Gender, Age and Musical Creativity ed. by Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gender, Age and Musical Creativity ed. by Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton Alexandra M. Apolloni (bio) Gender, Age and Musical Creativity. Edited by Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015. In 1999, Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (ed. Kathleen Woodward) made a compelling case that feminist scholars and activists must consider the roles that age—and ageism—play in shaping gender identities.7 Since the publication of Figuring Age, feminist scholars have interrogated the nexus of gender and age. Some have explored how representations of aging shape and reflect culturally constructed gender norms (see Sally Chivers’s The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema), while others (including Joanna Frueh in Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love) theorize how age operates both as a social construct and as an embodied process. As this work reveals, aging is at once physical and social. It is a process of change that happens to bodies over time, but how we understand and name those physical changes is shaped by context and discourse: what counts as youthful in one context can read as old in another. The authors of Gender, Age and Musical Creativity make a valuable contribution to this body of scholarship by asking how the cultural construction of age influences music-making. Gender, Age and Musical Creativity interrogates how age, power, and musical prestige are connected. It is thus part of a tradition of feminist scholarship that challenges how age is mobilized in the interests of power and authority. With age, the adage goes, comes wisdom—but that wisdom and authority only extend to a privileged few, and age, as Woodward and others have argued, can also bring social invisibility. As Susan Sontag observes, aging for some women is a humiliating process of “gradual sexual disqualification” that begins as soon as they leave [End Page 122] early youth.8 Others, including E. Ann Kaplan, argue that the very idea that aging reduces a woman’s sexual and social power assumes that there is power to be lost—and that this framework renders those who have never easily fit hegemonic standards of beauty (nonwhite, disabled people, non-gender-conforming people) all the more invisible.9 In music scholarship, work that explores connections among age, gender, and power is flourishing. This recent work expands and departs from the tradition of studies that examine age in the context of individual composers’ so-called late styles and instead takes a critical standpoint to consider how age shapes multiple experiences of music-making, including performance and listening. Andy Bennett’s Music, Style and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully examines how rock fans’ relationships with music cultures change over time; while Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style, and Identity, edited by Bennett and Paul Hodkinson, explores how aging intersects with gender, class, sexuality, and cultural identity in a range of different popular music fan communities. Ros Jennings and Abigail Gardner’s edited volume Rock On: Women, Ageing, and Popular Music gathers a variety of essays that consider how women performers negotiate aging in the public eye. Some of the scholarship on music and disability also makes productive connections to age. For instance, in Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music, Joseph Straus offers a critical take on the concept of late style and connects it to the assumption that both aging and disability are nonnormative bodily states. And lest we forget that age doesn’t just affect those considered old, work by scholars including Kyra Gaunt, Laurie Stras, Gayle Wald, Jacqueline Warwick, and others explores musical performances and constructions of girlhood, youth, and childhood.10 Gender, Age and Musical Creativity is a welcome addition to this growing body of scholarship. The essays, proceedings from a 2012 conference at the University of Huddersfield, are a rich and varied collection of case studies about age, generational change, the passage of time, and how individuals and communities negotiate age and change. Topics range from early modern performances of masculine authority to representations of feminine youth in musicals. Some essays explore how individuals perform age, how communities and groups change over time, and how generations define themselves around particular musical practices, while others deal with time and nostalgia. The...