My attempt to find let alone outline any specifics for a gendered approach to form and expression in music came thoroughly unstuck a few years ago when I attempted to raise it as a subject for discussion on this forum. Admittedly I was dealing in terms of the European classical music inheritance, and by trying to call out distinguishing characteristics immediately fell foul of lack of evidence to substantiate any claim I wanted to make.
The main reasons for losing my argument was a difficulty in finding any clear examples of music by classical composers that could clearly demarcate it as having been composed by women; furthermore with evidence of clear differences which could provide a clinching answer notably absent from works by women composers, one could not fall back on compliance with accepted conventions in a male-dominated world that included music. Had I pursued my position further instead of giving up at stage one's total dismissal, citing Elisabeth Lutyens as an example of one justly proud woman singly establishing her reputation as a vital pioneer of Modernism in British music at a time when this was bound to result in marginalisation, the fact that it was her adoption of a specifically male-originated method of basing composition, 12-tone music, that sealed her fate until other, male, composers (the so-called Manchester School of the 1950s), took it up in reaction against the reactionary sylistic nationalism of her predecessors and some contemporaries, would not in any way have substantiated my case, which would have required much deeper analytical delving if not searching for fag-ends on my part.
So here I am, shuffle beating myself into one of the corners of the forum seldom visited by non-jazz aficionados, where I know for sure I am likely to get a more mixed feedback on the subject. For here, it may be argued, may be found evidence that, outside the twin-disincentivisers or negative incentivisers of establishment conformism and commercialism, women - and it is specifically women we are speaking for in the quest for breaks with established status quo-enhancing and confirming modes of expression, organisation and performance - might be encouraged to find the wherewithal to "find their own voice", much in the same way or similarly to how ethnic minorities and within them, as elsewhere, gender-defined subgroups, have, and continue to. Arguably Wayne Shorter's "helpful" observation of the characteristics that made Miles Davis appealing to women listeners did not help! The circumstances of free collective creativity, identity and empowerment have been argued as truer definers for authenticity where it matters, namely in shaping individual utterance into effective articulation, than the individual isolated in her creative garret with a schedule deadline on a commission that must meet certain brief requirements to qualify for support, promotion and funding.
In this regard the Women in Jazz exhibition at The Barbican which in fact ends today was a salutary reminder of those days of heated discussion, argument and soul-searching among not just the female contribution to cutting edge radical political and social thinking, that divided advocates and would-be feminists into different camps. Sadly the Barbican library where the exhibition was held closes down on Friday afternoons, which prevented me returning from a backache-relieving break to make notes. Although The Guest Stars was possibly the best self-promoted band to have taken up the issue of female expression in music freed of sexist assumptions and conventions, and this being at a time when with Punk and various manifestations of Post-Punk challenging gender stereotypes and the right of women to go about their lives without perpetual physical and mental endangerment and on equal status with men proclaimed and gaining popular legitimacy with the role taken by women in the miners' campaign for jobs and communities. The exhibition included a lengthy video of The Guest Stars, in performance chunks interspersed with bits of interviews with each of its members, where the ideal of evolving specifically female, or feminist-defined, modes of expression previously denied or limited by role, convention and expectation, might be realised. As Deirdre Cartwright has indicated on her own website, two and a half minutes-worth of footage of The Guest Stars back in their heyday is all that exists; but this morning I have come across the folliowing link which summarises the origins and provenance of the band and the activism and thinking that underpinned its ideals:
While some with long memories and hankerings will claim over-generosity of hindsight and others compromise and even capitulation on my part here, there were, as I recall, three kinds of feminism embraced by those of us who professed a broad spectrum view of women's liberation and its place in the movements for social and political emancipation of the late 1970s and early '80s:
1) Bourgeois feminism - a point of view holding to the idea of self-emancipation as a fully realizeable competition-driven goal within the existing status quo, requiring no positive action e.g. quotas, as personnified in the personnage of Margaret Thatcher. In this game the playing field is not seen as intrinsically advantaging one sex or gender over any other, or of inbuilt social privilege, but of opportunity, based on "strength of character";
2) Radical feminism - based on the idea that men, not class, constitute the prime agency of women's oppression; and that gender separatism - women's communes, single-sex artistic, musical and political co-operatives, and the development of alternative "languages", including all and any means of self-expression and discourse thereby co-determined outwith aany aegis of male power and power relations, are the sine qua non of advance towards a fundamentally different kind of siociety and world; and
3) Socialist feminism - namely, that it is capitalism, not gender or sexuality, that determines and pre-formulates the structures of power, socialisation, thought and language which underpin and reinforce the status quo. Nevertheless, while it is a prime a priori imperative that women take the initiative of self-emanciation into their own hands, the ideological imperative which deems the prime agency of obstruction to be that of the ruling class empowered by money, privilege, state and mass media-assisted political and ideological self-legitimation over the means and distribution of the fruits of production, remains in principle the means of understanding guiding action and reaction.
In evaluating the alternatives to the present-day impasse of neo-liberal globalist capitalism I would, as will be expected, argue for 40+ years' worth of evidence overwhelmingly validating the third of the above options, adding the vital necessity of an ecologically-based environmentalist rider to the political agenda of any agency for consideration worthy of measuring up to the tasks facing humanity. Albeit surplus to the requirements of this deliberately self-limited topic for hopeful discussion, I drop it in with a degree of knowingness so as to pre-empt any charge of non-inclusivity. I would argue that while in my opinion an over-emphasis on "identity politics" has detracted from a primary focus on class relations in the bigger picture that has always been central to prioritising a common understanding of the primary issues at stake, effectively subcontracting agency to subordinate levels of effective power pressure where these have not effectively been "privatised" - cf as in Option 1) above, and thereby ineluctably yielding "common ground" to those who would have things remain as they wastefully and destructively are.
