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

Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. Ellie M. Hisama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xix + 191. $59.95.

In a draft of his treatise, Tradition and Experiment in the New Music (1931), Charles Seeger made a bold prediction: "If we are to hear a new music comparable to the music of Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven, it will be less through a musical pre-Raphaelite movement or a timorous anti-intellectualism than through a systematic overhauling of all the elements in the situation—materials, methods, and values." ¹ Along with Henry Cowell, Dane Rudhyar, and Carl Ruggles, Seeger was among a handful of American experimental or self-proclaimed "ultramodern" composers who lived or worked in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. The aesthetic landscape these composers shared and the legacy of works they left behind has recently emerged as a new arena of musicological research. Although written over seventy years later and focused on a new critical theory rather than a "new music," Ellie Hisama's Gendering Musical Modernism harkens to Seeger's prescription. Her study is a collection of feminist commentaries on the music of three American composers born around the turn of the century: Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. The repertoire Hisama examines is intimate in scale, consisting of six chamber works written for various combinations of piano, strings, and voice. All six scores are reproduced in the text.

Seeger's three categories offer a useful framework for evaluating Hisama's critical contribution. Between the wars American avant-garde composers reacted against the late nineteenth-century fascination with chromatic harmony by developing new uses of such materials as rhythm and dynamics. For example, Crawford—who wrote two of the six works Hisama considers—composed a movement for string quartet in which each part in the ensemble has a different change in volume. While one instrument's volume is growing, the others' are growing or receding at different rates, resulting in a new kind of texture—a shifting sea of dynamic changes.

Throughout her study Hisama also explores neglected musical resources, offering a virtual showcase of analytical tools developed in recent years to describe melodic contour or the changes in direction of a given melodic line. One of her favorite techniques is to identify a norm of melodic treatment in the opening bars, and then measure the variance from that norm throughout the work in order to show how it portrays either an accompanying poetic text or an underlying narrative.

Ultimately, however, she merges Seeger's second and third categories. For her, composers' creative "methods" are inseparable from their political and psychological "values." The result is a portfolio of gender protest that is unified more by the underlying feminist assumptions of each analysis than by any structural link between the trio of composers or the works themselves. Two different critical projects converge in Hisama's study: technical analysis and political/psychological commentary. For every work she argues that the treatment of melodic contour and various other structural features mirrors some psychological or political conflict experienced by the composer. Although Hisama usually precedes her technical studies with revealing biographical vignettes, she rejects the idea of compositional intent. Ultimately, her project affirms a connection between musical structure and the artist's subconscious experience. Biographical details from the composer's life or from the genesis of a specific piece always serve as a starting place for her commentary.

An example of this critical approach is her reading of Crawford's string quartet. Seven years after completing the entire four-movement work in 1931, Crawford made a significant revision to the third movement, adding a powerful climax near the end. Hisama relies on this "climactic" change of heart as the basis for identifying a "double-voiced discourse" between dominant and muted voices (19-34). On one level the piece displays a...