Women Musicians Research Articles

THE IMZAD AND TUAREG MUSIC: GENDER DEBATES VERSUS BELIEFS, VALUES AND PROMOTIONS

This paper discusses the Tuareg people of the Central Sahara, outlining salient issues relating to the imzad (a Targai musical instrument) and gender. It examines the various ways in which gender and gendered meanings are derived in musical instruments. Drawing upon Veronica Doubleday’s theory on gendered meanings constructed within relationships between humans and musical instruments, the paper examines the dual instrumental monopolies of the Targai (Tuareg women musicians) and the Targui (Tuareg men musicians) living in the region of Mali, Niger and Algeria. It argues that gendered monopolies and dominance in music and musical instruments is not a necessary debate; beliefs, value systems and hereditary among other factors, may necessitate the observed male-female monopolies in music performances (voice or instrument). Our cultural beliefs, values and safeguarding practices are of more importance when rightly channelled by our indigenous music, they can attract investors and promotions on the international scale. The paper contributes to the vast ethnomusicological literature on music and gender.

Review: Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, by Daphne A. Brooks

Review: <i>Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound</i>, by Daphne A. Brooks

Violeta Parra: musical and political legacy of a cantora

ABSTRACT This article discusses Violeta Parra’s work as a woman musician analysing how she contributed to challenging long-standing colonial paradigms in Chilean (and Latin American) music. Through a review of the multifaceted concept of cantora, or female singer of the people, as well as the analysis of four cueca songs, this study offers insights on how Parra negotiated the terms of the Chilean urban folkloric scene of her time. Her trajectory as a folklorist allowed her to vindicate an otherwise disparaged popular culture, and as cantautora, or singer-songwriter, she redefined the gender roles of her time becoming a musical and political referent for her peers, thus offering renovated perspectives on both female musicianship and national identity.

Facing the music: Stereotyping of and by women in US music journalism

This study updates and expands the application of stereotyping and professional socialization to music journalism in a way that is generalizable to the United States music journalism industry, and seeks to understand the role women journalists play in counteracting or perpetuating stereotyping of women musicians. A content analysis of 936 articles finds significant stereotyping of women musicians in major US music publications during 2016. The stories, randomly sampled from eight top US publications, were predominantly about men artists and by men authors, and were more likely to discuss women musicians’ appearance and relationships, and used more sexualized and emotional language. Improvement was found in that articles were no more likely to discuss women musicians’ age and youth than men’s. Women journalists were just as likely to stereotype women musicians as men journalists were, and more so in one category. We expand stereotyping by incorporating insights from professional socialization and applying it to the ‘soft news’ yet male-dominated field of music journalism, adding to our knowledge of hard news fields such as politics, business and sports. It also updates the few studies of music journalism from decades ago, showing little progress in the blatant stereotyping of women musicians

Review: The Blues Comes to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book, by Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick

Review: <i>The Blues Comes to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book</i>, by Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick

About the Contributors

About the Contributors

Las Sonatas para piano de Beethoven a través de los trabajos de edición de Agnes Zimmermann

Las Sonatas para piano son, en su conjunto, una de las obras de Ludwig van Beethoven más interpretadas a lo largo de la historia, tanto en público como en el ámbito escolar, pero también una de las que han disfrutado de un elevado número de ediciones a cargo de pianistas y estudiosos de diferentes países. De acuerdo con esta circunstancia, en este trabajo presentamos la edición realizada por la pianista y compositora británica Agnes Zimmermann (1847-1925), una de las mujeres músicas más célebres de su época que, además, mantuvo un estrecho contacto con el legado beethoveniano a lo largo de su carrera. En concreto, a través de fuentes primarias y secundarias, proponemos un acercamiento a la figura de esta destacada fémina y un estudio sobre las particularidades de su edición de las Sonatas para piano de Beethoven, publicada por la editorial Novello, Ewer &amp; Co. en 1873 y cuya reimpresión, revisada, vio la luz en el año 1880.

