Dusty’s Hair
Annie Janeiro Randall, Bucknell University

Dusty Springfield’s extravagant wigs were central to the singer’s striking visual image and aligned her with other blonde stars of the 1960s: Monica Vitti, Brigitte Bardot, and Kim Novak. The beacon-like wigs radiated an obvious but delicious fakeness that inspired a generation of drag queens and scholars to focus on Springfield’s “camp masquerade” (P. J. Smith) as the most remarkable element of her performance style. Taking this as my point of departure, I shift attention to the singer’s musical self-invention: like the hair for her wigs, Dusty’s musical signifiers were borrowed from numerous sources and stitched together to create the “White Queen of Soul.” Such borrowing—facilitated by the singer’s British imperial privilege and naturalized by centuries of colonial taking—was distinguished by Dusty’s unique adaptation of the black rhetorical concept of “signifyin(g)” (H. L. Gates). The singer’s ability to signify was the chief thread running through all of her individualistic interpretations—from the black American-inspired “Son of a Preacher Man” to Italian pop arias like “Di Fronte all’Amore.” While Dusty’s hair was part of a masquerade allowing the Irish, red-haired, queer singer to circulate as English, blonde, and straight within the music industry’s phallic economy, the look also disguised her transgression of racialized musical boundaries in an era when such border crossing—musical or otherwise—was heavily policed. This paper examines the play of black, white, and queer signifiers in Dusty’s audacious assault on essentialist notions of social and musical identity and concludes by modifying the “White Negress’s” title from “Queen of the Mods” to “Queen of the (Post)-Mods” in recognition of her disruption of pop music’s rigid identity codes.

Painting “the Only Black Man at the Party”: Joni Mitchell in the Age of Diversity
Miles Parks Grier, New York University

The critical establishment’s ten-year old rediscovery of Joni Mitchell has come at the usual cost of killing or dismembering the honoree. Rather than praise a diminished Mitchell for predicting and permitting a multiculturalism of idealized identifications, I propose that we examine the historical Mitchell whose confessions do not speak for everyone.
In liberating her from femininity and particularity, the recording industry and academy have transformed Mitchell into a mere means of injecting worthy minoritarian subjects into an expanded but fundamentally untroubled (musical) canon. These substitutions occur because she is now the human as outsider/artist. That she ascended to this level (first and increasingly) by re-presenting herself as a black male pimp on the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (1977) has gone unexamined. Focusing on Mitchell in the late 1970s—her music and her dissatisfaction with the bigotry and political gullibility of liberals—I argue that her race- and sex-change is more a historically motivated differentiation with the one than a transcendent identification with the Other. This interpretation allows us to understand pieces in which Mitchell retains distance from black men, such as her re-setting the romantic blues “Centerpiece” in her own dysfunctional “Harry’s House” (1975). As this Mitchell of haltingly suggests, our vision of humanity can no more end with the universal metaphor of the black hipster than it could with that of the confessing Woman. I unsettle today’s Joni and our imaginative identifications with her so that we might imagine with even more daring.

“Can you be a black feminist and laugh at this book?”: Black Feminist and Black Jazz Musicians’ Autobiographies
Nicole Rustin, University of Illinois

Drawing on the work of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, who argues that race is a metalanguage, one that has a totalizing effect (practically and theoretically), this paper examines the dynamic relationship between black feminism and black jazz criticism. Higginbotham calls for a model of historical writing which examines difference in order to resist the homogenizing effects of race. She argues as well for histories which reflect the multiple and conflicting currents of black intellectual thought and experience. The benefit of examining difference, when we consider the problem of black feminism, jazz, and gender, can be twofold. First, it will attune us to the ways in which race as a social identity has homogenized debates within jazz culture about aesthetics and politics; second, it will allow us to think about how black male musicians recognized and articulated alternative conceptualizations of beauty within black cultural practice. The talk will focus on these issues through a discussion of autobiographies by Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, and Hampton Hawes. The talk will also discuss the impact that black feminist approaches to jazz and gender, such as that of Hazel Carby, Angela Davis, and Farah Griffin, function within contemporary frameworks of jazz studies. Some of the questions and themes to be explored include irony and humor, self-representations of race, gender, and genius, and the sexualization of jazz music and musicians.

Vocal Fantasies: Race, Masculinity, and Jazz in Rudy Vallee’s Musical Doctor and Louis Armstrong’s Rhapsody in Black and Blue
Jessica M. Courtier, University of Wisconsin

In 1932 Paramount released Musical Doctor and Rhapsody in Black and Blue, two short films in which musical performances by Rudy Vallee and Louis Armstrong, respectively, are placed in comedically fantastical settings. In the former, “Doctor” Vallee oversees a hospital in which all ailments and cures are musical, while in the latter Armstrong performs at the command of a man who dreams that he rules as the King of Jazzmania.

Both films implicitly acknowledge each musician’s star status, yet each also reflects its star’s fraught relationship to conventional masculinity, defined in large part through race, particularly in the framing and style of the vocal performances. In his career as a radio crooner, Vallee disrupted normative modes of white masculinity by cultivating an intimate, emotional singing voice; in Musical Doctor Vallee’s unadorned performance is literally the voice of authority, singing and commanding music from others within the context of a controlled, hygienic hospital setting. By contrast, Armstrong’s performance is placed within circumstances of humiliation defined by a miscellany of emasculating racial stereotypes, yet a comparison of the film’s two songs with their recorded versions reveals a shifting between sophisticated scatting and exaggerated, inarticulate wails so far beyond his usual clowning as to suggest the double intention of both superficially complying with the stereotypes demanded of black film performers and critiquing them. Taken together, the films highlight the musical performance of gender in 1930s popular culture through the shaping of vocality, playing off images of naturalized race and gender, but in so doing drawing attention to their construction.

Empowering Music Students through Non-Sexist Teaching Strategies
Beth Denisch, Berklee College of Music

This paper addresses the specific milieu of the Berklee College of Music and its emphasis on popular music. Sexism in the music industry and in popular culture more generally gives particular salience and urgency to the need to address potential patriarchal bias in the presentation of material and management of classroom activities. The feminist concept of “situated knowledges” can contribute to the awareness of the ways a teacher’s own experiences have shaped his/her understanding of musical meaning and thus open up new possibilities of musical knowledge for students.

Listening to the Girls: Music, Gender and Technology in a Technology in Music Program
Karen Pegley, Queen’s University

Technology has been embraced widely within the North American school system and particularly within music education programs where MIDI technology often is used as a way to make music more accessible for students. Within the literature on gender and technology, many agree that women's technological socialization is complex, and that women relative to men have been described as less enthusiastic about new technological “advances.” This narrative resonates within the music education discourses where boys often are reported to have more ease with technology than girls. In a study conducted by Colley, et al., for instance, girls were described as “held back” and “circumspect,” in relation to the technology compared to boys, and one teacher is cited as saying that: “whereas the boys will automatically use the equipment, you have to lead the girls to it like horses to water.”

In this paper I problematize these statements vis-à-vis responses gathered from girls during two case studies within technology-driven Ontario intermediate schools. The grades seven and eight girls at these "paperless" schools spoke articulately about their concerns with current technologies, and challenged their educators to question their own assumptions surrounding technological inevitability. These girls shared particular concerns surrounding the loss of tradition and critical identity markers, as well as the value of process over product, repetition over rapidity. Their lack of enthusiasm and unwillingness to embrace technology, I will argue then, are not “inappropriate” responses but rather evidence of the negative repercussions of our new technological landscapes.

The Witch Dance: Composition, the Negotiated Curriculum, and the Music Classroom
Carol Matthews, Boise State University

In this presentation I intend to make clear the relationship between child-centered composition, a negotiated curriculum, and the egalitarian music classroom. Music, as it is taught in schools today is discipline-based, reifying the structures and functions of the common practice period, and essentially denying individual children their unique voices. In other disciplines, such as art and language, children are taught to be expressive, to experiment with the elements of visual and verbal expression as they learn them. Not so in music. To the contrary, students are frequently discouraged from experimentation with or developing theories about music, and their own musical cultures are often denied in classrooms dominated by the patriarchal canon. Their own methodologies for learning are not considered.

Using a feminist pedagogical approach, I will show how the current paradigms of music education, which deny students their own musical voices, can be changed by examining the classroom and the curriculum from the student’s perspective. I will consider briefly power relationships, the music classroom environment, and the necessity for developing a musical vocabulary or palate from which children may draw, experimentation, theory building and philosophical stance. The central concerns of this paper, however, are how students may draw on their own cultures and ways of thinking to compose music, and how to negotiate the acquisition of musical elements. I will pose corollary questions about the necessity for standard notation, Western musical history, and the power of the quarter note in making students creators of music.

