Cusick, Feminist Theory and Mind-Body Problem

Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem
Author(s): Suzanne G. Cusick

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Winter, 1994), pp. 8-27
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/833149
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FEMINIST THEORY,
MUSIC THEORY, AND THE
MIND/BODY PROBLEM
SUZANNE G. CUSICK
ONE OF THE FIRST intellectual rituals a person encounters on becoming a

feminist is the ritual of self-identification. It is understood now-as it was
not twenty years ago-that each of us speaks for sure only for herself,
each of us from a unique situation born of multiple identities layered
each on the other-class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religious
beliefs, and so forth. Further, it is understood that each of us speaks from
a situation that is partly defined by our listeners or readers: every
communication is the acting out of a relationship, in which our identity
of the moment is partly determined by the relationship we have or seek
to have with others. As eloquently elaborated by Donna Haraway in her
now-classic essay "Situated Knowledges," feminist epistemology assumes
that all knowledge claims begin life as partial knowledges, determined by
the situation of the knower; and that they develop into more generally
useful knowledge claims as the result of "conversation" among situated
Feminist Theory, Music Theory 9
knowers. It is from this idea-that useful knowledge emerges from

conversation among situated knowers-that I want to situate my self in
relationship with you, with music, and with feminism by revealing the
original impetus for this paper.l
That original impetus was an invitation from my colleague Fred Maus
to consider the problem of imagining what a feminist music theory might
be like. Fred's invitation led me to think of how I, a musicologist/organ-
ist/choir director, use music theory: for me it is a tool for understanding
pieces that I need to know about, or that move me. It further led me to
acknowledge that my thinking wasn't influenced by all feminist theory-
to assimilate it all and then graft it onto the existing root stock of music
theory would be an impossible and vanity-flaunting task. I have sought
instead to think honestly about the theory I was really reading and how I
was really trying to apply it to my thought about music. What I want to
do here is focus on one point of intersection between feminist theory and
music theory, a point of intersection that raises some interesting ques-
tions about how we think about music.
My interest in using feminist theory to illuminate music theory arises
from an interest in understanding why music has not been particularly
susceptible to gender-decoding techniques and theoretical paradigms
borrowed from the feminist criticism of literature and art. It has been my
impression that the various critical strategies we have tried to borrow
from those disciplines have not taken us nearly as far as they have taken
scholars in these other fields; worse, I think they have taken us to oddly
paralyzing rather than empowering conclusions about gender; perhaps
worst of all, I fear that these borrowed critical strategies are justifiably
criticized as bringing us to intellectually interesting but ultimately
unmusical places, or to places that make us begin to hate what we once
most loved in the world.
Contemplating (sometimes in my own work) what has felt to me like a
profoundly unmusical quality to some music criticism led me to recon-
sider the "situation" that is the central core of my own sense of musical-
ity. The central core of my musicality is performance, an identity so
strong that I can barely imagine what other musical identities people
(especially critics) might have. As I began to think from the performer in
myself, and not from the musicologist in her, I felt acutely that I was not
supposed to be thinking that way. I began, further, to suspect that there
were reasons related to gender that my musicological self had been pro-
fessionally formed to be different from my performing self. As a per-
former, I act on and with what we ordinarily call music with my body; as
a musicologist I have been formed to act on (and with?) what we ordi-
narily call music with my mind, and only with my mind. Thus, my musi-
cological habitus inclines me to think about music's fixed, textlike
10 Perspectives of New Music
qualities, an inclination that is perpetually at odds with the way my per-

