Musicology () is the scholarly study of music. A person who studies music is a musicologist. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture. In the intermediate sense, it includes all relevant cultures and a range of musical forms, styles, genres and traditions, but tends to be confined to the humanities - a combination of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and the humanities of systematic musicology (philosophy, theoretical sociology, aesthetics). In the broad sense, it includes all musically relevant disciplines (both humanities and sciences) and all manifestations of music in all cultures, so it also includes all of systematic musicology (including psychology, biology, and computing). The broad meaning corresponds most closely to the word's etymology, the entry on "musicology" in Grove's dictionary, the entry on "Musikwissenschaft" in ''Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', and the classic approach of Adler (1885).

In the broad definition, the parent disciplines of musicology include history; cultural studies and gender studies; philosophy, aesthetics and semiotics; ethnology and cultural anthropology; archeology and prehistory; psychology and sociology; physiology and neuroscience; acoustics and psychoacoustics; and computer/information sciences and mathematics. Musicology also has two central, practically oriented subdisciplines with no parent discipline: performance practice and research, and the theory, analysis and composition of music. The disciplinary neighbors of musicology address other forms of art, performance, ritual and communication, including the history and theory of the visual and plastic arts and of architecture; linguistics, literature and theater; religion and theology; and sport. Musical knowledge and know-how are applied in medicine, education and music therapy, which may be regarded as the parent disciplines of Applied Musicology.

Traditionally, historical musicology has been considered the largest and most important subdiscipline of musicology. Today, historical musicology is one of several large subdisciplines. Historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and systematic musicology are approximately equal in size - if numbers of active participants at international conferences is any guide. Systematic musicology includes music acoustics, the science and technology of acoustical musical instruments, physiology, psychology, sociology, philosophy and computing. Cognitive Musicology is the set of phenomena surrounding the computational modeling of music.

Subdisciplines

Historical musicology

Music history or historical musicology studies the composition, performance, reception, and criticism of music over time. Historical studies of music are for example concerned with a composer's life and works, the developments of styles and genres (e. g. baroque concertos), the social function of music for a particular group of people (e. g. court music), or modes of performance at a particular place and time (e. g. Johann Sebastian Bach's choir in Leipzig). Like the comparable field of art history, different branches and schools of historical musicology emphasize different types of musical works and different approaches to music. There are also national differences in the definition of historical musicology. In theory, "music history" could refer to the study of the history of any type or genre of music (e.g., the history of Indian music or the history of rock). In practice, these research topics are more often considered within ethnomusicology (see below) and "historical musicology" is assumed to imply Western Art music.

The methods of historical musicology include source studies (esp. manuscript studies), paleography, philology (especially textual criticism), style criticism, historiography (the choice of historical method), musical analysis (the analysis of music in order to find "inner coherence"), and iconography. The application of musical analysis to further these goals is often a part of music history, though pure analysis or the development of new tools of music analysis is more likely to be seen in the field of music theory. Music historians create a number of written products, ranging from journal articles describing their current research, new editions of musical works, biography of composers and other musicians, or book-length studies. Music historians may examine issues in a close focus, as in the case of scholars who examine the relationship between words and music for a given composer. On the other hand, some scholars take a broader view, and assess the place of a given type of music in society using techniques drawn from other fields, such as economics, sociology, or philosophy.

''New musicology'' is a term applied since the late 1980s to a wide body of work emphasizing cultural study, analysis, and criticism of music. Such work may be based on feminist, gender studies, queer theory, or postcolonial theory, or the work of Theodor Adorno. Although New Musicology emerged from within historical musicology, the emphasis on cultural study within the Western art music tradition places New Musicology at the junction between historical, ethnological and sociological research in music.

New musicology was a reaction against traditional historical musicology, which according to Susan McClary, "fastidiously declares issues of musical signification off-limits to those engaged in legitimate scholarship." Charles Rosen, however, retorts that McClary "sets up, like so many of the 'new musicologists', a straw man to knock down, the dogma that music has no meaning, and no political or social significance". (I doubt that anyone, except perhaps the nineteenth-century critic Hanslick, has ever really believed that, although some musicians have been goaded into proclaiming it by the sillier interpretations of music with which we are often assailed.)' (Rosen 2000).Today, many musicologists no longer distinguish between musicology and New Musicology, since many of the scholarly concerns that used to be associated New Musicology have now become mainstream, and the term "new" clearly no longer applies.

Ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology, formerly comparative musicology, is the study of music in its cultural context. It is often considered the anthropology or ethnography of music. Jeff Todd Titon has called it the study of "people making music". Although it is most often concerned with the study of non-Western musics, it also includes the study of Western music from an anthropological or sociological perspective, cultural studies and sociology as well as other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Though some ethnomusicologists primarily conduct historical studies, the majority are involved in long-term participant observation. Therefore, ethnomusiological work can be characterized as featuring a substantial, intensive ethnographic component. Closely related to ethnomusiology is the emerging branch of sociomusicology.

Popular music studies

Popular music studies, known, "misleadingly," (Moore 2003, p. 2) as ''popular musicology'', emerged in the 1980s as an increasing number of musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and other varieties of historians of American and European culture began to write about popular musics past and present. The first journal focusing on popular music studies was Popular Music, which began publication in 1981. It was not until 1994 that an academic society solely devoted to the topic was formed, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. The Association's founding was partly motivated by the interdisciplinary agenda of popular musicology though the group has been characterized by a polarized 'musicological' and 'sociological' approach also typical of popular musicology (Moore ibid, p. 4).

Music theory, analysis and composition

Music theory is a field of study that describes the elements of music and includes the development and application of methods for composing and for analyzing music through both notation and, on occasion, musical sound itself. Broadly, theory may include any statement, belief, or conception of or about music (Boretz, 1995). A person who studies or practices music theory is a music theorist.

Some music theorists attempt to explain the techniques composers use by establishing rules and patterns. Others model the experience of listening to or performing music. Though extremely diverse in their interests and commitments, many Western music theorists are united in their belief that the acts of composing, performing, and listening to music may be explicated to a high degree of detail (this, as opposed to a conception of musical expression as fundamentally ineffable except in musical sounds). Generally, works of music theory are both descriptive and prescriptive, attempting both to define practice and to influence later practice. Thus, music theory generally lags behind practice in important ways, but also points towards future exploration, composition, and performance.

Musicians study music theory in order to be able to understand the structural relationships in the (nearly always notated) music, and composers study music theory in order to be able to understand how to produce effects and to structure their own works. Composers may study music theory in order to guide their precompositional and compositional decisions. Broadly speaking, music theory in the Western tradition focuses on harmony and counterpoint, and then uses these to explain large scale structure and the creation of melody.

Music psychology and cognition

There is considerable overlap between the fields of music psychology, music cognition, and the cognitive neuroscience of music. Music psychology applies the content and methods of all subdisciplines of psychology (perception, cognition, motivation, personality and so on) to all aspects of musical behaviour and experience (performance, listening, composition). Music cognition is the study of music as information, from the viewpoint of cognitive science. The discipline shares the interdisciplinary nature of fields such as cognitive linguistics. Cognitive musicology emphasizes the use of computational models for human musical abilities. The cognitive neuroscience of music studies the way that music appreciation and ability is implemented in the brain and uses a methodology similar to cognitive neuroscience.

Performance practice and research

Performance practice draws on many of the tools of historical musicology to answer the specific question of how music was performed in various places at various times in the past. Although previously confined to early music, recent research in performance practice has embraced questions such as how the early history of recording affected the use of vibrato in classical music, or instruments in Klezmer.

Within the rubric of musicology, performance practice tends to emphasize the collection and synthesis of evidence about how music should be performed. The important other side, learning how to sing authentically or perform a historical instrument is usually part of conservatory or other performance training. However, many top researchers in performance practice are also excellent musicians.

Music performance research (or music performance science) is strongly associated with music psychology. It aims to document and explain the psychological, physiological, sociological and cultural details of how music is actually performed (rather than how it should be performed). The approach to research tends to be systematic and empirical, and to involve the collection and analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data. The findings of music performance research can often be applied in music education.

Critiques

Exclusion of disciplines and musics

In its most narrow definition, historical musicology is the music history of Western culture. Such a definition arbitrarily excludes disciplines other than history, cultures other than Western, and forms of music other than "classical" ("art", "serious", "high culture") or notated ("artificial"). A somewhat broader definition incorporating all musical humanities is still problematic, because it arbitrarily excludes the relevant (natural) sciences (acoustics, psychology, physiology, neurosciences, information and computer sciences, empirical sociology and aesthetics) as well as musical practice.

