Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music 3905323001, 9783905323009

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PHILLIPS ACADEMY

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PHILLIPS • ACADEMY

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Marianne

Kielian-Gilbert

On Rebecca Clarke's Sonata for Viola and Piano Feminine spaces and metaphors of reading

Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola and Piano, 7979. Inscription/epigraph:

Poete, prends ton luth; le vin de la jeunesse Fermente cette nuit dans les veines de Dieu.

Alfred de Musset, “La Nuit de Mai” Poet, take your lute; the wine of youth Ferments this night in the veins of God.

Alfred de Musset, “The Night of May”

The viola opens with a dramatic salutatory gesture as the piano sounds an open double¬ fortissimo sonority encompassing a fwe-octave registral expanse. The viola drinks in this sonority, offering in response an expansively figured, elegantly contoured phrase, linear¬ izing at its beginning and end the sonority’s pitch-intervallic components from the bottom outwards.

Transforming itself, the viola loops and retraces itself in two extended

variations: the first continues to animate the initial sonority; the second slips into a trans¬ formational improvisation linking and reconstituting its registral space in the process of shifting a minor third higherd

Rebecca Clarke's Sonata for Viola and Piano creates and transforms feminine spaces of

negotiation of both the power and illusion of solo expression.2 These relational spaces shape a discourse of musical relationships and reverberate in subjective listening, ac¬ knowledging and drawing on conceptions of the self and self-knowledge. Clarke’s poet takes up her lute, imbibing the “wine of youth” and declaring freedom from constraints - in my story, the binaries and singular norms, the assumptions and marginality of her gender. Her wine, a metaphor for release, vision, and possibility, fer¬ ments, ages, and distorts the godhead, engendering an intensity of experience, of a

On

Rebecca

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Sonata

presence that partakes of both ecstasy and pain, empowerment and numbness. In this experience, musical and listening subjects are mutually implicated and multi-sided. To theorize musical identity as interactive or conflicting relations of histori¬ cally situated persons, subject-themes and -producers, and embodied hstener(s) is to enable an alternative dynamics of musical relationship from the standpoints of women’s lives and the positions of “other.” My allegorical account of the piece and of my process of reading explores some of the signifying practices of subjectivity in rela¬ tion to the contradictions of feminine/female experience and women’s lives, acknowl¬ edging the dream and passion of alternatives. I want to portray a sense of my relationship and empathy with Rebecca Clarke and with this piece in engaging the experiential qualities of this movement, in voicing the dialogue and exchange of iden¬ 72

tities that emerge, and in thinking from perspectives related to her life and work. This relationship takes place in a context of negotiating the contradictions, ironies, and am¬ biguities of feminine/female experience and women’s lives. As a female hstener-musician-theorist, I also situate myself in the process of reception. I will suggest several metaphorical processes of musical reading, each linked with a particular theme group of the first movement of Clarke’s Sonata: Theme group i: a poet’s poppies (the reference is to two poems on “poppies” by Sylvia Plath) - animating a psyche, reading with emphasis as if for the first time; Theme group 2: a performer’s presence - recovering agency by changing the subject and changing the story, characterizing female as subject rather than object; and, Development and re¬ turn: a daughter’s patchwork - reading for intersections, diversity, and tensions, shap¬ ing plural selves in contexts of constructive self-doubt, compassionate irony, and “contextualized” presence. In the relational and transformative spaces of identity, multiple meanings come into relationship through a “conversation” of voices. My text distinguishes some of these voices

and interweaves

an

experiential narrative

of the movement with

statements by Rebecca Clarke and her contemporaries, as well as with remarks on subjectivity and self-knowledge by particular feminist writers. The first section ex¬ plores some critical positions on feminine/female subjectivity and the relational spaces these subjects inhabit. Each subsequent section takes up a metaphorical reading of par¬ ticular passages of the piece from the metaphorical “space” of poet, performer, and daughter. From these subject positions, I seek to realize a sense of my relationship with, and understanding of, Rebecca Clarke as Contemporary.

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/. Subjectivity and Relational Spaces Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge:

And you should have seen their faces, when they saw [the Viola Sonata] was by a woman!3

Robert Sherman:

When you began your composition studies, did you have any feelings that it was an unusual thing for a woman to be doing?

Rebecca Clarke:

I don’t think I thought about it very much...one way or the other. I just wanted to do it. ★

Rebecca Clarke:

When I had that one little whiff of success that I’ve had in my hfe with the Viola Sonata, rumor went around, I hear, that I hadn’t written the stuff myself, but some¬ body had done it for me.

Feminine /female subjectivities: The descriptions “feminine,” “female,” and “feminist” interrelate, respectively, the social and cultural construction of gender, the biological aspects of that construction or the reference to a specific historical being, and the political differences and conse¬ quences of sex-gender interactions. These constructions suggest the play between, and radical imphcations of, sexual specificity and difference. Sandra Harding stresses that “one must be able to distinguish biological, cul¬ tural, and political differences in order even to enter the recent discussions of the com¬ plex ways in which these differences have been and are used to construct one another.”4 Judith Butler theorizes sex-gender relations as performative — as fluid, mu¬ tually implicated relations enacting historically situated beings.5 Thus, to characterize identity in relational terms is to ahow the “interactive and even contradictory under¬ standings of male and female, masculinity and femininity.”6 The tensions of gender construction were evident when, in 1919, a jury of six men deadlocked and debated about a first-place, thousand-dollar prize between two anonymous viola sonatas. The tie was broken by the patron of the composition, Eliza¬ beth Sprague Coolidge, in favor of the viola sonata by Ernest Bloch rather than the sonata by Rebecca Clarke. Later, Mrs. Coolidge told her, “And you should have seen their faces, when they saw [the Viola Sonata] was by a woman!” A reviewer of the first performance, with a skepticism similar to that of the judges, described the outer

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movements as “couched in a kind of vehement sentimentalism” with an “evocative and capricious scherzo serving as a contrastive interlude.”7 The intensity of feminine/female subjectivity can function negatively in the dominant culture as a sign of the sentimental, of confessional outburst, madness, and thus of an impossibility of agency. In contrast, the intensity of a feminine signified or signifier as idealized or appropriated by the dominant culture may imply more positive values, release, or playful fantasy. Does Clarke’s reviewer hear through an “ear-trum¬ pet that amplifies all female anger as ‘hysteria’ and all female sorrow as ‘confessional’”?8 Criticism mirrors this asymmetry of perspective — some pathologize a female poet as psychotic, and her writing as symptomatic of that condition, while a feminist criticism may stress, as Jacqueline Rose puts it, “the representative nature of [an] inner 74

drama,” so as to uncover “the pathology of a patriarchical world...[such that the fe¬ male poet] becomes innocent — man and patriarchy are to blame.”9 Such extremes tend to gloss over the “precarious nature of self-representa¬ tion,”10 and the reflective and reflexive tensions of female signature. In their socializa¬ tion, women encounter processes and pressures of objectification, idealization, exclu¬ sion, and erasure intermingled with those of an ambiguous subjectivity, agency, and identity. They encounter a vocabulary in which they are invisible or are prefixes, the generic and masculine names reserved for the universal and the human. Female experi¬ ence and sexual identity go unnamed, silenced and submerged in the unconscious, never/rarely representing humankind. Monique Wittig, among others, notes that women have not been able to choose the terms of their subjectivity in her essay, “The Mark of Gender.” “The ab¬ stract form, the general, the universal, this is what the so-called masculine gender means, for the class of men have appropriated the universal for themselves.”11 Harriet Lemer extends this practice to sexual embodiment. “What is not named does not ex¬ ist...; the subject of vulvas is one of countless examples of how female experience is distorted, denied, and falsified...; [most men] assume that to speak of women is to exclude them [men].”12 The masculine-universal, as the unquestioned norm or ideal representative, operates, as Ehzabeth Grosz describes, “without any idea of the violence that this rep¬ resentational positioning does to its others - women, the ‘disabled,’ cultural and racial minorities, different classes, homosexuals - who are reduced to the role of modifica¬ tions or variations of the (implicity white, male, youthful, heterosexual, middle-class) human body.”13 In the entry for Rebecca Clarke in the 1980 edition of the New Grove Diction¬ ary one finds a single sentence: “English viola player and composer, wife of James Friskin.” Information about her music is subsumed under the entry for her husband.14

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Ann Woodward’s account of the competition for which Clarke had submitted her composition also makes clear the problem of Clarke’s achievement had the judges’ decision actually gone in favor of Clarke’s sonata, for “at the time of the composition, Miss Clarke was an acquaintance and neighbor of Mrs. Coolidge in Pittsfield..., [and, quoting Mr. Aldrich, one of the judges] ‘it would be said that it was given to your friend and neighbor through influence or friendship....’”15 This biased claim was made even though the seventy-two entries were entered and evaluated anonymously and though the identity of the composer was not revealed to Coolidge.

