A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender by Ellen Koskoff (review)

It was with exhilaration and nostalgia that I began reading Ellen Koskoff’s A Feminist Ethnomusicology. Many years ago, I embarked on my own initial fieldwork with a (now heavily worn) copy of her Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective (1987) in tow, thrilled to have an inspiring framework to inform and ground my experiences. Indeed, through many of her works, Koskoff has built a foundation of approaches for understanding intersections between gender and music. In this retrospective volume, she shares her intellectual, scholarly, and personal journeys, including inspirations and obstacles she faced, and gives us insight into the historical, political, and academic contexts that contributed to making that foundation possible. Koskoff also tackles theoretical and methodological rifts and conflicts between feminist anthropology, historical musicology, and ethnomusicology. She explores why scholars have been so reluctant to develop a robust feminist ethnomusicology and asserts a fortified model of ethnography as a necessary way forward.

Koskoff mentions that some might call this book an “intellectual memoir” (1), and she describes the contents creating “a personal map” (3) through her scholarly journey. Through this map she traces the history of attention to women, gender, and feminism in ethnomusicology, anthropology, and historical musicology. In her astute foreword, Suzanne Cusick describes the book as an autoethnography in the broad sense in which Carolyn Ellis defines it: as “research, writing, story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political.”³ Koskoff does exactly this as she takes the reader through a thoughtful journey into the ways that the fields of women’s studies, gender studies, cultural studies, literary criticism, poststructural studies, and postcolonial studies have influenced the field of ethnomusicology and how they have informed, inspired, and clarified her own perspectives and viewpoints. In analyzing these connections, Koskoff reflects on those past viewpoints and motivations.

This book exhibits Koskoff’s thinking processes, shifts, developments, and revelations over most of her career. It conveys her movement from searching for universal theories to explain the widespread subordination of women through broad comparative studies to in-depth examinations. It also shows how themes, such as that of sameness and difference, provide continuity throughout her works. Koskoff’s deep commitment to fieldwork shines through from beginning to end. She writes, “Although far from perfect, fieldwork—the face-to-face talking, laughing, listening, crying, eating, musicking, and all the rest—is still, for me, the best and most direct way to learn about others and their musics” (xiii). She chooses to discuss feminist works that are grounded in fieldwork and those that clarify themes of power, symbolism in language, ritual studies, and “interdisciplinary politics” (4). She acknowledges that intersectionality (the study of the intersections between gender and other aspects of identity such as race, ethnicity, class, and age) is important, though she focuses primarily on women, gender, and music in this book. Regarding the distinctions she makes between gender and feminism, she explains, “The study of gender is the lens through which I most clearly see inequality, but feminism is how I enact the knowledge I have gained in this work to resist and dismantle it” (7, emphasis in original).

The book contains seven key examples of Koskoff’s published works and one unpublished work grouped into three chronological sections. Each section includes a newly written framing chapter that gives an overview of her thinking at that time. Additionally, before each chapter, Koskoff supplies short introductions that describe her mindset and goals for the following piece. Koskoff’s pieces in the first section (1976–90) were in large part informed and motivated by the questions raised by the tensions and contradictions between existing scholarship on Hasidic music and the reality of Hasidic women’s lives. She offers personal background and illustrates the context of her first moments of feminist awareness, which altered the motivation and shape of her graduate work and continued to be a major focus throughout her career.

The second section contains work from...