A Critique of Current Research on Music and Gender

Author(s): Anne Dhu Shapiro

Source: The World of Music , 1991, Vol. 33, No. 2, Women in Music and Music Research
(1991), pp. 5-13
Published by: VWB - Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43561301

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A Critique of Current Research
on Music and Gender

Anne Dhu Shapiro

For us to use a girl singer in our band, she would have to have a really distinctive
voice - and it would be hard to have a girl anyway because she would stand out as
the star.1

This quote, from a member of a teenage group of five boys who have been
playing together as an amateur "heavy-metal" rock band for four years under
the name "Krazler" (the last name of one of their members), encapsulates some
of the realities and attitudes that form the basis for this paper - a critique of
current research on music and gender.
I shall return to the quote and to the band, but I'd first like to review what the
nature of research on music and gender has been. Of course, in an article of
this length, I cannot hope to do justice to the scope of all the writing that has gone
on for over a decade on gender and music, but I will try to characterize some
of the major trends, and from that characterization as well as my own ongoing
research, construct an argument for new directions for studies in music and
gender in this last decade of the 20th century. In this review I am indebted to
the prior research of many people; I will mention here only Ellen Koskoff, editor
of "Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective" (Koskoff 1 987), Barbara
L. Hampton, editor of "Music and Gender" (Hampton [forthc]), Marcia Herndon
and Susanne Ziegler, editors of "Music, Gender, and Culture" (Herndon &
Ziegler 1 990), and members of the Study Group on Music and Gender of the
ICTM in discussions over the past six years.

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6 • the world of music 33(2) - 1991

During the past decade a great deal of research on women in music has
been published by both historical musicologists and ethnomusicologists.2
Much of the research has been an attempt to redress the imbalance of male-
oriented studies - a sort of "catching up" in each category of study - typically
represented by the discovery of a woman composer or performer in an era or
society previously investigated only in terms of men's music.
For example, in Ellen Koskoffs book just mentioned, five of the fifteen
essays focus on historical aspects of a particular women's genre or an
individual performer in one or another culture; another five describe current
women's genres in cultures such as Bulgaria, Java, Afghanistan, Greece, and
Sephardic Jews in the diaspora. The remaining five articles in that volume are
what Koskoff calls "anthropological in orientation" that is, presenting analyses
of cultural/musical settings and having titles which emphasize societal struc-
ture and contain such phrases as "Women's Musical Role," "Inversion and
Conjuncture," "Musical Expression and Gender Identity," "Gender and Music"
and "Power and Gender." These are more likely to focus on both males and
females and their relationships in society, and are thus the only articles explicitly
about music and gender as opposed to music and women. However, in any
society which includes both women and men , the study of women's music may
be seen as a study of music and gender, even if men are not explicitly
mentioned.
Thus the articles outlined above represent three of the major kinds of
research being done on music and gender: historical research, genre research,
and cultural anthropology applied to music. The topics under these headings
are as potentially unlimited as the cultures and genres which provide their
material. But cutting across these categories one also finds political attitudes
and biases that limit expansion not only of research on music and gender but
of its potential usefulness to the field of ethnomusicology. These limiting
attitudes can be summarized as follows:
(1 ) the study of music and gender is most often conducted as a study of
women's music and is most often done by women;3
(2) the women seen as most worth studying are usually those who hold
equivalent status to the professional male musicians in a culture;4
(3) a corollary of #2: if their cultures do not give talented female performers
equal status to male professionals, this is deemed wrong;
(4) the expression of femaleness in music is most often found in the texts or in
the context of performance, rather than in the music itself;
(5) the granting of a "non-music" status to a performance genre done by
females is construed as a degradation of that genre; and
(6) perhaps most important, the gender make-up of the performing and

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 Shapiro, A Critique of Current Research ■ 7

composing forces of music is studied in separation from other, "non-

musical" aspects of culture.
As is clear from the presence of words such as "worth," "wrong" and
"degradation" in the six attitudes described, they are value-laden, but when
couched in musicological or anthropological language the values often remain
unexamined or are less than openly stated. Such hidden polemics do the field
harm and fail to explore fully the rich possibilities inherent in both gender and
music.
My own feeling is that it is important to look at gender both in and around
music as expressive of a society's arrangements as to power and authority. But
to do so completely, the entire social complex surrounding the music must be
considered: male and female, private and public music, elite and popular
musics, performers and audience, composers and consumers, and the busi-
ness and middlemen involved in purveying the music. Most importantly, at the
present time, with gender relationships influx the world over, it is particularly
important not to pre-judge and evaluate the activities of another society on the
basis of some model of progress which we as presumably "liberated" Western
professional researchers have incorporated.
Carol Robertson, in her article in the Koskoff book, "Power and Gender in
the Musical Experiences of Women," opens with a statement of how musical
performance can serve as an instrument of power:

There are many ways in which music touches the lives of women in specific cultural settings.
My concerns herein are with a broad, comparative view of performance as an instrument of
power and gender definition. In the hands of humans music and its adjunct behaviors can either
limit or expand the social, ritual, and political access and awareness of women, men, and
children (Robertson 1987:225).