Within historical musicology, scholars have been reluctant to adopt postmodern and critical approaches that are common elsewhere in the humanities. According to Susan McClary (2000, p. 1285) the discipline of "music lags behind the other arts; it picks up ideas from other media just when they have become outmoded." Only in the 1990s did historical musicologists, preceded by feminist musicologists in the late 1980s, begin to address issues such as gender, sexualities, bodies, emotions, and subjectivities which dominated the humanities for twenty years before (ibid, p. 10). In McClary's words (1991, p. 5), "It almost seems that musicology managed miraculously to pass directly from pre- to postfeminism without ever having to change - or even examine - its ways." Furthermore, in their discussion on musicology and rock music, Susan McClary and Robert Walser also address a key struggle within the discipline: how musicology has often "dismisse[d] questions of socio-musical interaction out of hand, that part of classical music's greatness is ascribed to its autonomy from society." (1988, p. 283). Since the 1990s, however, musicology has increasingly turned to socio-cultural methods.

Exclusion of popular music

According to Richard Middleton, the strongest criticism of (historical) musicology has been that it by and large ignores popular music. Though musicological study of popular music has vastly increased in quantity recently, Middleton's assertion in 1990—that most major "works of musicology, theoretical or historical, act as though popular music did not exist" -- holds true. Academic and conservatory training typically only peripherally addresses this broad spectrum of musics, and many (historical) musicologists who are "both contemptuous and condescending are looking for types of production, musical form, and listening which they associate with a ''different'' kind of music...'classical music'...and they generally find popular music lacking. He cites three main aspects of this problem (p.104-6). The terminology of historical musicology is "slanted by the needs and history of a particular music ('classical music')." He acknowledges that "there is a rich vocabulary for certain areas [harmony, tonality, certain part-writing and forms], important in musicology's typical corpus"; yet he points out that there is "an impoverished vocabulary for other areas [rhythm, pitch nuance and gradation, and timbre], which are less well developed" in Classical music. Middleton argues that a number of "terms are ideologically loaded" in that "they always involve selective, and often unconsciously formulated, conceptions of what music ''is''."

See also

Appropriation (music)

Cognitive Musicology

List of musicologists

Music and mathematics

Music education

Musical scale

Musical temperament

Music therapy

Musical tuning

New Musicology

Organology

Prehistoric music

Psychoacoustics

Psychoanalysis and music

Set theory (music)

Sociomusicology

Tonality

World music

Music and emotion

Virtual Library of Musicology

Notes

References

Adler, Guido (1885). Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft. Vierteljahresschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 1, 5-20.

Babich, Babette (2003) "Postmodern Musicology" in Victor E. Taylor and Charles Winquist, eds., ''Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism'', London: Routledge, 2003. pp. 153–159. ISBN 978-0415308861.

Honing, Henkjan (2006). "On the growing role of observation, formalization and experimental method in musicology. " ''Empirical Musicology Review''.

Kerman, Joseph (1985). ''Musicology.'' London: Fontana. ISBN 0-00-197170-0.

McClary, Susan, and Robert Walser (1988). "Start Making Sense! Musicology Wrestles with Rock" in ''On Record'' ed. by Frith and Goodwin (1990), pp. 277–292. ISBN 0394564758.

McClary, Susan (1991). ''Feminine Endings. Music, Gender, and Sexuality''. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1899-2 (pbk).

McClary, Susan (2000). "Women and Music on the Verge of the New Millennium (Special Issue: Feminists at a Millennium)", ''Signs'' 25/4 (Summer): 1283-1286.

Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). ''Studying Popular Music''. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15275-9.

Moore, Allan, ed. (2003). ''Analyzing Popular Music'', p. 2. ISBN 9780521771207. p. 2n2 reads: "'Popular musicology' should be read as the musicological investigation of popular music, rather than the accessible investigation of music!"

Parncutt, Richard. (2007). "Systematic musicology and the history and future of Western musical scholarship", ''Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies'', 1, 1-32.

Pruett, James W., and Thomas P. Slavens (1985). ''Research guide to musicology.'' Chicago: American Library Association. ISBN 0-8389-0331-2.

Randel, Don Michael, ed. (4th ed. 2003). ''Harvard Dictionary of Music'', pp. 452–454. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01163-5.

Rosen, Charles (2000). "The New Musicology", in ''Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New'', pp. 255–272. Harvard University Press.