Lesbian fandom remakes the boy band

Lesbians and other queer women are typically absent from theorizations of boy band fandom even though boy bands often have sizable lesbian fan bases. Lesbian fandom of the British–Irish boy band One Direction congregated primarily on Tumblr; this fandom constituted a queer community space that exposed the boy band as a site of lesbian erotic and creative energy. One manifestation of lesbian One Direction fandom was the drag king performance group known as Every Direction, which maintained an active Tumblr page in addition to performing live drag king renditions of popular One Direction songs. Interviews with the group's members, along with a content analysis of lesbian Tumblr fandom of One Direction, illuminate the significant creative output of this understudied fan community. This phenomenon is placed into conversation with the lesbian feminist–affiliated Women's Music Movement of the 1970s, which had a lasting impact on popular conceptions of lesbian musical preferences in the United States. I argue that lesbian One Direction fandom constitutes a contemporary queer political intervention that reworks lesbian feminist political tactics and priorities. This data acts as a record of the lesbian One Direction fan community that congregated on Tumblr during the band's heyday, as well as an intervention in scholarly theorizations of lesbian fans and fan practices.

Women, migrations and rock without borders1

Abstract: This article addresses a musician’s life history – Brazilian born woman musician, Flávia Couri – and, particularly, her emigration experience, in how it relates music, to punk’s globalization, to local and trans-local musical scenes. We recognize the importance of these dynamics by analysing an interview with the musician, focusing on her discourse about her own journey and circumstances of emigration. The discussion about emigration touches on the following points: the causes and the rationales of emigration; the life in the new location, challenges, successes and identity reconstruction of the emigrant; and a possible return to the ‘tribe’ at the country of origin. The line of discourse analysis used is attentive to the actual context of the discourse, meaning its conditions of production and reception. Through this analysis, we were able to follow, explain and understand this woman’s migrant trajectory and how that path was always accompanied by a soundtrack of which she was the creator and audience, attempting to show the possibilities that music offers for identity construction and reconstruction, as well as providing reasons and contexts for migration.

Gender-differences in conservatoire music practice maladjustment. Can contextual professional goals and context-derived psychological needs satisfaction account for amotivation variations?

In music education, women are present in great numbers. In professional settings, however, women musicians are not as predominant. With some exceptions, such as Scandinavian countries, women still pursue gender equality in professional music practice. To inquire about the causes of this, we considered if gender-differences in amotivation in conservatoire instrument practice could be associated with aspects of learning environment. Self-determination theory (SDT) posits that learning environments may influence motivation, by satisfying or thwarting students’ psychological needs and by selectively endorsing specific extrinsic goals. Thus, we analysed if–women and men–amotivation variations could be explained by differences in behavioural regulations and satisfaction of their psychological needs for competence and autonomy. Participants (67 women and 74 men, 18–47 years old) completed validated scales for amotivation, behavioural regulations, and needs satisfaction. Students exhibited high intrinsic and introjected regulations, and high autonomy and competence needs satisfaction. Students’ identified regulation levels were modest, and external regulation and amotivation levels were low. Women students’ perceived competence was lower, and their amotivation was higher than men’s. Amotivation variations were explained positively by identified regulation and negatively by context-derived satisfaction of the psychological needs for competence (and autonomy, only among women). Results suggest that internalization of extrinsic goals can pose difficulties and that psychological needs satisfaction may counteract amotivation (autonomy being potentially more important for women musicians).

Women Rock! How A North-East Music Blogger Redefines Women’s Role in Rock Music: A Critical Discourse Analysis

ABSTRACTThe blog North East Women in Music (NEWM) was founded in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2017 and featured emerging women musicians. Employing critical discourse analysis, I analyzed all fifteen articles on the blog. My study suggests that NEWM took important steps in challenging stereotypes about women musicians in the North-East underground music scene by reclaiming femininity and redefining gender constructions. Using a modest sample, this article represents a preliminary study whose conclusions suggest the need for further investigation. The findings have implications for future research on how feminist media producers challenge depictions of women musicians in British rock music discourse.

