Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts

Saturday, November 19, 2011

REBEL Baroque with Rufus Müller: Luminous, Numinous

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Annunciation
G    ood art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize—the minute and absolutely random detail of the World—and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form... the belief that the work of art reveals something of which the natural world is an imperfect image or symbol, and can reveal it more luminously if not more truly than [inartistic; uninterpreted] Nature.”
  —  Richard Elfyn Jones, p. 29.
L ast night’s Friends of Chamber Music REBEL performance with Rufus Müller (tenor)—a program entitled ‘Out of the Eclipse: Music of Transformation and Revelation’—was really excellent.

T he program was a meditation on Baroque idioms in terms of the Baroque chronotope of formation, the dynamics of space-time/dark-light interactions. Such interactions test the boundaries between truth and fiction, creation and destruction, conformity and iconoclasm.
  • Handel – Overture to Agrippina in G minor, HWV 6
  • Vivaldi – Sinfonia al Santo Sepolcro in B minor, RV 169
  • Handel – ‘Total Eclipse’ and ‘Your Charms to Ruin’ from Samson, HWV 57
  • Purcell – Chacony in G minor, Z 730
  • Telemann – ‘Wie? Kehren sich bei Jesus Krippen’ from Cantata No. 2 in C minor, TWV 1:1625
  • Bach – Concerto in A major, BWV 1055
  • Bach – ‘Zerschmettert mich, ihr Felsen und ihr Hügel’ from St. John Passion, BWV 245
  • Vivaldi – Sonata à quartetto al Santo Sepolcro in E-flat major, RV 130
  • Telemann – ‘Bei heißer Tränen dickem Regen’ from Cantata No. 13 in B minor, TWV 1:862a
  • Blow – Chacony in G major
  • Telemann – ‘Was gleicht dem Adel wahrer Christen’ from Cantata in F major, TWV 1:1511
  • Purcell – Fantasia No. 13 in F major ‘upon one note’, Z 745
  • Handel – ‘Tune Your Harps’ from Esther, HWV 50a
  • Handel – ‘His Mighty Arm’ from Jephtha, HWV 70
Q uestion’ figurations in ‘Wie? Kehren’ and ‘Bei heißer Tränen’ and elsewhere [much like mm. 8-9 of the tenor recitative ‘Wie hast du dich, mein Gott’ (Bach’s Cantata No. 21) or mm. 7-8 of the tenor recitative ‘Der Heiland ist gekommen’ (Bach’s Cantata No. 61] involve exchanges between the tenor part and the ‘contratenor’ line (viola in TWV 1:1625; violin in TWV 1:862a; oboe in TWV 1:1511). The questions—and the accompaniments to the answers—unfold a contrasting melodic pattern and a contrasting rhythmic pattern—which is how the composer creates structural contrasts among the motivic statements and develops depth. Constructing contrapuntal links out of the countersubject is a powerful method—a canon use-case that evokes a ‘receptive’ posture in the audience.

L eading/leaning tones abound, as we heard in the pre-concert lecture—especially in the pieces in the ‘dark’ keys (more than 2 sharps or flats), but the effect is not a cadential one. Instead, the melodic line moves in a peripatetic way... voice-leading that captures our attention by suggesting a self who has not made up her/his mind, or who is still discovering or questioning Life and the Divine... interrupted cadences on a large, “meta” scale that transcends the scope of individual works. This program—juxtaposing these pieces, strung together with hardly a pause between them—generates ‘hypercadences’, cosmic-scale implied plagal cadences. (Am I stupid for only now figuring out that that is what we mean by an excellent program or a good playlist?)

H andel’s cantatas have the women characters speaking/singing in their own voices, revealing a lot about their inner mental state, while the men tend to be detached, obscured by form and narrative. Stereotypically circumspect male, voluble woman. Lucrezia, Armida, Clori, or Diana, for example, versus Samson or Abdolonymus or Ruspoli [Harris, p. 51; presents arguments for interpreting the encoding and restraint used to veil same-sex meanings, while presenting alternative interpretations as well]. Müller’s Bach, Telemann, and Handel were powerful, inspiring, luminous.

I ndeed, as we listened our thoughts were wingèd, full of luminous hopes and dreams. And the dramatic changes in lighting in the darkened Grace & Holy Trinity sanctuary where REBEL performed helped to construct and reinforce the narrative authority that the music revealed to us... Revelations: by definition, novel; like dreams, they are subjective, and not readily corroborated by ‘evidence’. They persuaded us listeners to all-out belief, rather than reasoned with us or prove a specific predicate. One of my favorite performances! Bravo!