Desire(ing) and Difference: Not Who I Am, but How I Am
Elizabeth Gould, University of Wisconsin, Madison

The purpose of this presentation is to explore in terms of my philosophical construct of lesbian imaginary the Deleuzian (1994; Deleuze and Parnet, 1987) concepts of desire and difference in relationship to hearing, performing, composing, teaching, and learning music. Based on Cusick’s (1994) “lesbian relation with music,” lesbian imaginary opens possibilities of actualizing students and teachers in engaging with music in ways that are queer, feminist, and nomadic. Not only does lesbian imaginary make possible power-sharing relations in music, music classrooms and ensembles, it also introduces desire and difference; ways of being that have been systematically eliminated in music, discussions about music, teaching and learning of music. As fluid and unstable multiplicities, musicians interact in/with music in terms of claiming subjectivity non-discursively—literally, beyond language and propositional logic.

Traversing disciplinary borders, nomad logic (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), provides the basis for exploring these ideas in which both desire and difference are understood in terms of positivities and affirmation. Instead of existing relationally as subject and object (desire-for), and originary representation (difference-from), Deleuze argues that desire and difference exist in their own right: desire as joyful, aleatory, experimental processes directed toward extending and multiplying themselves; and difference as multiplicities and possibilities directed toward solving material Problems-Ideas, which constitute the only way difference may be thought beyond representation. As the means by which we actualize and are actualized in lived experiences, difference and desire are integrally implicated in lesbian imaginaries of music and musical lives, opening the way for unlimited possibilities.

Brad Garton, Columbia University; Elizabeth Hoffman, New York University; Margaret Schedel, University of Cincinnati; and Mary Simoni, University of Michigan

Women in arts and technology fields have sometimes experienced at least two kinds of discrimination: 1) their capacity to be “great” composers/artists is questioned, and 2) their scientific and technological skills appear to conflict with the traditional women's role of wife and mother. Changes within the field of computer music, and specifically the International Computer Music Association (ICMA) over the last two and a half decades will be traced by panel consisting of a former President, three Array editors past and present, and an active female member.

The ICMA is a global affiliation of individuals and institutions involved in the technical, creative, and performance aspects of computer music. Array, the Journal of the ICMA, is a reflection of the issues that interest the members of this community. In the past decade and a half there have been dramatic changes in the leadership of the organization. The first woman president, Mary Simoni, was elected in 2000, and the current board of directors has more female representation than any time in the association's history. The participation of women composers has increased strongly, although in research areas their numbers lag far behind.

The panel will discuss reasons for change, using the Array newsletter exchanges on Gender and Computer Music as referential documents. The panelists will trace the changes that have occurred in the field of computer music since 1993. Rather than looking at statistical studies, this process is a forum for individuals' views. Despite advances, women are still underrepresented in the field; the intersection of two male-dominated fields of technology and music results in a subgroup that inherits stereotypes from both parents.

Affinities between American Music Studies and Women’s Studies, ca. 1960-1985: A Revisionist Approach to the Historiography of Modern Feminist Scholarship in Music
Judith Tick, Northeastern University

This presentation will discuss the relationship between modern feminist scholarship in music and American music studies in their emergent “second wave” periods. It will focus on historical affinities between two “outsider” fields in relation to such issues as challenges to the canon, validating vernacular expressive culture, and responses to the need for innovative theory and methodology. It will include a critique of the foundational work of such scholars as Gilbert Chase and Gerda Lerner in relation to feminist scholarship in American music in the 1970s. As an early practitioner of women’s history and as an American music historian, I will offer a revisionist analysis of the larger historiographic context for “second wave” feminist scholarship in music by exploring its relationship to American politics via American Studies. My claim involves (in part) the impact of New Deal cultural nationalism on both. I will conclude with a discussion of the implications of my perspective for understanding the historiography of more recent feminist critical scholarship in music.

The Downside of Upward Mobility: Women, Musical Theater and Moral Reform in Nineteenth-Century America
Gillian Rodger, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

The mid-nineteenth century saw in increasing emphasis on the display of female bodies on the American stage, whether in the respectable context of ballet corps attached to many theaters of the period, or in the context of considerably less respectable store-front museums that staged displays of scantily clad women billed exotically as “Arab Girls” or “Female Minstrels.” Unlike Barnum’s more famous American Museum, these smaller museums catered to a primarily male audience from the working-class and immigrant neighborhoods in which they were located, such as the Bowery in New York City. Tensions over the presence of women in these contexts increased during the 1850s and in 1862 the New York state legislature passed a bill targeting the business practices of working-class theater in an effort to remove both alcohol and women from these establishments. In the 1870s and 1880s similar attempts were made in other states to control the spread of theatrical forms dominated by women, and particularly those forms that featured all-female castes and the Can can.

Using case studies drawn from variety and burlesque in the mid-nineteenth century, I will show the growing division within working-class theater in this period. How were performers affected by the changes in laws? Which female performers benefited from legal reform, and which did not? Was it possible to move between “decent” and “indecent” theatrical forms and did this change over time? How did this affect the performance style of the women on either side of this divide? And is it possible to view competing constructions of gender as well as class in this schism as well as in the tactics employed by female performers in their acts?

Banjos and Bicycles: “The New Woman” as Viewed through the Stereograph
Lydia Hamessley, Hamilton College

The figure of The New Woman was widely represented in late-19th-century American press: she wore bloomers, rode bicycles, smoked, and refused to do laundry. These tropes are typical in constructions of this threatening new woman. Simultaneously, women figured prominently in a marketing campaign by banjo manufacturers who sought to elevate the banjo by demonstrating its suitability for middle- and upper-class women. Although scholars have investigated both phenomena, none have considered whether these two cultural trends interacted with or affected one another. I explore this question by using a late-19th-century genre of visual images that is often overlooked: stereoviews. These three-dimensional photographs are a rich source of information about the popular attitudes of their time, and they provide strong evidence that links The New Woman with the banjo.

In these stereographic depictions, The New Women were often shown in erotic poses, usually with a hint of lesbian energy, and playing the banjo with the same gusto with which they smoked and rode bicycles. Through an examination of these 3D views, I will show how the banjo in the hands of The New Woman became a cautionary cultural icon for middle- and upper-class women, subverting the respectable image of the parlor banjo and the bourgeois women who played it. This new perspective enhances what we know about the way musical instruments have been used to reconfigure attitudes toward gender roles in the popular imagination. Moreover, this study demonstrates how gender and sexuality can affect the reception of music through powerful iconographic images.

Anne B. Mainstream: Negotiating Female Rappers’ Identity on the Big Screen
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, CUNY Graduate Center

In Lisa France’s 2003 film Anne B. Real, a young Afro-Latina named Cynthia struggles to build her identity as an MC in Morningside Heights. In the midst of her tumultuous and trauma-filled ghetto life, Cynthia finds her voice through the medium of hip hop, and specifically in the primarily masculine space of an MC battle. That this film contains virtually no profanity, no nudity, and only mild violence suggests that a woman-identified rap story must be family friendly. Through music, France feminizes rap and the ghetto in order to target a broader audience. While popular R&B tunes underscore Cynthia’s interior journey in the film—thereby reinforcing notions of gender and race in the New York City hip hop scene—her on-screen composition and performance of raps challenge society’s conception of who can and cannot take the mic.

I contend that the music in Anne B. Real weakens Cynthia’s hard-earned position as a female rapper where the plot would intend to strengthen her. When compared with the exclusively hip hop soundtrack of a male-centered rap success story such as Eminem’s in 8 Mile, the use of classical, jazz, and R&B music in Anne B. Real waters down the central musical focus, which should be hip hop. Further, Cynthia’s raps are never heard in completion, but are as fragmented as Cynthia’s persona in the film. Her status as composer/performer, when examined through the lens of feminist theory, contributes to a myth of flourishing pro-woman hip hop culture in post-9/11 New York City.

“Down-Ass Bitch”: Race, Class, Gender, and Lil’ Kim’s Gangsta Rap
Marnie Binfield, University of Texas–Austin

Popular rapper Lil’ Kim represents herself as a female “gangsta” and employs a range of verbal, musical, and visual cues to enact this persona. Many scholars have argued that the female gangsta challenges gender norms because she is as “hard” as any man. While I do not dispute this claim wholesale, I argue in this paper that it is imperative to consider culturally specific norms of “femininity,” which include intersecting race- and class-based social mores. Female gangstas earn acceptance among men not because they offer themselves sexually, but because they “live in the same squalid, poverty-stricken, drug-infested, violent environments” as the men with whom they associate (Stephens). While displays of assertiveness and control might challenge some social norms, they also illustrate that female gangsta rappers are credible members of the culture, that they are “down.”

In this paper, I bring an intersectional approach to an analysis of Lil’ Kim’s construction of the gangsta persona. Because Kim’s construction is multi-faceted, I consider not only her lyrical content, but also the musical styles she employs, and the visual texts in which she appears, especially music videos. I argue that Kim’s persona is rooted in her social context and the intersection of a variety of gendered, raced, and especially classed normative expectations. While scholars have devoted much attention to the gendered aspects of the female gangsta persona, a great deal less attention has been paid to its racial and class dimensions, which I argue are equally salient.