While I would agree with her general statement, I would suggest that the
performance of music perse does not have to do with power, but authority. The
difference between the two has to do with coercion - power refers to the ability
to force someone to do or refrain from doing something against his or her will,
be it economically, by law, or by social sanction; authority is the ability to define
a role for oneself in society and to fulfill it competently, often joining with others
to do it. When a person finds his or her authority, it is not something that is easily
taken away. In this case, authority refers to the role people take up when they
make music. While the means - and the rewards - for making certain kinds of
music can be withheld by a group in power, the actual making of music cannot
be coerced, nor can it be totally silenced when a person or group takes the
authority to produce it. The exact form a particular music takes is often
influenced by power structures, but, short of death, the will to make music
cannot be easily extinguished. The substitution of hand-clapping and body-

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8 • the world of music 33(2) - 1991

patting for the drums banned in the southern U.S. slave culture, and the
substitution of fiddle and mouth music for the banned Highland bagpipes in
1 8th-century Scotland are well-known illustrations of the principle that music
will find an outlet despite attempts to ban it.
To play, sing, or compose a piece of music is to take personal authority for
a certain length of time in creating and presenting a version of one's life. The
person or persons assuming the authority will usually draw on the conventions
of the surrounding society - and even on its power structures and their
definitions, limitations, and ways of developing access to resources for
presentation. But, except in cases of certain kinds of religious music, such a
performance does not in itself represent power, since it probably cannot
change people against their will. It is instead one of the most effective ways of
expressing some aspect of the way life is for an individual or group. And, as a
way to define an aspect of life, others can take their own authority to join and
be changed by it.5 Taking the performance seriously - its sound as well as any
text or extra-musical meaning - may give insight into the way performers feel
about themselves and their position. Adding to it the context of the performance
and its surroundings, including the non-musical ones, may give further insight
into how they fit into society as a whole. Paying particular attention to gender
and gender relationships is one important route to including the totality of the
context.
For example, in a paper previously presented at the International Council
for T raditional Music I reported on the seemingly near-silent role of the women
who participate in the girls' puberty rite of the Mescalero Apache, where the
sung ceremony is normally carried on solely by men.6 The ceremony, which
extends over a period of five days and four nights, involves the intense
participation of both male and female members of the pubescent girl's family,
as well as that of the whole tribal community. The ceremony itself is held
together in large part by music, which plays a role in creating both auditory
space and a ritual time-frame in which the ceremony is brought into existence.7
The audible makers of music are the singers, sometimes known as medicine
men, who are male, and the teams of singers, also male, who accompany the
dancing of the Mountain Spirits. The musical role of the women has been much
harder to ascertain, because it is both less audible and less visible. Neverthe-
less, it is crucial in seeing how the ceremony as a whole works. The most
important musical role is held by the medicine women and female relatives who
sit inside the ceremonial tipi during the dance of the girl undergoing the
ceremony. At precisely timed intervals during the songs sung by the medicine
men, the women emit a high-pitched glissando from behind their blankets,
sounds which not only create an aura of the sacred, but also serve the very

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 Shapiro, A Critique of Current Research • 9

III. 1 . Girls preparing for final portions of a ceremony with singer and sponsor. Mescalero Apache
Reservation , New Mexico

practical function of helping the medicine men to keep track of the many
repetitions involved in the songs. By including these deliberate and accurately
timed glissandi made by the medicine woman, as well as the sounds made
during the dance by the girl herself (whose dress is equipped with bangles
deliberately designed to make a soft jingling sound), and the subliminal
humming of onlookers, the gender balance of the whole ceremony becomes
more obvious. By thinking also of the activities associated with the ceremony
that are not musical but contribute to the success of the whole - the preparation
of ritual and other foods, the bathing and preparation of the girl - we are able
to construct a gender-balanced picture that much more accurately represents
how the Apaches themselves seem to view the relationship between the
genders in their own society than the one which holds simply that men are the
music makers and women are silent. The Apache view of male and female sees
the genders as èqual, but differentiated, with women especially singled out and
celebrated at certain points in their lives (as for example in the puberty
ceremony), just as they are heard infrequently but significantly during the

