recommended reading (what i've been doing instead of writing)

Soon enough I'll be writing about all of the following: Marshal McLuhan/Understanding Media; Katharine Park/Secrets of Women; Angela Davis/Women, Race & Class; Patricia Hill Collins/Black Feminist Thought; bell hooks/Ain't I A Woman; bell hooks/Art of My Mind; Eco/The Name of the Rose (a delightful escape from feminist theory and Infinite Jest); Eco/History of Beauty; Michael Bull/Sound Moves. Also this.

hungry selves and dfw's "stomach-level sadness"

There's something particularly sad about [being a human being in America at the turn of the millennium], something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.¹

These words of David Foster Wallace as quoted in All Things Shining resounded tonight as I read Kim Chernin's borderline whackadoo neo-Freudian The Hungry Self. Certainly interesting--if a bit extreme; in the end, worth the handful of hours spent reading it. With the aid of some considerable (and at times disturbing) matricidal overtones, Chernin argues that prevalence--one might say, epidemic--of disordered eating in our contemporary world is a proliferation of the "problem with no name." An emptiness incapable of articulation; a transmigratory frustration. Transferred from mothers to daughters, the suffering and indeed deferred dreams of the second wave function as a hollow void to be filled with preoccupations about food.

So often I have thought about the specifically American relationship to food: we are body obsessed over-eaters, under-eaters, fad-dieters, constantly occupied by caloric ruminations. Reading Chernin, I had to ask, do our obsessions stem from a fundamental inadequacy? A (literal) "stomach-level sadness"? Is the promise of the American Dream (and the inability to achieve it) our ultimate undoing?

1. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Sean Kelly. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press, 2011.

for the ladies

A short post, since I'm more than a little fried having read Bitchfest yesterday and The Body Project today. All these books about the female body (you'll remember that it hasn't been that long since I evangelized for The Beauty Myth and Backlash) are part of a burgeoning paper on image, body, and performance (could I be any more broad?!). The abstract is forthcoming, but I'll be using Wolf, Mulvey, Faludi, Butler, Foucault (duh), Virilio and everyone's favorite media studies prophet, Marshall McLuhan. Maybe even a few nuggets from Infinite Jest and All Things Shining. Some questions I am asking: What is the correlation between the shift from internal to external body and the omnipresence of the image? How is the eighteenth-century concept of the woman-as-consumer transformed in the twentieth and twenty-first century when everything from skin to hair to menstruation has become commodified? How has the advertising image replaced the mother as a figure of authority and specifically female knowledge? What is the effect of this? How does the modern American preoccupation with hygiene manifest itself in the treatment and socialization of women? What is the connection between technology, hygiene, efficiency and the body in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What are the specific implications for women? How has Foucault's concept of biopower been transfigured and translated in our contemporary moment?

backlash + the beauty myth: first impressions

Recently, I had the opportunity to read Backlash and The Beauty Myth in close succession. Worse (or better, perhaps) yet, I chose to reread The Transparency of Evil and The History of Sexuality in concert with Faludi and Wolf. The result, as those close to me will attest, was an overabundance of conversations centered on sentiments such as “the world is going to hell” and “I’m so angry about the culture of the nineties.” Indeed, Faludi and Wolf created a haunting picture of the world into which the women of my generation were born. Below I have written some preliminary thoughts on my experience and reactions to the aforementioned texts. However, more than just the feelings of anger and hopelessness Wolf and Faludi stirred within me, their accounts of the third-wave woman’s complex condition inspired several avenues for musical and cultural research--avenues I look forward to exploring over the next several weeks.

I would encourage everyone to engage with these texts, difficult and uncomfortable though they may be. A wise man once said, “you can never be truly free until you understand your conditioning.” Go. Read!

Cognizant only of image, commodity, and base sensations, we drift through a gray peril punctuated by unsettling sameness. Our experience has flattened and spread. Although once noble, the present condition of humanity represents a toxic leak contaminating the sacred, the pristine and the immaculate. Where the child was once a capsule of potentiality and hope, she is now, since the most recent fin-de-siecle, disfigured, grotesque. Like the prodigious birth, like the sixteenth-century horror, like the aberration of unmitigated otherness, late twentieth-century youth entered a world of hostile categories vigorously enforced by a virtual reality and a subtle violence.