O  , zerschmettert mich, ihr Felsen und ihr Hügel! Wirf, Himmel, deinen Strahl auf mich! [O, crush me, ye rocks and mountains! O, Heaven, cast your bright beam upon me!]”   —  Bach, aria from St. John Passion.
T his is a peculiar passage that occurs several places in the Bible, notably Revelation 6:16... I imagine that Karen Marie Marmer (REBEL violinist who curated this ‘Transformation & Revelation’ program) selected this aria for inclusion in part because of this (compare Isaiah 2:19). This is not some Romantic, intellectual, filial, reverent ‘Crush me, please!’ This is a servile, prostrate Fear-of-the-Almighty-consuming-fire-and-brimstone-before-whose-alienness-and-majesty-none-can-stand ‘Crush me now, then!’ wish of a prey animal for the predator to just finish it off. The voice grows silent, no protection or security for her/him. Because Christ is now unfurling the once and future scroll that had been closed with seven seals. William Cowper (1731-1800) was fascinated by this same passage and used it in his poem ‘Truth’. I wonder whether the pietistic, Lutheran Bach ever read Cowper.
P   ieces of music are like any other form of human construction: whatever the patterns of intention lying behind them [sacred or secular], they instantaneously acquire an element of autonomy whether we wish them to or not... music, or any art for that matter, can affect us in ways that we could not expect—not because they have some secret property that only posterity reveals, or purely because our climate of reception predisposes us to see or value something that was irrelevant before, but because there is an unpredictable and circulating relation between the piece and its reception—it is not a one-way process.”   —  John Butt, p. 27.
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Thursday, June 16, 2011

Ensemble 44: Vanity & Truth – Songs of Love by Women of the Italian Court

Ensemble 44
A   mor, non dormir più!
Su, su! svegliati omai?
Che mentre dormi tu,
dormon le gioie mie; vegliano i guai.

[Love, sleep no more—
Up, up! Will you never wake?
For while you sleep,
Sleep also my joys; awake are my troubles.]”
  — Barbara Strozzi (1619-77), ‘Amor dormiglione’, tr. Candace Magner.
E nsemble 44 (Hannah Davidson, viola da gamba; Teri Kowiak, soprano; Kathleen McDougald, harpsichord) presented a recital yesterday of art songs by Italian women composers of the Baroque period. The concert was one of the many ‘fringe’ events connected with the Boston Early Music Festival.
  • Strozzi – Amor dormiglione; La travagliata; Risolvetevi pensieri; Lagrime mie
  • Ortiz – Recercada settima (from ‘Tratado de glosas’)
  • Caccini – Se muove a giurar fede; La pastorella mia; Ch’amor sia nudo
T he texts for these songs are incisive, very passionate.
S   occorrete, luci avare,
un che muore di dolore,
con un vostro sguardo almeno!
Si può fare del guardare
carità che costi meno?.

[Help, you greedy eyes,
one who is dying of grief
with just one glance of yours!
Is there any act of charity
that costs less?]”
  — Barbara Strozzi (1619-77), ‘La travagliata’, tr. Candace Magner.
T he accessibility/universality of the sentiments expressed in these poems—timeless themes, really—plus the lyricism of the musical settings make these wonderful recital pieces, I think, for students and professionals alike.

T he acoustic intimacy of the small Steinert Hall in the Steinway Building in Boston made the experience for the several dozen attendees even more enjoyable. Such crystal clarity, for hearing the voice and the articulation of the viola da gamba and the harpsichord! The location was ideal—iconic, in fact, of how pieces like this are best presented.

E nsemble 44 has a new CD just released, entitled ‘Music of Ladies of the French and Italian Baroque’. I don’t see it yet on CDbaby website, but picked up a copy at BEMF recital… Beautiful! Here is a little clip from this disc:


    [50-sec clip, Ensemble 44, Barbara Strozzi, ‘Amor dormiglione’; 2011, 1.1MB MP3]



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Monday, March 8, 2010

International Women’s Day: Cecilia String Quartet and Kelly-Marie Murphy’s ‘Another Little Piece of My Heart’

Kelly-Marie Murphy
W    hat I most like about being a composer is… the cash compensation. No, heh, what I like most is that you can be anybody… you can be anything at all, anything you want—through the music. No constraints, total freedom. It’s tremendously liberating.”
  —  Kelly-Marie Murphy, introductory remarks, Ottawa Chamber Music Society concert, 07-MAR-2010.
T here is an apocalyptic ‘inclusiveness’ to this piece, a fellowship that all those affected by violence and loss (can) participate in.

O ur society is reluctant to speak about personal catastrophe—individual demolished lives and the struggles to pick up the pieces. Yet it is possible for music to speak about this—and persuasively, too.