Tagg, Philip (1979, ed. 2000). ''Kojak - 50 Seconds of Television Music: Toward the Analysis of Affect in Popular Music'', pp. 38–45. The Mass Media Music Scholar's Press. ISBN 0-9701684-0-3.

Further reading

Winkler, Peter (1978). "Toward a theory of pop harmony", ''In Theory Only'', 4, pp. 3–26., cited in Moore (2003), p. 9.

Tagg, Philip (1982). "Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Practice", ''Popular Music'', Vol. 2, Theory and Method, pp. 37–67., ibid.

van der Merwe, Peter (1989). ''Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth Century Popular Music''. ISBN 0198163053 (1992)., ibid.

Middleton, Richard (1990) ''Studying Popular Music''. ISBN 0335152759., ibid. and van der Merwe (2007), p. 515.

Brackett, David (1995). ''Interpreting Popular Music''. ISBN 0-520-22541-1., ibid.

Everett, Walter, ed. (2000). ''Expression in Pop-Rock Music''. ISBN 0815331606., ibid.

Moore, A.F. (2001). ''Rock: The Primary Text'', 2nd edn., ISBN 0754602982., ibid.

External links

The American Musicological Society (Wikipedia entry)

Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology Online

AMS: Web sites of interest to Musicologists

The Society for American Music

Graduate Programs in Musicology

Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology

International Association for the Study of Popular Music

Society for Ethnomusicology

Wikiquote - quotes about musicology

Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) - database of musical sources from around the world

On-line Journals

Although many musicology journals are not available on-line, or are only available through pay-for-access portals, a sampling of peer reviewed journals in various subfields gives some idea of musicological writings:

JIMS: Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies

Echo: a music centered journal

Empirical Musicology Review

Ethnomusicology Review

Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies

JMM: The Journal of Music and Meaning

Music Theory Online

Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Ethnomusicology OnLine

Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online

Music and Politics

Volume ! The French journal of popular music studies all articles available for free download up to n-2.

The following musicology journals can be accessed on-line through JSTOR (requires subscription for full access). Many of them have their latest issues available on-line via publisher portals (usually requiring a fee for access).

''19th-Century Music'' (1977–2004)

''Acta Musicologica'' (1931–2002) (current organ of the International Musicological Society)

''American Music'' (1983–2005) (Society for American Music)

''Asian Music'' (1968–2002)

''Black Music Research Journal'' (1980–2004) (Center for Black Music Research)

''British Journal of Ethnomusicology'' (1992–2002)

''Early Music History'' (1981–2002)

''Ethnomusicology'' (1953–2003) (Society for Ethnomusicology)

''Journal of Music Theory'' (1957–2002)

''The Journal of Musicology'' (1982–2004)

''Journal of the American Musicological Society'' (1948–2004) (American Musicological Society)

''Music Educators Journal'' (1934–2007)

''Music Theory Spectrum'' (1979–2003) (Society for Music Theory)

''The Musical Quarterly'' (1915–1999)

''Perspectives of New Music'' (1962–2000)

''Popular Music'' (1981–2003)

''Yearbook for Traditional Music'' (1981–2003)

Category:Aesthetics Category:Greek loanwords

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name	Susan McClary
birth date	October 02, 1946
birth place	St Louis, Missouri
occupation	Musicologist and professor
education	BA Southern Illinois University, MA and PhD Harvard University
subject	Music, Feminism
notableworks	''Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, & Sexuality''
spouse	Robert Walser
awards	}}

Susan McClary (born 2 October 1946) is a musicologist associated with the "New Musicology". Noted for her work combining musicology and a feminist music criticism, McClary is Professor of Musicology at Case Western Reserve University.

Biography

McClary was born in St Louis, Missouri and received her BA in 1968 from Southern Illinois University. She attended graduate school at Harvard University where she received her MA in 1971 and her PhD in 1976. Her doctoral dissertation was on the transition from modal to tonal organization in Monteverdi's works. The first half of her dissertation was later re-worked and expanded in her 2004 book, ''Modal Subjectivities: Self-fashioning in the Italian Madrigal''. Before becoming Professor of Music at UCLA in 1994, she taught at the University of Minnesota (1977–91) and McGill University (1991–94). She is also a professor at the University of Oslo. McClary is married to the musicologist Robert Walser.

''Feminine Endings''

One of her best known works is ''Feminine Endings'' (1991; ISBN 0-8166-4189-7). ("Feminine ending" is a musical term once commonly used to denote a weak phrase ending or cadence.) The work covers these topics:

#Musical constructions of gender and sexuality. #Gendered aspects of traditional music theory. #Gendered sexuality in musical narrative. #Music as a gendered discourse. #Discursive strategies of women musicians.