Relational spaces:

,

The opening dramatic sounds of Clarke’s sonata resonate in a musical space of creative possibility where metaphors of Eve, the Serpent, Satan, and the Fall prevail. The viola’s negotiation of the piano’s lush projection of a wide vast sonorous space: diffus¬ ing the “terror” of creation? asserting a potentiality within constraints of the law? opening up creative, transformative possibilities? In William Blake’s legend - Rebecca Clarke studied and set his poetry16 — “Female Space” is a materialized perception of the immensity of space in which Satan and creative identity vibrate:17

William Blake, Milton (1804):

Then Los & Enitharmon knew that Satan is Urizen Drawn down by Ore & the Shadowy Female into Generation Oft Enitharmon entered weeping into the Space, there appearing An aged Woman raving along the Streets (the Space is named Canaan) then she returned to Los weary frighted as from dreams

The nature of a Female Space is this: it shrinks the Organs Of Life till they become Finite and Itself seems Infinite And Satan vibrated in the immensity of the Space! Limited To those without but Infinite to those within: it fell down and Became Canaan: closing Los from Eternity in Albions Cliffs A mighty Fiend...

As Eve enters weeping into this shadowy Female Space, she encounters an aged woman raving along the streets. An emblem of female creativity, performance, tradition, and practice, the crone frightens. For space is complementary to the subject

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who occupies and implicates it, and feminine/female relational space has experiential, social, and cultural resonance. Elizabeth Grosz weaves a discussion which theorizes corporeality and the so¬ cial and sexually, specific body as integral to the workings of space:

Spatiality, the

space surrounding and within the subject’s body, is...crucial for defining the limits and shape of the body image: the lived spatiality of endogenous sensations, the social space of interpersonal relations, and the “objective” or “scientific” space of cultural (including scientific and artistic) representations all play their role— The representa¬ tion of space is...a correlate of one’s ability to locate oneself as the point of reference of space: the space represented is a complement of the kind of subject who occupies it.”18 76

Grosz points out that “space” is a representation of an ability to locate oneself and that it “complements” the subject in its multiple dimensions, whether defined bodily, interpersonally, or socially. “Relational” space serves as both conceptual in¬ strument and interactive process (as in “playing an instrument”) that can open up ways of conceptualizing subjectivity. The “spaces” of subjectivity function as metaphors for exchanges between different domains of reference. Metaphors extend the domains and regularities of experience and offer possibilities of projection and prediction.19 They are not simply byproducts of (or additions and embellishments within) discourse. The idea,

then,

is to

explore the relationship between space and subjectivity

differently, as “allegory,” so as to characterize the “relational spaces” between “us” and Clarke (said despite the opacity and violence of “us” as a category) and within her music. Allegory personifies easily recognizable experiences in mythical figures and al¬ lows one, while maintaining a perspective of distance, to draw those experiences into contemporary life. This move toward internalization occurs in a moment of recogni¬ tion and empathy as one sees the allegorical situation as familiar in one’s own fife. Separation and identity coexist in the space between, figure and lived experience such that figure and listener-interpreter are mutually implicated. Allegory thus internalizes tensions and processes of resistance, movement toward, projection, transfer, and sepa¬ ration. Though a real historical person and not a mythical figure, Rebecca Clarke and her music, her experiences of erasure and multiple position, resonate as both familiar and potentially revelatory for possibilities of situating and projecting one’s self in dif¬ ferent experiential contexts. Susan Suleiman points out the transformative role of emblematic figures and allegory in characterizing and theorizing the postmodern subject: “Derrida’s dancer, Haraway’s cyborg, Scarpetta’s cosmopolitan, Kristeva’s happy cosmopolitan, Cixous’ Jewoman, Spivak’s feminist internationalist, [Suleiman’s] laughing mother,...all of

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these are allegorical figures (some more poetic than others), standing for a set of ideas— They are also utopian, offered as idealized models or myths.”20 Recognizing and theorizing the gap between women’s lives and conceptual schemes or utopian models involve not only proposing multiple contexts and possi¬ bilities of identity, but also marking the gaps between theory and experience, between a feminist theory of political and philosophical alternatives and a feminist activism of realizing those alternatives in a material sense. Theory can hold open the potential and possibilities of alternate spaces and utopias not present or yet available in experience. It does not diffuse the political consequences of ongoing material conditions, but, rather, provides a means of constructing and understanding agency and subjective identity in multiple locations. In this sense, Elizabeth Grosz argues for a theoretical framework “which insists on (at least) two surfaces which cannot be collapsed into one and which do not always harmoniously blend with and support each other; a model where the join, the interaction of the two surfaces, is always a question of power...,”21 and I would add, empowerment. I have learned much from the work of feminist writers, in particular, Nancy Miller’s work on a poetics of female signature and Susan Suleiman’s attention to the signifying practices of writing about contemporaries. To uncover the poetics of women’s writing, Miller requires strategies for “adding emphasis,” “overreading the underread,” and “changing the subject” in a “desire to theorize female authorship and put on the table the textual and political stakes of female signature in the production, reception, and circulation of women’s writing.”22 Suleiman’s work explores the role of a “compassionate” irony in an ethical and political postmodernism that includes the implications of autobiography.23 In a similar spirit, my own readings are offered as semiotic exercises in how one (individually and collectively) might construe sounds as signs of experience and identity. “Experience” and “identity” refer to constructions that bring into play the complex interrelationship between what one knows and feels and what others assign, between acting and being acted upon, between signifier, signi¬ fied, and the dynamics of agency.

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II. Theme Group 1 - A poet's poppies: animating a psyche, reading with emphasis; the possibility of agency and the impossibility of fixed identity Rebecca Clarke’

Getting ideas down on paper was not always easy, and often I had no ideas at all; but every now and then, in the middle of struggling with some problem, everything would fall into place with a suddenness almost like switching on an electric light...; at those moments, though I had no illusion whatever about the value of my work, I was flooded with a wonderful feeling of po¬ tential power — a mirage that made anything seem possible.24

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In acknowledging these contradictory implications — potential power as mirage and genuine possibility and place - Clarke’s viola sings. In singing, the transformation of the feminine as authentic experience, source of empowerment, site of transgression, and discourse of resistance becomes possible. A felt intensity of experience, of pres¬ ence, this subjectivity is multi-sided, partaking of both ecstasy and pain, empowerment and numbness. In such presence, one may contemplate, as in Sylvia Plath’s, Poppies in October, “a forest of frost,” “a dawn of cornflowers,” yet also acknowledge, as in Poppies in July, the exhaustion of watching, the dulling of sensation, the conditional nature of feeling when “Nothing bums_But colourless. Colourless”:25

Sylvia Plath, Poppies in October Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts. Nor the woman in the ambulance Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly — A gift, a love gift Utterly unasked for By a sky Palely and flamily Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes Dulled to a halt under bowlers. O my God, what am I That these late mouths should cry open In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

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Sylvia Plath, Poppies in July Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing bums.

And it exhausts me to watch you Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch. Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep! — If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, Dulling and stilling.

But colourless. Colourless.

Poppies in October conveys the ecstasy and empowerment of experience - “a gift, a love gift utterly unasked for”; Poppies in July, a different side — “there are fumes that I cannot touch.” Christine Battersby points out that Plath’s work is often considered “too raw; too emotional” — “[i]n creative writing a woman has always the problem of aligning Romantic notions of art as an instinctive, non-rational activity against her need to assess (rationally and consciously) the likely reactions to a female voice.”26 Jacqueline Rose gives an accounting of Plath’s work as an emblem of the importance of inner psychic life and thus of the “importance of fantasy for the widest sweep of our cultural and historical life_ [Yet she also points out that] [e]xecrated and idolised, Plath hov¬ ers between the furthest poles of positive and negative appraisal; she hovers in the space of what is most extreme, most violent, about appraisal, valuation, about moral and literary assessment as such. Above all she stirs things up.”27

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The viola shapes five gestures, each with a corresponding physical basis in performance: an invocational 16th/dotted-8 th rising fifth, a modally infected ascending third with falling seconds (later harmonized in parallel triads), a i6th-note turn figure with a modally lowered seventh, a plagally colored fifth filled in by descending triplets, and a falling fifth in quarter notes which initiates an extension of the latter two gestures to the lower octave. Invocation/announcing presence, assertion /pushing boundaries, awareness/iden¬ tity through resistance, moving lyrically, self-assessment. Interesting the ways that the viola effects a suspension between the two fifths (A—E and E—B) in the piano’s lingering sound. How might one construe the relation of viola and piano?

The viola’s first variation grows from and elaborates the memory of gestures l and 2,

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and then extends and positions gestures 4 and 5 in dialogue and counterpoint. Does the viola’s monologue signify theme or fantasy? Is it introducing or announcing (or both)?

Closing its variation with the salutatory A—E fifth, the viola slips elusively to a melodic El?, thereby initiating a second improvisational variation into which seep tritone relations in the complex of perfect 5ths. The initial accompanying Fmy harmony links subse¬ quently with those of D7 and its tritone- and fifth-related harmonies, Al?y and A, re¬ spectively. Sounds draw from, reshape, and extend their referential roles: the playful extension of the dotted 8th/16th “insert” prefigures another melodic slippage to El?; ges¬ tures 1, 2, and 3, now colored by the tritone Aff-E, reposition and function both outside (as discontinuity) and within (as continuity) the musical discourse. Arched expressions refigure gesture 5 (viola and piano are in inverse motion), re-playing the melodic slippage from E to El? which in turn re-animates gesture 3.

