Susan McClary Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Susan McClary is a musicologist considered to be a significant figure in the "New Musicology" because of her work combining musicology and feminism in Feminine Endings (ISBN 0816641897). "Feminine Ending" is a musical term once commonly used to denote a weak phrase ending or cadence.She outlines the questions she has focused on in her feminist work:
- 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.
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 terrority to be explored and conquered, assimilated into the self and stated in the tonic home key.
McClary set the feminist arguments of her early book in a broader socio-political context with Conventional Wisdom (2000, ISBN 0520232089), since this allows a less critical tone the book also seems more optimistic. In it, she argues that the tradition 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 oppresive and hegemonic, some affirmative and resistant, in music through the reference of musical conventions in the blues, Vivaldi, Prince, Philip Glass, and others.
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. She is often attributed with first suggesting or claiming that Beethoven's Fifth is a musical enactment of rape, such as Glenn Lamont (http://www.freeradical.co.nz/content/41/41fioar2.html), who quotes her as saying, in 1987: "The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music... which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist." However, by 1991, Feminine Endings reveals a strikingly similar, and different, passage: "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 being before the subject of the symphony has managed to achieve its identity."
McClary herself admits that her analyses, though intended to deconstruct, flirt with essentialism.
Susan McClary is on the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is married to the musicologist Robert Walser.
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This is an Article on Susan McClary. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Susan McClary Quotes
Selected bibliography
See also
External links