forming self inclines to think about and respond to music. And when I
turn to music theory as a tool to help me understand a piece I need to
know about, I find that its habitus, too, inclines to focus on music's fixed,
textlike qualities. Could it be, I have wondered, that the focus on music's
fixed, textlike qualities-a focus that sometimes seems contrary to my
own musicality-is also implicated in our discipline's failure to decipher
very much of the gender coding we can assume to be part of our musical
traditions?
I began to think that it could be so, partly because of an old problem
of mine regarding Fanny Hensel's Trio in D minor, op. 11. I have been
thinking about this Trio for years, thinking about it as a musician who
loves the piece, and thinking about it as a feminist critic who would like
to explain how gender is encoded in the work. For I assume, from anal-
ogy with literary criticism, that the work of women may be different from
the work of men in its encoding of gender: indeed, it seems self-evident
that this should be so, since gender is a system of power relationships that
is designed to give men and women different experiences of life. Thus, I
assume that the experience Hensel had as a middle-class, ethnically Jew-
ish woman in nineteenth-century Europe may have informed her work in
audible-or at any rate in analyzable-ways.
But to admit that assumption is not entirely honest, for it is not the a
priori fact in my thought. The originating premise in my thought is a
hearing of the piece (Example 1).2
To my ear, the immediately striking thing about Hensel's trio is the
drama and force of its opening gesture. I identify these qualities-which I
admit to having first heard as remarkable in the work of a woman-with
the upward, angular, tonic- and mode-defining leaps of the violin and
'cello; I identify them, secondarily, with the furioso rumbling of the
piano part, which provides the strings' bold opening theme with its har-
monic support and with a microcosmic rhythmic grid.
To my ear, however, what is more striking still is the long-term work-
ing out of the relationship among the parts in the first movement. That
is, the piano part hardly rests from its technically demanding passage-
work, playing at a much higher technical level than do the strings; yet not
until the last turn to recapitulation does it participate in thematic give
and take with the strings, and only then do its companions take up a
theme it has introduced. Strings and piano might as well live in separate
worlds, worlds separated with a rigidity that is unparalleled in the trio lit-
erature as I know it. Yet the piano in its ceaselessly supporting role has
both the most difficult part and the most crucial part in articulating the
tonal plan of the movement's sonata form.
Feminist Theory, Music Theory II
TRIO.
F. Mendelssohn - Hensel, op.
Allegro molto vivace.
Violino.
, l - i r r ; i
Violouicrllo.
^:,o _- I t f' 6 I
AllAg.ro molto vivace.
Pianoforte.
^^t'^ L^"' i -
^, rt If f f`f If I
' fr r r f - r I
li * J 7- 3L i ?
' ^'w p i 'rf r , i- - p
i'i S*
....' ?-*%':'- ft Pi- *-
EXAMPLE 1
76 Lo'r r rljw r f
*= r rti r f
rr r
1.i -'1 i o
EXAMPLE 1
It is a very odd piece in that way, while not so odd in most other ways.
Its tonal plan, for instance, is not by itself remarkable. Nor do the nature
of the themes seem promising candidates for the kinds of readings of
sonata form as gendered discourse that Marcia Citron and Susan
McClary have essayed: the second theme is not very different from the
first, and is certainly no less angular, leaping, stylistically "masculine."3 At
best one might argue that the presence of a second "masculine" theme
where a "feminine" one ought to have been (according to Hensel's con-
temporary A.B. Marx) construes the discourse as having no room for the
feminine (or no room for the feminine side of an actual woman com-
poser's thought).4 But the similarity of themes could as easily be
explained as a manifestation of Hensel's concern for organic unity, a con-
cern revealed in countless details of this work. Indeed, as I think many
feminist critics have found, formal and tonal analysis by themselves seem
not to reveal anything much about the gender of composers, or their
experience of difference. Because I incline to think that a composer's
experience of difference will show up-if it does at all-in a work's eccen-
tricity, I have thought for years that the weird relationship of the piano
and the strings, amounting to a really striking imbalance in roles that is
resolved at the recapitulation, is somehow the site where difference has
been inscribed, described, or reconciled.
I have encountered highly skeptical states when I have tried to take this
position in classes or professional conversation. I now think that the
skeptical stares have been the result of my having responded to the piece
from a situation that is not professionally sanctioned, that of potential
piano player. Only recently have I understood why that situation was not
professionally sanctioned; and only recently have I had an idea of how
feminist theory could help me get around music theory's apparent pre-
occupation with the textlike nature of music, that is, with the grammar
and syntax of pitches and durations.
Here is my idea: I was interested in the relationship among parts as the
place where this work's gender subtext (and real drama) lay. There are
various ways I could make a historical argument exploring analogies
between the roles the piano and strings play in relation to each other and
the roles women and men in nineteenth-century middle-class life played
in relation to each other. I could relate those analogies to the stylistic
norms of nineteenth-century trios, and to the shifting balance between
piano and strings that is part of the genre's history.5 But I thought an
argument by analogy to social relations by itself might be pretty weak. I
wanted to be more analytical about these particular roles in Hensel's
piece; and I wanted a way to explain precisely how they changed, and
why their changing might count as the reconciliation of tension one
expects at the recapitulation of a sonata form.
Since music theory as I have known it is almost exclusively about