Theme 1 and its variations are a discourse of passionate transformation in a relational metaphorical space of both the power and illusion, theme and fantasy, of solo expres¬ sion (see Example 1). In contrast, measure 31 marks a dialogue between viola and pi¬ ano, a dialogue in which the viola fills space as inner voice: Clarke’s composition teacher at the Royal College of Music in London, Sir Charles Stanford, the teacher of Vaughan Williams, Holst, and also of her eventual husband, James Friskin, encouraged his first and, for a long while, only female student to change from the violin to the viola, because, as he said, “then you are right in the middle of the sound, and can tell how it’s all done.”28 She embraced this change in musical identity, a switch which she later wrote, “felt very natural”29 - the unique uneasy timbral pathos of the viola medi¬ ating sounds instead of being a readily identifiable leader.

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Example 1: Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola and Piano, I, mm. 1-38. Theme group 1 Questions: Theme & Variation 1 — how would one construe the viola? a. as “contained within” piano sonority or improvising freely? b. as “theme” or “fantasy”? as having a “thematic” or “introductory” function in relation to the melody and accompaniment texture and shifting harmonic processes of Variation 2? c. as projecting a suspension or a “non-resolution” of the note A in the piano’s sound?

Metaphors — Plath’s poppies: animating a psyche, reading with emphasis (the pos¬ sibility of agency and the impossibility of fixed identity). Musical Processes: statement and transformational unfolding of the viola (solo or as inner voice?), identity in relation to the registral expanse of the piano and its eventual shift marked by the dialogue between the two which closes the pas¬ sage.

Theme

Variation 1

Variation 2

themes:

1A

IB

1C

ID (arc)

IE (shift/close)

measures:

1-4

5-12

12-22

23-31

31-38

meter:

4/4-3/4—4/4

3/4

4/4—3/4—4/4

viola/piano:

viola &

viola &

viola & piano

piano sonority

piano figs.

in dialogue

E-A/B-E (027) E (027)

F-D

pitch emphasis:

A

D G D (027) G (027)

N.B. The tables of Examples 1-5 comprise the entire first movement of the Sonata.

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Example 1: Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola and Piano, I, mm. 1-38. Theme group 1

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Tensions now dimly felt: Is the viola “contained within” the sonority in the theme and variation l or improvising freely? Does the viola change the quality of the piano sonority or vice versa or both? Is the viola’s fantasy-like extension of the sonority thematic or introductory in relation to the melody and accompaniment texture and shifting harmonic processes of variation 2? Might one construe theme and variations as “introduction plus theme,” or “fantasy plus continuation”? How does the viola color the notes A—E—B of the piano sonority as stable or unstable; how does the piano support/resonate with the viola? These tensions are not resolved by the thematic dialogue between piano and viola of measures 31—38, or by the shift to transposed sonorities on D in measure 31 and G in measures 35ff., or even when the two instruments come together in measure 36.

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The point is not necessarily to decide these perceptions/questions one way or another, but to

suggest that our choices

and

construals,

whether as foreshadowing

or

responding, as echoing or articulating, as fantasy or remembrance, are not inconse¬ quential, nor arbitrary, nor neutral in their implications. They reflect a way of posi¬ tioning a perceiving subject in relation to a background of experience and of enacting multiple subjects in conversation through distinctions on that background.

III. Theme Group 2 - a performer's presence: reading for and recovering agency by changing the subject, changing the story Rebecca Clarke:

And the funniest of all was that I had a clipping once which said that I didn’t exist, that there wasn’t any such person as Rebecca, that it was a pseudonym....

The piano initially presents three four-measure phrases outlining melodic tritones in Debussyian breaths, in a quasi-dream state (as in the opening flute line from “Prelude to ‘Afternoon of a Faun,”’ or the English horn solo of “Nuages”). These piano phrases, sensuous and precise, are in the registral space of the viola’s characteristic low range. Each tritonal image reflects a different continuation. The last portion of the third image is an arching two-measure idea. With its entry in measure 31, the viola responds: an echo, a re-articulated memory, or an alternate formulation? Or does the piano fore¬ shadow the viola, is it a premonition of the viola?

The viola enters, dolce espressivo, and its f-minor contour floats within the piano’s ex¬ tended C7 harmony - the preceding and subsequent G-Cf tritone patterns retroactively and progressively felt as harmonic dominants of C - which itself slips by 3ths to F and

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Bi>. The viola then reinitiates the three phrases of the tritone melody heard earlier in the piano. Its contrasting melody X vanishes, leaving idea (x) in mm. 65-66, now a brief remembrance before a twelve-measure close, a close which alters the descending tritone G—C$ to the perfect fifth G—C. Is the viola melody’s change to a perfect fifth G—C at measures 6yff. an escape into tonal law and order, or an extension and slippage span¬ ning the length of the entire twelve measures, closing pianissimo? Tonal closure is an illusion.

The second theme configures a different metaphorical and relational space, bypassing objectification by mingling presence, introspection, and dream (see Example 2). A space of working and the problematic articulation of difference within that space — such spaces relate to both governing and alternate frameworks and thereby articulate asymmetrically positioned, and ironic or contradictory situations. One has the choice of hearing the second theme in terms of processes of melodic enclosure (statement — viola contrast/secondness — and restatement) or in terms of naming the viola, itself a problematized identity (mediated contrast), piano foreshadowing viola. According to Sandra Harding, thinking from the perspectives of the lives of women reveals emphases which may be implicated by other positions or standpoints, but are not supported or not made concrete in their conceptual schemes. For ex¬ ample, in her view, the perspectives of a lesbian standpoint underline the importance of seeing “women in relation to other women” and the “roles of single women in history”; seeing and imagining “communities of women designed, organized, and di¬ rected by women” or “communities that do not need or want men socially”; under¬ standing that “woman (heterosexual) is made, not born”; centering “female sexuality, and female sexuality as constructed by women”; revealing the “fink between the op¬ pression of women and the oppression of deviant sexualities”; understanding how “gynophobia supports racism”; and pointing out that “lesbianism is a central figure in traditional mascuhne discourse.”30 Harding’s formulation does not promote the isola¬ tion or elimination of different standpoints, but rather their recognition, negotiation, and exchange. In interrogating one’s choices, interpreting and probing the identity and char¬ acter of the particular dynamics of musical difference and contrast, one claims the agency of listening. Such contrasts may be understood in terms of power relationships associated with stories or frameworks of dominance (e.g., the piano finked with “the law” as a primary reference for the viola). As one gently notices and interrogates the musical play of one’s perceptions, other relationships are made available for experi¬ ence and understanding. Such alternate relational dynamics may access new stand¬ points by thinking and experiencing from alternate musical positions. Thus, to re-

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count an associative history of perceptual questions in this composition is to hear dif¬ ferently and also to hone more precisely the character and qualities of one’s musical experience.

Example 2: Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola and Piano, I, mm. 39-74. Theme group 2 88 Questions: How might one construe a. the piano (x, m. 49) — as foreshadowing or anticipating the viola’s entry (X, m. 51)? b. the viola (m. 51) — as contrast to or responding to, echoing the piano? c. the viola’s passage (m. 51) — within a formal enclosure, as ABA (statement — contrast? — return), as echo or mediated contrast?

Metaphors — a performer’s presence: recovering agency by changing the subject and changing the story; rethinking idealization and spectatorship. Musical Processes: “Debussyian” tritone melody in a dream-like state first in the piano. Viola (X) responds, as contrast or echo, an articulated memory or con¬ tinuation of the last portion of the piano fine (x)? Spectatorship and enclosure (ABA, statement — contrast? — return), or mediated contrast? Gt>—C gives way to G—C, escape into tonal order?

Statement themes:

measures:

2A

Contrast?

Return

2B

2C

2A

2B

a

al

a2 (x)

X

a

al

39-42

43-46

47-50

51-54

55-58

59-62

49, rubato

dolce espr.

largoroso meter:

3/4

viola/piano:

piano

pitch emphasis:

G—Cj| melody

a2 (x) 63-66

a/close 67-74

65, rit.

viola G-Cjt-D

F#—C G

F-C C (bass)

G-C# G-Ct-D melody

Gk-C

G-C C (bass)

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Statement 2A

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louder than in right

Example 2: Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola and Piano, I, mm. 39-74. Theme group 2

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Contrast? 2C

Return 2A

Example 2: continued.

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Example 2: continued.

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a/close

Example 2: continued.

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IV. Development and return - a daughter's patchwork: weaving in personal, social, political meanings; rethinking identity in contexts of irony and contradiction Rebecca Clarke:

...but anyhow I wanted rather to play another piece I’d written and I thought, this is too silly to put my name down — this was before the Viola Sonata and it seemed too silly to put my name down still once more — so I thought, I’ll invent a name_And people would ask me about Anthony Trent and I was rather self conscious at having invented him and I think I would blush - I still would blush in those days - and I would blush and I think...I could see in their faces that they thought, ah yes, there’s a romance somewhere, you know.... .. .1 took the first name Anthony because I liked that name..., and this is one for women’s lib, because although the piece by An¬ thony Trent was not particularly good, it had much more atten¬ tion paid to it than the pieces that I had written, I mean in my own name..., which is rather a joke.