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10 • the world of music 33(2) - 1991

ceremony. Women, though seldom heard singing publicly, do not express

regret at their silence. And the medicine women, whose role in keeping track
of musical repetition by providing the mysterious sound associated with the
goddess is crucial, are well aware of their importance - as are male singers who
depend on them. They do not call the sound they make music, however; their
word for it is "noise." Nor is this a denigration. It is a "holy noise," used to call
out the female deity.
In the same paper I reported on the anomalous appearance of a young
woman as one of the apprentice singers in recent ceremonies, and speculated
that her participation in a normally male role might reflect the effect of feminist
influences from the dominant Anglo culture. Her easy acceptance in this role
by the tribe, however, argues against hers as a rebellious stance, and I must
hold in abeyance my Western-influenced assumptions - that an ambitious
young female would naturally aspire to the more public medicine man's
performance role rather than the "quieter" woman's role - until further evidence
is in.
The Apache example shows that only by including as part of the gender
structure non-musical as well as musical components of the ceremony, and
only by listening carefully to what the people within the culture say about the
roles which they perform with so much authority, can a balanced picture
emerge.
With these principles in mind, let me return to the example which opened
the paper: the teenage boys who formed an amateur rock band that excluded
females from the ranks of its performers. While teenage rock music is often
looked upon as an expression of rebellion against mainstream society, my view
is more that the teen years in general offer the chance to distill (and often
creatively distort) the important structures and arrangements of the adult world
around them.
Let me reiterate the quotation from the band member:

For us to use a girl singer in our band, she would have to have a really distinctive voice - and
it would be hard to have a girl anyway because she would stand out as the star.

Among other things, this statement illuminates the tension so characteristic of

American society between democratic egalitarianism and the push for individ-
uality: the lead voice should be distinctive, but it should not be someone (in this
case, a female) who will stand out too much.
At the same time, and far more obviously, the statement illuminates and
exaggerates the tension and inequality between males and females in the
surrounding adult society - the feeling that the appearance of a female on stage
will disrupt the basically egalitarian structure of the band (and, no doubt, create

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 Shapiro , A Critique of Current Research • 1 1

sexual tensions within it). Instead, the norm for bands of this sort is for the all-
male band to appear facing an audience whose front ranks are composed
largely of females, who are undifferentiated in this role, since their major
contribution is to show appreciation, vocally and in body language, forthe band.
One could hypothesize that the structure serves as a mirror for a hierarchical
society with males still in the most visible positions, and females filling the
supportive clerical, secretarial and caretaker roles in large numbers. The mirror
is not a simple one, however, and elements of the society's confusion of gender
roles make their way both visually and audially into the band: males with
carefully cultivated long hair in an otherwise short-haired society, and, most
relevant to the topic of music, the prized high voice of the male lead singer and
back-ups. The band who doesn't want a female singer does want a sound in
a high, audible range, not normally associated with the contemporary Western
male voice. In the case of the band under study, the lead singer, ultimately
successfully replaced by the band (by another male) barely had a normal high-
baritone range, and his pitch in that range often wandered wildly.8 He was
reduced to shouting, posturing, and often being inaudible, a problem which
became particularly acute once the band began to make demo tapes.
Discussion of the band's performance, though, is incomplete in terms of the
gender picture without the screams of the girls in the audience, who, like the
women participating in the Apache puberty rite, are far from silent. A complete
analysis of a garage-rock performance (most likely at a local high-school or
park, or, in the case of successful groups, at a small club) would include the
sounds, physical location, and actions of the audience as well as the band.
While the female role is not as structured as the Apache example, it is possible
that some clear patterns would be found even in the seemingly chaotic sound
of girls' screams.

Conclusions

Based on the six attitudes outlined above, as well as the brief examples
described above, my critique of current research on music and gender is that
in the zeal to right old wrongs, we often fall prey to bad scholarship and become
ethnocentric. We too often substitute the prejudices and wishes of our own
cultures for a close, hard look at how things are elsewhere - and why - and we
fail to take seriously the idea that cultures express in music something true
about themselves. Our task as ethnomusicologists is to discover and appreci-
ate what that is rather than to wish it were otherwise.8 The art of perceptive
description and analysis without such prejudice is difficult to achieve - it means
finding in ourselves true empathy with elements of societies that in their overall
gender arrangements seem to differ radically from ours. For example, the

