What is it about?
The article reports from a two-phase study that analysed the literature and then implemented a three-part survey answered by 71 women composers. Through these theoretical and empirical data, we explore the relationship between gender, and symbolic and cultural capital in music. We employ Bourdieu’s theory of habitus to understand the gendered experiences of the female composers who participated in the survey.
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Why is it important?
Female composers have different investments in gender but, overall, they reinforce the male habitus. This is because in composition the female habitus occupies a subordinate position in relation to that of the male. The findings suggest a connection between contemporary feminism and the attitudes towards gender held by 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. We ask how women composers might be better located to overcome a social order which places them in a subordinate position predicated on gender. We suggest that change in the habitus of composers needs to be sufficient that it changes the field itself. Fields such as that in classical music composition are characterised by an orthodoxy (male norms) and a heterodoxy (female heretical challengers who seek to change the field). As such, change needs to be both autonomous—from inside the field and from lived experience, and heteronomous—from outside the field and reconceptualising experiences in the past.
Perspectives
The assumptions about female invisibility in music composition have permitted mainstream work in musicology to think of music as a male domain and to produce a history that obscures or completely excludes women’s contributions. However, this perception of music composition has been disproved through the presentation of historical evidence that women composers have existed for as long as composers who are men and that their difference, as argued by some is not necessarily based on the deep-seated belief that their music is inferior. In fact, it is this perceived difference, we argue, that has kept the distinction alive in feminist scholarship since the mid-to-late twentieth century and, similarly, in the broader work on gender and music.
Professor Dawn Bennett
Curtin University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Rise and Fall, and the Rise (Again) of Feminist Research in Music: ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’, Musicology Australia, July 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/08145857.2017.1392740.
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