In a play of genres and different textures, ideas from themes i and 2 oscillate in piano and violin in self-conscious variations: (var. 3) fanfare, rhapsody and chorale, anthem and march, quick-step, build-up and break-off, (var. 4) waltz and recollection (see Example 3). Quilting one moment and the next, embroidering different textures, displaying a diver¬ sity of connections. With each gesture, the viola pulls away from and returns to C, until the build-up and break-off in measure 89. After the pastiche of gestures from theme group 1 in variation 3, an elusive textural change in m. 90 extends the turn figure (ges¬ ture 3) in the fashion of a waltz. Against the piano’s waltz on/in G - a playful back¬ ground or a wistful dancing for the father? — the viola recalls the arching descending perfect fifth idea from theme 1 now interconnected with a shadouring of the tritone melody from the second theme and followed by the theme 2 closing idea. Though the close (previ¬ ously on/in G) is underpinned by B l?, the harmonic context is uncertain, openended, tritone-related to E.

Nancy Miller writes, “[T]he desire for the master’s voice is not to be under¬ estimated.”31 In similar fashion Christine Battersby concludes, “The ultimate battle for

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creative women is...to conquer the consciousness of the way men will react,” intertextually referring to the following passage of Virginia Woolf’s Women and Writ¬ ing: “The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women [writers].”32

94

Example 3: Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola and Piano, I, mm. 75-109. Development and return (overlap) Metaphors - a daughter’s patchwork: weaving in personal, social, political mean¬ ings, voicing and negotiating diverse contexts, forming alternative relation¬ ships, rethinking identity in contexts of contradiction and irony. Musical Processes: self-conscious oscillation between textures of identity (separate¬ ness and otherness, diversity and community) — muted, fluted, harsh, piercing, diffuse, transparent, stymied, military, dance-like, brassy, percussive, noise laden, ringing; genre-play — fanfare, rhapsody and chorale, anthem and march, quick-step, build-up and break-off, waltz and insert, recollection (of escape?).

Variation 3

themes:

measures:

Variation 4

1A

IB

1C

ID (arc) + 2C?

fanfare,

quick-step,

waltz

recollection

rhapsody, chorale

build-up,

& insert

anthem, march

& break-off

75—79, 80—81

82-88/9

misterioso / marcato meter:

Theme

3/4—4/4, 5/4—4/4

90-93

94-97 98-101

grazioso

espr.

2a/close

1A

102-05

106-09

3/4

3/4-4/4

viola/piano: viola &

viola &

piano sonorities

piano sonority

pitch emphasis:

At (015) & F (025)

-D

G

F-C Bt

Bt (026)

Mar

ANNE

IB "quick-step"

KlELIAN-GlLBERT

,-2

Example 3: Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola and Piano, i, mm. 75-109. Development and return (overlap)

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Var. 4

1C

Example 3: continued.

Sonata

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"recollection"

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Example 3: continued. N.B. This excerpt continues in Example 4.

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Themes I and 2 re-emerge in a double reversal, their tonal, dynamic, textural, timbral characters in reverse of those of their earlier counterparts; they thus undo and redo the traditional story of recapitulation in sonata form (see Examples 4 and 5). Theme 1 enters as both an “end” of the “development” and a strange beginning to an unaltered “thematic” restatement of variation 2. E—Af/Bt tritone and E-B perfect fifth alter-images intenningle.

The first theme of measures 1—3 is now (in contrast to the beginning) triple pianissimo, octave-doubled, registrally at the height of the five-octave-defined space of the piece, here over a Bl> pedal and Bt>—G#-D sonority in tritone relationship to the E sonority of the beginning of the piece. The viola articulates its invocational ascending A—E fifth at this

98

outermost spatial and tritonal boundary and descends from its highest note of the move¬ ment, Efi. The theme is melodically articulated and completed not by the viola, but by the piano. Not until the end of the piece will the viola return to this register.

Example 4: Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola and Piano, I, mm. 106-134. Theme group 1 Metaphors - plural selves: memory and altered identity, nostalgia and differ¬ ence; recognition of a female self, opening to self-doubt and reversal. Musical Processes: theme as both memory and altered identity, in relation to the “variation” which restates and repositions.

Theme

Variation 2 (overlaps with theme group 2)

themes:

1A

1C

measures:

106-09

110/11-15

meter:

3/4-4/4

3/4

4/4

viola/piano:

viola &

viola &

viola & piano

piano sonority

piano figs.

E-A/B-E Bl>-Gf-D (026)

F-D

pitch emphasis:

ID (arc) 116-20

121-24

IE (shift/close) 125-28

129-34

in dialogue A

D G D (027) G (027)

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The second theme, now dovetailed directly with the end of the restatement of varia¬ tion 1, also returns in a reversal of character, appassionato, double fortissimo, a major sixth higher, now incorporating and outlining the E—A$/Bl> tritone. Still the viola ar¬ ticulates its tritone melody as inner voice, but now it initiates that melody, the piano following in triumphant counterpoint throughout.

In the coda the viola once again soars alone and upwards, reaching but not transcending the upper octave space first defined by the piano (the viola’s highest note here is Dfi. Against the centricity of E, the coda recasts the tritone association of E and Bl/A# in a whole-tone coloring, m. 179 (E notably absent). In contrast and close, the piano ends with another open perfect-fifth sonority pattern, the Debussyian theme 2 “sigh” — its left-hand patterning lies within the E pedal of the piano and B pedal of the viola and now spans that interval.

Example 5: Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola and Piano, I, mm. 135-185. Theme group 2 & coda (overlap) Metaphors — multiple endings and reversals, a question of authenticity: ego/po¬ litical demand for equality vs. body without identity or form/demand for dif¬ ference. Musical Processes: restatement in transposition and counterpoint, identity (X) transformed, question of irony (derivative vs. authentic content), acknow¬ ledgement of the signatures of Rebecca Clarke (Debussy, etc., Anthony Trent, and Clarke herself, present/absent).

Statement themes:

measures:

Coda (overlap) coda

2A

2B

2C

2A

a

al

a2 (x)

X

a

al

a

135-38

139-42

143-6

147-50

151-54

155-58

159-62

167-185

163-66

167-71 (viola)

appassionato meter:

Contrast? Return

145, (x)

ffrinf

3/4

171—75 (piano)

viola/piano: viola & piano

viola

viola

piano

in counterpoint pitch

E-A|

emphasis:

melody

175-81-85 (viola & piano)

E-AH-B

A-El? E-B|>

A-D

E-A#

A (bass)

melody

E-A#-B

B-E/F|-B (027) E (bass)

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Statement 2A

Example 5: Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola and Piano, I, mm. 131-138. Theme group 2

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air

102

Coda

Example 5: continued, mm. 139-141, 170-185. Coda (overlap)

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Example 5: continued.

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How might one react to the plural selves suggested by these double reversals — the tritone harmonization of theme i at the “end” of the development, the triumphant theme 2 of the recapitulation, the tritone and perfect-fifth coloring of theme 2 in the coda and final pleasures of the piano? How would one notice the calm and serene closing of the viola in the upper register, or the derivative character of the second theme? Example 6 shows the closing measures of Debussy’s Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun. ” Clarke’s left-hand melody descends to its final place of rest within the con¬ cluding E-major harmony, rather than ascending as in Debussy’s French horn melody. In other respects the two passages are remarkably similar.

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Tr£s lent et tres retenu jusqu'S la fin

Example 6: Claude Debussy, Prelude to "The Afternoon of a Faun, mm. 106-110.

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I remember my disappointment (and complicity? - since I am linked with that which I critique) in thinking of Clarke’s ending as derivative and wanting perfection from my female heroines. Derivative need not mean lesser than, influences need not have negative connotations when heard in a woman’s work, the practice of making a heroine need not require perfection in that heroine. In these musical reversals he the recognition of a feminine/female self, open¬ ing to moments of self-awareness and to the compassionate irony, contradiction, and doubt to which such recognition gives rise. Spaces traditionally without power are rife with contradiction unless essentialist reductive formulations are challenged and socially and politically transformed, necessary, for example, in experiencing the tex¬ tural and dynamic reversals of themes i and 2 in the “recapitulation” or in rethinking creative working spaces as empowered rather than as potential places of erasure. (“Political" here has to do more with a (self)-conscious position on the potential im¬ plications of particular formulations rather than with reducing them to specific condi¬ tions.) On International Women’s Day, 8 March 1994, the associated press wire ser¬ vice, in an article detailing the atrocities of sexual violence (rape, genital mutilation, violent abuse) directed at women in many countries, included a quote from the head of the Human Rights Watch’s women’s projects, “We’re out of the closet where women’s rights are concerned..., but we are still in the kitchen where foreign policy is concerned.” Such spaces as the closet and kitchen stand in relation to that of the boardroom with the always potential possibility of the misuse and abuse of power in situations of asymmetrical relationship. Kitchen can be a creative working space where women can move freely, yet in relation to the all powerful boardroom perceived as a space of secondary or minimal significance. A (radical) retransformation of meaning allows the kitchen to emerge as a powerful metaphor of (female) power and empower¬ ment, one however that lies on an edge of and risks appropriation by the dominant (patriarchal) group. Such space may be given legitimacy when it is associated with the dominant ideological identity: “the patio” with its association with “leisure,” “meat,” and “barbecue,” is an acceptably permitted masculine appropriation of the kitchen (for kitchens are professionalized by “chefs”), leaving associations of drudgery, routine, ne¬ cessity, with a woman’s work of family maintenance, the work of a “cook.” “Legiti¬ macy” that confers identity as the “prize” of power rather than as a consequence of empowerment is not genuine. How difficult it is to redirect images - such as “recapitulation” and “second theme” — and to transform their contexts in alternative spaces! Collusion with and reinscription of subordinate and derogatory images lurk as shadows. The irony in these examples points to the contradictions between conditions or spaces of restric-

