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Reviewed by:
  • Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music by Sally Macarthur
  • Lindsey Eckenroth (bio)
Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music. By Sally Macarthur. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 210pp.

Driven by the author’s desire to reinvigorate feminist musicology using Deleuzian philosophical tools, this book promotes the productive power of thought, or what Deleuze terms “the virtual.” Sally Macarthur is more interested in what women’s music might become than in what it currently is, and she strives throughout to consider the future as open and unbounded by the standards and norms of the present. The current volume considers the complex networks of composition, performance, consumption, academic discourse, and pedagogy that compose the field of “new” music. Though some readers may initially be perturbed to find that Macarthur leaves the definition of “new” music ambiguous, it gradually becomes clear that her decision to do so is aligned with her politicized philosophy. A definition of “new” music would restrict the possibilities of what it could become, enclosing it in the repetitive thought patterns of the past and hindering our ability to think in the “in-between spaces of the old and the new” (4). Macarthur’s Deleuzian theoretical model introduces productive questions that undercut hierarchical thought and propel explorations of “new” music into the unknown.

Macarthur’s multifaceted approach to “new” music is particularly relevant to musicologists and composers working within the academic institution, but it is also more generally of interest to feminists writing and teaching in the humanities. Each of Macarthur’s six chapters accesses the themes of “new” music and feminist musicology in different ways. Specifically, in the first four chapters, she considers the usefulness of empirical research in feminist scholarship, the concepts of “author” and “musical work” as implemented in musicological writing, trends in the discourse and economic power structures of “new” music marketing, and the history of feminisms in musicology. In the remaining two chapters, Macarthur exemplifies the usefulness of the Deleuzian questions and concepts developed in the preceding pages, taking pieces by Sofia Gubaidulina, Elena Kats-Chernin, and Anne Boyd as case studies. She also considers research undertaken by two students: Katharine Nelligan, a composer interested in electronic dance music, and Danielle Bentley, a PhD student who investigates the issues surrounding “new” music’s tendency to alienate audiences. Throughout these discussions, Macarthur strives to think outside the discourses she perceives as hindering current musicological endeavors, and she remains overtly critical of positivism, narrative knowledge, totalizing dualities, and the neoromantic conception of the author. While validating her focus on the future—on imminence rather than transcendence—Macarthur attempts to avoid the repetitive master narratives that she views as governing Western musical thought and in doing so challenges readers to rethink how they write about [End Page 92] and teach music. As a vehemently political and functional book, Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music contributes to a growing body of Deleuzian writing on music and introduces feminists to a variety of tools that can help us productively engage the continual becoming of “new” music.1

In her review of statistical data originally presented in empirical studies on the state of women in music, Macarthur surmises that these positivist efforts ultimately prove what is already self-evident: “Women’s music barely signifies on concert platforms” (30).2 Although these studies advocate the expansion of women’s role in “new” musical production by providing concise numerical information and using statistics “as tools of persuasion to activate change” (27), she concludes that this established research model ultimately “produces thinking which forecloses thought” (33). Rather than using quantitative research to illustrate the negative difference between polarized categories (women/men, minority/majority, inferior/superior), Macarthur asks us to focus on ways that women’s “new” music opens up a transformative potential capable of destabilizing the dominant mode of musical production. The emphasis is shifted from the statistical insignificance of women’s music to its potential for “becoming-minoritarian,” a Deleuzian idea described here as a creative process of embracing difference by moving away from the majority. In this configuration, difference is considered a positive attribute, and the future of women’s music is conceptualized...

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