We learned that being alive was being abused. We learned that to suffer for beauty was a kind of perverted noblesse oblige. To be thin was to be virtuous and extremes of asceticism and hedonism were strict poles by which we were to model our lives. The uncompromising binary was queen; we were taught that the ideal woman existed in constant conflict: at once living the second-wave dream while yearning for the mystique of feminine docility and domesticity. We learned that to be a woman was to maintain a tenuous balance and willingly endure its pain. We learned to expect violence.

I’ve been ruminating on these two texts for some time, trying to make sense of them within the context of my own socialization, but also within the realm of musical practice. To be a musician is to enjoy a similarly paradoxical relationship with sacrifice, violence and victimization. We inflict the invasive violence of sound upon our spectator while instigating simultaneous symbolic self-immolation. Articulating the phenomenology of music-making is something best left to the experts (Turino! Peirce!), however the body emblazoned by performance constitutes one facet of a complex force-relationship. While we perform music we perform a cycle of violence: our frustrations, our woes, our years of practice transmute into an act of assault; we violate our audience as we have been violated.

blogging adorno: popular music and the "contrived postures of femininity"

Okay, okay. Time to confess: I have never read Introduction to the Sociology of Music. Once upon a time I tried to read Aesthetic Theory, and I am sorry to admit that my head almost exploded. Recently, a friend of mine began his own serious engagement with Adorno; after a few conversations about these studies, I decided it was foolish for me to sit around twiddling my thumbs with Dostoevsky my only literary/philosophical diversion. Eccolo, "baby's first" Adorno. And since every signature looks, more or less, like this:

I hope that you will indulge me as I post some thoughts daily as I make my way. First off, this is an ongoing project. As I read, I find myself overjoyed by the words on the page. Why it has taken me so long to engage with this text, I will never know; frankly, I'm a little irritated with myself that I didn't crack the damn thing open the day I received it in the mail. In any event, here we are, months later.

Prior to my engagement with Teddy, I took a few moments to read Susan Brownmiller's "The Contrived Postures of Femininity." You know I can't get enough of the disciplined, docile feminine body--Brownmiller's essay seemed to be an appropriate summer epilogue to Foucault, Butler, McClary and the rest. Upon reading "The Contrived Posture...", I had a largely predictable reaction: a lovely combination of anger, sadness, and an undeniable aporia (what can be done? how did we get here?). We should all read this in its entirety, however, in conjunction with my recent reading of IttSoM, I couldn't help but be reminded of the following passage and the notion of an ideal femininity (one that fosters and subsequently manipulates desire) based upon a tenuous balance between that which is crass and that which is cultured. Brownmiller writes:

Slowly, it dawned on me that much of feminine movement, the inhibited gestures, the locked knees, the nervous adjustments of the skirt, was a defensive maneuver against an immodest, vulgar display that feminine clothing flirted with in deliberate provocation. My feminine responsibility was to keep both aspects, the provocative and the chaste, in careful balance, even if it meant avoiding the beautifully designed open stairway in a Fifth Avenue bookshop. [1]

Likewise, about popular music, Teddy pens the following:

On the one hand [popular music] must catch the listener's attention, must differ from other popular songs if it is to sell, to reach the listener at all. On the other hand it must not go beyond what audiences are used to, lest it repel them. It must remain unobtrusive, must not transcend that musical language which seems natural to the average listener envisaged by the producers...

Going on, he writes:

The difficulty facing the producer of pop music is that he mus void the contradiction. He must write something impressive enough to be remembered and at the same time well-known enough to be banal. [2]

So why discuss these passages together? Their commonalities exist in their oblique references to a rhetoric of desire and more importantly (and indeed, more distressingly) cultural technologies of coercion. I have quite a bit to say about Adorno, structure/ornament and femininity, certainly. For now, why don't we just use these two passages as preliminary evidence for such a connection. Let's look at what we have here:

Adorno equates the hit song with its ability to traverse that tenuous passage between submission and dominance, the passive and dynamic, that which is familiar and that which is alien. Likewise, Brownmiller discusses that same delicate balance struck by feminine postures and manners. At once submissive and suggestive, the ideally desirable woman must expertly navigate the murky waters of culturally constructed conceptions of the feminine.

This banal observation aside, broader implications surround Adorno's rhetoric. Again and again Teddy returns to the coercive force of music, that it manipulates its "victims" through a manipulation of desire. I don't know about you, but to me this sounds like Brownmiller and countless accounts of the femme fatale. So I leave you with the following question: do Adorno's aesthetics valorize structure, thus devaluing ornament? And, if indeed we accept this premise (and I think we must), is there something intrinsically masculine about Adorno's philosophy of music?

