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theses

“I confess I enjoyed accentuating the character, perhaps as a provocation!” Thus Isabelle Aboulker, a renowned contemporary French composer, justified setting a viciously misogynistic text by Jean de la Fontaine in her song “La femme noyée” (The Drowned Woman). Her comment demonstrates a deliberate strategy for proactively and provocatively engaging with her own problematic cultural history through composition. This is just one of many approaches that contemporary female composers take to the negotiation of gender in their work.
This dissertation addresses Aboulker’s approach, together with those of Libby Larsen, Caroline Shaw, Pamela Z, and other composers and composer-performers of the current generation to the composition of art songs and vocal music in the twenty-first century. Engaging with musical-textual interpretation, performance studies, and emerging theories of collaborative musicianship, I develop an approach to their work that takes account of both creative musical acts and the social and historical place of the composers in question. My research addresses three central issues in feminist musicological scholarship through the analysis of both notated music and live and recorded performances of art song: first, the relationships and tensions between poetic text and musical composition; second, the focus of female bodies in performance as a site for the construction of meaning; and third, the category of the “female composer” as a marked and often derogatory term. Using a variety of examples by women composers with diverse compositional styles, I offer fresh insight into the multifaceted musical experiences of women in performance and composition.
My work draws on interdisciplinary methodologies both to destabilize traditional hermeneutic interpretation and to develop a new set of tools for a feminist understanding of musical works by women. Ultimately, I argue, the conventional focus on musical text as the primary object of study is a detriment to more dynamic areas of cultural production. Drawing attention away from the “text,” I focus instead on the women and on female body as conduits of composition, performance, listening, and understanding.

ETD_9841

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-7k28-jj29

ETD doctoral

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