Punk Stories: Four Memoirs of Rebel Women in Music

Punk Stories: Four Memoirs of Rebel Women in Music Kristine Somerville (bio) Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys by Viv Albertine. Thomas Dunne Books, 2014, 421 pp., $27.99 (hardcover). Reckless: My Life as a Pretender by Chrissie Hynde. Anchor Books, 2015, 312 pp., $16.95 (paper). Girl in a Band: A Memoir by Kim Gordon. Dey Street Books, 2015, 273 pp., $16.99 (paper). I Live Inside: Memoirs of a Babe in Toyland by Michelle Leon. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016, 215 pp., $19.95 (hardcover). When rocker and poet Patti Smith was a teenager, she loved paging through used copies of Vogue, eager for glimpses of the world beyond her working-class home and family in south Jersey. A black-and-white photo of wispy, white-haired Edie Sedgwick, one of the magazine’s “Youthquakers of 1965,” doing an arabesque on the back of a leather rhinoceros captured Smith’s imagination. She wanted to be that girl— self-possessed and connected to the moment. Smith moved to New York in 1969; she chronicles her years as an artist struggling to find a place in the downtown avant-garde scene in her 2010 National Book Award– winning memoir, Just Kids. Smith frequented some of Sedgwick’s old haunts, even living at the Chelsea Hotel, and in 1975 achieved critical acclaim with Horses, her debut album, which was a revolutionary marriage of music and poetry. The cover photography by Robert Mapplethorpe captures Smith’s androgynous beauty. Her jaggedly chopped hair, white button-down shirt, and black jeans and jacket became an early template for punk-rock fashion. Smith’s iconic look and uncompromising [End Page 179] art inspired young women who also rejected being “good girls” for the rigors and rewards of making music on their own terms. Just Kids also whetted readers’ appetites for stories of New York and London during the 1970s punk revolution and the 1980s postpunk aftermath, as told by women musicians who were at the center of the action. ________ Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys Viv Albertine. Thomas Dunne Books, 2014, 421 pp., $27.99 (hardcover). The title of Viv Albertine’s 2014 memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, announces the primary preoccupations of her female punk-rock cohort. These interests, with varying degrees of alcohol and drug use, figure prominently in the stories of women in the scene. The women assume all the rock-star privileges of men—who can blame them?—before becoming wives and mothers in their later years. Albertine, the lead guitarist and songwriter for the seminal band the Slits, begins her story with the in-your-face pronouncement that she “can’t be bothered” to masturbate. A pretty girl, when her hormones kicked in at age thirteen, she started messing around with bad boys and never stopped. Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1954, she grew up in North London. The family struggled financially, and, as Albertine put it, “I lived in a dump.” Listening to the Beatles on her record player provided escape and drowned out her parents’ fighting. In a moment of vulnerability, she told her father, “I want to be a pop singer when I grow up,” to which he replied, “You’re not chic enough.” There were few female role models: “It was inconceivable that a girl could cross over into male territory and be in a band,” Albertine writes. Instead she attended art school, a rite of passage for many punk and pop musicians. While a barmaid at Dingwalls in Camden Market, Albertine fell in love with the spirited chaos of the punk bands that played there. She met Kokomo drummer Jody Linscott, who told her that musical skill was not a requirement for membership; Jody had joined a band before she could play. Patti Smith’s Horses was another revelation: “Up until now, girls had been so controlled [End Page 180] and restrained. Patti Smith [was] abandon.” And Johnny Rotten, whose voice was neither trained nor tuneful, had an absolute sense of self-possession on stage that she admired. What Albertine thought were barriers—class, accent, lack of musical education—Rotten turned into virtues...