Okay, well, that was a little more sex and gender-y than I originally intended. Stay tuned for tomorrow: sonic landscapes and the distancing, stratification and reification of social classes.YEAH! Adorno is the coolest.

[1] Ashton-Jones, Evelyn, and Gary A. Olson. 1991. The Gender reader. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 543
[2] Adorno, Theodor W. 1989. Introduction to the sociology of music. New York: Continuum. 31

music + violence (part ii: torture)

As you know, I've been thinking about this quite a bit. My current project involves understanding classical music as a product of eighteenth century socio-cultural machinations that constructed the body as a primary locus for the transmission of “culture,” class, and power. In varying guises, physical conditioning and observation were utilized to formulate an ideal, “docile” body.

A good deal of this is inspired by Foucault (here! here!) and McClary (go! read it!), but recent exposure to The Beauty Myth has inspired further thought on the violent effect of disciplinary practices. I've referenced Wolff before, however in light of my current project on the subversive, sinister underpinnings of eighteenth century music, I would like to reference and reflect upon her description of the Iron Maiden and its contemporary analogue, the "modern hallucination" in which we (women) are currently entrapped.

Wolff describes the aesthetic duplicity, formal simplicity, and functional complexity of the Iron Maiden writing: "The original Iron Maiden was a medieval German instrument of torture, a body-shaped casket painted with the limbs and features of a lovely, smiling young woman. The unlucky victim was slowly enclosed inside her; the lid fell shut to immobilize the victim, who died either of starvation or, less cruelly, of the metal spikes embedded in her interior" [1]. Although Wolff likens the device to the very condition (and indeed conditioning) of women in the late twentieth century West [2], the analogy can--I believe--also be applied to eighteenth century music.

Indeed, aesthetic duplicity and formal simplicity provide apt descriptors for the music of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven (and yes, Stamitz). The wise and wonderful Arthur Schnabel once said, "Mozart is too easy for children, but too difficult for professionals." The equally wise and wonderful Alfred Brendel explains this stating that potential performers of Mozart's keyboard works "...either don't see the complications and think the pieces are too easy, or they do see the complications and find them too difficult." [3] Both Schnabel and Brendel articulate the expressive difficulties of eighteenth century music, however I would go further to say that it is this very aesthetic deception that contributes to disciplinary function.

Ostensibly innocuous, music of the classical period reflects those facets of human experience so valued by eighteenth century culture: pleasure, nature, facility, subversive control. Operating similarly to the Iron Maiden, these aspects of classical style pacify potential victims. Circumscribed by perfect proportions, golden means, and symmetrical sameness, both interpreters and listeners are entrapped and subsequently suffocated by an artform that valorizes an intrinsically unattainable ideal. Like the victims of the Iron Maiden, classical performers find a horrific end. It is the deception articulated by Brendel and Schnabel that so effectively ensnares performers and listeners. Fooled by a pleasing facade (the proverbial Iron Maiden), we become unwittingly implicated in and controlled by centuries-old disciplinary practices. We are tortured, contained, and insidiously transformed into instruments of control. Slowly--and indeed painfully--we acquiesce to hegemonic normative practices that reinforce hierarchical social structures based upon class, gender, and ethnicity.

However, where the Iron Maiden operates with relative swiftness, music of the classical era erodes its victims and their surrounding milieu over time. Insidious, its contemporary performance--as a violent practice--is indicative of our age of illusion. The repetition integrated in musical text and integral to effective performance (read: hours spent practicing) divorces the interpreter from musical meaning. Furthermore, the proliferation of recordings of every stripe dehumanize, decorporealize the act of music making. We are instruments in our own virtual deconstruction.

Thus, like victims of the most elegant medieval torture devices our flesh erodes slowly, we are left to vanish piece-meal into the ether: rotting piles of putrid matter.

[1] Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. 17
[2] Ibid. "The modern hallucination in which women are trapped or trap themselves is similarly rigid, cruel, and euphemistically painted. Contemporary culture directs attention to imagery of the Iron Maiden, while censoring real women's faces and bodies."
[3] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4845085

for international women's day

also: here; this; her; them; her; her; this;

music + violence (part i: silence)

Recently, issues of violence, control and suffering have weighed heavy on my mind. I think about the ways in which we do violence to ourselves, how we induce suffering on others, how we are bound to prevailing, subversive cultural systems intended to control our bodies. Obviously there are no bullet points and no simple strategies for resistance.

