Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music (review)

Sally Macarthur’s new book sets itself a daunting task. Ambitious in scope and aim, Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music attempts nothing less than a reconceptualizing of the framework for the study and performance of works by women, especially with respect to new music. Macarthur contends that previous scholarship on musical women has failed and that a new way must be found. She looks to the work of French theorist/philosopher Gilles Deleuze as a model and fashions arguments around his ideas and those of Deleuzian feminist scholars. Though the book seems promising in prospect, in the event it has problems that compromise its success. Nonetheless, I applaud Macarthur for the attempt: it is important that new approaches to women’s work be proposed and scholars invest creative energy in devising solutions.

Macarthur frequently mentions that her study is meant to be practical. She notes that women’s music is not performed much more than it was before the upsurge in feminist musicology, and it has not made significant inroads into music theory and analysis. But Macarthur’s discussions tend to evade practicality and avoid solutions, focusing instead on process, as seen in many of the theoretical points and the ‘Towards’ of the title. The Deleuzian concepts of in-betweenness, becoming, and potentiality assume a central role in the arguments. In this idealistic constellation, futureness is stressed as the goal of any theorizing that grapples with what-could-be. It is not enough to apply current concepts and patterns or use them as points of departure for what could be envisioned in the future. This utopian model, of course, is paradoxical from a practical standpoint: the future needs to be reconceived so as to improve a situation, but the solution is impossible to formulate and articulate because we are immersed in the present and cannot know the future. Nonetheless the notion of futureness is valid and worth while. With this sort of contradiction, the book often falls short for me.

Another contradictory theme concerns the individual composer. In much of the book Macarthur criticizes musicology’s emphasis on the figure of the composer as a strait jacket for women and their music. She endorses the idea of communal structures for music-making and believes this benefits the future of women’s music. Yet she devotes an entire chapter to three composers and their musical accomplishments—a move that implicitly reifies each figure. I certainly enjoyed learning more about Sofia Gubaidulina and discovering composers Elena Kats-Chernin and Anne Boyd, and I am glad Macarthur provides rich discussions of their lives, styles, and reputations. But the prominent inclusion of such material underscores the problematically utopian (and often unsustainable) nature of much of the book’s philosophical framework.

In chapter 1, ‘How is Gender Composed in Musical Composition?’, statistical research on women in music is criticized, especially the work of Patricia Adkins-Chiti. Macarthur implies that this represents the liberal approach to musical feminism, i.e. the Second Wave movement of the 1980s and 1990s that she claims focused on the collection of data and numbers. This is a distortion, as many studies advanced theoretical positions or explored larger questions of historiography, aesthetics, and reception (see, for instance, my book Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge, 1993)). Moreover, Adkins-Chiti’s work never loomed large; thus the elevation of its status to paradigmatic is curious. Macarthur’s goal in the chapter is to ‘consider a different way of conceptualising music’ from the data-driven liberal enterprise, and towards this end she utilizes Deleuze’s ‘philosophy of immanence . . ., a philosophy which is interested in thought or in the virtual world of possibilities’ (p. 24). Along the way empirical (‘liberal’) work is rebuked for its naming of problems, exerting a negative impact on women, concealing its political project, and for being as ideologically loaded as older thinking that excluded women. A notable positive, in the...