This work combines musicology within feminism. McClary suggests that sonata form may be interpreted as sexist or misogynistic and imperialistic, and that, "tonality itself - with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax - is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire." She interprets the sonata procedure for its constructions of gender and sexual identity. The primary, "masculine" key (or first subject group) represents the male self, while the allegedly the secondary, "feminine" key (or second subject group), represents the other, a territory to be explored and conquered, assimilated into the self and stated in the tonic home key.

"Constructions of Subjectivity in Franz Schubert's Music"

"Constructions of Subjectivity in Franz Schubert's Music" first appeared as a paper delivered at the American Musicological Society in 1990 and then in a revised version as a symposium presentation during the 1992 Schubertiade Festival in New York City. At the time McClary was influenced by Maynard Solomon's allegations of Schubert's homosexuality in his 1989 paper "Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini." McClary's paper explored the relevance of Solomon's research to what she termed the uninhibited, "hedonistic" luxuriance of Schubert's ''"Unfinished" Symphony.'' The symposium paper elicited in some mild controversy . Following evidence that Solomon's conclusions may have been flawed and largely based on his own psychoanalytic reading of a dream narrative Schubert set down in 1822, McClary revised the paper again. Its definitive version was printed in the 1994 edition of the book ''Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology'' edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, Gary Thomas.

According to McClary, Schubert, in the second movement of his ''Unfinished Symphony,'' foregoes the usual narrative of the sonata form by "wandering" from one key area to another in a manner which does not consolidate the tonic, but without causing its violent reaffirmation:

"What is remarkable about this movement is that Schubert conceives of and executes a musical narrative that does not enact the more standard model in which a self strives to define identity through the consolidation of ego boundaries...in a Beethovian world such a passage would sound vulnerable, its tonal identity not safely anchored; and its ambiguity would probably precipitate a crisis, thereby justifying the violence needed to put things right again."

While maintaining that attempting to read Schubert's sexuality from his music would be essentialism, she proposes that it may be possible to notice intentional ways in which Schubert composed in order to express his "difference" as a part of himself at a time when "the self" was becoming prominent in the arts. Schubert's music and often the man himself and the subjectivity he presented have been criticized as effeminate, especially in comparison to Beethoven, the model and aggressive master of the sonata form (Sir George Grove, after Schumann: "compared with Beethoven, Schubert is as a woman to a man"; Carl Dahlhaus: "weak" and "involuntary"). However, McClary notes:

"what is at issue is not Schubert's deviance from a "straight" norm, but rather his particular constructions of subjectivity, especially as they contrast with many of those posed by his peers."

Some of the ideas about composition as subjective narrative proposed in "Constructions" were developed by McClary in her 1997 article, "The Impromptu that trod on a loaf", which applies this analysis to Schubert's ''Impromptu'' Op. 90, Number 2. "Constructions of Subjectivity in Franz Schubert's Music" and the ideas in it continue to be discussed, sometimes critically. However, the article influenced a number of queer theorists, and in 2003 was described by the musicologist, Lawrence Kramer, as still an important paper in the field. The paper, and the reactions to it are also discussed in Mark Lindsey Mitchell's ''Virtuosi: A Defense and a (sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists''.

Other work

McClary set the feminist arguments of her early book in a broader sociopolitical context with ''Conventional Wisdom'' (2000, ISBN 0-520-23208-9). In it, she argues that the traditional musicological assumption of the existence of "purely musical" elements, divorced from culture and meaning, the social and the body, is a conceit used to veil the social and political imperatives of the worldview that produces the classical canon most prized by supposedly objective musicologists. But McClary does not ignore the "purely musical" in favor of cultural issues, incorporating it into her analysis. She examines the creation of meanings and identities, some oppressive and hegemonic, some affirmative and resistant, in music through the referencing of musical conventions in the blues, Vivaldi, Prince, Philip Glass, and others.

While seen by some as extremely radical, her work is influenced by musicologists such as Edward T. Cone, gender theorists and cultural critics such as Teresa de Lauretis, and others who, like McClary, fall in between, such as Theodor Adorno. McClary herself admits that her analyses, though intended to deconstruct, flirt with essentialism.

