Women and the Western Art Canon: Where Are We Now?

In 1993 my book Gender and the Musical Canon explored the theoretical, historical, and practical factors surrounding women and their music in the Western canon.¹ In this essay, I will discuss the current status of key concepts of the study, which show noticeable change after almost fifteen years. These include the place of social history, modelings of repertorial and disciplinary canons, and actual musical dissemination. The impact of third-wave feminism, not treated in the book, is also discussed. Despite the changes, it is still critical that librarians be active in acquiring works by women.

Musicology in THE Early 1990s

By the early 1990s, musicology had completed the first wave of discovery and recuperation of women's music. The field overall looked rather different from today. Social and cultural perspectives were just emerging, and Joseph Kerman's 1985 call for critical musicology in Contemplating Music was still audible.² Among major responses were some influential books: Susan McClary's Feminine Endings and Lawrence Kramer's Music as Cultural Practice.³ This sort of work stirred great controversy, and critics called it ahistorical, ungrounded, and relativist. Two key features of such studies are an interdisciplinary approach and a postmodernist perspective. Over the next fifteen years these methods were gradually integrated into musicology. Today scholars have many methods for gathering evidence and shaping arguments. The very definition of what constitutes evidence has changed. This is so pronounced that cultural context has emerged as the main paradigm in musicology. Reception studies are probably the most popular approach today.

But as I mentioned, these methods became acceptable well after the early 1990s. When Gender and the Musical Canon appeared in 1993, the application of theory and methods from fields outside musicology, which the book was based upon, was a startling new method. Gender itself was a relatively new word in mainstream musicological discourse. The concepts of canon and canon formation were just beginning to hit musicology, more than a decade after literature experienced contentious "canon wars." What Gender and the Musical Canon did was draw on gender, and on theory and methods of other fields, to trace out Western canon formation and the gendered implications of its processes. Actual women and their music played a central role. Canon formation became a lens for understanding historical women composers and their music. Similarly, women and their music opened a window on how repertories and canons get passed down and perpetuated.

Let me now turn to some key concepts of Gender and the Musical Canon and how things look today.

Repertorial Canons

The two main types of canons are repertorial and disciplinary. The first deals with repertories of pieces, the second with paradigms of how musicology is practiced. The two are closely related, and I will tie them together. I begin with two issues associated with repertorial canons: the "add-and-stir" model, and the "decentered author."

The Model of Add-and-Stir

Karin Pendle coined the term "add-and-stir" for the danger of mechanically adding new works to the canon, especially those of outside groups such as women, without questioning the old batter and coming up with new recipes for the reconstituted batter.⁴ I featured "add-and-stir" prominently because it represented a major way of thinking at the time. "If only we had more pieces by women in the score anthology," professors might say; "If only Grout treated more female figures." While visibility does count for a lot—without exposure, women remain invisible and are assumed non-history-worthy—it is not the whole picture. There needs to be more. That is where Pendle's call for new questions that lead to new paradigms becomes important. The how and why must be addressed, not just the what and the how many. Otherwise, women's accomplishments remain window dressing or token contributions, the result of special pleading.

Since Gender and the Musical Canon, the how and why have become very important, and have blossomed into new categories and methods. Social and cultural history figure prominently, as do practices of all segments of society...