Music has no gender?

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm still being "provoked" (in the best possible sense) - shall report back later.

Did you by any chance see the "Imagine" programme on Georgia O'Keefe from a couple of weeks ago (still available on the i-Player)? There was a quotation from an Art critic that might be useful in the context of the Thread title: "Art doesn't have a gender, but Artists do; and the experiences that shape their lives channel the Art they create." (Not an exact quotation.)

But how such channelling manifests itself in Music isn't clear-cut: Literary and Visual artists can make specifically male/female references (at least, in the sense that those terms are understood at the time that the Art is produced) - and probably composers working with recorded sources. But composers working with older, "traditional" pitch/rhythmic materials have to employ words (titles/programme notes) if they wish to make explicit socio-political commentary.

You're probably right in your adducement, ferney. My thoughts on Richard's comment re-post tonal harmonic relations were that it had less to do with gender specificity than how traditionally-shaped sequences involving tension and release by harmonic means of relative dissonance resolving onto relative consonance (to avoid ahinton re-stating Schoenberg's view that "atonality" is a relative, nor absolute harmonic state) allude to conventions deriving from language uses in discourse - the one-the-one-hand, on-the-other to-and-fro of opposing viewpoints ending in neat, or relatively neat dominant > tonic resolution. Hence the feeling of "Phew, thank goodness that ended on a major chord" feeling expressed by people wanting music to uplift them in the same way they crave certainty in life as a whole, whether it be the resolved quarrel or the feeling that God's in His heaven , all's well with the world. Hence my citing of the Watts quote above, where he argues - I dare say some might say contentiously - that music does not divide "reality" into grammatically defined categories and binary oppositions, the way language does (or some languages more than others do), and is therefore a "living" force (which The Student here subsequently queried - sorry if I'm mixing too many categories!).

If what Richard meant was how I am interpreting him, it would logically follow that removing the cadential impulse specific to diatonic goal-orientated musical construction also removes the musical analogy commonly assumed to associate language-conceptual thought processes with musical thought processes. In each case, by way of musical thinking processses outwith the Western diatonic-goal directed musical conventions from circa 1650 to 1910 - the dialogistic impulse to resolution is then understood to be coventional, not intrinsic, ontological, or whatever the right defining term would be.

On ther other hand (just to thicken the plot, as Watts would say!):

But no "slugs/sugar" sounds, or "snails/spice" rhythms have been shown to be specifically "masculine"/"feminine" - and I don't know that there can be, because human characteristics traditionally attributed/associated with gender stereotypes are (often) merely cultural flotsam.

And if there are gender-defined ways of imagining sound, then presumably there are gender-specific ways of listening to sound - which, whilst it would explain why those gender-defined sounds can't be identified (if I hear the sounds of a woman's Music in the same way that I hear them in a man's, then I cannot differentiate them in terms of gender - and women have the obverse "difficulty") would simply get us to a complementary impasse.

Surely this leads into a kind of gender-specific mutual solipsism - the kind of argument I find myself involved in with many female listeners not going along with my taste for musics containing a preponderance of higher-degree dissonance than one finds outside the Modernist inheritance, when I point out to them that many women composers of my generastion and the one or two before me clearly share my embrace of such musics!

There are probably further complications in all this, in that I would grant from my own reactions that there are musically reproducible sounds that grate on the "psyche" that I shrink from, especially at loud volumes where they seem tantamount to a kind of aural torture or attempts by someone with possibly malevolent intentions to overwhelm, but where the threshold diividing acceptable from unacceptable lies is probably more a facet of the recipient's temperament (some can take it better than others: I am nervous by nature) than of gender.

Complicated, innit?

[MrGongGong]

Pauline Oliveros always has interesting things to say

http://music.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/22.OliverosDontCallThemLadies.pdf

and there are lots of more recent writings

https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300

[Serial_Apologist]

Pauline Oliveros always has interesting things to say

http://music.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/22.OliverosDontCallThemLadies.pdf

and there are lots of more recent writings

https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/300

Thanx MrGG

[P. G. Tipps]

I think it is possible to tell whether a book was written by a man or woman simply by the language employed and other little clues along the way.

It might seem more difficult to do the same with a classical music composer but I wouldn't dismiss the idea completely out of hand, though I've never thought it particularly important to experiment in the area.

One can even make an educated guess at the gender of a contributor to a public forum such as this though, of course, without proof one cannot be really certain.

For example, I have long believed that the indomitable Mr GG is in reality a woman/lady/female* but, of course, it is just conceivable that I may be mistaken. Such a thing can happen.

Whatever, Vive la Difference!

* Choose according to preference.

[eighthobstruction]

....that Georgia O'Keefe essential watching....me, 3 times so far....one of those programmes which engender/provoke pondering....as was this one on Howard Hodgkin....(not what he says, more like what you think while watching....[bit like theEric Morecombe "the same notes but not nec' in the same order])http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode...howard-hodgkin

[Richard Barrett]

If what Richard meant was how I am interpreting him, it would logically follow that removing the cadential impulse specific to diatonic goal-orientated musical construction also removes the musical analogy commonly assumed to associate language-conceptual thought processes with musical thought processes.