"pitch syntax," I didn't think it could help me. But a combination of
arguments from feminist theory seemed like it could.
In her essay "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," his-
torian Joan Scott argues that gender is a system of metaphors about the
power relationships between and among certain kinds of bodies.6 Scott
contends that metaphors for gender are practically everywhere in our
public and private discourse, and that tracking them tells us interesting
things about ourselves and about how gender intersects with apparently
ungendered parts of life.
If gender metaphors actually do circulate throughout a society's dis-
course, it seems logical that gender metaphors are circulating in a soci-
ety's music-in the sounds composers choose, in the ways people hear
those sounds and in the associations they make with them.
Scott's theoretical license to look for gender metaphors in the oddest
places and the strangest transformations does not by itself help me to
ground my hearing of the Hensel Trio's drama. A more important
thinker for my needs is philosopher Judith Butler. In her 1991 book Gen-
der Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler argues the
initially astonishing proposition that gender is all an act.7 That is, both
what feminists have taken to calling sex (the biological configurations of
bodies) and what we call gender (the power relationships expected of
those bodies) result from the (obsessive) repetition of the acts which con-
stitute identities. For Butler, there is no originary core self which expresses
identity by socially recognizable acts; rather, the gendered self is the
cumulative result of performances.
Leaving aside the troubling or liberating implications of the idea that
all our identities are little more than elaborate drag shows, I want to
focus on what I take to be the most salient element of Butler's thought
for any person engaged in a performance art: that gender is performed; is
performed through countless actions the aggregate of which becomes
recognizable both to the performer and to her social companions as gen-
der, as the role she will play in a continually contested system of relation-
ships among bodies.
If gender is constituted by bodily performances, and metaphors of
gender are constantly circulating through discourse, might not elements
of all bodily performances be read as metaphors of gender even when
they seem to be performances of other things? If bodily performances
can be both constitutive of gender and metaphors for gender, then we
who study the results of bodily performances like music might profitably
look to our subject as a set of scripts for bodily performances which may
actually constitute gender for the performers and which may be recogniz-
able as metaphors of gender for those who witness the performers' dis-
plays.
Here then, is an intellectual ground from which I might tell my story
about the role of the piano in Hensel's Trio, a role which I initially heard
as cast and gendered feminine in relation to the theme-declaring strings,
whose role I heard as gendered masculine.
Is there evidence in the physical actions and interactions of the parts
that gender is either metaphorically or actually enacted by performers of
Hensel's score?
I tried to answer this question by concocting an analysis that was hope-
lessly boring to read, but that considered the movement's tonal, the-
matic, and relational scripts in tandem. I became more convinced than
ever that I had been right: for reading the tonal and thematic scripts of
the movement from the situation of the piano's role gave me a narrative
that moved me in just the way and just the places that the music moves
me.
But what had I really done? I had started from a feminist

urged me to think about bodies, performer's bodies, and
slipped into thinking about textural roles as metaphors f
Although I had confirmed for myself the intuition with
(and thus I am one step closer to writing a critical essay on
someday), I had not actually got much farther than I could
using the work of Edward Cone, who in various writing
essays of The Composer's Voice-teaches us how to identify v
a musical whole as agents or personae, metaphors for human
But the implications of Butler's and Scott's thought do
lead me to this familiar situation for critical knowledge. I at
a Cone-style analysis as the result of having allowed long-st
habits to prevent a systematic application of the ideas I pro
row. For the implication of Butler's theory, in particular, is
to have been thinking about actual bodies, not social roles. I
partly what I did to confirm my intuitions about the soc
the dropping of that thread, a difficult one to pick up
caused me to think I should withhold that part of my ar
can do it well. When I write an essay on Hensel's Trio,
argue that Hensel's script for the metaphorical social action
imbalances in her sonata-form movement is only readable if
edges the inextricable presence of the body in music-a
musicology's and music theory's focus on the intentions
composers scrupulously denies. Indeed, I suspect that H
much of this story into the relationship among physicall
(as opposed to writing it into the relationship among no
because she understood the tension surrounding her ro
composer to be as much metaphorical as it was real: it was metaphorical

