Masculinity and Western Musical Practice

Hardcover, xv + 333 pages, b&w illustrations in text, NOT ex-library. Gentle wear, book is clean and bright with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps. Untorn dust jacket shows shelfwear and creases to edges. -- An examination of the intersections between gender and music, this scholarly work delves into how concepts of masculinity have influenced and been influenced by Western musical traditions. By exploring a range of musical genres, historical periods, and theoretical perspectives, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which masculinity is constructed and represented in musical practices. The authors scrutinize the cultural and social implications of these gendered constructions, shedding light on the pervasive impact of masculinity on music performance, composition, and reception. -- Contents: Introduction; 1. Effeminate and Virile Musics and Masculinities [Introduction; Music and Masculinity in the Middle Ages / Elizabeth Eva Leach; Music, Melancholy and Masculinity in Early Modern England / K.Gibson; Of Mars I Sing: Monteverdi Voicing Virility / Richard Wistreich; Haydn and the Consequences of Presumed Effeminacy / Howard Irving; Virile Music by Hector Berlioz / Fred Everett Maus]; 2. National Masculinities, National Musics [Introduction; Gendered Reception of Brahms: Masculinity, Nationalism and Musical Politics / Marcia J. Citron; Aspiring to Manliness: Edward Elgar and the Pressures of Hegemonic Masculinity / Corissa Gould; 'I Am Blessed with Fruit': Masculinity, Androgyny and Creativity in Early 20th-Century German Music / Claire Taylor-Jay; Hellenism, the Divine and Ideal Masculinity in Manuel de Falla's Atlántida / Esther Zaplana]; 3. Identities, Voices, Discourses [Introduction; Knives and Tears: Representations of Masculinity in Late 19th-Century Italian Opera / Annamaria Cecconi; Caught in the Silken Throat: Modernist Investments in the Male Vocal Fetish / I.Biddle; Hermaphrodism and the Masculine Body: Tippett's Aesthetic Views in a Gendered Context / Iain Stannard]; Select Bibliography; Index. -- How have men used art music? How have they listened to and brandished the musical forms of the Western classical tradition and how has music intervened in their identity formations? This collection of essays addresses these questions by examining some of the ways in which men, music and masculinity have been implicated with each other since the Middle Ages. Feminist musicologies have already dealt extensively with music and gender, from the 'phallocentric' tendencies of the Western tradition, to the explicit marginalization of women from that tradition. This book builds on that work by turning feminist critical approaches towards the production, rhetorical engagement and subversion of masculinities in 12 different musical case studies. In other disciplines within the arts and humanities, 'men's studies' is a well-established field. Musicology has only recently begun to address critically music's engagement with masculinity and as a result has sometimes thereby failed to recognize its own discursive misogyny. This book does not seek to cover the field comprehensively but, rather, to explore in detail some of the ways in which musical practices do the cultural work of masculinity. The book is structured into three thematic sections; within these themes, it ranges across a number of specific topics: late medieval masculinities; early modern discourses of music, masculinity and medicine; Renaissance Italian masculinities; 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century ideas of creativity, gender and canonicity; masculinity, imperialist and nationalist ideologies in the 19th century, and constructions of the masculine voice in late 19th- and 20th-century opera and song. While the case studies are methodologically disparate and located in different historical and geographical locations, they all share a common concern for a critical revaluation of the role of masculinity in art music practices.…