No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
IN RECENT YEARS, SOME OF THE MOST exciting, challenging, and ground-breaking work in historical musicology has been done by musicologists. Their work is exciting because it has brought to light a new cast of characters--long-forgotten women who composed and made music; challenging because it has precipitated a thorough reevaluation of the ways we think about music, musical talent, and the musical canon; and ground-breaking because its emphasis on music as a sociocultural phenomenon has had a long-overdue impact on the discipline of musicology as a whole. In a little over two decades this subdiscipline has come of age, its maturity marked not only by a critical mass of significant publications (e.g., Bowers and Tick 1986; McClary 1991; Citron 1993; Marshall 1993; Solie 1993; Brett, Wood, and Thomas 1994; and Cook and Tsou 1994) but also by a number of reflective retrospectives penned by some of its leading exponents (e.g., Bowers 1989-90; Cook 1989; Wood 1992; Citron 1993; McClary 1993; and Solie 1997). Strangely--considering that many musicologists were influenced by the ways ethnomusicologists look at culture--there has been no parallel efflorescence in the sister discipline of ethnomusicology. While it is true that many ethnomusicologists include women in their studies as a matter of course, the theoretical models lighting up historical musicology's firmament are (with a few notable exceptions, such as Tolbert's 1997 conference paper, Feminist Epistemologies and Ethnomusicology) oddly absent--an indication perhaps that ethnomusicologists are less inclined than historical musicologists to search for theoretical generalizations. For the more culturally relativistic ethnomusicologist, the attempt to understand other cultures from their own (rather than a Western-centric) perspective makes generalization, critique, and the construction of theory difficult. At the same time, however, it provides a rich pedagogical opportunity. Taken into the classroom, the study of music and gender from a cross-cultural perspective can not only illuminate worlds very different from the students' own but can also enhance their awareness of campus issues of diversity and multiculturalism. By encountering and trying to understand the unfamiliar, students can be encouraged both to reevaluate their own familiar environment and to respect the culture of others. It is in this spirit that I offer the following practical thoughts on my own experience of developing and teaching an ethnomusicologically oriented course on music and gender. A View from the Trenches I teach a course called Music and Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective at Smith College. I think the location is important, for it helps explain some of the particular problems with which I struggle. Smith is more than a small liberal-arts college in western Massachusetts; it is also a women's college with a stellar program in women's studies, a heightened campus awareness of women's issues and issues of difference, and numerous activist groups of one ideological stripe or another. My course, although cross-listed as an optional core course in the women's studies program, is taught within the rubric of the music department's colloquium series--general-interest courses aimed at (but not restricted to) first- and second-year students who are not music majors. Colloquia of this sort have a maximum enrollment of fifteen students and place great emphasis upon writing and classroom discussion. The students who sign up for the course reflect the somewhat problematic mix of intended markets: the majority are first- or second-year students who have not declared a major, but there are always a few experienced women's studies majors and/or students who are passionately committed feminists. I use the term feminist advisedly here because, in the case of some of the younger students, their feminism is an article of faith embraced with all the passion of adolescent enthusiasm but little of the intellectual depth of a fully fledged ism. …
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.