A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender

Chapter 12 Out in Left Field/Left Out of the Field: Postmodern Scholarship, Feminist/Gender Studies, Musicology, and Ethnomusicology

12 Out in Left Field/ Left Out of the Field Postmodern Scholarship, Feminist/Gender Studies, Musicology, and Ethnomusicology, 1990–2005 In this article, I examine the role that intellectual lineage plays in answering the question of why historical and critical musicologists seemed to publish more widely in the area of gender and music than ethnomusicologists, highlighting the major ethical issues in both fields alluded to in previous chapters. I assert here that new musicologists were in a better position in the 1990s to create a feminist theory for Western art music, and especially popular music, largely because such a theory fitted so seamlessly within already defined Western historical and cultural analytic frameworks. Feminist ethnomusicologists, on the other hand, primarily concerned with cultural differences and depending on the method of fieldwork, were discovering and documenting very different social and cultural understandings of gender and music that could not be easily compared or universally theorized. Like their anthropological colleagues, feminist ethnomusicologists were (and still are) grappling with major cultural differences and with the ethical issues that arise from fieldwork. Some of the material I present here is a summary of that discussed more fully in earlier chapters. This article was first published under a slightly different title that ultimately became (even to me) too confusing to be useful, so I have changed it here for clarity. * * * Since the publication of Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective in 1987, I have watched the steady growth of feminist studies in historical musicology and ethnomusicology. Heavily influenced by postmodern theo- Out in Left Field/Left Out of the Field 169 ries derived from history, literary criticism, anthropology, cultural studies, queer theory, and the many “posts” of postmodernism, it is clear that recent postmodern studies have contributed much to our understandings of how both music sound and sociomusical activities are gendered. What has been less clear, however, are the reasons behind a growing separation between the two fields of musicology and ethnomusicology with respect to this research: after a brief spurt in the late 1980s and into the ’90s, work in feminist ethnomusicology seemed to slow in relation to that of musicology. Yes, certain excellent recent works stand out: Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond’s Music and Gender (2000), Tulia Magrini’s Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean (2003), and Jane Bernstein’s Women’s Voices across Musical Worlds (2004), among many others. Yet compared to studies in musicology, and especially in popular music studies, there seemed to be comparatively few. I began to question, first, if this was actually the case and, second, what could explain this disparity, if it did indeed exist. To find some answers, I conducted a quick, informal search, scanning the titles of more than fifteen hundred books and articles written since 1990 on the subject of women and music, feminist theory and music, gender and music, and, most recently, men and music to see if my perceptions were correct. The book titles were culled from the Voyager Catalog on the University of Rochester’s library system, and articles were taken from three prominent journals: the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Ethnomusicology, and the Journal of Women and Music. I knew from previous searches that at least half of the works would not be scholarly, but rather trade books chronicling the lives of famous female jazz singers or rock groups. The remaining half, that is, those attempting to theorize women, men, gender, and music in some way, could be roughly divided as presented in table 1. I decided to separate musicological from ethnomusicological work on the basis of method: was the work under question derived from textwork or from fieldwork? Table 1: Distribution of Books and Articles on Women, Gender, and Music, 1990–2004 Musicology (including Western classical ca. 90 percent and popular musics) Ethnomusicology (everything else, including ca. 10 percent non-Western popular and classical musics) 170 part iii: 2000–2012 The Journal of Woman and Music, the only music journal totally dedicated to publications on women, gender, and music, had a slightly higher percentage for ethnomusicological publications (approximately 17 percent). Table 2 shows the distribution of articles from the initial issue in 1997 to 2004. One could partially explain the statistics shown in tables 1 and 2 as evidence for the relative numbers of musicologists and ethnomusicologists in the field today. According to the American Musicology Society and Society for Ethnomusicology websites, about thirty...