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tion/power and those of empowerment. Compassion and re-visioning are vehicles for connection and for moving within conflict and contradiction. The composition is not the life, not Clarke herself, but her and our represen¬ tations and the conversations we have with them. Hers was a legacy of powerful father figures. Her own relationship with her father was continually interrupted by violent disagreements: he pulled her out, against her wishes, of the Royal Academy of Music at age nineteen when her teacher Percy Hilder Miles, a composer and friend of her father’s, proposed marriage - she had studied there since age sixteen.33 Her father, Joseph Clarke, withheld approval for her compositional activities, and eventually he also withdrew her from the Royal College of Music in London at the end of her sec¬ ond year of study and sent her “away from home with no funds and no prospects.”34 In

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the context of these disagreements, Clarke later wrote in her memoirs that composing became “a refuge, an outlet, and finally a passion.”35 Looking back on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday in 1976, in a radio interview with Robert Sherman (a portion of which is reproduced in the appendix), Clarke spoke of her multiple identities. One can sense the pressures of female identity in a world supported by reflecting and mirroring men. The oscillation between downplaying and taking credit. The necessity for female apology. The experimenta¬ tion with the male pseudonym, Anthony Trent. The suggestion in press clippings that her identity as Rebecca Clarke was fraudulent — that, more likely than not, Ernest Bloch had chosen a female pseudonym (!) for, given the quality of the work, it could not possibly have been written by a woman. As mentioned earlier, the reviewer of the first public performance of Clarke’s sonata, Herbert Peyser, noted, among other things, “the vehement sentimentalism [of the work]” and continued,

The sonata, while by no means music of signal importance or appreciable dis¬ tinction or originality, is yet a product of healthy and agreeable talent, con¬ ceived in real sincerity of spirit and executed with no inconsiderable adroit¬ ness.... In harmonization of her material... the composer quickly demonstrates how effectually she has absorbed Debussy and his disciples and apostles, even to our very own Charles Martin Loeffler.... Best of all, the sonata is written with a firm grasp of the viola’s capabilities (it is Miss Clarke’s instrument) and a piano part of independent richness and amplitude. In the balance and co¬ ordination of the two will be found one of the gratifying features of this ingratiatingly superficial work. The stunning performance by Messrs. Bauer [pianist] and Bailly [violist, and one of the judges of the Coohdge competi¬ tion] would have exalted much less interesting music.36

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Also according to Ann Woodward, “Herbert E. Peyser reviewed the Festival in Musical America, 4 October 1919. His patronizing comments couched in somewhat negative terms, nonetheless reflect a positive reaction to the Sonata” (my emphasis). Woodward’s characterization of the reviewer’s comments highlights her sense of identification with and acceptance of Clarke as well. Acknowledging that this sonata absorbs the harmonic techniques of accepted (male) composers and amply conceives the relationship be¬ tween the two instruments, the critic is at a loss to explain how such technical aspects are immanent in this work by a woman, a work which surprisingly either does not need to rely on the stunning abilities of performers or benefits from a stunning perfor¬ mance which is capable of exalting both its “gratifying” and its “less interesting” fea¬ tures. These comments reflect the profound social ambivalence toward and dismissal of female creativity prevalent at the time and still prevalent at times today.

In Blake’s legend, Eve, lost and weary in material space, must return to the world of Adam. Modem Eve inhabits many worlds. These worlds have experiential and con¬ ceptual dimensions: rethinking the subject/object dualism changes the traveler and the contexts of travehng. In Maria Lugones’ account, for example, “Loving my mother also required that I see with her eyes, that I go into my mother’s world, that I see both of us as we are constructed in her world, that I witness her own sense of her¬ self from within her world. Only through this travehng to her ‘world’ could I identify with her because only then could I cease to ignore her and to be excluded and sepa¬ rate from her.”37 In creating/realizing the sense of relationship with (or understanding of) Clarke as Contemporary, in recognizing the possibility of my relationship with her, Lugones suggests how I might enter Clarke’s space. Silent, I pull back, confronting Clarke’s worlds in bringing them into my own. Though mutually defined by this encounter, they, and we, are yet distinct. Wit¬ nessing, resisting, I glimpse what is lost, what is gained: Clarke’s own fullness and identity in the realities of her worlds; different perspectives and positions on her sur¬ roundings; feelings for the “spaces” between “us” and Clarke and within her music. The positions and feelings of interpreters often conflict in relation to the con¬ texts which they interpret. I may resist Clarke’s world because of the problems she faced and the attitudes she endured. This does not disregard the fact that some of those problems and circumstances are relevant today, as I think they are. Another sense of “witnessing and resisting” comments on a world-traveling that seems to sug¬ gest that one can truly enter another world, in Lugones’ case, the world of the mother, such that one ceases “to ignore her and to be excluded and separate from

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her.” The gaps between perception, reflection, and context, maintain distinctions and preserve differences, rather than combining or blending them. They affirm the mutual definition as well as the distinction of musical and listening “subjects” and allow con¬ nections and differences “to resonate without fixing them to a totalizing vision.”38 These “gaps” — the often conflicting associations between experience, understanding, and discourse — are not an indication of their futility, unreliability, or ad hoc nature. On the contrary, they point up the relational spaces within which experiential subjects operate and which resonate literally and metaphorically in music. Such a space con¬ veys a spectrum within which different degrees and kinds of interactions are possible, one often experienced and understood in temis of degrees of difference rather than

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fixed oppositional contrasts. In these spaces, to hear and listen is to recognize, enact, and negotiate conceptions of the self and other. Relational spaces — in turn re-figured and re-characterized — allow for move¬ ment beyond power inversion, essentialist reduction, and gender stereotyping and movement toward a space of diversity, connection, and inclusion of voices that have been silenced. A space of safety and thus a space where play and intimacy are possible. A space of relationship motivated by love rather than death. A space with the possibility of identity outside a discourse of power. A space of service (without loss), of trust, vulnerability, and the release of fear. A space of singing and dancing (bodily connection to surrounding life). A space of identity in process, identity which goes beyond discourse and structure. A space of spiritual connection and transforma¬ tion. Along similar lines, Suleiman asks, “Is it possible to theorize an ethical post¬ modernist subjectivity without recourse to universal values, but also without the in¬ nocent thoughtlessness of the ‘happy cosmopolitan’? Is it possible to argue that such an ethical postmodernist subjectivity has political (collective, relating to the public good) import and relevance? Finally, is it possible to argue for a political postmoder¬ nist praxis? In plainer words, what do we do if words fail and the shooting starts?... [The figure] of the individual ironist, who is characterized by ‘radical and continuing doubt about the final vocabulary she uses,’ is not only viable but can act as an agent of ethical choice.”39 The meanings of the character reversals and multiple identities of viola, piano, musical patterns, and subjective listening in Rebecca Clarke’s sonata take shape in their dynamic relation to one another: these plural selves, in their self awareness, insist on identity, yet question the basis and contexts for the construction of that identity. Such positions on the poetic language of women correspond respectively “to the po¬ litical demand for equality and to the demand for difference in the most fundamental psychic sense of the term” (emphasis added).40

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Subjectivity, identity and experience - how does one understand them in the framework of alien or unfamiliar contexts? According to Lerner, “When we feel fraudulent, or even tentative, apologetic, silenced, and self-doubting, it may reflect our honest refusal to internalize the idea that having power, prestige, or public expo¬ sure proves merit and authority...[and] may express our awareness that the dominant culture’s form of leadership and authority — and the concomitant images — do require fraudulent behavior. From this perspective, we may not hate being behind the po¬ dium so much as we hate the podium itself, because we wish instead to create alterna¬ tive, more collaborative, less rigidly hierarchical ways of exchanging ideas.”41 Voicing and uncovering the in-process senses of musical identity and experi¬ ence entwine the writer/critic self with the subject’s self and open up the texts of women to the contemporary process — and to this I would add, the necessity - of doing criticism, as Susan Suleiman would say, for the “sake of self recognition, an ex¬ panded historical awareness, and a sense of at least possible collective action” (toward what Suleiman calls, strong autobiographical reading).42 My links with Rebecca Clarke as Contemporary allow me to imagine and construe aural contexts as collective con¬ texts,

to

notice

the

poet’s

poppies/psyche,

the

performer’s

presence,

and

the

daughter’s patchwork of plural identities, to breathe and live in the feminine space between total innocence and total guilt, between autonomous expression and deriva¬ tive sameness, and thereby to say,

after Plath: O my God, what am I That these late mouths should cry open In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

and after Clarke: O my God, what am I That I am flooded with a wonderful feehng of potential power.

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Appendix From the interview by Robert Sherman of Rebecca Clarke at her home in New York in 1976 for WQXR radio as part of a tribute he did on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday (she died in 1979). Leonarda Sampler Cassette, Vol. 1 (LP1/1) (see Endnote 3).