The Beethoven and rape controversy

In the January 1987 issue of ''Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter'', McClary wrote of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:

:''The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.''

This sentence elicited and continues to elicit a great range of responses. McClary subsequently rephrased this passage in ''Feminine Endings'':

:''The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music. The problem Beethoven has constructed for this movement is that it seems to begin before the subject of the symphony has managed to achieve its identity.'' (128)

She goes on to conclude that "The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment" (129). The critiques of McClary discussed below refer primarily to the original version of the passage.

Readers sympathetic to the passage may be connecting it to the opinion that Beethoven's music is in some way "phallic" or "hegemonic," terms often used in modern feminist studies scholarship. These readers may feel that to be able to enjoy Beethoven's music one must submit to or agree with the values expressed, or that it requires or forces upon the listener a mode or way of listening that is oppressive, and that these are overtly expressed, as rape, in the Ninth. For related views, see discussion above, as well as the article "Criticism and sonata form".

Several commentators have objected to McClary's characterizations. Four examples are:

"Painter Jailed for Committing Masterpieces" by Robert Anton Wilson (also Wilson, Robert A. (1998). ''Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-ups'', p. 64. ISBN 0-06-273417-2.)

Historical Review Press: "The Godfather of the Multi-Cult Nightmare" by Robert Stacy McCain

"The Feminist Interpretations Debate, Concluded" by Glenn Lamont.

Leaving aside readers whose main interest is political, there are other reasons readers might take offense at McClary's sentence. The passage could be construed as unfair to Beethoven if one assumes that the "throttling murderous rapist's rage" putatively expressed in the music is supposed to have come from Beethoven's own habitual thoughts and feelings, which McClary does not suggest. Scholars and historians have found no evidence that Beethoven ever committed a rape or harbored an intense urge to do so.

Numerous musicological academics, however, have raised more serious and substantial objections to McClary’s scholarship, including (but not limited to) her notorious remark about rape. Four examples are:

Music theorist Pieter van den Toorn has complained that McClary's polemics negate the asocial autonomy of absolute music; he is concerned with Schenker-style formal analysis. Van den Toorn complains, for example, that “Fanned by an aversion for male sexuality, which it depicts as something brutal and contemptible, irrelevancies are being read into the music.” Van den Toorn's complaint was rebutted by musicologist Ruth Solie, but van den Toorn responded with a whole book on these issues. Composer Elaine Barkin, in another extended critique, complained that “McClary’s voice tone, language, attitudes all too resoundingly perpetuate and reinstantiate those very ‘patriarchal practices’ she is deploring.” McClary briefly dismissed Barkin's critique as "a caricature." Musicologist Paula Higgins, in another robust critique of McClary's work, has observed that “one wonders… if [McClary] has not strategically co-opted feminism as an excuse for guerrilla attacks on the field.” Higgins complains of McClary's “truculent verbal assaults on musicological straw men”, and observes that “For all the hip culture critique imported from other fields, McClary has left the cobwebs of patriarchal musicological thought largely intact.” ” Higgins is also critical of McClary's citation practice as it concerns other scholars in the area of feminist musical criticism. Ethnomusicologist Henry Kingsbury has criticized McClary’s inattention to the Friedrich Schiller poem set in the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony; he also lists numerous works by Beethoven and Schubert that he says contradict McClary’s claims regarding violence in Beethoven as well as her argument about the construction of gender in music.

Another source of controversy is the possibility that McClary's passage trivializes the horrific experience of actual rape victims by reducing it to mere metaphor. Even readers sympathetic to criticism of Beethoven's music may find that pinpointing a vague, unintended colonial program as "rape" is inaccurate.

The pianist and critic Charles Rosen has also commented on the famous passage. He avoids taking offense on any of the grounds mentioned above, and is willing to admit sexual metaphors to musical analysis. Rosen's disagreement is simply with McClary's assessment of the music:

:We have first her characterization of the moment of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony:

:[''passage appears here'']

:The phrase about the murderous rage of the rapist has since been withdrawn [as noted above], which indicates that McClary realized it posed a problem, but it has the great merit of recognizing that something extraordinary is taking place here, and McClary's metaphor of sexual violence is not a bad way to describe it. The difficulty is that all metaphors oversimplify, like those entertaining little stories that music critics in the nineteenth century used to invent about works of music for an audience whose musical literacy was not too well developed. I do not, myself, find the cadence frustrated or dammed up in any constricting sense, but only given a slightly deviant movement which briefly postpones total fulfillment.