because the role of the composer is implicitly always gendered masculine.
The composer is masculine not because so many individuals who live in
the category are biologically male, but because the composer has come to
be understood to be mind-mind that creates patterns of sounds to
which other minds assign meanings.9 The relationship of notes to each
other, because susceptible to apprehension as mind by mind, could not
contain Hensel's story as I hear it, the story of a biological and meta-
phorical woman seeking entry into masculine discourse. Nor could music
theory as I have known it help me tell the story I thought I heard,
because it is a discipline that identifies nearly totally with the composer as
mind, and which identifies music as mind. Identification of both
composer and music as mind may be our discipline's version of what
Donna Haraway calls the "god trick," the epistemological illusion of all
encompassing, and thus objective, knowledge.10
Music, an art which self-evidently does not exist until bodies make i
and/or receive it, is thought about as if it were a mind-mind game.
Thus, when we think analytically about music, what we ordinarily do i
describe practices of the mind (the composer's choices) for the sake o
informing the practices of other minds (who will assign meaning to th
resulting sounds). We locate musical meaning in the audible communi-
cation of one creating mind to a cocreator, one whose highly attentiv
listening is in effect a shared tenancy of the composer's subject posi-
tion.11 We end by ignoring the fact that these practices of the mind are
nonpractices without the bodily practices they call for-about which i
has become unthinkable to think.
That is, we have changed an art that exists only when, so to speak, the
Word is made Flesh, into an art which is only the Word. Metaphorically,
we have denied the very thing that makes music music, the thing which
gives it such enormous symbolic and sensual power.
I think there are theological, moral, and class implications to this
denial of the flesh in an art which cannot exist without the flesh, but my
job today is to explore the feminist implications of this delusion.12 In
denying the bodily actions involved in any music's existence, we have
taken a position on one of our civilization's most fundamental and
enduring philosophical dilemmas, the so-called Mind/Body problem. In
effect, we have rescued music for inclusion in the realm of the privileged
positionl.
Surely no one needs to be reminded how the elements in the Mind/
Body duality are gendered. Metaphorically, when music theorists and
musicologists ignore the bodies whose performative acts constitute the
thing called music, we ignore the feminine. We erase her from us, even at
the price of metaphorically silencing the music.
How could it ever be possible to "hear" (or "read") the g

phors in a music if we operate out of a paradigm that has
tally erased the metaphorical feminine? Perhaps the gender m
most richly there, precisely there in the work of bodies wh
years of discipline and minutes of intense labor bring forth
pleasure; precisely there in the silenced metaphorical feminin
formative acts.13
Thus have I thought myself into an unthinkable posit
that a feminist music theory must include theorizing abo
ing with great care) the practices of bodies (real ones) as wel
tices of minds. And especially a feminist music theory w
about the practices of performing bodies, the bodies most lik
metaphors of gender or to enact the constitution of gender
What would such a theorizing be like? Would it add any
knowledge of music or gender, or the relationship between t
First, I think such a theorizing would be more like fem
than it would be like traditional music theory, for trad
theory consists more of answers-descriptions of practic
understood to be objective and true-than of questions. Fem
on the other hand, tends to consist more of questions, or
around which to frame questions. At this point, theorizing a
bodies would be characterized, I think, by the kinds of
would ask.
It might interrogate the social and symbolic meanings embedded in

the bodily techniques used to produce sounds.14 What disciplines are
imposed on the bodies which produce the sound? What meanings are
ascribed to the public display or the deliberate concealment of those dis-
ciplines? When do those meanings constitute gender for the performers?
When can they be read as metaphors for gender by an audience?
How do layers of meaning result from the display and acknowledged
concealment of a priori bodily disciplines in the actual performance of a
work? And, especially in thinking about the actual performance of
ensemble music, when individually scripted combinations of discipline
display and discipline concealment interact in a collectively scripted
way-how are individual self-control and submission to discipline dis-
played as a social performance, an acting out of individuals' relationships
to others whose scripts may allow them greater or lesser social power?
We who spend our paid lives thinking about music might suddenly
need to spend a lot of time talking with our colleagues in the studios and
practice rooms, in order to develop answers to these sorts of questions.
We would certainly need to acknowledge that all the metaphors or
constitutive acts of gender performed by musical bodies have been medi-
ated by the performers' minds. Indeed, we would need to acknowledge
that the act of making music is the exact site of an actual solution to the
mind/body problem (as, arguably, is the act of listening attentively to
music). As such, the act of making music would seem to be at least as
likely a place for metaphors of gender to be found as is the relationship of
notes to each other.
A theory of musical bodies would most helpfully theorize, I think,
from a performer-centered subject position, because it is performers who
are most ignored and dismissed by a mind-mind conception of music.
Unlike the listener-as-mental-performer or the critic-as-mental-
performer imagined by Cone and others, an actual embodied performer
knows any work as a set of actions to be coordinated in particular ways. A
performer's composer-identification is never as complete as a listener's;
what impedes it is the sense that the work temporarily becomes not-the-
work, but instead something you do.15 It is something you do which is,
while you're doing it, entirely coterminous with who you are. Getting to
the point of performance involves thinking about the composer's inten-
tions, of course, and understanding what will be required of you if you
are to either realize or contradict them. But the score is not the work to a
performer; nor is the score-made-sound the work: the work includes the
performer's mobilizing of previously studied skills so as to embody, to
make real, to make sounding, a set of relationships that are only partly
relationships among sounds.
Let me give an example that is not explicitly feminist, a passage from
the "big" chorale prelude on "Aus tiefer Not" ("Out of the depths I cry
to Thee") in Bach's Clavierubung, Part III, BWV 686 (Example 2). This
is far and away the most physically challenging moment in the piece. Nei-
ther foot can rest long enough to balance the body, neither hand can rest
long enough to balance the body. For these few terrifying measures (ter-
rifying in the organist's experience), one might as well be floating in mid-
air, so confused and constantly shifting is the body's center of gravity.
The terror-and the difficulty-disappear at the place marked by the
arrow.
None of this is audible, except possibly as wrong notes