R.C.:

Yes, I studied at the Royal College of Music with Sir Charles Stanford who was the teacher of Vaughan Williams, and Holst and Frank Bridge, and my husband too, and all those fellows, and I was his only girl pupil ... and it was considered something rather ... rather unusual. And when I, when I had that one little whiff of success that I’ve had in my life with the Viola Sonata, rumor went around, I hear, that I hadn’t written the stuff myself, but somebody had done it for me. And I even got one or two little bits of (I don’t know if I’ve still got them, I doubt it) little bits of press clippings saying that it was impos¬ sible, that I couldn’t have written it myself. And the funniest of all was that I had a clipping once which said that I didn’t exist, that there wasn’t any such person as Rebecca (laughs) ... there wasn’t any such person as Rebecca Clarke, that it was a pseudonym (now these people have got most beautifully mixed) ... it was a pseudonym for Ernest Bloch. And I thought to myself, what a funny idea, that when he writes his very much lesser works, that he should take a pseudonym of a girl, that anybody should consider this possible. And the joke was that - this was sent to me by a friend from England, I think, it came out in an English paper - and I was in Singapore at the time and I had an extreme feeling of unreality, as if I really didn’t exist. I mean being in a place like Singapore and getting a clipping to say that there wasn’t such a per¬ son as me ... was a ... rather strange experience.

R.S.:

When you began your composition studies, ... did you have any feelings that it was an unusual thing for a woman to be doing?

R.C.:

I don’t think I thought about it very much ... one way or the other. I just wanted to do it. And, oh, I’ll tell you something that will amuse you. I played once at a recital in the old town hall and I played, two groups and in each group there was something that I’d written myself (as you know, there are awfully few solos for viola, and I think I also played some duets) ... but any¬ how I wanted rather to play another piece I’d written and I thought, this is too silly to put my name down - this was before the Viola Sonata and it seemed too silly to put my name down still once more - so I thought, I’ll invent a name. So I went through the rivers of England until I came across

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what sounded like a handy surname, and I took the name Trent. I knew nothing — the river Trent — I knew nothing about Trent’s Last Case in those days and all that ... I took the first name Anthony because I liked that name ... and this is one for women’s lib, because although the piece by Anthony Trent was not particularly good, it had much more attention paid to it than the pieces that I had written, I mean in my own name ... which is rather a joke. And people would ask me about Anthony Trent and I was rather self conscious at having invented him and I think I would blush — I still would blush in those days — and I would blush and I think ... I could see in their faces that they thought, ah yes, there’s a romance somewhere, you know... R.S.:

Did Anthony Trent ever reappear?

R.C.:

No, no, I let him die an easy death after the Viola Sonata, ... because that was really in a way, my start — it made a little bit of a rustle because I was a girl at that time, and I had my picture in The Times and my picture in Vogue and all that sort of thing, and I thought I was terribly important.

1.

I presented an earlier version of this paper, “Feminine Spaces in a Feminist Music Theory: Three Metaphors of Reading - poppies, presence, and patchwork,” at the Fifth Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, University of California, Berkeley, June

1994.

Translation of the de Musset text was provided by

Chun-Fang Bettina Hahn, Indiana LTniversity. 2.

See Rebecca Clarke, Sonata for Viola (or Cello) and Piano, with an introduction by Ann M. Woodward (New York: Da Capo Press,

1986;

copyright

1921,

J. & W.

Chester Music, Ltd.), and sound recording, Rebecca Clarke: Music for Viola (North¬ eastern, NR

212,1985).

I thank Maijorie M. Rusche, composer, for the opportunity

to discuss our individual characterizations of this movement. Thanks also to Liane Curtis for sharing her unpublished article, “Rebecca Clarke and Sonata Form: Questions of Gender and Genre,” which historically situates aspects of the “sonata design” of the first movement in relation to the book on composition by Clarke’s teacher, Charles Stanford, and challenges the “notion of coded sonata form” in which the “conventions of sonata form [represent] a coded narrative of oppression and victimization” (i).This article now appears in Musical Quarterly 393-429;

81/3

(i997);

see also her article, “A Case of Identity: Rescuing Rebecca Clarke,” The

Musical Times (May

1996): 15-21,

published since I wrote this essay.

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Unless otherwise noted, these quotations are taken from an interview of Rebecca Clarke by Robert Sherman at her home in New York in 1976 forWQXR radio as part of his tribute on the occasion of her 90th birthday (Clarke died in 1979). A portion of my transcription of this interview is reproduced with permission in the appendix at this end of this essay. See Leonarda Sampler Cassette, v. 1 (LP 1/1). Leonarda Productions, P.O. Box 1736, New York, NY 10025-1559, (212) 666-7697. Robert Sherman is Program Director ofWQXR radio; his interview of Rebecca Clarke was featured on his “Listening Room” series onWQXR.

4.

Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives

5.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 279.

Routledge, 1990). 6.

For an account of the contradictory meanings of feminine/female identities and the role of dream and possibility in the construction of these identities, see my paper, “Of Poetics and Poiesis, Pleasure and Politics - Music Theory and Modes of the Feminine,” Perspectives of New Music 32 (1994): 44—67. Also see the conference an¬ nouncement for the roundtable discussion before the 1994 Society for Ethnomusicology conference, “‘Gender Trouble’ in Music Research: Theoretical Chal¬ lenges, Problems and Approaches,” by conveners Susan C. Cook and Elizabeth Tolbert.

7.

The statement by Coolidge is also quoted by Christopher Johnson in his introduc¬ tion to the Da Capo Press edition of Clarke’s Trio for Piano, Viola, and Cello (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980), vi, and referenced in Clarke’s 1976 interview with Robert Sherman. The reviewer, Herbert Peyser, is quoted by Woodward in her introduction to the Da Capo Press edition of Clarke’s Sonata for Viola and Piano, vi.

8.

Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 103.

9.

Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago Press, 1991), 3.

10. Ibid., 5. 11. Monique Wittig, “The Mark of Gender,” in her The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 79-80. I also thank Lyn Ellen Burkett for conversa¬ tions on the complex relationships between oppression and difference in character¬ izing women’s lives and Naomi Cumming for discussions of our respective ideas on subjectivity. 12. Harriet G. Lerner, The Dance of Deception: Pretending and Truth-Telling in Women’s Lives (NewYork: HarperCollins, 1993), 54-55 and 218. 13. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward A Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 188.Thanks to Elizabeth Tolbert for bringing this book to my attention. 14. Specific information about Rebecca Clarke in 77ie New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, v. 6, Stanley Sadie, ed. (London: Macmillan, 1980), 855 is subsumed under the entry for her husband, James Friskin, rather than presented in her name. This problem is rectified somewhat by a more informative entry under “Rebecca Clarke” in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, v. 1, H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie, eds. (London: Macmillan, 1986), 452.

Marianne

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15. Woodward, v. 16. “The songs that Clarke composed during her student years at the Royal College of Music [in London] favored English musical themes and texts by William Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, and William Blake.” See Diane Peacock Jezic, Women Composers:The Lost Tradition Found (NewYork:The Feminist Press, 1988), 159.

17. William Blake, Milton, 1804. Tlte Poetry and Prose of William Blake, DavidV. Erdman, ed., and commentary by Harold Bloom (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 103, plate 10: lines 1-11. Lines 6-10 also cited in Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Stud¬ ies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer¬ sity Press, 1976), 34. Bloom’s commentary: 819: “Urizen...is the power in the fallen psyche that marks boundaries, defines the horizon, separates and divides, and in general limits and reduces.” 820-21: “Los.. .is divided in two.The result is a fallen Los or Adam, and Enitharmon or Eve, whose name indicates her role as the mother of‘numberless’ fallen descendants. Horrified by this separate female form, the unfallen Eternals com¬ plete the Fall by fastening down the roof of Science as a tent over the fallen, thus giving an objective existence to the order of nature. Within this tent, Los as a diminished perception resulting in time, and Enitharmon as a materialized perception of space unite, after a ‘natural’ courtship of mutual torments, so as to generate time’s serpent, Ore.” 827: “The identity of Satan as Urizen is revealed at last to Los and Enitharmon, who take necessary measure against their old enemy. But whereas Los vows not to succumb to Urizenic religion, Enitharmon’s customary failure of nerve deep¬ ens the Fall through the creation of a further, “Female Space,” here the unre¬ deemed land called Canaan to signify the England that Milton must hallow into an Israel.”

18. Grosz, 47 and 80. Since writing this essay, I encountered a text of Sue Best which details how the question of space is intimately bound up with the question of woman; see her “Sexualizing Space” in Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, Eliza¬ beth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 181-94: “If the concept of space is produced by the metaphor of woman, then it follows that the metaphor of woman is an essential and constitutive part of the concept of space” (186). Best acknowledges and critiques the feminization of space, and, following Luce Irigaray, conceives the body-matter of woman “as an essential and ‘active’ ingredient in the production of space” (190).

19. Metaphors are not “merely heuristic devices or literary embellishments that can be replaced by value neutral referential terms.” Harding, 44.

20. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 234 and passim.

21. Grosz, 189. 22. Nancy Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 4 and passim.

1 13

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23. See especially the discussion of mediated autobiography, autobiographical reading, and “strong autobiographical reading” in Suleiman, “Part Four: History/Memory,” 179-224.