I cannot help but consider the violence we do to our bodies in the interest of (all forms of) beauty. I am reading Naomi Wolff's The Beauty Myth, and I find profound resonance with the text. We are implicated in this system of control wherein our own bodies are used against us. We feel a strange combination of shame and guilt for our success, and induce psychological and physical suffering to compensate. Wolff argues that this attitude has been fostered by the (patriarchal) institution as a backlash to the successes of the second wave.

Given my current work in eighteenth century cultural/disciplinary machinations, I began to wonder about musical performance as an inherently violent act. If I wanted to wax poetic on the subject, I might suggest that, to interrupt silence with sound is to disrupt the immaculate and ineffable with an inevitably inadequate (and often sullied) expression of being. Going on, I might say, that it is in our nature to destroy this perfect quiet. We cannot remain complacent in the subtle luminescence of silence. Shimmering, it is a microcosmic representation of the infinite--a contemporary analogue to antediluvian moments of quietude preceding the big bang. We are, from the moment of our inception, conditioned by the urge to move forward, to incite catastrophe. If I wanted to wax poetic, that is what I would say.

So how is this intrinsically violent act manifested, resisted, or understood over time? A huge topic to be sure. I've written about an obvious example--Cage's 4'33"--before, however it deserves further visitation in the context of our present discussion of sound as intrinsically violent and catastrophic. Although I would hate to fall into the composer-biography trap, in Cage's case--considering his historical moment and his espousal of (all forms of) silence--it seems appropriate. Given his identification with Buddhist philosophy, could we read Cage's 4'33" as musical pacifism? Cage, not wanting to participate in inherently violent discourses of and about music, creates a "musical" work designed to resist--through silence--the intrinsically violent nature of music.

generation - reproduction - proliferation

Recently, I revisited Thomas Laqueur's comprehensive text, Making Sex, to refresh my knowledge of eighteenth century gender constructions. In discussing the dramatic epistemological changes occuring during the "age of enlightenment" Laqueur points out an ostensibly trivial change in nomenclature noting the change from "generation" to "reproduction" in the eighteenth century. [1] Laqueur further elucidates this change, and its accompanying relationship to the body-as-machine ideology, quoting Fontanelle: "...put the Machine called a Dog, and the Machine called a Bitch to one another for some time, and there may result another little Machine." [2]

I've written before about this concept of bio-power--that, in the eighteenth century, we start to see the institutionalization of the body. Effectively, reproduction becomes a concern of the state due to--among and in conjuction with other things--a burgeoning global economy. Creepy, no? When we consider the word "reproduction" in this context, it takes on the added connotation of mechanized reproduction. Furthermore, if one examines the prevalance and popularity of the body explained as a great machine (a microcosm of the universe as a watch, with God the divine engineer), such imagery can only be linked to industrialization.

Today, we find ourselves approaching a kind of "zero hour." Pessimistic though it may be, I would argue (and yes, Baudrillard would likely back me up) that we cannot remain in the purgatory of fractal expansion we have created. Words like "advance" "develop" "create" no longer accurately express the twenty-first centruy condition of production. Rather, we find ourselves in a paradoxically static dimension of proliferation: reproduction without conciousness, expansion lacking telos. Inundated by imagery, information and material we are entrapped by the unreal. Dissociated from experience we find ourselves espoused to that which is external and fundamentally alien. Adrift in an ocean of excess, the terrific and the grotesque commune with one another in post-modern bacchanalian revelry.

Where "generation" implies something sacred and singular, "reproduction" participates in rhetoric of multiplicity, duplication, and interchangeability. Upping the proverbial ante, "proliferation" culls images of crass overpopulation, a planet teeming with perverse, meaningless life.

[1] Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990.

[2] Ibid.

samuel steward + john cage = foucauldian resistance

So I read this book, and then I read this article. The combination of the two forced me to think about means of resistance. How did these two artists utilize silence and documentation to resist marginalization and persecution of homosexuals in mid-century America?

