Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (review)

For at least the last two decades feminists have urged publishers and authors of music history textbooks to include music by women composers. A quick perusal of recently published textbooks intended for the music history sequence reveals that they all include only a small number of works by the same handful of women composers and that analytic discussion of these works is lacking in detail. Moreover, music analysis continues to be underrepresented in feminist treatments of works by women composers, a crucial issue given that academia confers value on canonical compositions through music analysis based on meaningful methods.¹ Such conferral of value through analysis is particularly important for marginalized groups like women whose nonconformance to conventional procedures is more likely to be construed as incompetence than as compositional innovation: in the absence of significant music analysis women's compositions will not be accorded the prestige they deserve. However, conventional analytic methods, which were developed to explain and evaluate canonical works, do not necessarily support feminist interpretations of music and music history. Hisama's Gendering Musical Modernism not only brings innovative tools to the project of analyzing the music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon but also confronts the problem of reading the formalist analyses through feminist theory: for this and other reasons, it is a tour de force of feminist music scholarship.

Each of the seven analyses offered here uses a different method, as suggested by the music and the contexts of the composers' lived experiences as gendered subjects, "entwining" music analysis and social critique (181). Hisama makes no global claims about essential difference but rather documents the circumstances and attitudes of Crawford, Bauer, and Gideon through their diaries, letters, and published writings and demonstrates how the musical structures of these particular works comprise analogies to the composers' unspoken protest, experiences of marginalization, sexuality, identity, and political commitments. Her readings do not rely on that always suspect category, the "composer's intention," but rather situate Hisama's own hearing of the music from her subject position as an Asian American woman with experiences similar to those of her subjects. These are powerful premises for musical interpretation, for, as feminist theory's notion of "situated knowledge" shows, there are always epistemological limitations to "truth claims," which this methodology avoids, and these limitations proliferate when interpreting artworks.

Because analogy and metaphor are important means for perceiving and interpreting musical works, it is significant that Hisama's analytical methods focus on audible musical features, such as contour, register, texture, and timbre. Although some of her analyses employ pitch class set theory, probably the preeminent method of analyzing posttonal music, her original analytical tools stem largely from recent theories of contour, whose perceptibility offers clear advantages. Hisama's analyses are verifiable by listening and therefore are meaningful and satisfying. Significantly, Hisama rejects the conventional wisdom that modernism is inimical to the aesthetics and interests of women. This is a matter dear to my heart because much feminist music inquiry—following, it seems, the lead of feminist literary scholarship—seems to have leapt from nineteenth-century Romanticism to late-twentieth-century postmodernism, relegating modernism to the domain of men, machismo, and misogyny. This lacuna disadvantages women with modernist sensibilities, leaving their works underrepresented, their participation in modernist projects undertheorized, and a significant segment of musical expression politically unavailable to them.² Hisama's compelling analyses demonstrate that women composers have indeed used modernist idioms to create original works that also speak to feminist concerns.

The analytical methods employed in the seven analyses, although selected—and sometimes invented—to examine the particular material at hand, are in no way exclusive to these works; that is, they are models that may be applied to other musical works, although perhaps (or probably) [End Page...