The Rise and Fall, and the Rise (Again) of Feminist Research in Music: 'What Goes Around Comes Around'

This article reports from a two-phase study that involved an analysis of the extant literature followed by a three-part survey answered by seventy-one women composers. Through these theoretical and empirical data, the authors explore the relationship between gender and music’s symbolic and cultural capital. Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus is employed to understand the gendered experiences of the female composers who participated in the survey. The article suggests that these female composers have different investments in gender but that, overall, they reinforce the male habitus given that the female habitus occupies a subordinate position in relation to that of the male. The findings of the study also suggest a connection between contemporary feminism and the attitudes towards gender held by the participants. The article concludes that female composers classify themselves, and others, according to gendered norms and that these perpetuate the social order in music in which the male norm dominates

Experiencing Chen Yi's music: Local and Cosmopolitan Reciprocities in Ning for pipa, violin and cello

Chen Yi’s music, particularly her Ning for Pipa, Violin and Cello (2002), constructs reciprocities in compositional and aesthetic practice, and in the social-relational dynamics of musical contrast, performative and commemorative impulses. One aim of my paper is to suggest how Chen’s music offers multiple affiliations for music listeners, such that the local emerges in the cosmopolitan and vice versa. Events and textures emerge from, and become emblematic in emotional (affective) characters, in multiple orientations and receptions. Chen counterpoints and integrates the durational patterning suggestive of irregular Chinese “Ba Ban” tunes and more regular melodic models extending from popular song (e.g., the “Mo Li Hua” tune in Ning). Moving between, displacing and traversing—these emerging associations, narratives, encounters and migrations, entangle listening experiences of self and community, borderland and nation, and trauma and place