Eccolo, excerpts from a recent paper:
Traversing numerous cultural boundaries, Samuel Steward’s narrative invites understanding not only of the homosexual experience in twentieth century American culture, but also the lingering effects of eighteenth century treatments of sexuality. Spring chronicles Steward’s unconventional trajectory: the journey from precocious university student to Parisian literati to unfulfilled academic, tattoo artist, and finally Steward’s tragic end in a filthy Berkeley apartment, a space pregnant with poignant recollections of an ultimately hollow past. Through Spring’s aforesaid elucidation, recurring themes are illustrated, the most pervasive being obsessive representation in the form of documentation, fastidious record keeping, a kind of sexual curiosity cabinet, and artistic output (Steward’s oeuvre in both literature—the Andros novels—and body art).

Spring provides insight into the homosexual experience in twentieth century America, revisiting in various guises themes of reticence and declaration. Providing a theoretical framework for the subsequent discussion, Foucault writes:

"Silence itself--the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers--is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies." (1)

Indeed, homosexuality was that which was “forbidden to name” in mid-century America. While Steward resisted hegemonic normativity through artistic production and collection, others utilized silence to oppose a tradition of discriminatory discourse. Through a comparison to American composer John Cage’s reticence, Steward’s obsessive record keeping, “curiosity cabinet,” novels, and tattoos can be understood as the violent vocalizations complementing Cage’s silent resistance.

The life and output of American composer John Cage are both mired in complexity: drawing on cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary inspirations, Cage’s oeuvre is inextricably linked to his personal life (2). Thus through a brief overview of his works, one can better understand the means by which Cage resisted the construction of homosexual deviancy in mid-century America and throughout history.

The most pertinent form of “silent resistance” can be understood through noticing Cage’s relationship to the concept and implications of authorship. The aleatoric practices with which Cage began to experiment in the late 1930s (3) signal the composer’s separation from the western art music tradition and the culture therein—decidedly elitist, masculine. Rather than assert his authorship, thus assuming the role of male genius with all its history and implications, Cage opts for a “third way.” Authorship is neither valorized nor vilified, but rather, it is merely vacant thus offering a new space for artistic production and analysis.

Steward’s authorship, like Cage’s, similarly creates a novel forum for interpretation. However, where Cage creates this space through aleatory (a form of authorial silence), Steward vigorously asserts his authorship through veiled identities (Phil Andros, Phillip Sparrow, for example) and secret histories. Although Steward participates in a culture obsessed with authorship and “naming,” he does so from the safety of his secrets. By positioning himself in a space of truth-keeping, Steward fulfills one facet of a Foucauldian force relation: knowing that which is true (Steward’s identity apart from his pseudonyms and social subterfuges) imbues him with power.

Additionally, Steward’s records, documents, and “curiosity cabinet” speaks to his need to validate his experiences within the framework of the Western scientific tradition while maintaining participation in a discourse around authorship. For Steward, the documentation of his sexual activities returned them to cultural norms in that they became part of the accepted discourse on sexuality—that of containment, order, and scientific rationality.

Though less conventional, Steward’s experience as a tattoo artist operates within the same documentation compulsion. However, rather than producing a scientific document, Steward imprints a part of himself upon another. The tattoo thus functions not only as a document but also a representation of the artist. Following the tradition of art as the offspring of its creator, Steward’s tattoos take on a new complexity. If one considers the tattoo as an extension of Steward, then he has created a mobile, plural, identity for himself further complicated by tropes of genius, pleasure, pain, bodily mutilation and control.

The tattoo as part of Steward’s artistic output, read through familiar notions of genius, also suggests a “queer” interpretation of hetero-normative social practices. Often, the impulse to procreate, aside from simple biology, is mired in cultural and social expectations: to create offspring is to ensure the continuation of familial tradition: a kind of immortality. Because of Steward’s homosexual identity and historical context, this type of immortality was unavailable to him thus he sought—consciously or not—alternative methods, the tattoo for example. More than merely visual, the tattoo as an artistic expression and subsequent experience is loaded with a multiplicity of socio-cultural meanings and implications. Finally, in contrast with Cage’s authorial and literal silence (the composer’s aleatoric oeuvre and 4’33”, respectively), Steward’s tattoos are declarations: mobile artworks visible to the public eye, created through a process inextricably bound to both pain and power.

