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. (Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis.) By Ellie M. Hisama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. [xix, 198 p. ISBN 0-521-64030-X. $59.95.]

In this provocative study, Ellie M. Hisama analyzes six works by three women composers with an eye toward the ways in which each piece reflects the feminine subjectivity of its author. She adopts standard techniques of post-tonal analysis to argue "that formalist readings acknowledging the impact of a composer's gender and political views on the work itself impart valuable ways of hearing and apprehending these compositions" (p. 3). Challenging the postulate that modernism was somehow misogynist, she maintains that the technical freedoms of contemporary music provided new expressive opportunities for women composers. While this in itself does not truly gender musical modernism, as suggested by the title, Hisama's general project and specific interpretations effectively illustrate new ways of mapping the influence of gender on musical structure.

A revision and extension of her 1996 doctoral dissertation, Hisama's book retains the cautious tone typical of that document. The title, Gendering Musical Modernism, is in this respect fairly misleading because the study is much more limited than one might expect from the invocation of such broad categories. Under the rubric of gender, only the specific, documented, biographical experiences of these three women are considered. Hisama disavows the study of gender as a broad category in favor of examining the individual construction of feminine identity in composition. She does not attempt to compare or contrast the various gendered musical strategies found in the sampled works of Crawford, Bauer, and Gideon, believing that any search for "identifying common structural elements or strategies" is ultimately "futile" (p. 10). In addition, modernism is strictly equated with the post-tonal idiom; Bauer's music, for example, is considered "more conservative than Crawford's" because it relies on a pitch center (p. 5). Hisama offers no discussion of modernism as a conceptual practice or cultural condition. The degree to which modernism is thus gendered remains unclear.

Of course the title is not necessarily the author's own, and Cambridge University Press should not be blamed for trying to interest a wider readership in a narrowly construed analytical study. Yet Hisama might have productively engaged some of the larger issues that her own work brings into play. In particular, she chooses not to mount a substantive theoretical defense of formalist analysis as a vehicle for feminist consciousness rather than transmitter of masculine sensibilities. Acknowledging that "some feminists reject rational and formalist approaches as masculinist," Hisama nonetheless does not wish "to stop analyzing music from codified principles—in short, to designate formalism as the Other in feminist music analysis" (p. 13). She seems to follow the journalist's stricture to show rather than tell, allowing her analyses alone to prove the feminist potential of "codified principles," but a more pointed response to the critiques of formalism (particularly Fred Maus's "Masculine Discourse in Music Theory," Perspectives of New Music 31 [summer 1993]: 264-93) would have been welcome.

With reference only to her stated goals, however, Hisama's book proves a success, presenting six deft analyses that reveal how the gendered subjectivity of three composers informs their music. She employs an impressive range of post-tonal analytical techniques and, most importantly, develops her own. These new tools include a measurement of "twist" in the third movement of Ruth Crawford's String Quartet (chap. 2), discussion of "contour deviance" in her "Chinaman, Laundryman" (chap. 4), and evaluation of performative contour space between the pianist's hands in Marion Bauer's Toccata (chap. 5). Narrative description, contour theory, pitch class, and voice leading analysis are additional tools brought to bear on the other works under scrutiny: the fourth movement of Crawford's Quartet (chap. 3), Bauer's "Chromaticon" (chap. 6), and Miriam...