24. Quoted in Johnson, vi. 25. Sylvia Plath, Ariel: Poems by Sylvia Plath, foreword by Robert Lowell (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 19 and 81, respectively. Lowell comments: This character is feminine, rather than female, though almost everything we customarily think of as feminine is turned on its head.... Everything in these poems is personal, confessional, felt, but the manner of feeling is controlled hallucination, the autobiography of a fever_This Ariel is the authors horse. Dangerous, more powerful than man, machinelike from hard training, she her¬ self is a little like a racehorse, galloping relentlessly with risked, outstretched 7 74

neck, death hurdle after death hurdle topped. She cries out for that rapid life of starting pistols, snapping tapes, and new world records broken. What is most heroic in her, though, is not her force, but the desperate practicality of her control, her hand of metal with its modest, womanish touch (vii).

26. Battersby, 103-04. 27. Rose, xii and 1. 28. Johnson, vi. 29. This quotation is taken from Rebecca Clarke, “I Had a Father Too: or The Mus¬ tard Spoon,” manuscript (i970?-i979), 159. See also the essay Christopher Johnson wrote for the recording, Rebecca Clarke: Music for Viola.

30. Harding, 253—63. Witness the same-sex negotiation of femme/butch roles which simulate and comment on heterosexual role-play.

31. Nancy Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (New York: Routledge, 1991), 42.

32. Battersby, 104. The passage by Virginia Woolf is from her Women and Writing (Lon¬ don: The Women’s Press, 197.9), 62.

33. This and other biographical details are chronicled in Johnson’s introduction to Clarke’s Trio, v-vii.

34. Ibid.,vi. 35. Ibid.,v. 36. Woodward, vi. 37. Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia 2/2 (1987): 3-19 and 8.

38. See Kielian-Gilbert, “Of Poetics and Poiesis,” 54. 39. See Suleiman; her formulation of an ethics of irony is adapted from that of Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1989). 40. Rose, 235. Her comments were made in reference to Plath’s poem, “Daddy,” in Ariel, 49.

41. Lerner, 75. Lerner bases her observations on the work of Peggy McIntosh, “Feeling Like a Fraud, Parts One and Two,” Work in Progress, The Stone Center Working Papers Series, No. 18 (1985) and No. 37 (1989), respectively.

42. Suleiman, 8.

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Voice, Race, and Sexuality in the Music of Joan Armatrading

When she was 14, Joan Armatrading wanted to play the guitar, but she had to get her

hands on one first. Though her father was an amateur musician and a guitarist at that, he offered his daughter no help: in fact, according to Armatrading, he hid his instru¬ ment in order to avoid encouraging her musical ambitions. Her big break came when she spotted a guitar in the window of a pawn shop in Birmingham, England, where her family had settled after moving from her birthplace of St. Kitts in the West Indies. By trading in two baby carriages donated by her mother, she obtained the much desired instrument, taught herself to play, and started writing songs.1 Armatrading’s resourcefulness soon resulted in her first album: at the age of 21, she recorded Whatever’s for Us, which introduced within a folk-based idiom her re¬ markable singing and sophisticated song writing as well as her considerable skills as a guitarist. Since 1972 she has released eighteen albums which traverse an astonishing range of musical styles; her tunes are alternately imprinted by jazz, blues, pop, funk, reggae, and rock, as well as folk.2 (See discography in the Appendix.) Armatrading’s distinctive voice - throaty, warm, and expressive - has garnered a number of gold records internationally; her 1976 album Joan Armatrading reached the top five in England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.3 In the United States her music has attracted a devoted and enthusiastic following, and her concerts generally sell quite well. However, none of her albums has earned a gold record, and her music is not widely known; her last Top 10 hit in the United States was “Drop the Pilot” in 1983.4 There are at least two factors that have contributed to Armatrading’s longstanding difficulty in breaking into the American market. First, she has been criticized for not

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projecting a sufficiently attractive image. One of her first producers, Pete Gage, recalls the following:

[Once] I’d done an absolute miracle..., I had actually got Joan to take off the Blue Sweater. She lived in a big, baggy, blue sweater. The first night at Ronnie Scott s [a club in London] she was going to wear the Blue Sweater, but I managed to per¬ suade her into wearing a white blouse.5

From the earliest days of her career, Armatrading has presented herself plainly in publicity photos, on recording covers, and in concert. She appears without a trace of make-up, sports a decidedly unglamorous Afro, and tends to wear sneakers, jeans, and T-shirts or loose-fitting shirts.6

The consequences of Armatrading’s nonchalant attitude about what she wears in per¬ formance can also be considered in the context of race. Within the last decade, several white women singers working in the United States’ popular music industry have rejec¬ ted conventional representations of femaleness in dress and appearance - for example, k.d. lang and Melissa Etheridge - and have gained commercial success and national visibility.7 Yet black women singers have been granted far less freedom in the realm of visual representation: those who cultivate a diva image like Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Donna Summer, and Janet Jackson tend to be seen and heard far more frequently than artists like Armatrading.

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A second factor in Armatrading’s relatively cool reception in the United States is, I think, her racial identity insofar as it challenges traditional American notions about black singers of popular music. She once remarked that “in America, to be black and English is weird”;8 indeed, while the U.S. eagerly welcomed the “British Invasion” onto its shores as personified by four white men, it has largely ignored British black musi¬ cians, male or female.9 Unlike the successful American black women singers mentioned above, Armatrading does not perform dance music; she composes all of her songs and plays instruments (piano and guitar) in addition to singing. Taking this notion of Armatrading’s non-conformity as a starting point, I will ex¬ plore three aspects of identity - gender, sexuality, and race - as they pertain to a num¬ ber of her songs in order to propose ways of theorizing and hearing her music that ac¬ knowledge its dazzling unconventionality within each of these layers of identity. More specifically, I will argue that her songs may be usefully understood in relation to her identity. Through its use of musical register, vocal quality, lyrics, and musical styles, Armatrading’s music resists being contained within traditional sites of gender and sexuality and effectively negotiates her identity as a black British female diasporic.

“I

DON’T THINK THE WORLD REALLY NEEDS ANOTHER

SOUNDS

LIKE

PERSON WHO

EVERYBODY ELSE”’0

Armatrading’s supple, vivid voice catches the listener’s ear immediately. Distinctive for its extraordinarily wide range, her voice disregards the boundary that traditionally sep¬ arates female and male voices; accordingly, it carves out a musical space for female voices that is infrequently explored in pop music. Like her casual physical appearance, then, Armatrading’s singing range resists a gender stereotype.11 In Armatrading’s song “Heaven,” for example, her voice effortlessly moves out of the registral territory that is culturally marked as “female” by singing the low E that lies a sixth below middle C at two cadences. This pitch is situated just outside the con¬ tralto’s range, the lowest of the female voice types, and it also lies in a range comfort¬ able for all of the male voice types. The text for the first two verses of “Heaven,” from Track Record, is given below.

Came into my life Made me think that I was really somethin’ Took me by surprise

Someone with your charm Lookin’ my way

Am I in Heaven Am I in Heaven Am I in Heaven Have I gone up Have I gone up To the big cloud Number nine Help

Thus, the song begins by portraying the narrator as insecure, needing comfort, and grateful to this “you” for “looking my way.” In the chorus that follows, however, when the narrator employs her deeper voice, she becomes a protector and source of comfort. Later, as the narrator moves back into a higher register on the words “Because I’ve found the perfect someone/Who could take me in their arms and love me,” she returns to the role of one who needs to be comforted. This shift between the states of needing and being needed accompanies the narrator’s movement back and forth between two registral spaces, high and low.12 The song thus allows a single narrator to occupy dual emotional sites and registers, entering a registral space for a woman vocalist that is not commonly visited.

Oh

babe

you’re so

right

forme-

And

I wan-na be the sun- shine when you’re gone...

Example 1: Melody of verse 3 and the beginning of the chorus.

Starting on the

above middle C, Armatrading sings the line “Brought me out of my

cell” in a register customarily sung by a female voice; in this verse, the highest pitch she

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sings is the bent note on the word “out” that lies about a fourth above the initial Dl13 On the word “Startin’,” her voice stretches upward to the D* in the higher octave. Upon reaching the chorus, which begins with the line “And I wanna be the sunshine when you’re gone,” her voice dives down at the line’s cadence to the E below middle C on the word “gone” and again drops to E in the next line, “And I wanna be the apple of your eye,’ on the word “eye.” Her voice is thus not fixed in the higher register that traditionally accommodates women’s voices, but freely traverses between two registral spaces.14 One of Armatrading’s most beautiful songs, “Willow” from Show Some Emotion, provides another example of how a song’s narrator is positioned in two distinct registers as she assumes different types of power. The lyrics after the bridge appear below.

