My chosen period, the late eighteenth century, brought additional challenges. Music making, including something approaching a mania for composing, was then so widespread among amateurs of both sexes that a historically oriented study of the period needed to come to terms with this phenomenon. This period also saw the emergence of writing about music as a widespread and professionalized activity, taking the diverse forms of musical theory, pedagogy, criticism, reviewing, aesthetics, and history. Such writing presupposed, and helped to form, a readership in thrall to self-improvement and polite conversation, for whom knowledge about music was as important as its practice. Limiting the scholarly focus to images of women in texted and operatic music would likely fall flat.
This book traces a journey through this challenging and rapidly changing terrain. A collection of relatively self-standing essays written across a decade or more, the book reflects my evolving understanding of what gender studies can contribute to scholarship on a period no longer called classical. There is a cost in presenting my material as a series of related fragments. Unities of style and method are jeopardized, and the book does not proceed as the exhaustive working through of a single argument. But there are benefits, too, in a study that embodies disciplinary history and shows an author’s attempts to do justice to historical materials within the limits of his gradually developing methods and beliefs.
Chapters 2, 3, and 6 were published previously in the academic journals of the University of California Press and appear with light revisions and updating. In their new context here they form aspects of the book’s larger themes: the exalted status often accorded the female sign, and a newly emerging ideal of femininity, in the musical culture of the late German Enlightenment. Chapter 2, focusing on the iconic image of the young lady at music, unpacks the ideal of female musical accomplishment in all its contradictions and ambivalence. The earliest of my essays to make it into this book, it is also the most strenuously critical of the period’s idealizations of musical women. As the project unfolded and my material was tested by (and on) anonymous peer reviewers, colleagues, students, and friends, I realized that it was unnecessary to keep reissuing health warnings about the dangers of female idealization. On the contrary, it seemed to me that it was time to ask if idealization (however problematic) might have had other roles than putting women in their place. Ironically, then, it is as if the project proceeded in reverse, moving from a strenuous deconstruction of the mystique of femininity to a position in which that mystique serves as a “hermeneutic window” into the musical aspirations of the period. One of the problems I had with this book was that I found it difficult to justify that change of approach. Wasn’t I in danger of turning feminist criticism on its head, of betraying precisely the intellectual and political agendas that inspired my turn to gender issues? For a few years I went quiet (at least on gender issues), and the project stalled.
During that time I developed a private pleasure in tracking down female composers of the period. That activity caused concern among some of my colleagues, who reminded me that “gender and sexuality” were hotter themes than “women composers.” I knew what they meant, but I became suspicious of this emphasis on representations, particularly because there were still so few discussions of works composed by women in musicology’s major journals. It seemed that the stigma that used to surround works by female composers now attended research into them, or, at least, research that was framed as “rediscovery.” The challenge as I understood it was to say something about women as composers, or about their music, that would engage a musicological community turning ever more explicitly to issues of musical meaning. An initial answer I came up with, which appeared in an article published in 2004, involved no great innovation, just a shift of emphasis. In an account of the life and works of a then forgotten musician, Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes, I offered the standard kinds of appraisal (her biography and contemporary reception, and some comments on style and text setting) but also sought to render unfamiliar the question of what composing, and being a composer, had meant, culturally, in her lifetime. I sought to redeploy the “recovery” project as part of a history of musical authorship. As part of this I traced the high value placed on her works at the time of her death, when authenticity and naturalness represented cherished ideals and the emotional authenticity and naturalness of her works was attributed above all to her sex. In the course of that discussion I indicated that Minna Brandes was not alone: a vast number of women composed and published their music in the late eighteenth century, a fact that challenges commonly held assumptions that women were prohibited from or chastised for composing. It appears, rather, that in this historical moment there was a desire for female authorship, which reached an intensity not met again until the feminist movement of the 1970s.
Why then not write a book about this repertory and the kinds of musical authorship it demonstrates? Why leave so many interesting stories untold, or no more than hinted at in backnotes? There were several reasons. The first concerns the term “woman,” which in this historical site was broken up by other terms of social difference to such an extent that it would impose a false unity if taken as the fundamental category of research. Distinctions of rank, for example, would mock any attempt to collapse female royalty, professional female musicians, ladies of leisure, and the laboring poor into a single social group. To write a book about women composers in eighteenth-century Germany would risk inscribing and reifying sexual dimorphism at the cost of historical reality. The challenge, as I saw it, was to relate female authorship to the broader feminocentric trends in contemporary musical culture.
Exploring the reception of female composers returned me to the issue of idealization. Idealization of female musicians was popping up again and again, a seemingly productive aspect of the period that served to articulate some of its most cherished and distinctive ideals. My (inevitably partial) reading of feminist criticism had alerted me, however, to idealization as something problematic, something I felt I should resist. Marina Warner’s Monuments and Maidens often rang in my ears, but I think that Warner insisted too much on the gulf separating the real and symbolic realms. She argued, famously, that the female form is available for allegorical use and invested with symbolic power precisely because such power is not available to women on the ground. But some of her material seems to contradict this. It took time for me to let go of my assumption that idealizations of women, and femininity, were little more than forms of containment, objectification, and disempowerment. Eventually I found I could retain something of that critical perspective and at the same time trace its (in other ways) productive aspects in the rise of major developments in music of the period: the culture of sensibility; the accomplishment ideal; the primacy accorded native, female singing voices over imported castrati; the burgeoning numbers of female composers; androgyny in sound ideals and notions of authorship; the premium placed upon reformed, polite male manners in everything from critical writing to ensemble playing; and the centrality of women in some of the period’s contemporary music-historical narratives.
In that spirit I conceived chapters 1, 4, and 5, in which, without endorsing female idealization, I attempt to show how significant it was to the musical culture of the period. I joined these chapters with revised versions of the texts published earlier, which appear here as chapters 2, 3, and 6. In the long, wide-lens introduction I lay out the theme that unifies the book, that of the “sovereign feminine,” along with the related trope of the “living muse,” using examples from a range of musical, literary, and visual sources. I also explain the historical narrative