Oaxacan Indigenous Women Musicians' Collective Songwriting Process on the Title Track of Mujeres

Oaxacan Indigenous Women Musicians' Collective Songwriting Process on the Title Track of Mujeres Xóchitl C. Chávez (bio) Introduction This interview features Maestra Leticia Gallardo Martínez and Diana Gabriela Gallardo Martínez of the all-female wind band, Banda Femenil Regional "Mujeres del Viento Florido,"1 of Santa Maria Tlahuitoltepec, Oaxaca (Sierra Mixe), Mexico. The dialogue you are about to read reflects the two-year process in producing the album—and its collectively written title track—Mujeres. The interview is led by Dr. Xóchitl C. Chávez, assistant professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Riverside. This interview weaves together stories from the First Workshop of Indigenous Women Musicians of 2018, including tales of transborder and local networks, the challenges Indigenous women face in the recording industry, intergenerational collaboration, and how the global pandemic has brought further innovation with technology and social media. The interview was conducted on May 23, 2020. Xóchitl C. Chávez: What was the inspiration for the song, "Mujeres"? Leticia Gallardo Martínez: "Mujeres" was a collectively written song that arose out of the intention to host the First Indigenous Oaxacan Women gathering with other women musicians from different locations in Oaxaca and California. This idea was dreamt up from an informal dinner we had in 2015 in Los Angeles with Maestra Jessica Hernández, Maestra Yulissa Maqueos, and Dr. Xóchitl Chávez—where we promised one another that we would collaborate on something together. The opportunity presented itself in 2018, and we were able to coincide with the travel plans of Maestra Jessica Hernández and Professor Xóchitl. We coordinated a small musical "Encuentro" workshop with 46 people, which has been named "The First Workshop of Indigenous Women Musicians." Along with Dr. Xóchitl Chávez, Maestra Jessica Hernández, and Maestra Mercedes Payan Ramírez, we designed activities and workshops on topics such as conducting, identity discussion, ethnographic interview and documentary techniques, how to seek out colleges in Mexico, and collectively composing songs. A particularly supportive dynamic was [End Page 121] created after one of the sessions where fellow women musicians shared very strong experiences about their identities as women from indigenous communities. Given the stories that were being shared, we gave words of encouragement to one another, and acknowledged that each one of us had lived a hard process to incorporate into the community music bands both in Santa Maria Tlahuitoltepec and communities like Los Angeles. We acknowledged the processes and the forms in which it had been difficult to join and for us to create music with a group of people who sometimes weren't so open, or sometimes didn't agree with this idea that women could make music. After the discussion on identity, we brainstormed themes with Maestras Jessica Hernández and Professor Xóchitl, and they wrote ideas on the board as they heard from our colleagues. After a few of us saw how they were organizing the ideas, other fellow women musicians started contributing their experiences, and collectively we talked and began to draft verses and stanzas. Collectively we added and cut out, and we did an exercise of revising to see if the idea was good or if it was missing something. Then, we recognized when we finished and agreed on the first draft. Next, we decided to create music to accompany the lyrics we wrote. We took some instruments and we started to see what type of rhythm would fit, what type of music it could be. As this was happening, I could feel a melody that came to me through the lyrics as they were written. After speaking out the lyrics again, this melody came to me, and I worked on it a little more with Maestra Nataly Luis Pérez (who plays the trumpet), trying to adapt this melody from what we were weaving, and then we found the melody. That very day we created the melody for the song, "Mujeres." Once I saw our colleagues play the music and sing collectively during one of our rehearsals, we decided to record the melody there, in the open space of the school. That is where the idea of...

