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Susan McClary (born 2 October 1946) is a musicologist considered to be a significant figure in the "New Musicology". She is noted for her work combining musicology and feminism. October 2 is the 275th day (276th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar, with 90 days remaining. ...
1946 (MCMXLVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ...
A musicologist is someone who studies musicology. ...
The New Musicology is a term applied to a wide body of work produced by many musicologists who consider themselves and their musicology neither new nor New. ...
Feminism is a collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies largely motivated by or concerned with the liberation of women from subordination to men. ...
Feminine Endings Perhaps her best known work is Feminine Endings (1991; ISBN 0-8166-4189-7). ("Feminine ending" is a musical term once commonly used to denote a weak phrase ending or cadence.) The work covers these topics: In Western musical theory a cadence (Latin cadentia, a falling) is a particular series of intervals or chords that ends a phrase, section, or piece of music. ...
- Musical constructions of gender and sexuality.
- Gendered aspects of traditional music theory.
- Gendered sexuality in musical narrative.
- Music as a gendered discourse.
- Discursive strategies of women musicians.
The publication of Feminine Endings (now in its second edition) is considered to have been a significant step in the acceptance and proliferation of feminist musicology within academia. Largely because of this influence, McClary was a 1995 winner of a MacArthur Fellowship. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent grantmaking institution. ...
In Feminine Endings, McClary describes, among other things, how sonata form may be interpreted as sexist or misogynistic and imperialistic, and that, "tonality itself - with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax - is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire." She analyzes the sonata procedure for its constructions of gender and sexual identity. The primary, once "masculine", key (or first subject group) represents the, always in narrative, male, self, while the secondary, "feminine" key (or second subject group), represents the other, a territory to be explored and conquered, assimilated into the self and stated in the tonic home key. Sonata form is a musical form that has been used widely since the early Classical period. ...
Sexism is discrimination between people based on their Sex rather than their individual merits. ...
Misogyny is an exaggerated pathological aversion towards women. ...
Imperialism is the policy of extending the control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics and/or economy of other countries. ...
Gender often refers to the distinctions between males and females in common usage. ...
Other work McClary set the feminist arguments of her early book in a broader socio-political context with Conventional Wisdom (2000, ISBN 0-520-23208-9), since this allows a less critical tone the book also seems more optimistic. In it, she argues that the traditional musicological assumption of the existence of 'purely musical' elements, divorced from culture and meaning, the social and the body, is a conceit used to veil the social and political imperatives of the world view which produces the classical canon most prized by supposedly objective musicologists. However, one should not receive the impression that McClary ignores the "purely musical" in favor of cultural issues, it is a crucial part of what creates cultural meaning. She examines the creation of meanings and identities, some oppressive and hegemonic, some affirmative and resistant, in music through the reference of musical conventions in the blues, Vivaldi, Prince, Philip Glass, and others. The blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the use of the blue notes and a repetitive pattern that typically follows a twelve-bar structure. ...
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (March 4, 1678 – July 28 or 27, 1741), nicknamed Il Prete Rosso (The Red Priest), was a Venetian priest and baroque music composer, as well as a famous violinist. ...
This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...
This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...
While seen by some as extremely radical, her work is influenced by musicologists such as Edward T. Cone, gender theorists and cultural critics such as Teresa de Lauretis, and people who, like McClary, fall in between such as philosopher Theodor Adorno. Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian born author and Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. ...
Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg. ...
McClary herself admits that her analyses, though intended to deconstruct, flirt with essentialism. The term deconstruction is often used in a loose way as a synonym of critical analysis, especially the kind of uncooperative critical analysis that subjects a work or a text to close scrutiny in order to expose contradictions, poor logic or unwelcome affinities with other works or cultural objects. ...
In philosophy, essentialism is the view, that, for any specific kind of entity it is at least theoretically possible to specify a finite list of characteristics —all of which any entity must have to belong to the group defined. ...
The Beethoven and rape controversy A sentence by McClary which has been very widely quoted is given below. Here, "the Ninth" refers to Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. 1820 portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler Beethoven redirects here. ...
Composer Ludwig van Beethoven 4th movement (European Union anthem) samples: Ode to Joy ( file info) — String version from 1997. ...
- The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.
The sentence appeared in the January 1987 issue of Minnesota Composers' Forum Newsletter, a journal with a relatively small circulation. Nonetheless, it continues to elicit a great range of responses. McClary subsequently rephrased this passage in Feminine Endings: - The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music. The problem Beethoven has constructed for this movement is that it seems to begin before the subject of the symphony has managed to achieve its identity. (128)
She goes on to conclude that "The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment." (129) It is significant that the critiques of McClary discussed below refer primarily to the original passage from the Minnesota Composer's Forum Newsletter.
Readers sympathetic to the passage may be connecting it to the opinion that Beethoven's music is in some way "phallic" or "hegemonic," terms often used in modern feminist studies scholarship. These readers may feel that to be able to enjoy Beethoven's music one must submit to or agree with the values expressed, or that it requires or forces upon the listener a mode or way of listening that is oppressive, and that these are overtly expressed, as rape, in the Ninth. For related views, see discussion above, as well as sonata form. Feminism is a social theory and political movement primarily informed and motivated by the experience of women. ...
Sonata form is a musical form that has been used widely since the early Classical period. ...
Hostile reactions were posted on the Web by several commentators; here are four examples:
The intent of such postings often is not so much to discuss Beethoven as to support an attack on the purported decadence of modern academia, particularly in the humanities. Such commentators assume that the reader will immediately agree that McClary's opinion is absurd, and then take this absurdity as evidence that modern academics have "gone astray" and are unworthy of the public's support. Plato is credited with the inception of academia: the body of knowledge, its development and transmission across generations. ...
