Masculinity and western musical practice

About this book

"How have men used art music? How have they listened to and brandished the musical forms of the Western classical tradition and how has music intervened in their identity formations? This collection of essays addresses these questions by examining some of the ways in which men, music and masculinity have been implicated with each other since the early modern period. Feminist musicologies have already dealt extensively with music and gender, from the 'phallocentric' tendencies of the Western tradition, to the explicit marginalization of women from that tradition. This book builds on that work by turning feminist critical approaches towards the production, rhetorical engagement and subversion of masculinities in fourteen different musical case studies. In other disciplines within the arts and humanities, 'men's studies' is a well-established field. Musicology has only recently begun to address music's engagement with masculinity and as a result has sometimes thereby failed to recognise its own discursive misogyny. This book does not seek to cover the field comprehensively but, rather, to explore in detail some of the ways in which musical practices do the cultural work of masculinity. The book is structured into three thematic sections: (1) effeminate/virile musics and masculinities, (2) national masculinities and national musics, and (3) the masculine voice. Within these themes, the book ranges across a number of specific topics: late medieval masculinities; early modern constructions of the male author and military masculinities; seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas of creativity and gender; masculinity, imperialist and nationalist ideologies in the nineteenth century, and constructions of the masculine voice in nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera and song. While the case studies are methodologically disparate and located in different historical and geographical locations, they all share a common concern for a critical revaluation of the role of masculinity (in all it's varied representations) in art music practices."--Jacket.