her femininity then enters the delineations, from which position it acts to alter our perceptions, normally unchallenged in this regard, of the inherent meanings. The more that femininity is delineated, the less inclined are we to judge the inherent meanings as autonomous essences.
To summarize the argument so far, music delineates gender in a variety of ways, according to the gender of the performer and/or the composer, in combination with the music’s style, its historical context and the subject-position of the listener. Musical delineations are not closed unto themselves, but they affect our perceptions of inherent meanings. When music delineates femininity through a female performer or composer, we are liable to also judge the handling of inherent meanings by that performer or composer in terms of our idea of their femininity. It is not that there is anything feminine about the inherent meanings, but that the idea of femininity filters our response to them.
I sent some questionnaires8 to a selection of mixed secondary schools in different parts of England, which aimed to tap teachers’ perceptions of boys’ and girls’ musical practices and aptitudes. It was no surprise to find that in almost every one of the seventy-eight schools, girls were reported to sing in abundance, often to the total exclusion of boys; that large numbers of girls played keyboard and traditional orchestral instruments enthusiastically, joining orchestras and bands and taking part in school concerts, whereas boys played mainly electric guitars, bass and drums. Overwhelmingly, teachers stated that girls are better at playing classical music than boys, giving the reason that girls are more persevering, hard-working and committed. It was interesting to discover something about teachers’ views of pupils’ proclivities in the realm of composition, a curriculum requirement which has only existed in any widespread sense in Britain over the last ten years or so. I found that in teachers’ eyes and ears, girls are more conservative at composition, less imaginative, less innovative than boys, who are understood to have all the hallmarks of a sense of aesthetic adventure. In sum, musical girls are understood to be numerous, persevering, but ultimately conservative and mediocre; whereas musical boys are perceived as rare, creative and gifted.
Some of these perceptions, such as how many girls sing in the choir or play the piano, are easily empirically verifiable. In and across music classrooms there is a replication of the historical precedents that are part-cause and part-effect of gendered musical meanings, as girls and boys continue by their musical practices to reproduce the history of women’s and men’s musical roles. Others of the teachers’ perceptions, such as how gifted girls and boys are at music and especially how creative they are at composition, are not empirically verifiable at all. Such impressions are based on aesthetic judgements about pupils’ musical products. These judgements can be understood in terms of deeply embedded musical meanings handed down through history and like everyone else, teachers and pupils in schools respond to music in terms of musical meanings that are, among other things, gendered. This includes not only delineated meanings, but the effect of delineations upon our perceptions of inherent meanings. Thus, as with all listeners and critics, when teachers judge pupils’ work, the gendered musical delineations, which cannot be avoided, also act to affect their perceptions of the music’s inherent meanings. For pupils themselves, when they make choices about their musical practices and when they are working on performances or compositions, the delineated meanings of their chosen music and of their own work will come back at them and affect their perceptions of its inherent meanings.
Music’s incorporation of gender does not reside hermetically in musical meaning, for gendered musical meanings affect our consciousness and experience, not only of music, but through music, of ourselves. Gendered musical meanings participate in the construction of our very notions of masculinity and femininity. This means, therefore, that we can use music to confirm and perpetuate our concepts of ourselves as gendered beings. Such a use of music lies behind
many of the teachers’ perceptions of girls’ and boys’ musical activities and abilities. Thus teachers may be right that girls are more interested in violins than drums, and they may be right that girls are conservative in composition. What is