The çengî: Descriptions of Professional Female Performers in French and Italian Accounts of Travel to the Middle East, 1550–1650

The çengî:Descriptions of Professional Female Performers in French and Italian Accounts of Travel to the Middle East, 1550–1650 Carla Zecher Aunique female musico-theatrical practice emerged in Ottoman society of the sixteenth century, which would fall out of favor in the late seventeenth century but endure in a modified form well into the modern era. At its origin was a musical instrument, a type of harp called the çeng, which lent its name to troupes of professional women musicians and dancers, the çengî, whose captivating performances caught the attention of European visitors to the Middle East. In lands under Ottoman control, because of the Islamic mandate that assigned women and men to separate spheres of devotional and social activity, women's skilled music-making took place in strictly circumscribed arenas. Although the authors of travel accounts do not mention it, the women of elite families doubtless made music in their residences, in the privacy of their own quarters. In the Seraglio, the highest class of concubines—the gedikiler or "privileged ones," chosen for their beauty and talent—performed for the Sultans, but this was also in private.1 The çengî, in contrast, were visible to outsiders and therefore we find them described in travel accounts penned by European diplomats, secretaries, and men of science. These companies, composed of non-Muslim women, were active in cities such as Constantinople and Cairo and remunerated for their music-making and dancing. Because the word çeng is similar to the Turkish word for gypsy, çingene, some visitors thought these women were gypsies. It is very unlikely though that the word for gypsy somehow derived from the name of the harp. It is possible that the performers' ethnicity was sometimes Roma, but probably they were Greek, Armenian or Jewish.2 There existed male counterparts to these female troupes, dancing boys, also sometimes called çengî but more often referred to as köçek. We know from the writings of the Ottoman traveler and musician Evliyâ Çelebi that by the later seventeenth century there were a dozen companies (kols) of boy dancers and mimes active in Constantinople, each numbering anywhere from 100 to several thousand. The boys hired out in small groups to perform what were apparently set choreographies, and they were a major attraction in the wine taverns of Galata, the city's European quarter and a famed pleasure spot.3 Gilles Fermanel, [End Page 148] a conseiller in the parlement of Normandy who visited Constantinople in the early 1630s, mentions these "cabarets" as being places where one could go to see entertainments in large rooms: "comedies, farces, et autres galanteries semblables." He reports that upon the occasion of the wedding of one of the Sultan's sisters, the cabarets remained open all night.4 Unlike the boys, the dancing women do not seem to have performed in taverns and coffee houses; rather, they were engaged for private gatherings. However, their companies mirrored the groups of dancing boys in that they too were gender specific and engaged in theatrical forms of gender bending. The female çengî drew the attention of European travelers to the Levant from at least as early as the first permanent French embassy to the Porte in the mid-1530s. The çeng The signature instrument of the female dancers, the çeng, was a small, silk-strung square harp, held in the lap with the pegboard against the left knee.5 A medieval Iranian instrument, it had predecessors in antiquity and saw its heyday in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in the Levant and Central Asia, where both women and men played it. Individual Persian and Turkish male masters of the instrument received the formal title of Çengî. In the seventeenth century there were several prominent Çengî in Constantinople, musicians of local origin—a sign that by then the Ottomans had made the instrument their own (Feldman, Music 154). Like many musical instruments of the early modern period, the çeng was revived in the late twentieth century, albeit with newer designs and tuning mechanisms, so we now can get a sense of what early modern travelers heard (a sound clip is available on the Turkish Music Portal). In early Iranian...

Migrant Female Musicians and their Fight for Social Rights

The aim of this essay is to examine the social action of women composers, often obliged to migrate, for long or short periods, in search of greater freedom and affirmation of their musical talent. The history of yesterday and today features numerous women musicians, composers and performers, active in the production of music, in social and political life, who often had and have to travel and migrate to assert themselves. Going on tour has always been part of the life of the artist – but for women it was not easy to travel freely and at will, on their own besides. Until the nineteenth century, such a thing was almost always strictly forbidden. Sometimes women composers and performers left the countries in which they resided for personal reasons, driven not only by the “compulsion” to change country because in their own it was impossible to choose the pathway they wished to follow.