Dismantling the Entrenchment of Sexism and Religion: Women, Cuban Bata Drumming, and the Trailblazing Work of Amelia Pedroso
Robin Burdulis, percussionist, Brooklyn, NY

Drumming remains a steadfast male bastion across countries and cultures. Despite the fact that women have been drumming within the traditions of various cultures, and are now playing drums formerly forbidden them, why does the idea of women drumming still bring up primal prejudices on the part of both men and women? Why does this persist among contemporary peoples in modern societies?

Nowhere is this contradiction more pronounced than with the interface between Cuba and the U.S. regarding women and bata drumming. This is evidenced by the pervasive belief still held by musicians in the U.S., as well as practitioners of Yoruba-based religions, that women in Cuba cannot and do not play bata drums, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

Amelia Pedroso was instrumental in breaking the long-standing taboo against women playing bata drums in Cuba. She was one of the first Afro-Cuban women to play bata publicly and was a role model for women worldwide. Her challenge of the taboo was particularly effective because of her highly respected status within her culture. As a priestess of Yoruba, renowned singer of Yoruba liturgical repertoire and descendent of a long line of Afro-Cuban cultural preservationists, she was positioned ideally to succeed in this challenge. She formed a women's bata group which toured to NYC, further informing and inflaming the debate about women and bata on a global level. In this presentation I will highlight Amelia Pedroso's work in Cuba and abroad to shed light on the role that sexism, colonialism and religion plays in perpetuating a prohibition that no longer exists.

From Lisheen to London: Julia Clifford’s Life Remembered
Tes Slominski, New York University

In an era when scores of musicians recorded thousands of Irish tunes, fiddler Julia Clifford (1914-1997) was one of only a handful of female instrumentalists of her generation who made commercially available recordings or became known outside her immediate community. Though she was an exemplary Sliabh Luachra (Cork/Kerry style) fiddler and a stalwart of the London Irish emigrant music scene, Clifford is primarily known as student, sister, and bandmate of fiddlers Pádraig O’Keeffe and Denis Murphy. Recordings by O’Keeffe, Murphy, and Clifford are considered to be the most authentic examples of Sliabh Luachra music, and musicians today tell anecdotes galore about O’Keeffe and Murphy, but rarely tell stories about Julia Clifford. Aside from a small amount of biographical and stylistic study, mostly in relation to O’Keeffe and Murphy, no scholarly work has discussed Clifford’s experiences as a female instrumentalist. Likewise, her influence on subsequent generations of musicians and the experiences of women of any generation playing Irish traditional music remain largely undiscussed. This paper investigates how living musicians’ memories of Julia Clifford create a narrative of her life story and influence that is both in accordance with and in resistance to established ideas of traditional music culture, including Irish music culture’s ambivalence toward female instrumentalists. Interviews with musicians in Ireland and England will demonstrate how musicians’ memories tend to simultaneously emphasize unity of life and music in their own relationships with the music and its practitioners.

To Persist Is To Ignore: Women Composers and the Denial of the Body
Linda Dusman, University of Maryland–Baltimore County

According to Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford never left any documents that described herself as a “woman composer.” In her biography of this seminal American composer, Tick states: “To ignore is to resist: the more one acknowledged gender as an issue, the less one felt a full citizen in the world of art…In such challenging times she [Crawford] and her friends enfranchised themselves as composers by rejecting claims about female creativity grounded in biological determinism.”

The world of music has never experienced the ascendancy of female creators to the iconic status of women in other art forms (Georgia O’Keefe or Toni Morrison, for example). Certainly the non-representational quality of music makes it more difficult to realize a “woman’s voice,” but are there other factors at work, both within women composers themselves and in the culture that surrounds them, that suppress gender identity in music? Is it still impossible to feel a full citizen if one acknowledges one’s gender? Given that the resistance to claiming the status of “woman composer” is as strong as ever, this old issue begs examination.

This paper will use as a site for analysis the recital of women’s works for violin and electroacoustics proposed by Airi Yoshioka for FTM 8, including works by Linda Dusman, Tania León, Alice Shields and Karen Tanaka. The author will survey recent works by women composers released on recordings, interview the composers and the performer from this recital, and analyze the compositions performed, seeking common stylistic threads that reveal, disguise, or distort gender/race/sexuality in these recent works.

Meetings of Two in Kaija Saariaho’s Music
Pirkko Moisala, Abo Akademie University

The proposed paper introduces an ongoing study, which takes an ethnographic and dialogical approach to the works of Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish-born (1952) composer living in Paris. Saariaho’s sonorically rich computer assisted music calls for new kinds of research methods.

In the spirit of a dialogic approach (Bahktin; Korsyn; McClary), Saariaho’s works are examined as relational texts, which take place in inter-textual networks. The research material for this study comprises various kinds of acts which give meanings to music, including performances and different verbalizations of it. I have interviewed the composer on several occasions, as well as her trusted musicians and sound technicians. In addition, Saariaho’s reception in the international media, previously published interviews and scholarly assessments of her music form a part of the research material. All utterances about Saariaho’s music are taken as seriously as the score and the sounding phenomenon it prescribes.

The theory of Two by Luce Irigaray guides my interpretation of Saariaho’s music. Much of the Irigaray reception has connected her work with other French feminist theorists, particularly with the concept of ecrituré feminine, without acknowledging the ultimate goal of her thinking: to establish a culture based on Two subjects, the relationship of which would not be hierarchically but horizontally ordered and based on mutual respect. My aim is to read various kinds of acts which give meanings to Saariaho’s works in concomitance with Irigaray’s ethics. This is a gesture, which emphasizes the equality of different kinds of music-related acts. It leads to an interpretation of the ethics which “rings” in Saariaho’s music.

Discontinuity in Motion: Walking the Virtual Body with Janet Cardiff
Lauren Wooley, University of California–San Diego

In sound’s spatialization, formerly static relationships between artist, art, and audience can take on more of a dialogic play. Sound art and installations can present and/or construct environments wherein the audience – directly, through instruction, or indirectly, through implication – is invited into the role of performer. In their performativity, the audience is placed within the art itself, their very corporeality becoming a part of the spatial/sonic dialog. This shifting and merging of roles opens up a place for a re-examination of the apparent constructedness of, and the power relationships within, this space.

Janet Cardiff is an artist who, through the use and manipulation of scopic and sonic realms, plays with this dialogic invitation. Examining her Walk series, in particular Her Long Black Hair (2005), a Central Park site-specific walk, and MOMA Walk (1999), a San Francisco museum walk, I will look at how Cardiff plays with constructions of artist/audience, visual/sonic, voice/body, passive/active, past/present through and on the walker’s body. In my experience, walking in Cardiff’s art is a matter of mutual willings. Cardiff’s disembodied voice can take on an embodied presence in the walker, where desire, intimacy through distance, the non-synchronous narrative, the simultaneity of time and memory, and the disjuncture of subjectivity all present themselves within a larger gendered space. In this space, and through the walker, Cardiff explores a realm where the visual and the sonic, and the voice and the body, become entangled not necessarily in oppositional confusion but rather in simultaneous cohesion.

The Eternal City of Women: Transparency, Time, and Community in Meredith Monk’s Education of the Girlchild
Nicole Anaka, University of Victoria

In Part Two of Meredith Monk’s landmark 1973 music theatre work, Education of the Girlchild, an ancient woman (Monk) reverses chronology in a long solo, tracing her life as she moves very gradually to the front of the stage, becoming younger with each step. Questing backwards through time to become the young woman she was in the first act, her life is abstracted and essentialized through gesture and vocal sound, completing the accordion-like structure of the work. Her linear, although backwards, traveling contrasts with the horizontal layering of Part One, which presents the lives of six “companions”—a female Knights of the Round Table—in disjunctive, startling episodes that show flashes of everyday life in this city of women, transparent layers of ritual activity deepening into rich, multi-layered metaphors for teaching, learning, building communities, and making art.

The enigmatic, yet oddly familiar quality of the work is enhanced by Monk’s use of the voice, which expands the boundaries of vocalization to include non-verbal sounds. In her personal explorations of extended vocal technique, the voice is used as a tool for activating and uncovering a consciousness that is primordial, pre/anti-logical, and oracular. Fixed identity is exchanged in favour of a flexible voice that is as capable as gesture of incarnating multiple personae. Education of the Girlchild is opera from elsewhere, employing temporal disruptions and wordless vocalizations to create a mysterious, plotless fable of a community of women living outside of time.

“The Mouth’s Cradle”: Vocal Intimacy in Björk’s Medulla
Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, University of Virginia

Medulla (2004), Latin for marrow, may be Björk’s most “embodied” album yet. Almost entirely vocal, Medulla layers and loops the extremes of Björk’s unique vocality, weaving her voice through collaborators’ female Inuit singing, choir accompaniment, and male beat boxing. Medulla revels in the alarmingly raw, exposed humanness of the usually unheard vocal sounds that it mingles with more familiar vocalities. Called “the creepiest album of the year or the most unabashedly jubilant,” Medulla rewards steadfast listeners with “songs that can be complex and otherworldly or devastatingly intimate.”