culations, or some subtle way the organist's return to
result in more confident playing. Certainly, neither harm
puntal analysis would identify this little passage as critical
meaning, much less as what it is to the person playing the
max.
Yet this passage sets the phrase of "Out of the dept

"Send me the grace my spirit needs." Grace is arguabl
the cocomposing ideal listener throughout the phrase
dance-like bass. Grace, dramatically represented as a
body's craving for a place to balance, comes to the organ
the phrase. There are thus two messages about grace her
Bach's mind to the cocomposing listener, and the other a priv
from Bach's mind through the body of the organist to t
mind (which is induced to enact a prayer state-for a Lutheran
grace).
-;__,_
$.S#; 4;_.;
1 : C --
r:r;__. -
rr Cr
[Send me the grace my
3^ r 1 C r
J J . J_
T^r rr r d f
spi - rit needs ]
v r rr r r1 1F r Tr r
EXAMPLE 2
It seems to me self-evident that both messages are part of the work

musical meaning, even though one of them is unheard. Traditionally
equate the purely physical "reading" of this device with sixteenth-centur
Augenmusik (a kind of text-representation that's only visible to the per-
formers, not audible to listeners), and declare both to be musically mean-
ingless:17 to do so, however, is to negate the possibility of performers as
receivers of meaning. To deny musical meaning to things only the pe
formers of a work will know implicitly denies that performers are know
ers, knowers whose knowledge comes from their bodies and their minds
(knowers whose pleasures come from their bodies and their minds).
deny musical meaning to purely physical, performative things is in effect

to transform human performers into machines for the transmission of
mind-mind messages between members of a metaphorically disembodied
class, and, because disembodied, elite.
An embodied music theory, then, would include in its notion of musi-
cal meaning things which could not be heard by even the most attentive
cocomposing listener.
What could an embodied music theory tell us about gender, the sup-
posed intellectual focus of feminist theory? What could it tell us about
music?
If, as Joan Scott argues, gender is always and everywhere a meta-
metaphor of power; and if ultimately musical performances can be
deciphered as simultaneously individual and social enactments of power
(control of the self and control of tools; cooperation with, support of,
domination of one's companions), then we might learn a great deal
about how the norms of gender pass sideways through society by watch-
ing them pass through such bodily actions as musical performance.
Indeed, we might discover implicit as well as explicit gendering attached
to certain musically performative acts, from which we could learn enor-
mous amounts about how music teaches or (possibly more importantly)
unteaches gender. For music draws its performers' (and possibly its lis-
teners') bodies into enacting physical and psychic intimacy with what
thinkers as chronologically diverse as Giovanni Maria Artusi and Edward
Hanslick have identified as music's body, sound itself.18 These enact-
ments of intimacy allow for play with the power dualities implied by our
contemporary gender system. Thus, it may be that we will discover that
much of the pleasure in music is afforded by the opportunity it gives us
to play ourselves free of gender's rigidities.1
Such theorizing might lead thinking about music, European or Euro-
centric music anyway, in quite unlikely directions. It might consider the
notion that musical choices-like one's instrument or medium-might
be gendered in unexpected ways, not for what the instrument or medium
seemed to represent but for what its performance encouraged one to
enact; or for how it characteristically interacted; or for how its perfor-
mance characteristically negotiated the relationship of body and mind. It
might consider the hypothesis that in our time musical performance is
always gendered feminine because it so involves the body; thus, perhaps,
musical performance has acquired the negative prestige usually borne by
the mark of the feminine. If that were so, or to the extent that it was, a
career in musical performance of any kind would require complex negoti-
ations on the part of performers seeking to reclaim their masculinity or
their social prestige. An embodied music theory might consider the
increasing modernist control of performance and, in a

