How Have Aspects of Gender Been Represented Through Music?
How have aspects of gender been represented through music?
Literature and visual art are almost always concerned with the organisation of gender and the construction of gender. Since listeners know how to explain how it creates its effects, music gives the illusion of operating independently of culture mediation. Music based on gender and how that is seen or heard is able to contribute heavily (if surreptitiously) to the shaping of individual identities: along with other influential media such as film, music teaches us how to experience our own emotions, our desires and even our own bodies. This way of understanding music is every day in the area of popular music production and reception. Both musicians and listeners know that one of the primary dangers in this music is the public construction of gender and sexuality. Weather Prince, Madonna, The Smiths or Guns ‘n’ Roses, “most pop artists strive to create images that challenge traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity, to present models of gender that range from liberatory , to polymorphously perverse, to mutually supportive, to overly misogynist and violent.”[1] The critical controversies that greet each new development demonstrate how very significant this music is – not simply as leisure entertainment, but as a site in which fundamental aspects of social formation are contested and negotiation. Such critical debates are almost entirely absent from traditional musicology. The standard explanation would be that while popular music admittedly addresses issues such as sexuality, classical music “the standard concert repertory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” [2]is concerned exclusively with loftier matters. Indeed, it is precisely this difference that many devotees of classical music would point to a proof that their preferences are morally superior to those of pop music fan: their music is not polluted by the libidinal – or even the social.
Classical music (no less that pop) is bound
Literature and visual art are almost always concerned with the organisation of gender and the construction of gender. Since listeners know how to explain how it creates its effects, music gives the illusion of operating independently of culture mediation. Music based on gender and how that is seen or heard is able to contribute heavily (if surreptitiously) to the shaping of individual identities: along with other influential media such as film, music teaches us how to experience our own emotions, our desires and even our own bodies. This way of understanding music is every day in the area of popular music production and reception. Both musicians and listeners know that one of the primary dangers in this music is the public construction of gender and sexuality. Weather Prince, Madonna, The Smiths or Guns ‘n’ Roses, “most pop artists strive to create images that challenge traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity, to present models of gender that range from liberatory , to polymorphously perverse, to mutually supportive, to overly misogynist and violent.”[1] The critical controversies that greet each new development demonstrate how very significant this music is – not simply as leisure entertainment, but as a site in which fundamental aspects of social formation are contested and negotiation. Such critical debates are almost entirely absent from traditional musicology. The standard explanation would be that while popular music admittedly addresses issues such as sexuality, classical music “the standard concert repertory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” [2]is concerned exclusively with loftier matters. Indeed, it is precisely this difference that many devotees of classical music would point to a proof that their preferences are morally superior to those of pop music fan: their music is not polluted by the libidinal – or even the social.
Classical music (no less that pop) is bound
Bibliography: McClary, Susan, “Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality”, (University of Minnestoa Press, 1991) Freud, “The Ego and I.D.”, 2nd edition ( John Storey, 1997) Solie Ruth A., “Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship”, (The University Press Group Ltd, United States, 1995) Mulvey, “Male Gaze”, (Routledge,1998) Citron, Marcia J, “Gender and the Musical Canon”, (Cambridge University Press, 2000) ----------------------- [1] McClary, Susan, “Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality”, (University of Minnestoa Press, 1991) page 126 [2] Freud, “The Ego and I.D.”, 2nd edition ( John Storey, 1997) page 162 [3] Solie Ruth A., “Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship”, (The University Press Group Ltd, United States, 1995) page 234 [4] Mulvey, “Male Gaze”, (Routledge,1998) page 53 [5] McClary, Susan, “Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality”, (University of Minnestoa Press, 1991) page 32 [6] McClary, Susan, “Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality”, (University of Minnestoa Press, 1991) page 84 [7] Citron, Marcia J, “Gender and the Musical Canon”, (Cambridge University Press, 2000) page 177