T his piece, the second of six string quartets thus far composed by Murphy, was commissioned by CBC Radio for the International ‘Strings of the Future’ Festival and premiered at the Festival in 1999 by the Alcan String Quartet. The title derives from the old Ragovoy-Berns song of the same name, recorded by Janis Joplin in 1968.

S o far as I can tell, Murphy’s string quartet does not quote any melodies or harmonies from that song. But you can readily perceive parallels, in terms of the ethos and the gender-centric aspects of the string quartet and its popular-music namesake.

T he four-movement 15-min work begins with a slow, ethereal dialogue between the four performers, with unisons panning from left (Vn1) to right (Vc and Vla) and back again. The second movement is dominated by anxious staccato exchanges, mm ~ 120. The third movement is cinematic in its running, fleeing, desperate dash to safety. The fourth movement, mm ~ 56, begins with a solo viola statement—despondent, marooned—answered sympathetically by the cello and viola. Pianissimo high harmonics of the first violin part enter, adding a sense that the marooning will be permanent.

T he program notes by Craig Pedersen aver that, while composing this quartet was underway, Murphy was puzzled and impressed over how the heart, “a simple muscle, is taken as the seat of emotions.” Or, implicitly, puzzled and impressed over how much of our emotional state and its trajectory are muscular… physiologic… endocrinologic… beyond our capacity to predict or control.

M aybe the out-of-controlness and muscularity of fear and anger are easiest for us to comprehend.

B ut the other emotions are muscular/reflexive as well. What I mean is: if we manage somehow to cope with the injury and are not completely destroyed, then our recovery—and our preparedness to forgive and our feeling able to let go and move on—these feelings are surprising, emergent—astonishing even to the one who feels them. There is a genuine sense of discovery that is revealed in each of this piece’s movements—an emergence of ideas and emotions that maybe surprised even Murphy as she went about composing it.

T he calm that emerges by the end of the fourth movement is not one of wary acceptance or unstable endurance or any other precariousness. It is a satisfying conclusion, opening onto a spacious, open plain. The heart has miraculously survived its ordeal, with its dignity and integrity intact—surprising even its muscular self—still desiring [Life], still pumping. A new joint venture?—of both women and men?—working anew on constructive solutions together if they wish?—enabling each now to live fulfilling lives? In performance, the Cecilias fully inhabit the work, with gestures and insight that endow it with credibility, riveting the listeners’ interest. Murphy’s music tells vivid stories that empower and inspire men and women alike.

S cores and parts for Murphy’s compositions are available from the composer and from the Canadian Music Centre, 20 St. Joseph St., Toronto, ON, Canada M4Y 1J9 (info@musiccentre.ca).

K elly-Marie Murphy began her studies in composition at the University of Calgary and received her Ph.D. in composition from the University of Leeds. Murphy has subsequently held residencies at the Snowbird Institute for the Arts, Utah; Tapestry Music Theatre/Canadian Opera Company, Toronto; rESOund Festival of Contemporary Music, Edmonton; Strings of the Future International String Quartet Festival, Ottawa; Soundstreams/Encounters, Toronto; and at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Most recently, Murphy received Honorable Mention in the 2008 Barlow Prize competition.

M urphy has received numerous commissions—notably from the CBC and the Canada Council for the Arts—and has written for some of Canada’s leading performers and ensembles such as the Winnipeg, Toronto, and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras, Shauna Rolston, James Campbell, the Gryphon Trio, Borealis String Quartet, Rivka Golani, Judy Loman, and James Sommerville.

M y impressions from Sunday’s concert are that Kelly-Marie Murphy composes the kinds of music that she herself wants to listen to, pieces that are inspired by events or concepts that are deeply meaningful to her—ones that are emblematic of freedom, breaking free of constraints.

A nd, as evidenced by the energy bestowed on Murphy’s ‘Another Little Piece of My Heart’ (1999) by the members of Cecilia String Quartet in performance, Murphy’s compositions are also the kinds of music that thoughtful artists who champion new music want to play. Bravo! It was an exciting concert, one richly symbolic of this day, International Women’s Day.

T he Cecilias will next be performing Dvorak’s Piano Quintet in A major, Op.81 No.2, with Menahem Pressler at Pollack Hall at Schulich School of Music, McGill University, in Montréal on 17-MAR.