As part of a larger project analyzing listener intimacy with vocal gender transgression in recent popular music, this paper gleans musical and social meaning by paying attention to the physical and studio production of vocality. Delving into Björk’s vocal personae reveals her long career of developing “alternative femininities,” a term Samantha Holland uses to describe female identities that combine radical gender transgression with aspects of traditional femininity. Fittingly, Björk’s critical, almost paradoxical combination of transgressive and traditional femininities is fashioned by a vocality that pushes listeners past their comfort limits and then draws them back with enveloping gestures of intimacy. “Mouth’s Cradle,” a song about breast feeding, sonically explores vocal intimacy and unease. Metaphorically, the entire album invites the listener to enter intimately into the mouths of singers. Combining musical and feminist analysis with listener ethnography, this paper explores Björk’s alternative feminine vocalities and the ways listeners react to her disturbing yet intimate voice in Medulla.

Sincerely Yours–Vera Lynn: Performing Class, Sentiment, and Femininity in the “People’s War”
Christina Baade, McMaster University

Vera Lynn is emblematic of the nostalgic construction of World War II as a “People’s War.” Lynn pioneered a new model of vocal stardom, an Anglo-American hybrid of music-hall comedienne and dance-band crooner. Nevertheless, her radio performances, especially the series Sincerely Yours—Vera Lynn, became flashpoints in a backlash against sentimentality and women’s voices on the air.

Sincerely Yours embodied the BBC’s wartime aims of boosting national unity and morale with entertainment. The series was built around Lynn’s personality: her Cockney upbringing, sincerity, and “almost evangelical belief in the need for the sentiment she sings.” The formula succeeded, attracting record audiences. Lynn, with her “reassuring” voice and sympathetic persona, became the Forces’ No. 1 Sweetheart.

To critics, Lynn’s repertory and syrupy patter demonstrated that BBC wartime entertainment had become overly sentimental, escapist, and demoralizing. In 1942, the BBC banned crooners and promoted “virile” entertainment. Lynn was too popular to ban, so the BBC shifted her to an all-singing format. As the prototype for sentimental performance, Lynn became a popular target for impersonators, a practice she protested as mocking her fans’ sincerity.
This paper explores the BBC’s ambivalent relationship with Lynn’s on-air presentation, singing style, and broader star persona. Lynn mastered radio’s intimate address while signalling that wartime separations and anxieties were communal experiences. This paper interrogates the discourses of femininity, class, and nationality invoked by Lynn’s fans and critics. It concludes by considering nostalgia, as a characteristic of wartime entertainment and its role in constructing the war in popular memory.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Church of the Electric Guitar
Gayle Wald, George Washington University

In interviews I’ve conducted over the last several years with scores of fans and professional colleagues of Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973), the great gospel singer-guitarist, two phrases recur: “She could make that guitar talk!” and “She could play guitar like a man.” Both phrases express praise for Tharpe’s playing, yet while giving voice to quite distinct notions of what it means to play the guitar meaningfully or well. My paper probes the meaning of these expressions to try to unsettle some extraordinarily tenacious biases in music criticism and historiography that even their detractors tend to reinforce. At stake is not merely the way that knowledge and memory of Rosetta Tharpe has been codified and passed on, but possibilities for imagining virtuosity differently.

What do people mean when they say Tharpe “made the guitar talk” or “played like a man”? How specific are these expressions to Tharpe as a sanctified gospel guitarist, or to Tharpe as a black woman in gospel? Can a man “play like a man”? Can he play like a woman? Using video clips of Tharpe as illustration, I show how Tharpe drew upon distinctly Pentecostal Christian practices of musicking. Well before male players rendered the guitar solo an orgiastic expression of male sexual libido, Rosetta perfected something both more subtle and perhaps more radical: the art of the guitar as an instrument of ineffable speech. The Holy Ghost rapture she expressed through her instrument existed outside and indeed beyond the logic of the phallic body.

“This Girl Isn’t Just a Singer. She’s a Musician”: Sarah Vaughan, Instrumental Singing, and Mannerisms in Jazz
Elaine Hayes, University of Pennsylvania

In American jazz criticism of the 1940s and 1950s the highest praise that a female vocalist could receive was having her singing likened to an instrument. This accolade communicated a respect for the vocalist’s musicianship and creativity, and simultaneously aligned her with the predominantly masculine domain of instrumental jazz – a privilege granted few girl singers. In contrast, these same critics denigrated vocalists that they perceived as lacking musical conception and mastery as possessing a mannered and affected style of singing frequently linked to the commercial and often feminized domain of popular music. Focusing upon the shift in reception to vocalist Sarah Vaughan, this paper explores how critics differentiated between an “instrumental” and “mannered” mode of singing and identifies the gendered ideologies that informed this widely used rhetoric. I begin by outlining Vaughan’s rise to prominence as a founder of the bebop movement and the positive responses to her performances on “race” labels (1944-1949). Relying upon narratives of genius and musical complexity, critics attributed her singing an instrumental quality, and like the instrumental playing of her male colleagues, they characterized it as of the mind. When Vaughan became more popular and signed with Columbia records (1949-1953), however, critics dismissed her singing as effeminate and of the body. Reviewers discussed her “equipment” and lamented as her trademark vocal inflections became mannered and ponderous. This paper concludes by considering the larger ramifications of this rhetoric as it relates to the positioning, and frequent exclusion, of female vocalists in the jazz canon.

Gender, Media, and Performative Shifts in Toba Batak (North Sumatra, Indonesia) Pop Laments:
Referencing, Reframing, and Re-presenting Grief
W. Robert Hodges, University of California–Santa Barbara

The Toba Batak practice of lament singing (mangandung) has undergone significant change since it was first documented in the early nineteenth century by European colonial and missionary visitors. Existing primarily as a women’s domain within the context of funerary mourning rituals, Toba Batak lament singing has been dramatically reshaped – primarily in connection to processes of Westernization, Christianization, and out-migration from the North Sumatran homeland of the Toba Batak – during the past 150 years. These processes have prompted an exchange of musical, technological, and contextual features which, from the late 1970s, have provided a new locus for public expressions of grief namely, the Toba Batak popular music industry. In this paper I address some of the ways in which the movement from funerary mourning practice to popular music genre have impacted the conceptual and perceptual construction of Toba Batak laments. Within a theoretical framework of nostalgia studies, I discuss a number of significant shifts in the production and use of lament in Toba Batak society. Notable among them are shifts in gender participation as popular lament singing has become decidedly male dominated; shifts in performance media as popular laments incorporate the instrumental and harmonic trappings of Western pop music; and performative shifts relating to the construction of an “audience.” In addition, the paper addresses features which serve to sonically, textually, and performatively reinforce the categorization of popular laments as “lament,” thereby underscoring the idea of a musical exchange.

Reading, Listening: Music as Metaphor
Emily Wilbourne, New York University

Across the back cover of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Lauren Berlant proclaims: “Sedgwick writes with intense precision, and yet her work directs us toward the domain where meaning is music, unquantifiable, enigmatic, non-linguistic. If the performative speech act, with all its relation to norms and laws, is central to the reception of her work in queer theory, then the performativity of knowledge beyond speech—aesthetic, bodily, affective—is its real topic.” In this quote, music figures as supralinguistic, unquantifiable, enigmatic; a communicative and yet inexplicable performative of knowledge.

Whenever music is invoked as metaphor or analogy, intelligibility relies on the implied coherence of musical experience. For the reader or listener, linguistic force depends on the transparent relationship between “music” and something else entirely. The musical analogy articulated by Berlant extends beyond this blurb, not only do Sedgwick’s essays explore the analytic possibilities of texture and affect – two words that, to the musically literate, bear a double meaning, she is but one of a significant and influential number of feminist and queer scholars (there included Irigaray, Kristeva and Butler) who articulate musical metaphors. While I would not deny that music is aesthetic, bodily or affective, I want to question how it is that music can stand within critical theory as aesthetic goal, loaded with meaning and yet hermeneutically impenetrable. Rather than asking how feminist or queer scholarship offers new perspectives on music, this paper looks at how thinking seriously about music might alter our understanding and deployment of queer and feminist critical theory.

Women’s Electric Nerves and Musical Nervousness
James Kennaway, Berlin, Germany

Increased scientific understanding of the nature of auditory nerves in the nineteenth century led to a more physiological conception of the effects of music on the listener. Surprisingly, it was not physiology but psychiatry that took centre stage. The idea of nerves was elided with the notion of nervousness, and certain music was held to be more “nervous” than others. Thus some kinds of music could cause psychiatric symptoms by “over-stimulating” the listener.