That is part of what I meant, although the discursive/syntactic approach to musical form isn't limited to tonal music - it would also apply to music where a "tonality-shaped hole" is filled with something else.

Is it possible then to think of a sort of parametric axis between the syntactic and non-syntactic in music? - so that it could become a compositional variable rather than a stylistic assumption? This is something that interests me greatly, including as a listener.

[The_Student]

That is part of what I meant, although the discursive/syntactic approach to musical form isn't limited to tonal music - it would also apply to music where a "tonality-shaped hole" is filled with something else.

Is it possible then to think of a sort of parametric axis between the syntactic and non-syntactic in music? - so that it could become a compositional variable rather than a stylistic assumption? This is something that interests me greatly, including as a listener.

by this, do you mean music that is constantly evolving/moving without any kind of return or resolution? How would one read/listen/understand this? If we are designed by nature to find resolution and comfort in a music-but come across something that won't render this, it must be quite a difficult listening activity? Do we crave something else in this music? is it the openers? the frustration of finding the answer? maybe this music is meant to create a dream like sensation where one is inside the music, completely unaware of temporal changes. A lack of sound-marks or cadences, its a different way of listening all together (try doing the dishes whilst listening to this style) one must concentrate- (just thinking back to my buddy Ligeti with Atmospheres and the Saariaho I am working on)- Would Adorno have liked this i wonder?

[Richard Barrett]

If we are designed by nature to find resolution and comfort in a music

My point is that we aren't, unless people who appreciate Western art music since the middle ages to the mid-twentieth century are "designed" differently from those who appreciate music from other times and places. The tension/relaxation model is only one among very many possibilities.

[The_Student]

My point is that we aren't, unless people who appreciate Western art music since the middle ages to the mid-twentieth century are "designed" differently from those who appreciate music from other times and places. The tension/relaxation model is only one among very many possibilities.

oh wow- that just opened the doors right up! what other possibilities are there?

I know very little- but from what I have read, it does appear plausible though, that considering humans like repetition, the seek regularity. ( we get up, have coffee, take a shower, work for 8 hours (or more), come home, have dinner etc etc. why is it that this is so engrained? Also, would this not account to western art "listeners" to actually being "designed" differently? If we took our existence here and contrasted it to someone living in timbuktu, surely their understanding of music would be very different to ours because their lives are different? But then again- humans get up at dawn {do something} and go back to sleep at night.

but then there is the sex theory also...

[Pulcinella]

Given the two new cello concertante works (Watkins and Bray) we've had at the Proms these last few days, would 'gender-aware listeners' (if such a species exists) have said that one was composed by a male and the other by a female, I wonder?

[MrGongGong]

oh wow- that just opened the doors right up! what other possibilities are there?

Ask La Monte or Pauline or Alvin or John or Ellen or your local bell ringers

The world is full of musics that work in different ways

[ahinton]

Ask La Monte or Pauline or Alvin or John or Ellen or your local bell ringers

Alvin? Are you quite sure that Mr Stardust would have a valuable answer? (no, of course I know who you mean! but...)

[Richard Tarleton]

I know very little- but from what I have read, it does appear plausible though, that considering humans like repetition, the seek regularity. ( we get up, have coffee, take a shower, work for 8 hours (or more), come home, have dinner etc etc. why is it that this is so engrained?

I think this began when we stopped being hunter-gatherers (leading entirely opportunistic lives) and became farmers requiring much more set hours, increasingly at the behest of others . With industrialisation, it just got worse. Suggested reading: Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari.

Also, would this not account to western art "listeners" to actually being "designed" differently? If we took our existence here and contrasted it to someone living in timbuktu, surely their understanding of music would be very different to ours because their lives are different? But then again- humans get up at dawn {do something} and go back to sleep at night.

An analogous thought, prompted by a book review I read on Saturday - Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct (excellent book) argues that language as an innate instinct - it's just that it's filled in different ways in different cultures. Could the same be true of music?

[Richard Barrett]

Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct (excellent book) argues that language as an innate instinct - it's just that it's filled in different ways in different cultures. Could the same be true of music?

Given Pinker's rather breathtakingly ignorant and dismissive comments on music itself, I tend to regard his pronouncements on what is and isn't innate as highly suspicious, together with much else that comes under the heading of "evolutionary psychology" and the reactionary political agenda which motivates it (see particularly Steven Rose on that subject). The book to look at on the hypothetically common origin of music and language, and therefore on how and to what extent they're connected, is in my opinion Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals.

[Bryn]

Given Pinker's rather breathtakingly ignorant and dismissive comments on music itself, I tend to regard his pronouncements on what is and isn't innate as highly suspicious, together with much else that comes under the heading of "evolutionary psychology" and the reactionary political agenda which motivates it (see particularly Steven Rose on that subject). The book to look at on the hypothetically common origin of music and language, and therefore on how and to what extent they're connected, is in my opinion Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals.

I would find it difficult to disagree with a single word of that.