Cecilia String Quartet




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Saturday, May 9, 2009

Ain’t No ‘Girl’ Music: Physical Vehemence in Unsuk Chin’s ‘Akrostichon-Wortspiel’

T    hough some points of contact with the theatrical surrealism of Ligeti’s ‘Aventures/Nouvelles’ might be detected, ‘Akrostichon-Wortspiel’ gives much more emphasis to wit and exuberance than to menace. The third movement, ‘Die Spielregel—strawkcurtieZ’ (Zeitruckwarts - reversed time) is a dazzling scherzo with appropriate palindromic elements. But the most sheerly beautiful music is in the fifth movement, ‘Domifare S’, whose beguilingly repetitive descents are magically offset by the simple device of destabilising a bass line, which is in any case slightly out-of-tune. A similar process is applied to the initially stable, inflected Bs at the start of the last movement.”
  —  Arnold Whitall, Musical Times, 2000.
F  or the relatively apolitical Unsuk Chin it is not a question as to how frequently performed or widely noted a piece may become. Instead, what matters most is that it be performed empathetically and be understood, no matter how esoteric its content or intentions.

A  nalysis assumes that music is a metaphor for ‘literary’ meaning—analysis aims to clarify relationships, customarily using methods that closely parallel ‘literary’ theory.

A  nd the Unsuk Chin piece performed at Lincoln Center last night is nominally ‘literary’. The texts that informed/inspired Akrostichon-Wortspiel come from Michael Ende’s ‘The Endless Story’ and Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’. The selected texts have been redacted so as to juxtapose consonants and vowels to form novel, surprising patterns. In some places (e.g., Mvt. 3) the letters comprising the words are reversed, playing tricks with the things signified. It is a different sort of fantasy—entirely different from the ‘grotesqueries’ of Ligeti’s ‘Mysteries of the Macabre’, which was the first piece of the program.

Y  et, analyzing ‘Akrostichon’ in a ‘literary’ way seems wrong somehow. And why always draw parallels between Unsuk Chin and Ligeti or Lutosławski or others, anyway? To me, seems like a ‘stretch’. Not that resemblances are hard to find; they are not. But the ‘stretch’ has for me more to do with the motivations that seem to underlie the music and why it came to be written. For example, I enjoyed the intensely physical passages in ‘Akrostichon’, where modernist and classical idioms violently oppose each other.

K    ommt der öffentliche Druck, das ist sehr schwierig, die Qualität zu halten, die Öffentlichkeit will immer mehr, man versucht die Gunst der Stunde zu nutzen...
[The public pressure... it is very difficult to maintain real quality... the public wants more and more, of whatever is en vogue...].”
  —  Unsuk Chin, interview with Hanno Ehrler, Berlin, 2008.
Unsuk Chin, Akrostichon, Mvt. 1

    [50-sec clip, Ensemble intercontemporain, Unsuk Chin, ‘Akrostichon-Wortspiel’, Mvt. 1, 2.0MB MP3]

T  he aggressive passages in the Ligeti pieces on the program are less ‘open-ended’, less ‘exploratory’, more ‘flamboyant’ than Unsuk Chin’s. Maybe it’s a difference that arises because of their different cultures, different ages at the time these respective pieces were composed, different financial and political circumstances at the time, and so on. Surely it could have nothing to do with gender, could it?

W  ell, sure, it could! There is a physical vehemence in ‘Akrostichon’—a gendered performativity, along the lines that Judith Butler has written about. It is not a ‘tame’ cross-word. It is intensely physical, not cerebral. This piece, to me, is about beauty-in-vehemence—about women’s right to engage in aggression and vehement action, in violent performative action that involves risk. Inexplicable risk—much like my maternal grandmother who, in the 1920s, was physically boisterous; a honky-tonk piano player in Superior, Wisconsin, among other things; smoked big stogies to the ripe old age of 93… valor on the violent fields brings ‘glory’ to the valiant-violent participants; violence and aggression beget ‘story’ and meaning; risk is essential to creation and story-generation.

Yeree Suh
C  hin’s compositional method seems thoroughly ‘organic’, and more concerned with forging palpable ‘continuity’ than Ligeti may have been in the 1970s and later. Ligeti, by then, had nothing to ‘prove’. Unsuk Chin is, in this piece, showing her discoveries of what needs yet to be proven, physically. The development progresses relatively slowly: the listener has ample time to grasp the emerging textures, orient herself/himself, place things in context, become convinced of what is being ‘shown’ or ‘proven’. In all, this was an absolutely wonderful interpretation by Yeree Suh and members of Ensemble intercontemporain, under Susanna Mälkki’s shrewd-yet-intensely-physical direction. Bravo! (for the entire program, not just the one piece that spawned the comments above)

Susanna Mälkki, photo © N.Y. Times




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Thursday, June 5, 2008

Stalking: An Occupational Hazard for Chamber Musicians?

Pathé book
I  am not absolutely certain that I’m being stalked. But I’m pretty sure somebody was following me after our quartet’s last performance. What should I be doing about this? I don’t know who to talk to or call about this.”
  —  Anonymous.
This is outside the scope of things I have any personal expertise in. The links below may be helpful to you, though.

