Towards a twenty-first century feminist politics of music

Abstract

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music. By Sally Macarthur. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 210 pp. Driven by author's desire to reinvigorate feminist musicology using Deleuzian philosophical tools, this book promotes productive power of thought, or what Deleuze terms the virtual. Sally Macarthur is more interested in what women's music might become than in what it currently is, and she strives throughout to consider future open and unbounded by standards and norms of present. The current volume considers complex networks of composition, performance, consumption, academic discourse, and pedagogy that compose field of music. Though some readers may initially be perturbed to find that Macarthur leaves definition of music ambiguous, it gradually becomes clear that her decision to do so is aligned with her politicized philosophy. A definition of music would restrict possibilities of what it could become, enclosing it in repetitive patterns of past and hindering our ability to think in in-between spaces of old and new (4). Macarthur's Deleuzian theoretical model introduces productive questions that undercut hierarchical and propel explorations of music into unknown. Macarthur's multifaceted approach to music is particularly relevant to musicologists and composers working within academic institution, but it is also more generally of interest to feminists writing and teaching in humanities. Each of Macarthur's six chapters accesses themes of music and feminist musicology in different ways. Specifically, in first four chapters, she considers usefulness of empirical research in feminist scholarship, concepts of author and work implemented in musicological writing, trends in discourse and economic power structures of music marketing, and history of feminisms in musicology. In remaining two chapters, Macarthur exemplifies usefulness of Deleuzian questions and concepts developed in preceding pages, taking pieces by Sofia Gubaidulina, Elena Kats-Chernin, and Anne Boyd case studies. She also considers research undertaken by two students: Katharine Nelligan, a composer interested in electronic dance music, and Danielle Bentley, a PhD student who investigates issues surrounding music's tendency to alienate audiences. Throughout these discussions, Macarthur strives to think outside discourses she perceives hindering current musicological endeavors, and she remains overtly critical of positivism, narrative knowledge, totalizing dualities, and neoromantic conception of author. While validating her focus on future--on imminence rather than transcendence--Macarthur attempts to avoid repetitive master narratives that she views governing Western musical and in doing so challenges readers to rethink how they write about and teach music. As a vehemently political and functional book, Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music contributes to a growing body of Deleuzian writing on music and introduces feminists to a variety of tools that can help us productively engage continual becoming of music. (1) In her review of statistical data originally presented in empirical studies on state of women in music, Macarthur surmises that these positivist efforts ultimately prove what is already self-evident: Women's music barely signifies on concert platforms (30). (2) Although these studies advocate expansion of women's role in musical production by providing concise numerical information and using statistics as tools of persuasion to activate change (27), she concludes that this established research model ultimately produces thinking which forecloses thought (33). Rather than using quantitative research to illustrate negative difference between polarized categories (women/men, minority/majority, inferior/superior), Macarthur asks us to focus on ways that women's music opens up a transformative potential capable of destabilizing dominant mode of musical production. …