Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy (review)

Bonnie Gordon's book intrigued me at first glance because the title brought together Monteverdi and unruly women, both subjects dear to my heart. Monteverdi's music has always generated rigorous scholarship, particularly because his output stands at that watershed in early modern history where "change" happened, where, put simply, an old aesthetic was challenged by a newer, modern music and scholars even of the time debated transgressive musical behaviors. Monteverdi's work has been epicentral to that early/modern discussion; concurrently, Monteverdi has always been part of our acceptable musicological canon. By virtue of that academic nod, he has not historically been associated with any flagrant or even gentle championing of feminine unruliness. Suzanne Cusick and Susan McClary, who have read sections of Monteverdi's music from their feminist perspectives, have actually suggested ways whereby Monteverdi's music served further to inscribe the assumed patriarchal silencing of women who temporarily found voice. A book that might locate moments of women's deliberate unruliness in a composer's music that I have always loved but have not especially heard as an advocate for women's culturally uplifted voices was most appealing.

So I must say up front that this was not the book I found, even if Gordon does offer some tantalizing nuggets about women's embodied voices, contextualized in commonly held beliefs about those bodies and how they functioned. Her references to women's leaky vessels and Galenic theories about humoral heat are not new, even to musical scholarship. However, her most valuable contribution is her nuanced reading of how cultural perceptions of bodily change instigated crucial musical shifts and how the embodied voice necessarily reinvented itself to accommodate a new worldview. This does not, for me, reflect a singularly "feminine" phenomenon but one that might also accommodate the burgeoning of instrumental versus vocal music, a fascination with the castrato, and the myriad of cross-dressed, ambiguous, and complicated gender roles that erupted on the youthful operatic stage. The shifting soundscape that Gordon identifies is original and thought-provoking, and perhaps a different title would have better reflected the merits of her book, for when I encountered these thoughts, most clearly articulated at the end of the book, I was better able to look back into the volume with different eyes.

Given the book's title, I felt compelled to reach first for that content in ways that I could. Gordon's work reads sometimes as a dissertation (from whence it came), though the writing is fluid and compelling to read. There are times, too, when I am intrigued by a thought I wish she had developed; instead, summaries of others occasionally stand in for her own ideas. My reading is selective and threads its way through two particular pathways that Gordon identifies in her introductory materials. The first is the potential of the embodied female voice. For Gordon, the very act of a woman's mouth moving in song is her unruliness. It allows her to occupy a "space between the lines" in a culture that did not aspire to see her with her mouth opened (1). So I look to see where Gordon identifies these spaces, what constitutes the "in between" in kinesthetic ways for women in the music she describes. Second, Gordon asks us to follow certain of Monteverdi's female voices through the real and imagined women's (and, sometimes, men's) bodies through which his music circulated. I turn to the notion of fantasy that those performances inspired. Every culture projects fantasies onto its performers. Those fantasies are not singular but reflect the diverse anxieties of the gendered, socioeconomic, racial otherness of the audience. Depending on who is looking, Monteverdi's women could have inspired multiple fantasies (though I read Gordon's work to suggest that the patriarchal fantasy was the dominant one). So as I travel through Gordon's discussion I imagine myself as a viewer of the performance as Gordon...