Music and Gender (review)

Music and Gender. Edited by Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. [xiii, 376 p. ISBN 0-252-06865-3. $24.95.]

From Ellen Koskoff's pithy foreword to Marcia Herndon's posthumous epilogue, this collection contains sixteen thoughtful, well-written essays that explore much more than the relationship between music and gender in culture.

When encountering a new collection of essays, my first response is often to discern why the editors have decided to produce the book. Tenure needs aside, what are the intellectual reasons the essays have been bound together rather than appearing as individual contributions in disparate journals? In many cases, essays are connected through their previous verbal presentation at a conference or perhaps because the authors all write and work within close proximity. It should be noted that these locational connections between authors may or may not yield cohesive collections.

The authors represented in Moisala and Diamond's Music and Gender hail from places as far flung as Croatia, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Estonia, Canada, and the United States. They are composers, ethnomusicologists, historians of Western music, and sound technicians. These authors are not connected by physical proximity, and it is not stated if they ever met in person as a whole group during the preparation of this volume, although several of them have connections to the Music and Gender Study Group of the International Council for Traditional Music. The essays themselves are divided into four disparate subgroups reflecting many different intellectual positions. I must admit that my heart sank as I first surveyed this heterogeneity and pondered how I might comprehend the intended cohesiveness of the collection. It became clear almost immediately, however, that I had worried for naught.

As might be inferred from the title, gender and music do figure in each of the essays, but what really binds them together is the idea that gender and music, and most other aspects of culture, are fluid constructs, the interpretation of which is context-based and negotiable. The authors do not limit the privilege of this fluidity of interpretation to the ethnographic present of the subjects of their study. In addition, they acknowledge and foreground both their own subjectivity and that of the readers and revel in the idea that interpretation between subjectivities makes the business of reading the book an interactive process, whether or not the reader wishes to engage with it.

This process is started in the introduction in which the editors describe where they imagine their collection fits into the field of gender and music studies, and perhaps more importantly, introduce the readers to "the conversation." We learn that the authors did have contact with one another: not just a brief but intense conference encounter, but rather an extended and vibrant discussion through e-mail. Indeed, the authors were in almost continuous contact with one another during the conception, writing, and editing processes. Their e-mail musings, confessions, and articulations helped shape the intellectual framework of the collection, not only after the fact, during the writing of the introduction, but also throughout the writing processes of the authors themselves. While not all of the authors acknowledge the e-mail communications in their essays, engagement with the ideas is palpable in most of the essays. The best thing about this, however, is that no single view on the ideas discussed in their group communications, or even on the interpretations of the exchange itself, emerges. The reader is left with a plethora of impressions and analyses and to his or her own thoughts on them, and this is a good thing.

In her foreword, Koskoff articulates what she views as the three overlapping waves in the recent history of scholarship within feminist/genderist (a term suggested by one of the authors represented in the collection) music studies: woman-centric studies, gender-centric studies, and most recently, studies whose focus is derived from postmodern theoretical ideas. Ideas from each of these waves can be found among the intellectual positions represented in this...