The main reasons for losing my argument was a difficulty in finding any clear examples of music by classical composers that could clearly demarcate it as having been composed by women; furthermore with evidence of clear differences which could provide a clinching answer notably absent from works by women composers, one could not fall back on compliance with accepted conventions in a male-dominated world that included music. Had I pursued my position further instead of giving up at stage one's total dismissal, citing Elisabeth Lutyens as an example of one justly proud woman singly establishing her reputation as a vital pioneer of Modernism in British music at a time when this was bound to result in marginalisation, the fact that it was her adoption of a specifically male-originated method of basing composition, 12-tone music, that sealed her fate until other, male, composers (the so-called Manchester School of the 1950s), took it up in reaction against the reactionary sylistic nationalism of her predecessors and some contemporaries, would not in any way have substantiated my case, which would have required much deeper analytical delving if not searching for fag-ends on my part.
So here I am, shuffle beating myself into one of the corners of the forum seldom visited by non-jazz aficionados, where I know for sure I am likely to get a more mixed feedback on the subject. For here, it may be argued, may be found evidence that, outside the twin-disincentivisers or negative incentivisers of establishment conformism and commercialism, women - and it is specifically women we are speaking for in the quest for breaks with established status quo-enhancing and confirming modes of expression, organisation and performance - might be encouraged to find the wherewithal to "find their own voice", much in the same way or similarly to how ethnic minorities and within them, as elsewhere, gender-defined subgroups, have, and continue to. Arguably Wayne Shorter's "helpful" observation of the characteristics that made Miles Davis appealing to women listeners did not help! The circumstances of free collective creativity, identity and empowerment have been argued as truer definers for authenticity where it matters, namely in shaping individual utterance into effective articulation, than the individual isolated in her creative garret with a schedule deadline on a commission that must meet certain brief requirements to qualify for support, promotion and funding.
In this regard the Women in Jazz exhibition at The Barbican which in fact ends today was a salutary reminder of those days of heated discussion, argument and soul-searching among not just the female contribution to cutting edge radical political and social thinking, that divided advocates and would-be feminists into different camps. Sadly the Barbican library where the exhibition was held closes down on Friday afternoons, which prevented me returning from a backache-relieving break to make notes. Although The Guest Stars was possibly the best self-promoted band to have taken up the issue of female expression in music freed of sexist assumptions and conventions, and this being at a time when with Punk and various manifestations of Post-Punk challenging gender stereotypes and the right of women to go about their lives without perpetual physical and mental endangerment and on equal status with men proclaimed and gaining popular legitimacy with the role taken by women in the miners' campaign for jobs and communities. The exhibition included a lengthy video of The Guest Stars, in performance chunks interspersed with bits of interviews with each of its members, where the ideal of evolving specifically female, or feminist-defined, modes of expression previously denied or limited by role, convention and expectation, might be realised. As Deirdre Cartwright has indicated on her own website, two and a half minutes-worth of footage of The Guest Stars back in their heyday is all that exists; but this morning I have come across the folliowing link which summarises the origins and provenance of the band and the activism and thinking that underpinned its ideals:
While some with long memories and hankerings will claim over-generosity of hindsight and others compromise and even capitulation on my part here, there were, as I recall, three kinds of feminism embraced by those of us who professed a broad spectrum view of women's liberation and its place in the movements for social and political emancipation of the late 1970s and early '80s:
1) Bourgeois feminism - a point of view holding to the idea of self-emancipation as a fully realizeable competition-driven goal within the existing status quo, requiring no positive action e.g. quotas, as personnified in the personnage of Margaret Thatcher. In this game the playing field is not seen as intrinsically advantaging one sex or gender over any other, or of inbuilt social privilege, but of opportunity, based on "strength of character";
2) Radical feminism - based on the idea that men, not class, constitute the prime agency of women's oppression; and that gender separatism - women's communes, single-sex artistic, musical and political co-operatives, and the development of alternative "languages", including all and any means of self-expression and discourse thereby co-determined outwith aany aegis of male power and power relations, are the sine qua non of advance towards a fundamentally different kind of siociety and world; and
3) Socialist feminism - namely, that it is capitalism, not gender or sexuality, that determines and pre-formulates the structures of power, socialisation, thought and language which underpin and reinforce the status quo. Nevertheless, while it is a prime a priori imperative that women take the initiative of self-emanciation into their own hands, the ideological imperative which deems the prime agency of obstruction to be that of the ruling class empowered by money, privilege, state and mass media-assisted political and ideological self-legitimation over the means and distribution of the fruits of production, remains in principle the means of understanding guiding action and reaction.
In evaluating the alternatives to the present-day impasse of neo-liberal globalist capitalism I would, as will be expected, argue for 40+ years' worth of evidence overwhelmingly validating the third of the above options, adding the vital necessity of an ecologically-based environmentalist rider to the political agenda of any agency for consideration worthy of measuring up to the tasks facing humanity. Albeit surplus to the requirements of this deliberately self-limited topic for hopeful discussion, I drop it in with a degree of knowingness so as to pre-empt any charge of non-inclusivity. I would argue that while in my opinion an over-emphasis on "identity politics" has detracted from a primary focus on class relations in the bigger picture that has always been central to prioritising a common understanding of the primary issues at stake, effectively subcontracting agency to subordinate levels of effective power pressure where these have not effectively been "privatised" - cf as in Option 1) above, and thereby ineluctably yielding "common ground" to those who would have things remain as they wastefully and destructively are.
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