music culture, the virtual erasure of performance from t
as a means of understanding the value of the metaphorica
our high culture. It might thereby understand better t
pearance of musical performance as a behavior conside
responsible adults.
It might investigate the phenomenon that singing, in bo
musics, is a thing more likely to be done by women than
singing alone, without apparent mastery of an instrum
nomenon related to ideas of the body as feminine? For
the most fully embodied kind of music-making and parad
fore, the one which most demands what a piano stude
called "rigorous mind control," the integration of a pe
body to a single end. Is singing's full embodiedness rela
term trend in European art music that has deprivilege
favor of instrumental? Does that long-term trend, acted o
teenth through the twentieth centuries, tell us some
about our culture's responses to the feminine?
These are questions I would like to explore. They don
like questions a music theorist would want to ask; at
sound so to me, a person who has long supposed that th
about the syntax of music's most textlike elements. Certai
imagine how to apply this kind of thinking to the hearing
work-which is why I ran aground in my effort to do s
sible, in fact, that this sort of thinking undermines a
because works are the products of a composer's mind, and
ing intended to complement composer-identified
performer- (and ultimately listener-) identified thinking.
to use such complementary thinking as a means to better
intersections of music and gender, a corollary goal of
would be to restore a recognition of the body's actual cont
web of meanings understood by the word music.
We as listeners and critics can hear much of what m
and in so hearing we more fully know the Mind/Body
music promises-even if we know it only with our mind
limitations of the mind-mind game by acknowledging in o
(analyses, hearings) the mediations and meanings of b
stand to know music more intimately if we know it as a c
sation of (situated) minds and (situated) bodies. And sin
system of power relationships among bodies, we cannot po
the gender content there might be in a given work witho
ing how our music's complex conversations require
behave.
I think this sort of thinking will eventually be

whatever discipline gives it a home. Music theory
for that home because besides offering us a set of p
syntax and structure of works' textlike qualities, m
tradition of theorizing about the phenomenon that
ern era, speculation about music has not been t
music theory-but it has never quite gone away, e
philosophy-oriented corner of the discipline that I
of musical bodies to flourish. In the future, if such
insights to practitioners of the composer-identified
oped in the mainstream, theory would have beco
wants: a theory that can resolve or transcend the M
theory that can explain how musical practices engen
would then be worthy of music itself.20
NOTES
1. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in

Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies
14 (1988): 575-99.
2. Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Trio in D minor: for piano, violin and

cello, op. 11, introduction by Victoria Sirota (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1980). At least four recordings are available: by the Macalester
Trio for Vox Records (SVBX 5112, 1979); by Jean-Claude
Bouveresse, Hughes Mackenzie, and Fran;oise Tillard for Calliope
Records (CAL 1213-14, 1984); by the Clementi Trio for Largo
Records (5103 Largo, 1986); and by the Dartington Piano Trio for
Hyperion Records (CDA 66331 Hyperion, 1989).
3. See Susan McClary, "A Material Girl in Bluebeard's Castle" in Femi-
nine Endings; Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis and Oxford:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1-34, especially 12-17; her
ideas on sonata form as gendered discourse are also central to the
argument of the essay "Sexual Politics in Classical Music," op. cit.,
53-78. Marcia Citron's reading of sonata form as gendered dis-
course is most fully elaborated in the fourth chapter of her forthcom-
ing book Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993). I am very grateful to Professor Citron for
having allowed me to read this chapter in typescript.
4. A. B. Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition (Leipzig,

1845). His clearest reference to the gendering of themes, often
cited, is on page 273:
In diesem Paar von Satzen ist ... der Hauptsatz das zuerst, also
in erster Frische une Energie Bestimmte, mithin das energischer,
markiger, absoluter Gebildete, das Herrschende und Bestim-
mende. Der Seitensatz dagegen ist das nach der ersten energi-
schen Feststellung Nachgeschaffne, zum Gegensatz dienende,
von jenem Vorangehenden Bedingte und Bestimmte, mithin
seinem Wesen nach nothwendig das Mildere, mehr schmiegsam
als markig Gebildete, das Weibliche gleichsam zu jenem vor-
angehenden Mannlichen. Eben in solchem Sinn ist jeder der
beiden Satze ein Andres und erst beide miteinander ein
Hoheres, Vollkommneres.
In this pair of themes ... the main theme is the first one, there-
fore first and foremost the decisive one in freshness and energy,
therefore the one constructed more energetically, more vigor-

