McClary's position, concerning the process by which music is gendered as masculine or femi

McClary's position, concerning the process by which music is gendered as

masculine or feminine, is that socially-grounded codes are "composed into" the

music, that they are immanent to the text, there to be discovered. McClary has

traced narratives of power and sexual differences in sonata forms by mapping

(5) the gendered terms in which theorists have described them onto pieces which

variously appear to enact or resist such constructions.

Rieger has likewise traced the inchoate differentiation of musical affects by

gendered characters in late-eighteenth-century opera, and charted their much

heightened divergence in contemporary film music. Both of these approaches

(10) share a common assumption of a degree of awareness of such gendered codes at

the point of composition, an awareness which, if not fully reflective, at least

shows a composer's "practical consciousness" of how musical expression works

within his or her culture. This conception permits music to participate fully in

cultural processes, thereby allowing us to bring cultural contexts to bear in our

(15) explanatory models of musical styles and forms, but its critics rightly argue that

it carries an extreme risk: it is all too easy for this approach to re-inscribe the

values it would aim to critique. We may accuse McClary of adopting the very

stereotypes she deplores, and similarly we may regard her identification of

musical difference with cultural difference to be an overinterpretation, though

(20) unless we limit our focus to some extreme of the avant-garde, we must concede

that some kind of contrast between masculinity and femininity will always exist

in any music.

It is perhaps best to argue the possibility that such gender metaphors are

merely functions of our interpretational frameworks, imposed on music from the

(25) outside. Treitler describes the way in which scholars from the eighteenth to the

twentieth centuries have differentiated between Old Roman and Gregorian chant

repertories in gendered terms, and argues that these metaphors relate entirely

to a project of Western cultural supremacy, and not to any immanent musical

characteristics of the actual chants. We may make the same point about all

(30) repertories: gender is encoded not in the music, but in the critical language we

use, much like Pigmalion's chisel, to bring the music to life. While this

position is weaker than McClary's in an explanatory capacity—it cannot use

social values to account for why a piece was written the way it was rather than

any other, aesthetically speaking--its value is ultimately greater in that it

(35) allows us to develop fresh listening strategies which invest familiar and well-

loved music with new and arguably more positive values. Hence, it is more

attractive for the development of a politically responsible critical strategy,

though even in this respect, the position is not without shortcomings, most of

which become apparent when we examine the relationship between musical

(40) material and cultural meaning.

The author considers the metaphors of masculinity and femininity we associate with certain pieces of music to be

A．external to the music, imposed in most cases by the interpretational criteria of critics and listeners

B．interesting but unnecessary for the enjoyment of these pieces of music by most listeners

C．evidence that socially-grounded codes are composed into music, and not simply the product of interpretation

D．a means by which familiar and well-loved music can be invested with new and arguably more positive values

E．evidence for a fundamental difference between the music of the avant-garde and more traditional varieties