Women Musicians of Uzbekistan: From Courtyard to Conservatory by Tanya Merchant

Women Musicians of Uzbekistan: From Courtyard to Conservatory by Tanya Merchant

Female Composers, Conductors, Performers: Musiciennes of Interwar France, 1919–1939 by Laura Hamer

Reviewed by: Female Composers, Conductors, Performers: Musiciennes of Interwar France, 1919–1939 by Laura Hamer James P. Gilroy Hamer, Laura. Female Composers, Conductors, Performers: Musiciennes of Interwar France, 1919–1939. Routledge, 2018. ISBN 978-1-138-21203-9. Pp. 218. Hamer's book explores the fortunes of French women musicians in France between the two World Wars. She includes composers and conductors, as well as instrumental soloists on the piano, violin, and harp. Among the musiciennes of whom she writes, the two with the greatest name recognition today are teacher and conductor Nadia Boulanger and composer Germaine Taillefer, whose career benefitted from her membership in the 1920s group Les Six—the only woman among her five colleagues. Hamer devotes much attention to the ambiguous position of women in the French musical world during these years. The official policy of the French government was to promote a domestic role for women as wives and mothers so as to rebuild the population of the nation depleted by World War I. Women were also limited in the choice of instruments they could play. Piano and violin were considered more ladylike than brass, wood-winds, or percussion, which were forbidden to them. Hamer also points out the gendered [End Page 203] language used by music critics. Even if the latter applauded a woman's performance or œuvre, they emphasized the charm and delicacy displayed. An alternate form of gender bias was to compare the power and strength of a musicienne's accomplishment to a man's. Despite all these limitations, women did extremely well in music in the 1920s and 1930s. Women students constituted an increasing percentage of the student body of the Paris Conservatoire and other important schools. They were also highly successful in gaining recognition through prizes, like the Grand Prix de Rome. Their works were frequently included in major concerts, and they were often engaged as soloists. Moreover, women founded their own orchestras to give themselves greater opportunities. The orchestra of the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs (1904) hired men to play the instruments that were still deemed unfeminine, while the Orchestre féminin de Paris, founded by conductor and violinist Jane Evrard in 1930, resolved the issue by becoming an all-string ensemble. Women were also hired as professors at the Conservatoire, but it was rare for them to be offered the highest-level positions. Hamer writes as well of the impact of the personal lives of these women on their careers. Unhappy marriages could be an obstacle, particularly if the husband resented his wife's public life or, if he was also a musician, he felt threatened by her greater professional success. Women in music often had to devote long hours to teaching in order to support themselves. Some wrote textbooks that have become standard. All this took time away from composing. Hamer studies in depth several musiciennes whose achievements have fallen undeservedly into oblivion. Among them are three composers who were protégées of Paul Dukas at the Conservatoire: Elsa Barraine, who celebrated her Jewish heritage in music and participated in the Resistance; Yvonne Desportes, who tackled large-scale orchestral works and opera; and Claude Arrieu, who, despite her close association with Olivier Messaien (known for his naturalistic free styling), concentrated on neoclassical and baroque forms. James P. Gilroy University of Denver Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Bessie Lim (林培世, 1897-1999), the ‘First’ Woman Musician in Modern Korea: Seeking a Better Society through Songs

Bessie Lim (林培世, 1897-1999), the ‘First’ Woman Musician in Modern Korea: Seeking a Better Society through Songs

‘Neither Pure Love nor Imitating Capitalism’: Euro WILD and the Invention of Women's Music Distribution in Europe, 1980–1982

Euro Women's Independent Label Distribution (WILD) was a pan-European network of feminist music distributors active in the early 1980s. They were affiliated to WILD, the US-based Women's Music distribution network founded in 1979 to disseminate the growing corpus of Women's Music emerging from the US Women's Liberation Movement (WLM). This article presents an interpretation of archive materials that document Euro WILD's activities from the Women's Revolutions Per Minute archive, housed at the Women's Art Library, London. Constrained and enabled by the archive materials on offer, I revisit some of the practical and political problems the network faced as European distributors of US Women's Music. Key issues explored include the perception of US cultural imperialism by women based in Europe and the affective politics that circulated transnationally between distributors. Finally, this article explores how the concept and practice of the Women's Music industry changed when women beyond the borders of the US engaged with it.

Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan by Gerald Groemer

Reviewed by: Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan by Gerald Groemer Shawn Bender (bio) Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan. By Gerald Groemer. Oxford University Press, New York, 2016. xxv, 304 pages. $105.00, cloth; $36.95, paper. Gerald Groemer’s Goze: Women, Musical Performance, and Visual Disability in Traditional Japan is an exhaustively researched work of historical musicology on the visually disabled women musicians of Japan called goze. In his book, Groemer traces the emergence and coalescence of goze into performing groups in the Edo period, the challenges of their occupational “liberation” in the Meiji period, and the gradual dissolution of goze organizations over the course of the twentieth century. Those scholars familiar with his previous work will not be surprised by this choice of subject. Groemer’s The Spirit of Tsugaru: Blind Musicians, Tsugaru-jamisen, and the Folk Music of Northern Japan (Harmonie Park Press, 1999) remains the most comprehensive treatment available in English of the shamisen music of northern Japan, a folk genre in which the most important innovators were blind men. The music of the socially and geographically marginal is clearly of great interest to Groemer, and in devoting two monographs to it he effectively reverses the dominant gaze of Japanese musicology, one which usually begins with the music of religious and imperial court ritual, moves through an overview of the classical stage arts, and concludes with some mention of folk and popular styles. Instead, in Groemer’s writing, the folk [End Page 147] are front and center; classical elements receive mention only when they are intentionally incorporated into performance by folk musicians. In so doing, Groemer seems to be motivated by the laudable desire not just to write about the music of Japan’s marginal groups but to write their music into the field of Japanese ethnomusicology, or, to be more specific, English-language scholarship on Japanese music. As a detailed description of the lives and music of Japan’s blind female shamisen players, Goze is a great success. Groemer draws heavily on Japanese primary and secondary sources in constructing his account. He thus brings the insights of Japanese researchers to a much larger scholarly public. But, for too much of the book, Groemer’s narrative stays within the descriptive and taxonomic mode characteristic of much native and foreign scholarship on Japanese music. Aside from the formal analysis of song texts and musical structure, Groemer’s book rarely moves beyond description and classification either to make a persuasive argument about what goze represent or to engage substantively with social theories of disability, performance, and gender that might aid in understanding them from a broader perspective. In the introduction, Groemer tells us that the word “goze” was originally a polite way to refer to a woman. Eventually, though it is not clear how, the term came to refer exclusively to blind female musicians. Their activities centered in the Echigo region of Edo-period Japan (now Niigata Prefecture), largely because of the unique adaptation of domestic architecture to the winter weather of the region: goze found the outdoor hallways created by the overhanging eaves of row homes convenient in their itinerant search for paying customers. The chapter provides additional accounts of goze by European visitors to Japan and by native Japanese folklore scholars. Interesting as these anecdotes are, it would have been beneficial to have included as well some statement of the argument of the book in this chapter, or in the preceding preface, that would help the reader place this and other parts of the book into context. Clearly, the status of goze as visually disabled is a key defining characteristic of their occupational identity. In the first chapter, Groemer focuses his discussion on what he calls the “production of visual disability” (p. 15). The chapter moves through early Buddhist understandings of disability rooted in the transgressions of past lives to biomedical objectifications of disability in late Edo and Meiji-period Japan. Groemer shows that, regardless of the intellectual paradigm within which visual disability was understood, the end result was the same: the production of a disabled subject (p. 34). Neither in medieval nor in modern Japan did...