Women were understood to have “weaker nerves” than men, and be especially at risk of the sexual and psychological dangers of nervous music. Patricia Fara in her new book on the subject notes an occasion on which castrati were used in an experiment to see if their “effeminate” nerves could pass on electricity. Both lay and medical reports, from Krafft-Ebing to Thomas Mann, detail women and gay men suffering from conditions brought on by musical over-stimulation of the nerves. For example, in 1914 Augusta Vescelius wrote about, “A young lady of my acquaintance, on the verge of nervous prostration, attended the opera Tristan and Isolde. The next day she was in a state of collapse and not until after months of rest did she regain her health.”

This paper deals with the role of sexual and cultural politics in the concept of electrical nerves. It will also consider why certain kinds of music, notably the neue deutsche Schule and Modernism, were associated with the symptoms of late nineteenth century psychiatry.

Ambrosia, Darienne, Pandora and Aggie: Their Drag Naming Stories
Christopher Brent Murray, New York University

The coming out story is by now a nearly ubiquitous cultural trope that represents a moment of revelation and sometimes of self-empowerment in the white/western queer life-narrative. Less familiar perhaps is its cousin, the drag-naming story. Here I do not intend to produce a “drag name theory,” but rather to present four intriguing stories about the complicated relationship between drag name and drag persona. In my interviews with four Rochester, New York drag performers, the story of choosing or being given a drag name served as a common moment of personal definition and declaration. Though all four performers had dabbled in drag before being named, the moment of naming played a crucial role in solidifying their intentions, and ultimately to committing to a performance image. For my four informants, the naming story also seemed related to obliquely declaring a repertoire of music—a territory that their newly born personae planned on inhabiting. My writing addresses these territories’ relationship with the naming story, but will also discuss the potential meanings behind deliberate betrayals of personally declared identities, and the conflicts that arise when territorial boundaries overlap.

“Where’s that partner of mine?” Ethel Waters and the Management of Black Queer Desire
Samantha Pinto, UCLA

Though America’s white lesbian culture did not emerge until after World War II when women experienced new economic and social freedoms, a substantial black lesbian culture coalesced decades earlier, primarily among the blues women of the Harlem Renaissance. Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters and Gladys Bentley were all lesbian or bisexual and actively participated in a thriving lesbian culture, which historians largely fail to recognize. This project, then, attempts to answer two questions: why was the culture of the blues women so conducive to lesbianism? And why have these black lesbians received so little recognition by historians?

I argue that ultimately it was the “low” culture in which the blues women existed that was such an oasis for lesbians, and which also kept it invisible from written accounts of history. Other women in the early twentieth-century struggled to embrace their lesbian desire because they lacked physical and economic mobility to live autonomously of marriage. The blues women’s lifestyle of constant touring and performing in prohibition’s underground nightlife offered independence and mobility at the expense of security and domesticity. Indeed, performing cost the women social respectability as they were viewed no differently than the prostitutes, gamblers and other criminals with whom they associated. The nightclub performing venues evaded the radar of law enforcers and other official recorders of history. The “oral culture” of the musicians and its lack of textual posterity ensured the sexual and social liberty of the blues performers as well as their exclusion from written accounts of history.

Between the Sugar Plum Fairy and Sugar Rum Cherry: The Ellington-Strayhorn Nutcracker Suite
Lisa Barg, McGill University

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s adaptation for jazz orchestra of Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite (1960) is remarkable not only as a work of abundant musical pleasures, but as an unusual encounter between the musical worlds of modern jazz and nineteenth-century Russian concert music. Their collaborative re-imagining can be understood as a critical act of cultural translation and reception, one that highlights a play of difference and affinity between work and model. These affinities include a shared sense of aesthetic values and various forms of “otherness” vis-à-vis dominant critical-historical categories. In the case of Strayhorn, who served as the principal creative voice in at least six of the nine movements, such musical and historical affinities point towards issues surrounding black gay identity and, more specifically, raise the possibility of a queer reading of Strayhorn’s contributions, not least because his spectral collaborator was also a gay man.

Extending the pioneering work of David Hajdu and Walter van de Leur, I want to consider how Strayhorn’s identity as an openly gay black man came to bear on his sonic translations. How does the music’s mix of the personal and stylized, of African American and French modernist sounds, fit in with other queer figurations of identity in African American literature and art? What role do strategies of irony and parody play? These questions are perhaps most pertinent when examining Strayhorn’s re-interpretation of the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy and Arabian Dance which inspired some of his most extensive and richly evocative alterations.

The Erotically Satisfying Experience of Performance
Amy Daken Valladares, New York University

In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. - Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic”

Erotic knowledge is another form of knowing, of the body's “physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us.” The word “erotic” is ambiguous because of its appropriation by “white, patriarchal, classist” society, which tends to confuse erotic with sex. Lorde's reclamation of the word provides a valuable opportunity for understanding what for many black people is the “process of becoming . . . the ultimate experience of spiritual transformation” (Burnim 1989), appearing in performative moments throughout the diaspora.

I aim to understand connections between the West African concept of ache' as it exists today for Afro-Cuban ritual specialists and Lorde's re-imagining of the erotic. Examples of erotic knowledge and experience will be examined through performative moments of U.S. and Cuban popular and ritual music. Recent feminist/womanist authors have attempted to correct misappropriations of the erotic despite centuries of oppression in which black bodies have been sexualized, politicized, used as sites of contestation, and struggled to express social injustice. Through these authors' work, I hope to show how African descendants have also been conduits of Lorde's erotic connection: an “open and fearless underlining of [the] capacity for joy,” and how this deepens our understanding of the experience of diasporic performance.

Singing Christianity as Emancipatory Justice
Zoe Sherinian, University of Oklahoma

The South Indian Dalit (untouchable) composer/theologian Theophilus Appavoo has created a Dalit feminist theology expressed and transmitted through Tamil folk music. He intends it to serve as a means of emancipatory politics at the local village level for outcastes, women and the poor and potentially as a more universal theological model. The key to Dalit feminist political consciousness is the theological recreative expression possible through a folk music system that encourages performative political/spiritual contextualization or recreation. Through reception analysis of the song "Our Parent God, Mother and Father" I show the complex reality of Dalit feminist politics on the local level. I interrogate the tensions of caste, gender and class within the Dalit Christian community which Appavoo's song was not always able to resolve and in some cases magnified. I also explore the broader applicability of Appavoo's theology through bringing his ideas into conversation with feminist and womanist theologians/theorists Serene Jones, Emily Townes and bell hooks. Appavoo's ideas of "universal family," of corporate sin, and critical change resonate with Jones' ideas of communitarian "bounded openness," Townes' conception of womanist spirituality of justice, and hooks' understanding of dialogical empowerment. In an era in which Christianity in the U.S. has been appropriated by right wing fundamentalists and conservative politics, this work contributes to a larger theory of the relationship between performance, identity politics, feminism and Christianity among oppressed communities. It shows that through performance these Christian theologians and their communities are expressing a moral agency founded in justice which conservative fundamentalism lacks.

Powerful Women: Images of Women in Trinidadian Music
Ejima Baker, CUNY Graduate Center

In Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s, Sherrie Tucker suggests the inclusion and exploration of “counternarratives help develop [new] narrative strategies.” Indeed, considering the myriad of narratives available for a single musical genre enables us to see a more inclusive picture of others and ourselves. Historically, the popular music of Trinidad and Tobago has primarily reflected the experiences of the male Afro-Trinidadian population. An in-depth study of the role of the narrative of the powerful woman in their songs allows a space where we can contest the hetero-normative, sexist, and racist picture of the nation previously articulated by male artists.

This paper will review the common images of women in calypsos, where they are normally ignored, characterized as evil, or seen as possessions. In focusing on two songs, “Golo” by Second Imij and “Caribbean Woman” by Denyse Plummer, this paper provides an alternative image of Caribbean women that differs greatly from the stereotypes prevalent in songs written and performed by men. The paper will then explore the two aforementioned songs, which present women not only as backbone of Caribbean society, but also catalysts for a change in how we define what is and is not (and who is and is not) Trinidadian. In “Golo” and “Caribbean Woman,” these two songs present us with new narratives of women: instead of passive, mute women; we have images of women who are prepared to change the world.

Speaking Back: The Political Project of Nina Simone
Shana L. Redmond, Yale University

To think of Black women’s music in the twentieth century is to imagine the infinite possibility of the human spirit and the lengths of creative imagination. From Blues to Hip Hop, Black women’s talent has transgressed genre and political space in an often stifling, racist, and paternalistic United States. Very few icons of the twentieth century epitomize this socio-political trajectory more conclusively than Nina Simone (1933-2003). As an activist, musician, and artist, Simone was able to critically engage and examine the human experience through the lens of a shared humanitarianism without losing the necessary critique of the domestic experiences of Black communities in America. A critical member of the Civil Rights era cultural vanguard, Simone reconfigured the space for protest within popular musical culture and produced a major anthem of the movement: “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”.

