Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing (review)

My assignment for this review—one that I happily accepted—was to consider Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing from the perspective of feminist theory and music. While neither the book nor any of its essays save one makes explicit claims relating to feminist thought, there is good reason to expect that some of the major themes of the essays intersect with current issues in feminist philosophy, aesthetics, and social theory. As the title suggests, several essays in the book are informed by postmodern thought, in which feminist theory has been a central if not dominant strand.¹ However, feminist theory has had neither an easy nor a simple relation to certain strands of postmodern thought—a relation that may be observed in this anthology as well.

In his introductory essay, editor Andrew Dell'Antonio articulates four threads that run through the nine essays of the book. Three of these are easily familiar to feminist theory: control, power, and the body. The fourth common strand, listening and the musical "text," framed with specific reference to music, may be understood to comprehend issues of subjectivity and experience—frequent topics in feminist theory. While it is possible to see the broad outlines of feminist thought shimmering through the common strands of these essays, none of the essays except for Tamara Levitz's "The Chosen One's Choice" thematize gender and the broader topic of difference it implies. No book or author can realistically take up all issues or perspectives, and hence it would be disingenuous to criticize this book for failing to address gender and difference more broadly and thematically. My task here is to explain why one of the central strands of postmodern thought broadly conceived does not make much of a showing.

Others have taken note of this absence. Ethnomusicologist Ellen Koskoff has recently observed that postmodern theory often ignores women.² Koskoff's argument is primarily focused on her diagnosis of why gender and sexuality are less frequently categories of concern in ethnomusicological as opposed to musicological studies, but as part of her thesis she includes observations on how some strands of postmodern theory effectively ignore women. Building on the work of feminists from various fields, Koskoff notes that the destabilization of modern epistemological categories that is the hallmark of postmodern theory often results in abstractions that make individuals—and women in particular—disappear. The particularities of lived experience are subsumed into abstractions and generalities in a conceptual move that replicates the universalizing tendencies of modern thought. Philosopher Linda Alcoff has also recently protested the exclusion of feminist thought from the broader discipline of philosophy. In her essay "Philosophy Matters: A Review of Recent Work in Feminist Philosophy" Alcoff argues that while feminist thought "disrespects the disciplinary borders and traditional metaphilosophical assumptions that have framed contemporary Western philosophy," it should be "seen as philosophy per se."³ As these two authors observe, well into the twenty-first century the topics of gender and difference have not been fully integrated into disciplinary thinking of various sorts. I return to this general issue after considering in some detail the various essays in this collection and how the ideas of its authors either do contribute or might have contributed to broader issues of feminist thought.

First, some statistics. In table 1 I list the authors of the collection by gender; the numbers following each name indicate the length of the essay.⁴ Table 1 shows that there are seven essays by men (I count both of the editor's contributions as one) and three by women, one an afterword by Rose Rosengard Subotnik, the author who initially drew attention to a concept of "structural listening" in her thoroughgoing critique. Robert Fink has by far the longest essay, surpassing Tamara Levitz by six pages. Most of the essays run about twenty-five to thirty pages, but both Paul Attinello and Elisabeth Le Guin have relatively short essays at nineteen pages. Dell'Antonio's introductory...