The humanities are those academic disciplines which study the human condition using methods that are largely analytic, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences. ...
Leaving aside readers whose main interest is political, there are other reasons why readers might take offense at McClary's sentence. For instance, on one reading, the passage could be construed as unfair to Beethoven: this would be so if one assumes that the "throttling murderous rapist's rage" putatively expressed in the music is supposed to be a spillover from Beethoven's own habitual thoughts and feelings, which McClary does not suggest. Scholars and historians have found no evidence that Beethoven ever committed a rape or harbored an intense urge to do so. On the other hand, it is also clear that McClary did not literally accuse Beethoven of these things, so the objection might well be considered hypersensitive.
Another possible source of controversy is the possibility that McClary's passage trivializes the horrific experience of actual rape victims, reducing it to a mere metaphor. Even readers sympathetic to criticism of Beethoven's music may find that pinpointing a vague unintended colonial program as "rape" is inaccurate.
The noted pianist and critic Charles Rosen has also commented on the famous passage. He avoids taking offense on any of the grounds mentioned above, and indeed is willing to play with sexual metaphors just like McClary. Rosen's disagreement is simply with McClary's assessment of the music: Charles Rosen (born May 5, 1927) is an American pianist and music theorist. ...
- We have first her characterization of the moment of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony:
- [passage appears here]
- The phrase about the murderous rage of the rapist has since been withdrawn [see below], which indicates that McClary realized it posed a problem, but it has the great merit of recognizing that something extraordinary is taking place here, and McClary's metaphor of sexual violence is not a bad way to describe it. The difficulty is that all metaphors oversimplify, like those entertaining little stories that music critics in the nineteenth century used to invent about works of music for an audience whose musical literacy was not too well developed. I do not, myself, find the cadence frustrated or dammed up in any constricting sense, but only given a slightly deviant movement which briefly postpones total fulfillment.
- To continue the sexual imagery, I cannot think that the rapist incapable of attaining release is an adequate analogue, but I hear the passage as if Beethoven had found a way of making an orgasm last for sixteen bars. What causes the passage to be so shocking, indeed, is the power of sustaining over such a long phrase what we expect as a brief explosion. To McClary's credit, it should be said that some kind of metaphorical description is called for, and even necessary, but I should like to suggest that none will be satisfactory or definitive.
The term "withdrawn" in Rosen’s passage alludes to McClary's later work (1991) in Feminine Endings, quoted above. Orgasm is the conclusion of the plateau phase of the sexual response cycle, and is experienced by both males and females. ...
Though McClary no longer focuses strictly on gender and sexuality in music (she remains fascinated with how music generates pleasure, however), her original controversial remarks about Beethoven (and also Schubert), despite being nearly twenty years old, continue to exist for her critics as ever-contemporary examples of her scholarly transgressions.
It is worth noting that McClary "can say something nice about Beethoven" (1991, p.119) and discusses his Op. 132 positively, saying "Few pieces offer so vivid an image of shattered subjectivity as the opening of Op. 132." One may also contrast with McClary's Lou Harrison's view of Beethoven's codas as "an exasperated absentee landlord pounding on the door for back rent." (Miller and Lieberman 1998, p.192). Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 - February 2, 2003) was an American composer. ...
Personal Susan McClary is on the faculty in the Musicology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is married to the musicologist Robert Walser. The University of California, Los Angeles, generally known as UCLA, is a public university whose main campus is located in the affluent Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. ...
Robert Walser is a musicologist associated with the new musicology. He is author of Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, ISBN 0819562602. ...
Quotes - "Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential." from http://www.ucla.edu/spotlight/archive/html_2001_2002/fac0502_mcclalry.html
- "Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence."
- "Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music", Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (1994), ISBN 0-415-90752-7
- "My history of Western music contains Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, but it also includes Stradella and the Swan Silvertones, Bessie Smith and Eric Clapton, k.d. lang, Philip Glass, and Public Enemy. And it treats all of them as artists who have negotiated with available conventions and in particular historical circumstances to produce musical artifacts of exceptional power and cultural resonance. If I can no longer privilege any one tradition, I find myself perpetually in awe of the countless ways societies have devised for articulating their most basic beliefs through the medium of sound."
- "Turtles All the Way Down", Conventional Wisdom: the Content of Musical Form (2000), ISBN 0-520-22106-0
Selected bibliography Works by Susan McClary - "The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year." In Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception. Ed. Leppert and McClary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 13-62.
- "Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition." Cultural Critique 12 (1989): 57-81.
- Georges Bizet: Carmen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- "Constructions of Subjectivity in Franz Schubert's music." In Queering the Pitch. Ed. Brett, Wood, and Thomas. New York: Routledge, 1994. 205-33.
- Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, & Sexuality. 2nd. ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002 (1991).
- Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.
Other Constructions of Subjectivity in Franz Schuberts Music was originally a presentation in which highly controversial musicologist Susan McClary set about to discuss how Franz Schuberts music may have been affected by his sexuality. ...
- The quotation from Charles Rosen above is taken from Chapter 15 of his Critical Entertainments (2000) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-17730-4.
- A more balanced assessment of McClary's work appears in Paula Higgins (1993) "Women in Music, Feminist Criticism, and Guerrilla Musicology: Reflections on Recent Polemics," '19th-Century Music Vol. 17; Issue 2; fal 1993; pp. 174-192 ISSN 0148-2076. Higgins is particularly critical of McClary's citation practice as it concerns other scholars in the area of feminist musical criticism.
- Miller, Leta E. and Lieberman, Frederic (1998). Lou Harrison: Composing a World. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511022-6.
See also Early music is European classical music before the classical music era and after Ancient music. ...
Sonata form is a musical form that has been used widely since the early Classical period. ...
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