Current U.S. statistics on stalking are here. More than one million women and almost 400,000 men are stalked annually in the United States. Eight percent of women and two percent of men in the United States have been stalked in their lifetime. Although stalking is a gender-neutral crime, most victims (78 percent) are female and most perpetrators (87 percent) are male. In the course of managing a stalking episode, 28 percent of female stalking victims and 10 percent of male victims obtained a court protective order. Sixty-nine percent of female victims and 81 percent of male victims had the protection order violated. Eighty-one percent of women who were stalked by a current or former husband or cohabiting partner were also physically assaulted, and 31 percent were also sexually assaulted by that partner.

The average duration of stalking is 1.3 years. Most stalking, however, lasts about one month. Statistically, the median (31 days) is way lower than the mean (470 days in the U.S.). The statistical distribution has a long tail toward the right (longer durations). Two-thirds of stalkers pursue their victims at least once per week. Seventy-eight percent of stalkers use more than one means of pursuing, contacting or interfering with the victim. Have a look at this article by Mullen’s group in Australia for more information. (The stats are qualitatively similar in other countries, although duration distributions by stalking type, comparative prevalence by stalking type, and other details differ quantitatively from country to country, or even by region within each country.)

Stalking, Table.1 from Mullen et al., 1999
There are no statistics maintained on epidemiology of classical musicians as targets of stalking or as stalker perpetrators, although undergraduate musicians or conservatory students probably experience stalking rates comparable to other university students (about 20%). Possibly members of small chamber music ensembles might be more vulnerable on account of the small number of members in the group, and the absence of budget such as a large orchestra may have for security and other services.

Stalking behavior is not motivated by any one thing, and therefore no one strategy is effective protection against all the various types of stalking and types of stalkers. Effective strategies are ones that take into account the particular circumstances and identity, if these are known (that is, the history of any prior relationship with the pursuer; the chronology of events; the methods the pursuer is using).

R  isk assessment in stalking situations is currently limited by a lack of prospective studies of representative samples. Clinicians and the legal decision-makers do not, however, have the luxury of deferring action until such evidence emerges. They must, for the present, depend on integrating knowledge from stalking research, borrowing from the systematic studies of risk in other areas, and drawing on clinical experience... The longer stalking has lasted, the longer it is likely to persist. Nearly 50 percent of stalking situations amount to a short burst of intrusive behavior lasting only a few days and not extending beyond two weeks. This form of harassment is typically perpetrated by a stranger. In contrast, stalkers who persist for longer than two weeks usually continue for many months.”
  —  Paul Mullen et al., 2006.
Even if no physical violence has occurred, the anxiety and fear and implied threats are a form of harm. You do not know what the stalker might do next.

B  eing stalked can induce depression, anxiety, and chronic stress. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) describes the psychological sequelae of stalking... To our knowledge, however, the utility of [PTSD] treatments in the management of stalking victims has yet to receive empirical support.”
  —  Paul Mullen, Michele Pathé, and Rosemary Purcell, Stalkers, p. 221.
Don’t assume that there is just one pursuer. Some celebrities attract multiple pursuers, either serially or concurrently. Classical musicians may not have as great a likelihood of this as other celebrities, but the risk of it is surely not zero.

Do inform others about what is happening and what you are concerned about. Neighbors, co-workers, friends, and other ‘proxies’ who are not aware of the victim’s situation and who think they are being helpful can unwittingly disclose the information that a stalker wants to know.

If you have children who could be potential secondary targets for the pursuer, do have a calm, serious discussion with the children about the subject and instruct them how to be safe. In the U.S., you can contact VictimServices.org’s 7x24 hotline at 1-866-689-HELP (4357) for advice.

The Mullen-Pathé-Purcell book is especially good. It covers strategies to defend against and manage stalking behaviors; protecting personal information; declining and terminating contact; classifying different types of stalking and stalkers and risks associated with each; false stalking and delusions of being stalked; stalking-by-proxy, such as ordering/cancelling goods and services. Proxies utilized by stalkers may include your current or past employers, doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, hairdressers/cosmetologists, gyms/fitness clubs, banks, schools, churches/synagogues, and other intermediaries.

The book provides comprehensive discussion of morbid infatuations and other psychopathologies; incompetent suitors and intimacy seekers; acquaintances and friends. It counsels us to avoid any further discussions or correspondence with the pursuer—do not indulge them in argument or negotiation; do not deliver your termination message incrementally, in ‘let them down slowly’ instalments. The imperative is to be decisive, be firm.

The 12-page 2006 paper by Mullen and co-workers is excellent. The pdf is downloadable free here.