:To continue the sexual imagery, I cannot think that the rapist incapable of attaining release is an adequate analogue, but I hear the passage as if Beethoven had found a way of making an orgasm last for sixteen bars. What causes the passage to be so shocking, indeed, is the power of sustaining over such a long phrase what we expect as a brief explosion. To McClary's credit, it should be said that some kind of metaphorical description is called for, and even necessary, but I should like to suggest that none will be satisfactory or definitive.

McClary also notes that she "can say something nice about Beethoven", saying of his String Quartet, Op. 132, "Few pieces offer so as vivid an image of shattered subjectivity the opening of Op. 132."

Quotes

"Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential."

"Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence."

"My history of Western music contains Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, but it also includes Stradella and the Swan Silvertones, Bessie Smith and Eric Clapton, k.d. lang, Philip Glass, and Public Enemy. And it treats all of them as artists who have negotiated with available conventions and in particular historical circumstances to produce musical artifacts of exceptional power and cultural resonance. If I can no longer privilege any one tradition, I find myself perpetually in awe of the countless ways societies have devised for articulating their most basic beliefs through the medium of sound."

Selected bibliography

Works by Susan McClary

"The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year." In ''Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception''. Ed. Leppert and McClary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 13-62.

"Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition." ''Cultural Critique'' 12 (1989): 57-81.

''Georges Bizet: Carmen''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

"Constructions of Subjectivity in Franz Schubert's music." In ''Queering the Pitch''. Ed. Brett, Wood, and Thomas. New York: Routledge, 1994. 205-33.

''Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, & Sexuality''. 2nd. ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002 (1991).

''Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form''. Berkeley: University of California Press,, 2001

''Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.

See also

Early Music

Notes and references

Sources

Bal, Mieke (ed) ''Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies'', Taylor & Francis, 2004. ISBN 0415316618

Hatten, Robert S. Hatten ''Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert'', Indiana University Press, 2004. ISBN 025334459X

Holland, Bernard, "Dr. Freud, Can Tea Really Just Be Tea?", ''New York Times'', February 17, 1992

Horowitz, Joseph "Schubert: Eternally Feminine?", ''New York Times'', January 19, 1992.

Kramer, Lawrence, ''Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song'', Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521542162

Maynard Solomon, "Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini" in ''19th-Century Music'', April 1989, Vol. 12, No. 3, Pages 193–206.

McClary, Susan, "Constructions of Subjectivity in Franz Schubert's Music" in ''Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology'' (Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, Gary Thomas (eds.), CRC Press, 2006 ISBN 041597884X

McClary, Susan, ''Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, & Sexuality''. 2nd. ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002 (1991).

Mitchell, Mark Lindsey, ''Virtuosi: A Defense and a (sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists'', Indiana University Press, 2000. ISBN 0253337577

Miller, Leta E. and Lieberman, Frederic (1998). Lou Harrison: Composing a World. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511022-6.

Peraino, Judith Ann, ''Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig'', University of California Press, 2006. ISBN 0520215877

Rosen Charles, ''Critical Entertainments'', Chapter 15 (2000) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-17730-4.

Ross, Alex, "The Gay Connection in Music and in a Festival", ''New York Times'', June 27, 1994.

Rothstein, Edward, "And If You Play 'Bolero' Backward ...", ''New York Times'', February 16, 1992.

Rothstein, Edward, "Was Schubert Gay? If He Was, So What? Debate Turns Testy", ''New York Times'', August 6, 1995

Sleeman, Elizabeth (ed.) "McClary, Susan K(aye)", ''International Who's Who of Authors and Writers'', Routledge, 2003, p. 348. ISBN 1857431790

Tellenbach, Marie-Elisabeth, "Franz Schubert and Benvenuto Cellini: One Man's Meat" in ''The Musical Times, Vol. 141, No. 1870, Spring 2000, pp. 50–52

Tommasini, Anthony, "'Outing' Some 'In' Composers", ''New York Times'', August 6, 1995.

Tommasini, Anthony, "What's So Gay About American Music?", New York Times, October 24, 2004.

