The Harmony of the Tea Table: Gender and Ideology in the Piano Nocturne

TLDR: Instrumental music, however, poses its ever familiar quandary: lacking an evident semantic content, it would seem to stymie efforts to understand "systems of representation" at work within it.

Abstract: IN THE FLOURISHING BUT fledgling literature on constructions of gender in music, instrumental music reposes in relative neglect. Guided by the premise that, in Teresa de Lauretis's words, "gender is both a sociocultural construct and a semiotic apparatus, a system of representation which assigns meaning ... to individuals within the society,"' and nourished by theoretical models developed by critics of literature, art, and film, music historians have most readily explored the ramifications of gender in opera and song. The attraction is obvious. Gender may initially be broached through the semantic content of the text, which then serves as a kind of lens through which is filtered the critic's reading of the music. Instrumental music, on the other hand, poses its ever familiar quandary: lacking an evident semantic content, it would seem to stymie efforts to understand "systems of representation" at work within it. Music historians have shied away from trying to recover and explicate these gendered systems partly because the idea that instrumental music occupies an autonomous realm still remains a powerful ideological force in the discipline. Those of us who would seek to lessen the stranglehold of this ideology on modern critical discourse encounter particular difficulties. We might recognize that the language of formalist musical criticism-a twentieth-century stepchild of the aesthetics of autonomy-does not adequately serve the purposes of an inquiry into gender.2 But shorn of this customary prop, we face an apparent conceptual void, for the ideology of autonomy still seems to command our linguistic possibilities. How can we speak of gender when constrained by the analytical demands of "the music itself"? The few efforts to treat gender in instrumental music all seem most awkward precisely when discussion shifts from feminism to traditional musical analysis. We can trace this sense of incongruity primarily to an implicit dissonance between the aims of the two systems of thought. The vocabularies of musical analysiswhether they label harmonic and contrapuntal processes, detect Schenkerian Urlinien, or identify pitch-class sets-typically represent implicit or explicit distillations of individual viewpoints, usually those of a composer, analyst, or "ideal" listener. (And assertions that these analyses are or were generally perceived by