ously, more completely-the dominant one and the decisive
one. The subsidiary theme, on the other hand, serves as con-
trast, constructed and determined by the preceding, thus by
nature necessarily the gentle, cultivated more flexibly than vig-
orously-the feminine, as it were, to that preceding masculine.
In this sense each of the two themes is different and only with
the other becomes something higher, more perfect.
I am grateful to Professor Citron for leading me to this exact pas-

sage, and for this translation.
5. For an overview of the genre's history, see Basil Smallman, The Piano
Trio: Its History, Technique and Repertoire (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1990).
6. Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analy-

sis" in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 28-50.
7. Judith P. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of

Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). See also her essay "Imitation
and Gender Insubordination," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay
Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 13-31.
8. Edward T. Cone, The Composer's Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1974). Cone's book has proven to be
the source for much of the most inventive music criticism of the last
decade. Anthony Newcomb has made particularly fruitful use of
Cone's ideas about musical personae, particularly in such essays as
"Once More between Absolute and Program Music: Schumann's
2nd Symphony," 19th Century Music 7 (1984): 233-50; and "Schu-
mann and Late 18th-Century Narrative Strategies," 19th Century
Music 11 (1987): 164-74. Carolyn Abbate has made equally good
use of Cone's ideas in her recent book Unsung Voices: Opera and
Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1991).
9. For an early articulation of the value that great music should be that
understood as a mind-mind game, see E. T. A. Hoffmann's famous
1813 essay on Beethoven's instrumental music in Simtliche Werke,
ed. C. G. von Maasen (Munich and Leipzig, 1908), vol. 1, 55-64.
Excerpts from the essay are translated in William O. Strunk, Source
Readings in Music History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 775-
81. In a passage discussing the intrinsic unity underlying Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony, Hoffmann describes that unity as consisting of "a

deeper relationship which does not reveal itself in this way [by means
of the famous rhythmic motive] speaks at other times only from
mind to mind . . ." (Strunk, 778).
10. Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 587.
11. For a particularly eloquent presentation of this position, see Edward

T. Cone, "The Authority of Music Criticism," Journal of the Ameri-
can Musicological Society 34 (1981): 1-18. In this essay, Cone seems
to argue that critical knowledge of a piece of music is only available
through "its performance, real or imagined" (15). Yet the performer
he imagines is curiously omniscient, having a knowledge of pieces of
music that is, in an embodied reality, available only to performers of
solo repertoire. For all other kinds of pieces, Cone's performer/critic
must know the music through an imagined performance-a disem-
bodied performance that is therefore closer to the situation of
knowledge Cone calls "conception" than to that which he calls "per-
ception," the apprehension of a piece by physical ears. Composer and
critic meet, then, in the disembodied world of "conception." Cone
implies that sometimes the critic has a clearer idea of that world than
the composer. Thus, by implication, the meeting of composer and
critic in this world can occasion a competition between them for
conceptual competency.
12. When an earlier version of this essay was read at the 1992 annual
meeting of the Society for Music Theory, several auditors found my
sudden use of theological language startling, if not on the verge of
offensive. I meant to use imagery that would startle, and felt that use
of theological imagery was consistent with much of the language of
professional music theory, especially the work of Cone. I certainly
did not mean to privilege the view of any traditional European reli-
gion over that of any other; rather, I meant to draw attention to the
way that we have come to use "classical music" as a source of reli-
gious experience, including the kind of experience that temporarily
resolves the perennial Mind/Body problem. For two very differently
situated overviews on the use of "classical music" as a source of reli-
gious experience, see Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music,
trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1989), and Lawrence Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emer-
gence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1988), especially chapter two, "The Sacralization of
Culture."
13. I have intentionally used language here that would evoke the
imagery of birth, to suggest the possibility that part of academic
music's refusal to contemplate the work of performing bodies arises
from just such an intuitive connection between musical performance
and birth-giving, the refusal to contemplate it being a manifestation
of our cultural horror of the act of birth-giving.
14. Such interrogations are already addressed to non-European musics,