External links

TRANS 15 (2011) Celebrating the 20th anniversary of "Feminine Endings" by Susan McClary: Special issue dedicated to Gender Studies, Feminism, and Music. [NEWS ON: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=133667046665880]

UCLA Department of Musicology, Biography of Susan McClary

Susan McClary, "In Praise of Contingency: The Powers and Limits of Theory", Keynote Address, ''Society for Music Theory'' 2009 Annual Meeting, Montréal, Canada

Lawrence Kramer with reply by Charles Rosen, "Music à La Mode", ''The New York Review of Books'', Volume 41, Number 15, September 22, 1994

Category:American musicologists Category:Gender studies academics Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:1946 births Category:Living people

fr:Susan McClary

Reem Kelani is a Kuwaiti musician, born in Manchester, England, and brought up in Kuwait. Initially influenced by the jazz music her father played on his record player, a family wedding Reem attended in her maternal home in Galilee in the seventies sparked her interest in Palestinian music.

Career

Reem released her debut solo CD "Sprinting Gazelle – Palestinian Songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora" to critical acclaim in February 2006. Reem’s next CD project will be a tribute to the Egyptian composer Sayid Darwish (1892–1923).

In addition to music performances, Reem conducts workshops on Arabic and Palestinian music in schools, colleges, and at festivals. Reem is also a regular broadcaster; she wrote and presented ‘Distant Chords’ for BBC Radio Four between 2001 and 2003, featuring the music of migrant communities in the UK.

External links

Reem Kelani's home page

BBC article

'My narrative is that I exist', interview with Natalie Hanman, The Guardian 19 September 2008

Sprinting Gazelle reviews

full biography

Category:Living people Category:British people of Palestinian descent Category:British emigrants to Kuwait Category:Musicians from Manchester Category:Kuwaiti musicians

Jeffrey Swann (born November 24, 1951) is a renowned classical pianist.

Swann was born in Arizona but moved to Dallas, Texas, as a young child. He began piano studies at the age of four. While attending St. Mark's School of Texas, he studied for seven years with Alexander Uninsky at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. (He was known at St. Mark's for practicing without shoes - socks only.) He received his Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from the Juilliard School under Beveridge Webster, and completed his Doctor of Musical Arts degree under Adele Marcus, graduating with highest honors. During this time, he won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in 1974 and opened the 1975-76 YCA Series at Carnegie Hall with his New York debut.

He won first prize in the Dino Ciani Competition sponsored by La Scala in Milan, second prize at the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Brussels, and top honors in the Warsaw Chopin, Van Cliburn, Vianna da Motta and Montreal Competitions.

References

Category:Musicians from Dallas, Texas Category:Texas classical music Category:American classical pianists Category:1951 births Category:Living people Category:Prize-winners of the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition Category:St. Mark's School (Texas) alumni

it:Jeffrey Swann

James Edward Zimmerman (February 19, 1923 – August 4, 1999) was born in Lantry, South Dakota. He was a coinventor of the radio-frequency superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) and he is credited with coining the term.

Career

Westinghouse Research Laboratory, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania - 1943 – ??

Smithsonian Institution, 1953 – 1955

Ford Motor Company, Scientific Laboratory in Dearborn, Michigan, 1955 – 1969

SHE (now BTI), Founder 1969 – 1970

National Bureau of Standards, 1970 – 1985

While at NIST, Jim introduced two important innovations in SQUID magnetometry:

Fractional-turn SQUID, improving the coupling efficiency

SQUID gradiometer, improving sensitivity to nearby fields

In addition, in the late 70's and early 80's, he also gave a major contribution to the development of low-power closed-cycle Stirling refrigerators, to reach temperatures in the range 4K - 8K with the purpose of cooling SQUID devices and small-scale superconducting electronics without resorting to liquid helium dewar vessels. A major achievement was the use of plastic parts made in the laboratory, which would be assembled in a totally non-magnetic cryocooler (refrigerator), in order not to interfere with highly sensitive SQUID's. Later, he was also involved in the development of pulse-tube cryocoolers.

Education

South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, B.S. Electrical Engineering 1943 Carnegie Institute of Technology, ScD Physics 1951 – 1953

Awards

NIST Fellow Samuel Wesley Stratton Award, the highest award for scientific achievement conferred by NIST In 1987 he became one of the first to make a SQUID using the newly discovered high-temperature superconductors.

Trivia

On New Year's Eve of 1969, he participated in an historic experiment, conducted at MIT in collaboration with David Cohen and Edgar Edelsak recording the first human magnetocardiogram using a SQUID sensor.

External links

Physics Today Obituary

Category:American engineers Category:1923 births Category:1999 deaths Category:People from South Dakota