Recognizing possessiveness, hypersensitivity, dependence, jealousy, and mood swings in friends or business acquaintances can help to identify the potential for stalking and may be instrumental in your decision to terminate contact with the person, as a means of preventing stalking by someone who is known to you. According to Mullen and Pathé, ex-intimates are the stalking victims most likely to be threatened and assaulted. A history of domestic violence and/or jealousy before separation have been reported to increase the risk of violence in this group. Statistically speaking, and despite some famous examples to the contrary, stranger stalkers present the lowest risk of assaulting their victims.

Do be selective about disclosing personal details, including home address or phone numbers or email addresses. A post-office box provides security to prevent theft of confidential materials from a private letterbox at your home.

Do get an electric shredder for your home and be careful to shred all of your mail before placing it in the recycling or rubbish bins. Don’t take the same route to work or concert hall or other destinations; don’t do anything that’s readily monitored, in which your routine daily patterns can become known in a manner that may make it easier for a pursuer to harrass or attack you.

Do get a whistle. Get a small mace or pepper spray if legal in your area.

Do avail yourself of some musician-specific guidance for your use of MySpace, FaceBook, and other social networking sites, available on pages 206-208 of Frances Vincent’s book. Her blog is here.

Do consider hiring under-cover security services, such as Bo Dietl & Associates, for at least a few days or for covering your next several performances. They can discreetly monitor the performance venues and monitor your comings and goings, to ascertain whether there is or is not suspicious stalking-type activity. On a short-term or intermittent engagement basis such services are not tremendously expensive, and the reassurance that can come from their expert observations (esp. if they find no evidence of stalking) is huge. And, if in fact there is someone stalking you, they are expert in engaging law enforcement, the courts, forensic healthcare, and other appropriate authorities to deal with it in an expeditious, definitive way. With far more flexibility than the authorities can muster, an under-cover security service can devise counter-measures to stop the person, or to precipitate circumstances and evidence that will make the pursuer chargeable under the anti-stalking laws. Tremendously good value. Here are some more suggestions:

  • If you are arriving or departing from a performance in separate vehicles, make sure each person is accompanied/escorted between the performance venue and the transportation.
  • If you are not accompanied while en route, be sure and phone someone to let them know when you are departing and when you expect to arrive.
  • Leave your mobile phone turned on. If it has a GPS feature, leave that turned on as well.
  • If no one will be home when you get there, arrange to go to someone else’s house/apartment and stay with them, instead of going directly home to an empty house.
  • Let doctors, lawyers, hairdressers, dentists, etc., know the importance of maintaining your security. They may be able to arrange off-street parking so that you are less visible. Ask them to instruct the receptionist not to allow any information about you to be leaked out.
  • Check to be sure the library, gym, video shop, etc., will not give out information about you.
  • Sell your car and buy a different one if feasible, so that the stalker will not recognize you (for awhile).
  • Make sure you check the car before you get in, to make sure no one is in it.
  • If you are being followed drive directly to the nearest police station.
  • Don’t always drive the same way home. Don’t always take the same subway or bus home.
  • Put the car away immediately when you arrive home, out of sight if possible.
  • If you believe someone is stalking you, call the police.
  • Arrange for your mail to be redirected to a post office box. You will need to fill in a Mail Redirection form from the Post Office.
  • Call ‘fire’ instead of ‘rape’ or ‘help’.
  • Put 911 into your mobile phone directory so that it can be speed-dialed. Note that, when contacting 911 from a cellular phone, you must identify where you are (i.e., tell the dispatcher your exact address or location). From a hardwired landline phone, the address pops up on the dispatcher’s computer automatically. But with cell phones, the computer doesn’t know where the phone is. 911 calls placed from cell phones are routed to the closest 911 operations center based on cell tower site location that’s closest to where you are calling from. And although technology has made advances in getting cellular phone calls to the appropriate police/fire agency, the process is not 100-percent accurate. If you call 911 on a cell phone, it will be associated with the nearest mobile phone repeater cell antenna tower, which may be miles away from where you are. The software will not route to the correct 911 center closest to you but instead will route to the 911 center that is closest to that cell tower. Then, if you are not able to speak freely or if you hang up or an attacker damages your phone, the dispatcher will not have your address information available, and it may take many minutes to locate the approximate address where your cell phone transmissions came from to send you help. Help would be dispatched from a 911 center needlessly further away from you, possibly some miles beyond that cell tower, to a destination that is so vague as to offer minimal chance of locating and assisting you in a timely way. Uggh.
  • For the reasons noted in the previous point, put other emergency numbers into your mobile phone, for each of the cities where you perform.
Please be safe. Don’t ignore or discount what’s going on or pretend that it’s not happening or that it will go away. Contact one of the social services agencies in your area who have responsibility for sexual harassment prevention and management, or one of the national services whose URLs appear in the list below. Bo Dietl & Asociates provide a number of security and investigative services to performing musicians. Thank you for your CMT comments and questions!