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12 • the world of music 33(2) - 1 991

deliberate avoidance of singing by the married women of the Greek village

described by Susan Auerbach in Koskoff's book (Auerbach 1987) has its
counterpart - albeit non-musical - in Western culture in the still viable image of
the "good married woman" who does not flaunt herself or her independence,
though she may well competently carry on a career. In deference to her
husband's career, she does not "sing" about hers, but instead saves her public
utterances to those connected with her family role, just as the "singing" of the
Greek women after marriage is confined to ritual laments for the family-related
activities of weddings and funerals rather than the freer songs of their youth.
In our example, rather than saying that the boys in the Krazler band "should"
let girls into the band, we can try to understand why they don't, and, most
important, document where girls do come into the picture, in this case, as
important and active members of the audience.
To escape both the new prejudices and the old limits of male-oriented
research I am suggesting that we think about the gendered structures of society
that sustain and surround musical performance. We must consider the
musicians, yes - but also their audiences, both active and passive; the silent
ones, the ones who dance, the ones who make "noise," the ones who are paid
and praised as well as the ones who take up their own authority to sing out who
they are, whether or not they are recognized for it.
We must extend these structures outward from the actual sounding music
until we can see clearly the relationships not only between genders but also
between music and non-music. This approach leads away from both ethnocen-
trism and what I will call "musico-centrism," for lack of a better term. That is,
despite our continued focus on music, we must remain conscious of the non-
musical contexts, especially of gender. The whole field of ethnomusicology
might thus be enriched by studies in music and gender.

[Final version received: May 8, 1991]

Notes

1 Quoted from a member of Krazler, a "garage-rock" band from the suburbs of Boston,
Massachusetts, May 1 989.
2 The ethnomusicological literature in particular is well summarized in Koskoff's introductory
essay in Koskoff 1987:1-23. Since the publication of that book in 1987, there have been other
important contributions. Among them, Vander 1 988 and Keeling 1 989; as well as many journal
articles.
3 In the Herndon & Ziegler 1 990, all the authors are women, and about two-thirds of the articles
are devoted exclusively to women's music.

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 Shapiro , A Critique of Current Research • 13

4 There are signs of a change in this attitude seen in Herndon & Ziegler 1 990 in which several of
the essays are devoted to women's music by non-professionals.
5 There is ongoing discussion in the sphere of Western music of all kinds, ranging from Wagner
to rock, as to whether some kinds of music do in fact coerce their listeners into feeling a certain
way. My own view is that such an effect on feeling requires prior consent by the listener and that
this is often withheld, especially when the music is outside the usual cultural sphere of the listener
(e.g., an older person listening to rock; a teenager listening to Wagner).
6 "Silent Music: the Role of Women in Native-American Ceremonial Music," was presented at the
1987 Meeting of the ICTM in East Berlin. In a revised state it is scheduled to be published in
Hampton [forthcl.
7 For a complete account of the role of music in this ceremony cf. Shapiro & Talamantez 1 986:77-
90.
8 The question may reasonably arise as to how this singer was chosen in the first place; the pattern
for many garage-rock groups is to form first on the basis of friendship and ownership of
instruments. In the case of a singer, when he is not also a player, issues of friendship with other
players and of general popularity and personality often loom larger than actual singing talent -
at least until the band moves toward a more musically developed stage.
9 This task as researchers may well be different from our task as mothers and fathers or even as
consumers or creators of music, roles in which we may well wish to take definite stands on what
music should sound like and who should be included. The personal and ethnomusicological
roles should not be confused, however, or we will not learn much of value.

References

Auerbach, Susan
1 987 "From Singing to Lamenting: Women's Musical Role in a Greek Village." In Women
and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Ellen Koskoff, ed. Contributions in Wom-
en's Studies 79. New York: Greenwood Press, 25-43.
Hampton, Barbara L. (ed.)
[forthc] Music and Gender Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Herndon, Marcia & Susanne Ziegler (eds.)
1 990 Music , Gender , and Culture. Intercultural Music Studies 1 . Wilhelmshaven: Florian
Noetzel.
Keeling, Richard H. (ed.)
1 989 Women in North American Indian Music: Six Essays. The Society for Ethnomusicol-
ogy, Special Series No. 6. Bloomington, IN: Society for Ethnomusicology.
Koskoff, Ellen
1 987a [Introduction]. In Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Ellen Koskoff, ed.
Contributions in Women's Studies 79. New York: Greenwood Press, 1 -23.
Koskoff, Ellen (ed.)
1 987b Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Contributions in Women's Studies
79. New York: Greenwood Press.
Robertson, Carol
1 987 "Power and Gender in the Musical Experiences of Women." In Women and Music in
Cross-Cultural Perspective. Ellen Koskoff, ed. New York: Greenwood Press,
Shapiro, Anne Dhu & Inés Talamantez
1986 "The Mescalero Girls' Puberty Ceremony: The Role of Music in Structuring Ritual
Time." Yearbook of the International Council for Traditional Music 1 8:77-90.
Vander, Judith
1 988 Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women. Urbana, III. : Univer-
sity of Illinois.

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