(Un)gendering Musical Bodies

Scholars of nineteenth-century German music have documented discourses of art religion (_Kunstreligion_), in which wordless music assumed a spiritual dimension that could transport listeners to a transcendent, absolute realm. Performers and composers functioned as transmitters of this transcendence, supposedly subsuming their subjectivity in service to a higher good. Arguably this discourse was best exemplified in the reception of Clara Schumann (1819--1896) and those in her circle, construed by Eduard Hanslick as a "priesthood of art" in 1869. In studies of Schumann and her colleague, singer Amalie Joachim, scholars investigate how contemporary notions of gender influenced their reception (Klassen, Borchard, Stefaniak); however, no studies to date explore how the art-religious category of priesthood, malleable as it was, functioned as an example of gendered discourse.
I argue that the artistic priesthood offered a kind of alternative gendered space---neither fully masculine nor feminine---that could accommodate exceptional performing mothers such as Schumann as well as the bachelor composer-pianist Johannes Brahms. The notion originated during the Romantic literary movement of the early nineteenth century, which, according to literary scholar Lothar Pikulik, equated normality with failure. Given intellectual and social developments in German-speaking lands around 1850, Romantic discourses of the artist-priest should have faded away as outmoded, yet they persisted in spite of critical backlash. The gendered exceptionality also persisted in the face of an increasingly prescriptive masculine-feminine dichotomy, which in turn developed thanks to the burgeoning movement for women's rights.
In the case of Brahms, my analysis reveals gendered nuances and ambiguities that have been overlooked in earlier studies that focus on his masculinized reception (Citron, Gerards). Rather, I argue that this masculinized reception developed with the ongoing nineteenth-century polarization of gender roles, particularly the reduction of public emotional display for men, and in response to the very gendered ambiguity of the artistic priesthood. Whereas Brahms's reception in the 1860s aligns more with the art-religious rhetoric of priesthood like that of Schumann, by the later 1880s, this ambiguity is replaced by a reception that positions Brahms as a masculine representative of bourgeois heteronormativity.

With the release of her album Switched-On Bach in 1968, Wendy Carlos brought widespread attention to the Moog synthesizer, helping to popularize the use of electronic instruments outside of academic circles. Several authors have written about the importance of Carlos's work in the history of electronic composition (e.g., Vail 2000, Holmes 2002, Miller 2004); however, scholars have only recently begun to discuss her use of technology from a sociocultural perspective.


Previous scholarship has drawn associations between Carlos's technological proficiency and transgender identity. Judith Periano, discussing the association of gender, sexuality, and synthesizers, suggests that Carlos, "being herself a product of technology, must have felt an affinity with the synthesizer" (Periano 2014 p. 300). Sasha Geffen, drawing on Donna Haraway (Haraway 2004), characterizes the technologies behind Carlos's synthesizer and vocoder compositions as "disrupt[ing] the natural voice… in favor of a gender-disobedient cyborg voice" (Geffen 2018). Both authors suggest a movement away from a purely human state towards a technological one; however, Carlos's discussions of her own compositional philosophy appear to be at odds with this interpretation of her music.


In this paper, I argue for a conception of Carlos's music as moving toward a human state from within the domain of electronic composition, rather than the other way around. Drawing upon Carlos's frequent references in interviews and other first-hand sources to a "human element" in her music, I focus on three primary factors of her compositional philosophy. First, Carlos associated humanity with parameters traditionally valued in Western classical composition; she believed that most early electroacoustic composers lost touch with humanity by severely undervaluing these parameters. Second, the high degree of importance Carlos placed on orchestration led her to favor precise control over timbre as a means of better approximating the nuance of a seasoned acoustic performer. By contrast, she lamented the loss of human performative nuance brought about by prepackaged synthesizer patches and drum machines. Finally, her more experimental works, such as the album Beauty in the Beast (1986), still value the musical parameters Carlos associated with humanity, even as they overturn certain fundamental assumptions of the Western classical tradition.

Most studies of professional European concert orchestras consider women players to have been a rarity before World War II. While resistance to female string players had all but vanished by the turn of the century, the numerous women graduating from Europe's conservatories posed a challenge to the concert orchestra's ideals. Émile Vuillermoz noted the so-called "Peril rose" (1912) which threatened to undermine the seriousness of orchestras should women be admitted: the conspicuous presence of women's bodies, their "pretty profiles" and "fine white hands" revealed recent music's loss of masculine "vigor" and "intellectualism." Literature on women's orchestras and other ensembles similarly reveals the gendering of orchestras, where women's professional orchestras were often regarded as popular entertainment or visual spectacle. [Santella 2012; Ellis 1999.] However, as Marie Daubresse revealed in 1904 ["La femme musicienne d'orchestre"], women played in two prominent Paris orchestras: that of the Schola Cantorum, and the Concerts Colonne. Drawing on program books, iconography and journalism, this paper extends earlier studies of these orchestras and their repertoire [Pasler 2012, 1998] to explore how women's bodies were positioned in these mixed-gender concert orchestras. Through an examination of discourse on the physical requirements of instrumental performance, women's clothing, comportment, and orchestral reception, I explore how the bodies of women orchestral players were alternately eroticized and disciplined in the context of French ideals of femininity, modernity, and nation. The orchestral body's idealized collectivity and its historical emphasis on work over worker have led it to be largely overlooked in musicological embodiment studies, but consideration of women's roles in the orchestra reveals the very ambiguities between individual embodied experience and the social body that have characterized body histories [Canning 2006]. This paper thus not only renders visible women whose contribution to orchestral history has long remained obscure, but also invites us to reconsider the terms on which that history has often been constructed.