Categorizing Stalking, Fig.1 from Mullen et al., 2006

Glass book


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Sunday, November 26, 2006

Gendered Musical Practices, Feminine Styles

Alison Balsom
CMT: My young niece has recently decided to begin studying trumpet. I told her about how exotic and novel this choice is, and gave her copies of the recent CDs of Amanda Pepping and Alison Balsom to give her a sense for what’s possible—how mastery of that instrument can be cool for a girl.

DSM: Coincidentally, I was recently reading a medical journal article about cerebrovascular events in musicians, such as cerebral embolism due to a patent foramen ovale and spinal epidural hematoma during trumpet playing. Do you imagine that the phenomenally high intrathoracic and subsequent intrapharyngeal pressure associated with brass playing contributes to why there are so few women brass players in orchestras and other classical music groups?

CMT: I can’t imagine it. There surely isn’t any relevant physical difference between the genders with regard to brass playing—with the possible exception of tuba and lung capacity. Women are able to generate and sustain pressures in Valsalva maneuvers that are as high as men. There isn’t any gender-based anatomical difference that would differentially affect brass playing compared to other wind instruments. Mouthpiece pressure, tooth displacements, and so on. The intrathoracic pressures in double-reed playing can be higher than those for brass instruments—but there’s no barrier for women oboists and bassoonists and so on. So surely the rarity of women brass players just reflects the impact of entrenched cultural notions about what’s “feminine”—the tide of what’s culturally permissible for womanly playing.

DSM: So this is really about whether or not there’s such a thing as feminine musical style or styles. Stereotypes—like the notion that women’s music production should be fluid, should appear as playful regardless of how much exertion is involved, should be hyperexpressive and emotional and dialogical, should be pliant and enabling of others, should be acrobatic or balletic, should have great dramatic moments, should exude a certain jouissance, should be atmospheric, should refer to life events and relationships, should have wide and demonstrative ties between thematic elements, and should overtly draw attention to and emphasize the differences in the movements of women from those of men. The whole bit.

CMT: Well, yes. And how do these things replicate societal norms for gendered musical practices and experience gendered musical meanings? How do these affect women’s expectations and the specific practices and products of their composing and performing?

DSM: As you know, historically, relatively few women have been composers. Equally few are brass players. Shall we think about these correlations? Musicologists and sociologists have only in the last twenty years or so begun to study the situation, and there’s still a lot of work to be done (see Bowers & Tick, 1986; Citron, 1993; Marshall, 1993; Cook & Tsou, 1994; Halstead, 1997; Green, 1994, 1997).

CMT: Regarding primary music education, the majority of gender-related research has been on instrument choice (Bruce & Kemp, 1993; Green, 1997), with relatively little research so far on gender and music in relation to children’s compositions (Green, 1994, 1997; Charles, 2001). The children in Charles’ research carried on ideological assumptions that’re passed down through history about what girls/women and boys/men ought and ought not to do and what they’re like as musicians. She found that children have gendered expectations in relation to music and have strong ideas about the differences between girls’ and boys’ musical practices, even at an early age. She calls these ‘ideologies of gendered musical practices’. Charles found that in general children acted out gender roles in relation to compositional practices. But the most interesting findings were contradictions between the ways that children talked about things (their discourse) and how they operated in practice—contradictions they didn’t seem to notice themselves. And that is, in itself, a chink in the tyrannical cultural armor.

DSM: The teachers in Charles’ study did display many entrenched, gendered assumptions about boys’ and girls’ musical practices and products. And so there’s a summary in Charles’ paper—about girls’/women’s musical subculture—a concept of ‘female musical subculture’.

CMT: About 10 years ago, Lucy Green also worked out a model of gendered musical meaning and experience. Green argues that we must keep open some level of pure musical meaning that’s free from symbolic content. When heard, it’s affected by the values that exist outside the musical notes themselves. In relation to her model, Green says that ‘musical composition requires knowledge of the technology of voices, instruments or other sound sources, and this knowledge implies masculine delineation of mind which conflicts with patriarchal constructions of femininity’. She describes the concept as ‘twofold’ because it’s not only about the cognitive control over knowledge and technique but also because history—which is itself patriarchal—results in an assumption that the authorship behind a piece of music is male. The delineation of masculinity in the construction of musical meaning is associated with the public sphere—the mind, technology and non-conformity—whereas the delineation of femininity is associated with the private sphere—the body, emotions and conformity. It’s an excellent encapsulation of the preconceptions that girls and women in music face.