(1) Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 27
(2) “Jonathan Katz,” http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/KatzPages/KatzWorse.html.
(3) Robert Morgan, Anthology of Twentieth-century Music (W.W.Norton, 1992). 360

the cmm reading list + a chilling look at things to come

Oh, hello there, CMM blog, didn't see you there. I've read so many things since last we spoke; thus begins the CMM reading list. I recommend: Weimar Culture/Gay; Fin-de-Siecle Vienna/Schorske (a perennial favorite, always useful); History of Sexuality/Foucault (more like a history on the discourse surrounding sexuality); Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud/Lacquer; Discipline and Punish/Foucault; Feminine Endings/McClary (did I already mention this one?); Craft Objects, Aesthetic Contexts: Kant, Heidegger, and Adorno on Craft/Corse; Queer Mother for the Nation/Fiol-Matta; Telling Stories/Maynes; How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves/Eakin; Secret Historian/Spring; The Book of Questions/Jabès; "John Cage's Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse"/Katz (read it in its entirety here); The Gutai Manifesto/Yoshihara (available here). And "Death of the Author" again. Why isn't Barthes required reading for musicians?!

With all these things swimming around in my mind, what does the future hold?
1. Cage as Modernist. We like to believe that Cage's iconic 4'33'' is all about the expression of post-modern plurality and his aleatroric oeuvre an ode to absent authors a la Barthes. But what if, by reducing music to its essential elements (as in 4'33"), Cage offers a musical analogue to a Greenbergian (yes, Greenbergian) concept of art? I am referencing that which Greenberg would refer to as "post-painterly abstraction" and that all-too-loaded descriptor "modern."

2. Hindemith as Author: Conflicting Temporalities, Conflicting Epistemologies. There is a passage from "Death..." that surfaces in my mind with alarming frequency:

The Author...is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the annunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. [1]

Most recently, these words appeared (figuratively speaking of course) as I practiced this concerto's introductory soliloquy. So much of Hindemith's musical material aligns him with a modern (ascetic) compositional style: an organicism indebted to Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and (papa) Schoenberg, an interest in structural austerity (Adolf Loos, anyone?), and aesthetic aims ostensibly opposed to nineteenth century decadence. In the case of Der Schwan, however, Hindemith's reference to storytelling in a musical space creates a paradox of temporalities: at once the performer acts as Author reconstituting that which has already occurred through his/her performing body while also engaging in a performative act, the "here and now."

3. Ornament, Asceticism and The Modern. As intimated in the preceding text, for the Moderns (that is to say, the fin-de-siecle Vienna intelligentsia), art ought to be imbued with both austerity and spirituality resulting in an asceticism that traces its progenitor to--surprisingly enough--Kantian aesthetics. Through explications on excerpts from Schoenberg's Style and Idea, Hermann Bahr's essay The Modern, and Weininger's Sex and Character I will elucidate the bondage of modernity to a intrinsically masculine spirituality that seeks to humiliate artistic "flesh" as a means to achieve aesthetic purity.

4. Anna Morandi Manzolini's Oeuvre in the "Century of Looking." A wax anatomist devalued by her contemporaries and subsequently the art historical canon, Morandi Manzolini provides, in her life and work, a lens through which to view a culture obsessed with looking. Although numerous feminist scholars have sought to reclaim and subsequently valorize Morandi Manzolini as a scientist and artist, more efficacious is the utilization of her work as a means by which to illuminate the eighteenth century urge to order, observe and control the body.

5. Performing Bodies, Objects in Motion. I read this passage from Feminine Endings and couldn't help but formulate a few thoughts. McClary writes:

For women’s bodies in Western culture have almost always been viewed as objects of display. Women have rarely been permitted agency in art, but instead have been restricted to enacting—upon and through their bodies—the theatrical, musical, cinematic, and dance scenarios concocted by male artists. Centuries of this traditional sexual division of cultural labor bear down upon…any woman performer…when she performs, always threatening to convert her once again into yet another body set in motion for the pleasure of the masculine gaze. It may be possible for men in the music profession to forget these issues, but no woman who has ever been on a stage, or even in front of a classroom, can escape them. [2]

The performing musician confronts the aforesaid crisis daily. Western art music is inextricably bound not only to a culture of insidiously subtle oppression but also within a web of Foucauldian force relations. As performers, listeners and scholars we participate in musical systems of inequity wherein our own bodies and those of our colleagues, students and teachers move perilously (and sadly, often aimlessly) through a minefield of subjugating gazes, historically conditioned responses, and unwittingly discriminatory discourses.

Excited?

1. Roland Barthes, Image, music, text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 145
2. Susan McClary, Feminine endings : music, gender, and sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 138