This space of protest and artistry is what I will discuss in my paper. In true Black radical feminist form, Simone’s life contradicted many of the rigid racial and gender tenets of American society post World War II. She was a mother, who true to her Blues roots, spoke openly of sexuality and pleasure within her music. Shattering the limited subjectivities of Black women in her piece “Four Women”, she subsequently became a pioneering figure in a growing women’s vanguard of arts and literature. Through an analysis of her life and music within historical context, I will position Simone beside prevailing notions of gender roles, racial stereotypes, and political allegiance in America. Through this work, a version of historical agency and creativity will be exhumed from the not so distant past.

“La era esta pariendo…”: Re/producing Sexual Politics in Cuban Nueva Trova
Susan Thomas, University of Georgia

Drawing from gender theory, musical and textual analysis and interviews with the artists themselves, this paper examines the gendered discourse of Cuban nueva trova and questions cultural politics of representation, appropriation, and subjectivity. In the years following the revolution, the nueva trova movement became not only a forum for singer songwriters to articulate the political ideals of the hombre nuevo in song, but also to advocate a changing sociology of the sexes that would be freed from the political economy of bourgeois society. The space carved out by three generations of trovadores is a decidedly masculine one and while their song texts deconstruct women's roles, particularly in intimate relationships, there is no similar deconstruction of the masculine viewpoint from which they write. The prominence of themes dealing with sex, gender, and female homosexuality is striking, particularly when one considers the scarcity of women in the nueva trova movement and their lack of engagement with these themes in their work. Female artists tend not to write and perform songs that explicitly challenge the dominant paradigm regarding intimate relationships, and those that do are careful to frame such songs as expressions of their own subjectivity, eschewing any interpretation of a larger political project as well as any kind of labeling that might be appropriating of others. Post-revolutionary cultural prescriptions discourage the formation of subcultural identities, trumpeting the power of the “pueblo unido.” Yet the cultural work enacted when discourses of difference are defined and expressed only by voices already empowered to speak (sing) is a question that warrants further examination.

“The Call of Salome”: American Adaptations and Recreations of the Female Body
Mary Simonson, University of Virginia

That Richard Strauss’s Salome generated a stormy reception and moral firestorm during its initial run at the Metropolitan Opera House is an established part of American music history. Less frequently acknowledged is the popularity of Salome herself. Before, during, and after the premiere of Strauss’s opera in 1907, Salomes flooded vaudeville, modern dance, and film; “Salomania” was so intense that a 1908 New York Times article elected “officers” of “The Salome Club”: “President, Gertrude Hoffmann; Vice President, La Sylphe; Treasurer, Lotta Faust; Secretary, Eva Tanaguay,” and went on to joke that membership in the club was “limited to fifty thousand” performers.

In my paper, I will place “popular” Salome performances, namely Hoffmann’s vaudeville acts and Florence Lawrence’s film depiction, in dialogue with two American operatic performances in the first decade of the twentieth century: the substitution of dancer Bianca Froelich for Olive Fremstad in the Met’s 1907 production, and Mary Garden’s performance as both dancer and singer in 1909. Against a backdrop that considers early twentieth-century shifts in American discourses on the body (sparked by the increasing popularity of physical culture systems, suffrage, reproductive rights, social dance, and modern dance), I will discuss the ways in which Salome and the women performing her simultaneously challenged, created, and recreated versions of the texts(s) they drew on, representations of and discourses about the female body, and ideologies regarding creative agency more broadly.

Invisible Woman: Vi Redd’s Contributions as an Alto Saxophonist
Yoko Suzuki, Rutgers University

This paper examines the question of why so few female jazz saxophonists have been commercially recorded, and focuses on African-American jazz saxophonist/singer Vi Redd (b. 1928) as a case study. Praised by the renowned jazz critic Leonard Feather for her “Bird-like sound” and “blues-rooted feeling,” Redd possesses a unique sound, brilliant technique on the instrument, and remarkable skill in bebop style improvisation. Although she has led her own bands and toured with such jazz greats as Earl Hines and Dizzy Gillespie, she has appeared on only a few recordings as a sidewoman since her two recordings as a leader in the early 1960s. Her five recordings as a singer with Dexter Gordon and Count Basie as well as a twelve-week tour with his orchestra to Europe and Africa demonstrate that she was commercially more successful as a blues singer.

Redd’s career illustrates the all too frequent trope of the “invisible” female jazz instrumentalist. According to the stereotypical dichotomy in the jazz world, men are instrumentalists and women are singers. Into the twenty-first century, women are still largely excluded as instrumentalists while promoted as singers. The refusal by the industry and wider audiences to recognize Redd’s artistic contributions as a saxophonist suggests that her invisibility reflects stereotypes of gender and sexuality that persist in the jazz world.

The Work of Mieko Shiomi at the Intersection of Fluxus, Feminism, and National Identity
J. Michele Edwards, Macalester College, emerita

Japanese composer, performance artist, and pianist Mieko Shiomi (b. 1938) is a significant, long-term participant in the Fluxus movement, creating many events and intermedia art. Her connection with Fluxus has been frequently referenced; however, examination of her work in terms of feminist analysis and national identity has been largely overlooked. In this paper, I will present a richer understanding of her work by reading compositions in light of the intersections of Fluxus with feminism and national identity and will demonstrate the ease of coexistence among these dimensions of her work. Fluxus artists were engaged by Asian philosophy and aesthetics, and Shiomi’s interests correspond with traditional Japanese sensibility. Her experimental works embrace a Zen point of view, where the focus is on action rather than theory and direct vision rather than interpretation. Her work projects a unity of art with life; she relinquishes authorial position; and openness in form and content offers a critique of patriarchal values.

Fluxus is described by art historian Alexandra Munroe as the first instance in modern art history that Japanese artists helped originate a major international artistic direction, and Shiomi participates in this. She not only escapes the boundaries of the established art world but also finds an aesthetic that is compatible and consistent with her gender and national identity. The paper will incorporate my interview material with Shiomi as well as discussion of specific works, e.g., Disappearing Music for Face, which exists in a variety of realizations.

Staging the Body: Sexuality, Music and Feminism
Belinda Deneen Wallace, University of Maryland

Jamaican Dancehall artist Lady Saw is undeniably the “queen of the dancehall.” Her career has spanned more than a decade and her latest release, “Strip Tease,” has enjoyed (US) commercial success. However, her career has also been plagued by controversy over her “provocative” performance(s) and lyrics. Rather than limiting Lady Saw as a controversial figure, I posit that Lady Saw represents a complex performer whose body and lyrics defy conventional discourses on female subjugation and empowerment. To that end, this paper seeks to complicate the relationship between Lady Saw’s performance(s) and music and her audience. Her performance(s) and music combine to create what I call a “Staged Body.” The “Staged Body” is primarily encountered in two ways: visually and aurally. Through her performance(s) in concerts and in music videos, Lady Saw’s body is measured, and valued, by its ability to be constructed, controlled and consumed by her (presumably male) audience. Conversely, her lyrics are often received as a coded language to be deciphered and consumed by her (presumably female) listeners. In essence, the “Staged Body” operates by simultaneously resisting and reinscribing the female body as a constructed, controlled and consumed item/image. This paper will explore the simultaneity of resistance and reinscription and their role in establishing female agency.

Female Piano Teachers and Performers in Early Twentieth-Century America: Challenges, Innovations, Legacies
Connie Arrau Sturm, West Virginia University

Early twentieth-century America piano teachers such as Evelyn Fletcher-Copp (1872-1944) and Carrie Louise Dunning (1860-1929) made significant contributions to musical life in their contemporary society and helped spur the development of modern American piano pedagogy. With their creative and innovative teaching strategies, journal articles, workshops, and method books, they helped transform a piano teaching approach based on technique and regimen inherited from European piano pedagogues, into the child-centered and age-appropriate piano instruction that forms a hallmark of American piano pedagogy and is now regarded as a model of elementary piano pedagogy in many countries throughout the world. Although recognized in important publications of their time (e.g., The New York Times, Musical America, and The Etude), the accomplishments of these teachers have since disappeared from the musico-historical record, and are not recognized in current professional literature related to music education or piano pedagogy. While women’s role in shaping American musical culture has generally been marginalized, the professional achievements of independent piano teachers (who are predominantly women, working with young children in a private setting) have over time been almost totally devalued and ignored. This paper will examine some of the many ways that early twentieth-century female pianists advanced American music education and pianism despite societal prejudices and limitations, and laid the groundwork for modern-day American piano pedagogy.

Women Teachers as Musical Creators: Three “Daughters of Miriam”
Constance L. McKoy, University of North Carolina-Greensboro

While rank-and-file music teachers are predominantly female, the towering figures of the history of music education are all men (Kodaly, Dalcroze, etc.). This paper argues that, although Frances E. Clark, Anna Lechner and Sarah Glover lack the immediate name recognition of their male counterparts, their work has influenced the theoretical foundations underlying best practices in music teaching and learning.