DSM: Yes, but boys are just as constrained and inscribed by cultural gender norms. Yes, they appear to have a more positive relationship to technology than did most girls, and this was in Charles’ study reinforced by boys’ choice of abstract compositional titles (‘Loud and Soft’; ‘Heavy and Light’; ‘Wooden and Metal’; and so on; see also Armstrong, 2001). But that also means that boys are culturally enjoined against being free to choose other things—they are not at liberty to choose less technically-bound, abstract, objectified, power-conscious forms. Charles finds that more girls chose compositional titles associated with emotion and nature rather than objectivity (‘Happy and Sad’; ‘Rain and Sunshine’). The findings strongly suggest that girls in their discourse and to some extent in their practice were acting as members of a female musical subculture. No surprise there. Discouraging but not surprising.

CMT: So girls reproduced traditional gendered musical practices and carried out ‘expected’ or ‘culturally constructed and sanctioned’ roles connected with the conventional private sphere that is reserved to them. The term ‘subculture’ rather than ‘culture’ is used because women’s experiences have been marginalized by male culture, and this leads to a location where commonalities emerge. Marginalization in turn discourages them, to a greater degree anyhow than boys. The concept of female musical subculture is used to explain women’s musical practice within the context of patriarchy and does not imply anything that is essentially female. It acknowledges the category of ‘woman’ as a social construction (see Nash, 1994) and is about women perpetuating traditional musical practices for social/historical reasons.

DSM: This suggestion of feminine perseverance and conformity bugs me. By ‘being girls’, by describing their music as soft and slow and having a preference for soft and slow music, they are ‘against themselves’—or so Charles interprets it. Thank goodness some music education programs are smashing these barriers.

CMT: In light of Citron’s recent writing, it could be said that the girls experience a sense of Other and ‘an anxiety of authorship’. Their sense of Other is another dimension to the concept of female musical subculture. McClary locates ‘semiotic codes’ in sonata form and argues that music participates ‘actively in the social organization of sexuality’ (1991, p. 9). Similarly, Citron identifies ‘codes of gendered representation’ in sonata form and maintains that the codes ‘tell us a lot about the representation of women and men in society, how ideologies affected how music itself was conceptualized and described, and how music had close ties with ideals and processes in society’ (1993, p. 137).

DSM: So children’s and teachers’ discourse on the musical practices of boys and girls in the primary classroom reflect views about gendered musical behavior that have been socially and historically constructed within the larger society. Microcosmic meaning drawing from macrocosmic meaning concerns larger totalities of history and humanity (where past and present connect) that are unifying patterns of beliefs. In the case of this study, in their discourse children defined their being and consciousness in relation to the social world, to others and to the system of beliefs and values that is already in existence about gender and gender and musical practice. This was then reinforced by teachers’ views about boys’ and girls’ composition.

Alison Balsom
CMT: Chamber music becomes just one more discursive field within which meanings are produced about social relations . . . the discourses will include and be drawn from those current in broader society.

DSM: Yes. Kids quickly learn the discourse of how to represent gendered musical practice that conforms to adult expectations—and this fits in with the wider social organization of music. But the taboos on gendered musical behavior are not so strong at younger ages. The discourse on musical practice has more power over their thinking than over the nature of the music they produce. Ideology quickly dominates their conscious thinking and affects their interpretation of what’s actually happening in their musical training. Would you contend that the social system of gender relations is both a cause and an effect?

CMT: Although imposed externally by outside social forces, it does arise out of self-imposed boundaries. But I think the evidence indicates that in their musical practice kids don’t consistently reproduce ideologies. Thank goodness! My niece, the iconoclast, and her supportive music teacher and parents. All things are in a continuous process of change and humanity is always, whenever it participates in social relationships, open to continual socialization. It’s only a matter of time, once kids are in secondary school, before the strength of ideology becomes greater and contradictions between musical discourse and practice decrease. Iconoclasm gets more difficult between age 14 and 20, say.

DSM: Another icon/iconoclast to tell your niece about is Ellen Zwilich. Ellen is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Music (the first woman ever to receive this coveted award), the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, the Ernst von Dohnányi Citation, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, 4 Grammy nominations, and, among other distinctions, she’s been elected to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1995, she was named to the first Composer’s Chair in the history of Carnegie Hall, and she was designated Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 1999. Her chamber works have been commissioned by the Boston Musica Viva, the Abe Fortas Memorial Fund of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 92nd Street Y and San Francisco Performances (Piano Trio), Chamber Music Northwest (Clarinet Quintet), the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (Double Quartet), and Carnegie Hall (String Quartet No. 2). Ellen was named to the Carnegie Hall Richard and Barbara Debs Composers’ Chair in 1995, the first such position in the Hall’s history. And, in addition to Alison Balsom and Amanda Pepping, you might hook your niece up with Marie Speziale or Susan Slaughter, another couple of excellent women brass artists.


Ellen Taaffe Zwilich


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