both by ethnomusicologists and by participants in the cultures in
question. See, for example, John Baily, "Musical Structure and
Human Movement" in Musical Structure and Cognition, ed. Peter
Howell, Ian Cross, and Robert West (London: Academic Press,
1985), 237-58, on the greater importance of kinesthetic patterns
than sound patterns in the playing of the African kalimba. And see
Bell Yung, "Choreographic and Kinesthetic Elements in Perfor-
mance on the Chinese Seven-string Zither," Ethnomusicology 28
(1984): 505-17. I am grateful to Joseph Dubiel for pointing out
these references to me.
15. See Roland Barthes's famous essay "Musica Practica," in The Respon-
sibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation,
trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985), 261-66, for a beautifully distilled explication of the perform-
ing body's apprehension of music as "something you do."
16. This performer-situated idea of what a musical work is differs sub-
stantially from that proposed by Roman Ingarden in The Work of
Music and the Problem of Its Identity (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1986). In chapter 1, "The Musical Work and Its Perfor-
mance," Ingarden argues that musical works do exist independent of
any performances.
17. The imputation of meaninglessness to Augenmusik was first made in

Alfred Einstein's monumental The Italian Madrigal (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1949). His valuation of compositional
gestures comprehensible only to the performers holding partbooks
has remained a commonplace of the scholarly literature on madrigals.
18. Artusi and Giulio Cesare Monteverdi both referred to sound-
armonia-as constituting the body of music (as distinct from its
soul) in the various documents which made up the so-called Artusi
Monteverdi controversy at the turn of the seventeenth century. See
Claude Palisca, "The Artusi-Monteverdi Controversy" in The New
Monteverdi Companion, ed. Nigel Fortune (New York: Norton
1985), 127-58, and my essay "Gendering Modern Music: Thought
on the Monteverdi-Artusi Controversy," Journal of the American

Musicological Society 46 (1993): 1-25, for two views of the rhetoric
used in this controversy. On Hanslick's views in this regard, see Fred
Everett Maus, "Hanslick's Animism," Journal of Musicology 10
(1992): 273-92.
19. On musical performance as a performer's acting out of intimacy with
the piece played, see my "On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A
Serious Effort Not to Think Straight" in Queering the Pitch: The New
Gay and Lesbian Musicologies, ed. Philip Brett, Gary Thomas, and
Elizabeth Wood (New York: Routledge, 1993).
20. Versions of this essay were presented at "Gender and Music Theory:
A Symposium," University of Virginia, October 1992; at the 1992
Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory, October 1992; and
at the conference "Feminist Theory and Music II: A Continuing
Dialogue," Eastman School of Music, June 1993. I am very grateful
to Joseph Dubiel, Marion Guck, Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, and
William Benjamin for their comments on early drafts of this paper. I
am grateful, too, to my colleagues Elizabeth Hudson, Fred Everett
Maus, and Alicyn Warren for extremely incisive and helpful criti-
cisms; and I acknowledge the influence on my thinking of long con-
versations with Gloria Trode, a singer in Syracuse, New York, and
with Eric Stassen, a percussionist and conducting student at the Uni-
versity of Virginia. I dedicate this essay to Margaret McFadden,
whose graceful struggle with the Mind/Body problem since the
summer of 1992 is the essay's inspiration.

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Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem

Author(s): Suzanne G. Cusick

ONE OF THE FIRST intellectual rituals a person encounters on becoming a

knowers. It is from this idea-that useful knowledge emerges from

qualities, an inclination that is perpetually at odds with the way my per-

' ^'w p i 'rf r , i- - p

Since music theory as I have known it is almost exclusively about

But what had I really done? I had started from a feminist

composer to be as much metaphorical as it was real: it was metaphorical

How could it ever be possible to "hear" (or "read") the g

It might interrogate the social and symbolic meanings embedded in

None of this is audible, except possibly as wrong notes

Yet this passage sets the phrase of "Out of the dept

spi - rit needs ]

It seems to me self-evident that both messages are part of the work

deny musical meaning to purely physical, performative things is in effect

increasing modernist control of performance and, in a

I think this sort of thinking will eventually be

1. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in

2. Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Trio in D minor: for piano, violin and

4. A. B. Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition (Leipzig,

therefore the one constructed more energetically, more vigor-

I am grateful to Professor Citron for leading me to this exact pas-

6. Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analy-

7. Judith P. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of

8. Edward T. Cone, The Composer's Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

Fifth Symphony, Hoffmann describes that unity as consisting of "a

10. Haraway, "Situated Knowledges," 587.

11. For a particularly eloquent presentation of this position, see Edward

14. Such interrogations are already addressed to non-European musics,

17. The imputation of meaninglessness to Augenmusik was first made in

on the Monteverdi-Artusi Controversy," Journal of the American

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