Making Modern Music History: Marion Bauer’s Twentieth Century Music
Elizabeth L. Keathley, University of North Carolina-Greensboro

This paper demonstrates the significance of the historical writing of Marion Bauer (1882-1955) by comparing the coverage, paradigms, and examples in her books to those of contemporaneous music histories and by considering their critical and academic reception. Bauer’s 1933 volume Twentieth Century Music not only instructed students, but also guided listeners through the music of a century still young.

Power and Gender in Modern Music Patronage: Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge’s Changing Patronage Style
Elizabeth Yackley, University of North Carolina-Greensboro

This paper argues that, over the course of her patronage career, the patronage style of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864-1953) changed from one marked by the "feminine" values of nineteenth-century "cultural feminists," with an emphasis on nurturing, to a more "masculine" style emphasizing control over the composition and performance of new works, professional relationships with men rather than women, and cultivation of the most prestigious chamber music genre, the string quartet. This study draws its data from Coolidge's correspondence with composers and other documents in the Library of Congress, and interprets the data to argue that Coolidge's patronage style changed to give her more credibility in the ("masculine") public sphere and exhibited aspects of what Catherine Parsons Smith, after Gilbert and Gubar, has called a "female affiliation complex." Thus, although Coolidge established her own status within modern music culture, and arguably accomplished much in the promotion of modern music, she contributed to the notion of modernism's putative "masculinity."

Virtually Connected to Billie Holiday
Carol Muller, University of Pennsylvania

This paper is nestled between Sherrie Tucker’s imperative that we read women into jazz history, and Farah Griffin’s thoughtful meditation on Billie Holiday—her life, voice, and mythology. The purpose of my paper is to extend Griffin’s work on Billie Holiday beyond the United States of the late twentieth century, to 1950s South Africa where a young woman, Sathima Bea Benjamin, read Billie Holiday’s “searing autobiography” Lady Sings the Blues. Published in 1956 it arrived in the local library soon afterwards. She read the book just before it was banned in 1959, Ms. Benjamin heard the voice of Billie Holiday on record in the backyard of one of South Africa’s elite suburbs. It was after reading about her life and hearing her voice that the South African singer realized her own sound and style resonated with the life experiences and music made by Billie Holiday.

Recently, I have been in conversation with Ms. Benjamin—who still lives in New York City—reconstructing the relationship she imagined to jazz through the voice and words of and about Billie Holiday by having her re-read the autobiography, Griffin’s book, and Mergolick’s biography of “Strange Fruit.” In this paper, I examine ways in which Ms. Benjamin inserted herself, and South African jazz history more generally, into the larger archive of jazz history and performance through the connections she imagined between the voice and words of Billie Holiday and her own performance. I consider three key dimensions of jazz song in this dialog: the political, emotional and autobiographical.

Cultural and Gender Identities in Flower Drum Song
Judy Tsou, University of Washington

In her book Cold War Orientalism, Christine Klein describes a change in racial formation of people of color that began in the 1940s. The shift was from racialization to ethnicization—from biologically and physically defined categories to socially and culturally defined categories. This sea change was a reflection of legislative changes; immigration exclusion laws were repealed in 1943, and Chinese were allowed to become American citizens for the first time in 1952. In addition, the concept of the “melting pot,” where immigrants from different racial and ethnic backgrounds assimilate, became popular through Israel Zangwell’s play of the same name.

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's musical Flower Drum Song (1958) reflects this new kind of thinking about assimilation and ethnicization. In the musical, both white and Asian identities are created in the all-Asian cast to underscore the assimilation and coexistence of the two very different cultures. This polarization of identity is achieved through subtler versions of the exotic curiosity and voyeurism of years past. Contemporary Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang has remade this musical to purge it of exoticism and belittlement. From the same musical yarn, Hwang has woven a different story that demystifies and empowers both the culturally white and culturally Chinese characters. In this paper, I will discuss the cultural and gender identities in the two version of the musical. I will also examine Hwang's intent on erasing the cultural hegemony that gives Orientalism its durability and strength. I will further compare the two versions of the musical to the novel by C. Y. Lee on which the musical is based.

“Meri Awaaz Suno” (Listen to My Voice): Women, Vocalism, and Nation in Hindi Cinema
Pavitra Sundar, University of Michigan

The most distinctive feature of Bombay cinema—or Bollywood, as it is popularly known—is its use of extravagant song and dance sequences. An integral part of South Asian culture on the subcontinent and in the diaspora, Hindi film music is today gaining increasing global attention. My paper examines the ideological effects of “playback singing,” the Bollywood practice of having professional singers lend their voices for the musical segments. Specifically, I analyze the theme song of a recent blockbuster, Lagaan (2001), to understand how female voices become sites for the construction of national identity.

The most famous voice on the Lagaan soundtrack is that of Lata Mangeshkar, the popular singer who monopolized the playback industry for four decades and is known as “The Nightingale of India.” The theme song of the movie juxtaposes Mangeshkar’s saccharine, ultra-feminine voice with two (primarily) female choruses—one aggressive and loud, the other light and airy. These varied female voices embody a range of sexual, national, and racial meanings. The India that comes into being in the interstices of the three sets of female voices thus seems affirming to all women. Yet within Lagaan’s utopian nation, and certainly within the film industry and broader social milieu, women with “ethnic” and sexually provocative voices are often deemed dangerous and disallowed from speaking (or singing) for the nation. The social norms embedded in female singing voices thus reveal the limits that Hindi film music imposes on the voice of nation, and vice versa.

Aural Intercourse: the (Hetero)Sexual Trope of Hybridity
Roshanek Khesti, University of California–Santa Cruz

Scholars of sexuality and psychoanalysis have primarily linked fetishism to “scopophilia” (the love of looking) and have privileged vision in the production of knowledge about this peculiar form of displaced desire. I argue that world beat music represents an alternate, less visible site for the sublimation of fetishism’s troublesome yearning. Through an analysis of sound as gendered and racially marked, I explore the trope of musical hybridity and link this to the heterosexual imperative. I contend that bodies matter in the production and reception of sound. According to Roland Barthes, bodies inscribe through music. The materiality of the body that produces sound matters in terms of the sound’s effect and affect as well as its possibilities for reception.

Through the analysis of ethnographic data collected for over twenty months at Kinship Records, a highly successful world beat record company in San Francisco, I propose that the gendered practice of hearing is a phenomenological process of engaging with the body of the other through listening. I will focus my analysis on two of Kinship’s most successful artists, Brazilian vocalist Bianca Costa and Asian Massive producer and tabla master Kamal Ghosh, who are both local to New York City. I perform an ethnographic analysis focused on the soundscape and its phenomenological, sexual, and cultural affect.

“Politics is music–is life!” Ani DiFranco on Post-9/11 Feminism
Heather Feldman, CUNY Graduate Center

Singer-songwriter and New York native Ani DiFranco has spent her entire career entwining the personal and the political, particularly in her music. DiFranco told the Boston Globe: "My politics [are] inherently more bodily, they [are] more about the immediate art of survival in a man's world.” Criticisms of the right wing, corporate America, racial intolerance, and America’s consumerist culture have permeated her songs since her debut in 1990. “It’s not like I have an agenda in my music, it’s just that to me, the world is political. Politics is music—is life! That’s the lens I look through.”

In 2004, DiFranco released Educated Guess, her first solo album in thirteen years. Several of the tracks on it demonstrate an intense and personal reflection on American politics, culture, and capitalism in post-9/11 society. In my paper, I will offer a close reading of the spoken-word piece “Grand Canyon,” which uniquely combines DiFranco’s raw emotional reaction to the events of 9/11 with her pride in her country and the state of feminism, “the coolest f-word ever,” today. Although the poem is spoken, DiFranco accompanies her usual dramatic reading with ornamental, sometimes ghost-like, vocal and electronic gestures that highlight particular moments in the piece, creating a haunting, riveting image of the days following 9/11 in New York City.

Babelogues: The Feminine Writing of Patti Smith
Christina Linklater, Harvard University

Patti Smith has long maintained that her art is not informed by her gender. This stance is reinforced by photographs such as those by Robert Mapplethorpe for the cover of her 1975 debut album, Horses, which emphasise her androgynous appearance. In interviews and her recently-published notes and letters, too, she insists that her songs and poetry are “beyond gender or social definition” and “selfless.”

From a feminist position with which Smith would likely take issue, I propose that, despite her protests to the contrary, her work is not exactly “beyond gender.” I present my argument in three stages. First, I acknowledge Smith’s more familiar persona as a politically-engaged artist in mid-1970s New York City, briefly considering some aspects of public life to which she made frustrated reference in her private and published writings (the approaching American bicentennial, for instance, whose organisers began actively discouraging dissent at the start of the decade). I next turn to less recognised themes of gender by way of her contemporaneous poetry collection Babel, wherein she first articulated her fascination with the Tower of Babel and her aesthetic of “babelogues”—the term she coined for intentionally forbidding texts; babelogues were cited by Simon Reynolds and Joy Press in 1995 as analogous to Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine, or feminine writing, an intriguing possibility which is here explored for the first time. Finally, I trace the musical and lyrical deployment of babelogues in “Land,” the triptych of convoluted lyrics and innovative vocal techniques which forms the centrepiece of Horses.

Gender Performance and Conflict in the 1970s Punk Movement
Brooke Bryant, CUNY Graduate Center

Punk poet Patti Smith and pin-up queen Debbie Harry were the most commercially successful female musicians to emerge from the mid-1970s New York punk scene, a movement that was otherwise dominated by men. Although members of this insular downtown community were generally supportive of the subversive goals of one another, Smith and Harry were fiercely competitive. Interviews by these women and their peers illustrate an aggressive rivalry; Harry constantly challenged the serious nature of Smith’s poetry, while Smith dismissed Harry’s kitschy music as superficial and meaningless.

This paper analyzes Smith and Harry’s mutual antagonism through the lens of gender, drawing on theories presented in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings. By examining studio recordings and live shows by, photographs of and magazine articles about Smith and Harry, the paper demonstrates that these women embodied drastically different images of femininity. Patti Smith’s ability to control the musical and textual voices of both men and women presented the possibility of an authentic escape from masculine repression. By contrast, Debbie Harry’s bleached, stilettoed “Blondie” character represented subversion through ironic submission to ideals imposed by a hegemonic male culture. This paper locates the source of Smith and Harry’s conflict in their performances of gender, which were ultimately incompatible.

“For the ladies, and the fags, yeah”: Electronic Feminist Punk Subculture, Performativity, and Queer Politics
Angela Wilson, Montréal, Québec

This paper examines the youth subculture surrounding electronic feminist punk rock music. Focusing mainly on New York City-based Le Tigre, an aggressively feminist band with roots in the 1990s feminist punk rock subculture of Riot Grrrl, it will explore innovative efforts to create a new brand of feminism blending queer politics with elements of second and third wave feminisms.

Using music and lyrics, I will demonstrate that through the subculture, young feminists and queer-identified women use alternative media such as fanzines, internet message boards, web sites, performance, and music making to stimulate a dialogue about sexual abuse and homophobia. I will also look closely at musicians' use of technologies like sampling and electric guitars in a conscious defiance of gendered musical stereotypes.

The presentation will contrast electronic feminist subculture with self-proclaimed post-modern "electroclash" music to highlight the political agenda of bands like Le Tigre as they strive to cross political, sexual and gendered boundaries while making dance music. I will argue that Le Tigre’s explicit and earnest feminist and queer politics, and the fact that the band demands emotional engagement from its young fans makes the music community an important study in youth subcultures.

Overall, this paper will explore how young artists are revamping feminist theory and activism by making music challenging the boundaries of performance and politics, second and third wave feminism, and queer politics and feminism. In the end I will argue that the resulting subculture counters the popular perception that young women have turned their backs on feminism. Quite the contrary: they have created their own unique and queer-inclusive musical feminist movement.

Catherine’s Operas: Royal Female Performativity in the Patriarchy of Eighteenth-Century Russia
Inna Naroditskaya, Northwestern University

Catherine the Great (1729-1996) was the last of four empresses (Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth, Catherine the Great) who ruled Russia for most of the eighteenth century, subversively creating what has been called "the women's kingdom." Cross-dressing both metaphorically and literally (both Elizabeth and Catherine wore male military uniforms to lead parades and conduct balls), these women challenged the gender dynamics of the male patriarchy. During a period known for operas, masquerades, and courtly pageantry, the line between theater and day-to-day life was continually blurred. In this context, Catherine wrote librettos for five operas performed between 1786 and 1790. Produced half a century before Glinka's Ivan Susanin, often considered the first nationalist opera, these works anticipated major directions in nineteenth century Russian opera. This paper examines the complex relationships between two of these operas Fevei (1786) and Nachal'noye upravleniye Olega ('The Early Reign of Oleg', 1790), and the theatricality/ performativity that pervaded Catherine's rule. These relationships reveal the musical nationalism (the folk songs Catherine used), the portrayal of Oriental others, and the staging of social hierarchy. Paradoxically, in her operas, the female ruler establishes a paradigm for male governance in Russia.

The danger to patriarchy posed by Catherine's rule can be gauged by the extreme suppression of powerful women in nineteenth century Russian opera. This threat reached an apex in two of Tchaikovsky's operas (Cherevichki 1888 and Pique Dame 1890) in which Catherine herself appears as a character, nearly silent.

British Queens on the Early Nineteenth-century Italian Opera Stage
Naomi André, University of Michigan

A not often recognized trend in early nineteenth-century Italian opera is that many are based on subjects about British royalty. In a cross-section of operas written between 1816 and 1843, this paper explores two central questions: (1) why were Italian composers' interested in composing operas about British history? and (2) what do these operas say about operatic voicings of plot and character? While the first question addresses specific issues related to the phenomenon of English literature (in translation) appearing in Italy for the first time, the second inquiry relates to broader questions regarding women's roles in opera. This paper draws upon examples from six representative “Queen” operas: Rossini’s Elisabetta d’Inghilterra, 1816; Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, 1830; Donizetti’s Rosmonda d’Inghilterra, 1834; Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, 1834; Donizetti’s Roberto Deveraux, 1837; and Pacini’s Maria d’Inghilterra, 1843.

Unlike Italian opera after 1850 with a singular Romantic heroine, these “Queen” operas reflect the common practice of operas with two leading women. While feminist opera criticism has focused on the “victimhood” fate of women, in these Queen operas at least one woman lives and sometimes both survive. Moreover, who is loved, who is able to get her desires met, and how the two women relate to each other (as contrasting rivals or juxtaposed friends) outline distinct character types for two categories of women. Regardless of who is married or who is the mistress, the audience's sympathy is drawn to the women with the least amount of political power. Conversely, the ruling queen—the woman with the most power—always ends the opera alone, without the man she loves.

Heard but not Seen: Extended Vocalism and Queer Femininity
Juliana Snapper, University of California–San Diego

In the 1960s through the 1990s, popular, jazz and classical idioms saw dramatic shifts in expressive vocalism. Artists such as Abbey Lincoln, Cathy Berberian, Nina Hagen, and Diamanda Galas stretched the boundaries of vocal articulation by exploring libidinous and abject states through screaming, groaning and growling. These extended modes of expression were often combined with more conventional singing techniques, the fusion or juxtaposition of different vocal genres, and the intersection of live performance with electronic media. These artists perform unusual relationships between authorship/performance, embodiment and femininity, describing body-instruments with unstable physical borders that are actively expanded and re-shaped—with or without the use of electronic musical prosthetics. In each case, the physical appearance of the singers is sculpturally feminine. Their enlarged features, bombastic hairdos, and hyper-feminized body shapes were as integral to their performances as the extended reach and dexterity of their internal instruments. The extended and internally virtuosic feminine bodies resonate as queerly female (femme) because of the way womanhood and femininity interact in these performances to destabilize both categories. The model of the tribade sexual organ—a mythically/historically overdeveloped instrument both tucked within and protruding out from the body—is helpful here to understand the dynamics of receptivity, interiority, action, and penetration that shape both femme vocalism and femme sexual modalities. Where queer theorists have tended to address queer female femininity in terms of their problematic place within a visual economy (their invisibility), singers like Hagen and Galas remind us not to privilege what we see over what we hear. These femmes become intelligible through their vocal bodies.

Diva-Worship and Homoerotic Desire in Berio’s Recital I (for Cathy)
Megan Jenkins, CUNY Graduate Center

According to Terry Castle, female fascination with operatic divas is as old as the genre itself, and contains undertones of homoeroticism. I propose that Berio’s Recital I (for Cathy) (1972) is a piece about not only the protagonist’s mental disintegration, but is one that also addresses female homosexual desire. I will demonstrate the possibility that homoeroticism is represented through two differing means in Recital—one visual, the other musical.

Recital is a dramatic work portraying the psychological collapse of the female protagonist—a role famously performed by Cathy Berberian. The work features other characters, including the wardrobe mistress, a silent role specified for a woman. The actions of the wardrobe mistress, as prescribed in the score, result in actions not unlike those of “diva worshipers”—a category of listener defined by Castle, who finds diva worshipers represented in such works as the novel Painted Veils by Huneker and Cushing’s memoirs about Olive Fremstad. The inclusion of this silent character suggests the concept of diva worship, and thereby creates a space for a queer interpretation of the music.

Recital relies heavily on quotation for its musical content, a phenomenon that evokes characters from more than twenty other operatic works. I posit that in a performance of Recital, the protagonist is not the only character subjectified; rather, Dido, Titania, Desdemona, Lakmé, Carmen, and others are invoked through the singing of their songs. Abbate’s idea of “multiple de-centered voices” in music, which she presents in Unsung Voices, will be useful in parsing the complex tangle of subjectivities found in the web of the “real life” performers, the fictional protagonist, the wardrobe mistress, and the characters from the operas that are quoted. The multiple layers of subjectivity in Recital allow for any number of readings, including a story of homoeroticism in the opera house.