And if it’s money you want Or trouble have W hatever you want me to do ,411 you got to do is ask

CHORUS: I said I’m strong Straight Willing To be a shelter in a storm Your willow, oh willow When the sun is out

The narrator initially offers herself as a source of comfort and support to an unidenti¬ fied “you.” But when Armatrading sings the words “I’m strong” in a high, strained reg¬ ister for a second time in the song, her voice breaks and dies away, suggesting that the narrator’s strength is an illusion. Then on the word “straight,” the melody splits into two voices through overdubbing: the lower one is sustained, holding rock solid onto the tonic while the upper voice spirals downward in a path that is decidedly not straight; the curves of the vocal line suggest a willow rather than a strong, straight tree. It is signifi¬ cant that Armatrading sings both parts - the higher voice that aspires to be strong and straight but isn’t, and the lower voice that quietly supplies the passage with its foun¬ dation. Since we know the singer to be a woman, we can understand both voices as be¬ ing projected by a female who is both strong and vulnerable. “Willow” thus demonstrates another use of the distinction between vocal registers: the demands of the high register seem to sap the song’s narrator of her strength - here,

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the stamina to make it to the end of the phrase - which she regains only when the lower voice enters to support the upper voice. By placing her voice in contrasting regis¬ ters, Armatrading is able to project multiple identities. “Love and Affection,” which is perhaps Armatrading’s best-known work, can be understood to draw upon the mapping of high and low registers to female and male, but in a different way than either “Heaven” or “Willow.” The song’s lyrics are given be¬ low, with each verse numbered.

1.

I am not in love But I m open to persuasion East or West Where’s the best For romancin’ With a friend I can smile

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But with a lover I can hold my head back Really laugh

2.

Thank you You took me dancin’ Cross the floor Cheek to cheek But with a lover I could really move, really move I could really dance, really dance, really dance, really dance I could really move, really move, really move, really move

3.

Now if I can feel the sun in my eyes And the rain on my face Why can’t I feel love Really love Love love love love love love love love

4.

Now I got all the friends that I want WELL GIVE ME LOVE Love I may need more But I shall just stick to those OH GIVE ME LOVE That I have got

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With friends I still feel so insecure Little darling I believe you could help me a lot Just take my hand and lead me where you will No conversation no wave goodnight WELL GIVE ME LOVE

6.

Just make love with affection Sing me another love song But this time with a little dedication Sing it sing it sing it sing it You know that’s what I like/love WELL GIVE ME LOVE

Once more with a feelin’

727

Give me love, give me love Love

Opening with that most evocative line “I am not in love/But I’m open to persuasion,” the dreamy voiced narrator begins on

in the key of E, traveling up to G** by the time

she reaches the second syllable of “open.” After she observes in verse 4 that “I got all the friends I want,” a second voice enters in a much lower register, singing the E an oc¬ tave and a sixth below middle C. This voice is a candidate for the person with whom she could “really move/really dance.” Given the subsequent interaction of this deep second voice with the original voice, a listener can understand it as gendered male. This person is not the sensitive lover she dreams about; beginning in verse 4, he presents himself as a rather boorish guy with a one-track mind, repeatedly and persistently croaking “WELL GIVE ME LOVE” on a single pitch, which is the only thing he says throughout the entire song. Despite the female narrator’s request to “just make love with affection,” and later her more pointed plea to “sing me another love song,” the male voice continues to de¬ mand love, never altering his rhythm, wording, or pitch base, refusing to budge from that stable tonic E. She tries again, asking him to repeat his song “with feeling,” but he still wants only one thing.15 At the end of verse 6, the deeper voice reiterates his words, “Give me love,” initially as a triplet over a single beat; the narrator then restates his phrase but stretches the triplet over two beats. By rhythmically recasting this phrase, she demonstrates one way that he might adjust the performance of his love song. The higher voice then demon¬ strates to the bass voice another, more interesting way he might sing: rather than

Voice,

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robotically repeating “well give me love” on the tonic, she sings the word “love” melismatically, sweeping down a sixth from G** to B. Armatrading also deploys her instruments to characterize these two figures as the insistent male and the interested-but-not-yet-satisfied female. In verse 3 a guitar enters on B which ascends diatonically to E and back down to B. Its four-note motive is shown in Example 2.

Example 2: Guitar motive of verse 3.

As unrelenting as the male voice, the guitar repeats this musical statement or variations 722

on it until the song’s conclusion. In verse 5, as the narrator sings about feeling insecure despite the presence of her friends, the music moves out of the major mode in which it had been solidly situated, and the strings begin a stepwise ascent from A. After reach¬ ing the tonic they continue upward to

and then to the lowered third scale degree, G\

which briefly suggests E minor; this shift to the new mode accompanies the narrator’s invitation to the deeper voice to “lead me where you will.” In verse 6, which begins “Just make love with affection,” the guitar quickens the pace of the motive. After the higher voice sings the melisma on the word “love” in verse 6, a saxo¬ phone enters during the bridge. Its solo contrasts sharply with the guitar’s motivically static music; its rhythms are free and improvisatory, its melody bold and expansive. The saxophone reaches up from the E above middle C to its climax tone, G\ which lies a tenth higher. Both the rhapsodic sax and ostinato guitar continue in this fashion to the song’s final cadence; they can be understood as instrumental parallels to the vocal pair formed by the higher voice’s melismatic improvisations and the lower voice’s persistent and predictable entreaties.

“I

HAVE A LOT OF THINGS I

LIKE TO KEEP SECRET”

Armatrading has repeatedly remained reticent about her personal life, stating: “Every¬ body has a right to the privacy they want for themselves. You have to give a certain amount away..., but sometimes people take it further and try to get into real personal stuff. Every single question that you’re asked you don’t have to give an answer to.”16 In one interview, after being peppered with a series of questions about whether she was ro-

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mantically involved with anyone, had plans to get married, or would like someday to have children, she shrugged all of them off, simply saying “Who knows?”17 Her refusal to continue this particular line of questioning underscores her firm de¬ sire to avoid talking publicly about her own sexual identity. She has also said, “I truly want to keep my personal life to myself. I have a lot of things I like to keep secret,”18 and she added that, contrary to what many of her fans believe, all of her songs are not autobiographical, because “that would mean people knowing every personal aspect of your life, which I don’t think would be a very good thing.”19 Many who are familiar with Armatrading’s music assume that she is a lesbian. This study, however, is not in¬ tended to pin a specific label onto her sexuality; rather, I believe it important to recog¬ nize that several of Armatrading’s songs are open to lesbian readings.20 As in her interviews, the lyrics in many of Armatrading’s songs tend to dodge par¬ ticular issues and frequently obscure the sex of the people described. In “Heaven,” for example, she sings: “I’ve found the perfect someone/Who could take me in their arms and love me,” which avoids locking this “someone” into a single sex. When asked about the “ambiguous sexuality” of her songs, Armatrading responded that “I like to think that my songs are going to relate to both male and female. And it seems to work. The men cry over songs like ‘Willow,’ and the women do as well. I try not to be too specific. I might say ‘I’ but I’ll try not to say ‘boy’ or ‘girl,’ ‘he’ or ‘she,’ so that it can be for whoever’s listening to it.”21 Armatrading has repeatedly maintained that she wants to offer her songs to a diverse audience:

I write songs for anybody that wants them. If a gay person wants it, it’s theirs. If a feminist wants it - or a man, or a little boy of 10, or somebody who’s 60 - it’s theirs. I didn’t write it and say, “Well, only women can listen to this, or only people under 30.” The songs are for everybody. I don’t get involved in movements. You shouldn’t limit things.22

Her rejection of political movements reflects a conservatism evident in a 1980 interview:

I do not write feminist songs. Let’s get that straight once and for all. I write songs for whoever likes them, and blokes seem to like them as much as women.23

Armatrading’s dismissal of feminist concerns in this interview seems to have given way, by the end of the decade, to a position more overtly sympathetic to the situation of wo¬ men and lesbians, who comprise a substantial portion ol her audience.24 In her 1988 tune “All a Woman Needs,” she sings that “[W]oman/Love is all she needs/He will ne-

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ver get his way with ease/He has to woo her properly/Or he’ll never win her heart”; a later verse states that “Man likes to own/A woman shares/Man has his needs/A woman cares.” Her 1992 song “If Women Ruled the World” also voices a feminist viewpoint: its lyrics suggest that if women ruled the world, there would be “no more sons dying young/Women bore sons for living...no more war/no more hate— They’d rather talk than murder.” Armatrading never presented such positions in her songs of the 1970s and early 1980s; perhaps by the late 1980s she felt more comfortable expressing femi¬ nist sentiments, having secured a place for herself in the popular music business. In one interview, Armatrading reflected on how she survived as a woman in the maledominated recording industry:

I’ve always worn clothes that I feel comfortable in. They kept saying things like, “Have you thought of wearing a dress or putting your hair up? At least stop wearing 724

that little wooly hat on stage.” I went right on doing what I wanted to do. You’ve got to be a bit stubborn because most of the record business is run by men, and men always have set ideas about how things should be. There’s a lot of pressure on women to conform. If you want to survive you’ve got to be either strong or stubborn or deaf.25

“Taking My Baby Uptown,” from her album To The Limit, is one of her many songs that does not identify the sex of the person addressed. It describes a scene in which the narrator is walking with a “pretty person on my arm,” which induces a crowd to start shouting that she “should have never been born.” Verse 3 is given below.

It was Friday I had money I was feeling kind of special I was taking my baby uptown The moon was high The stars were bright And there were lots of people in the street I held your hand You kissed me And then all the people started to Stare We started a commotion Someone making Comments Morals

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The state of affairs And I said What we got is the best

Although the lyrics do not specify why this couple faces such hostility, it is possible to read the song as describing a scene of street harassment familiar to gay couples who are openly affectionate in public. Because the couple’s physical characteristics are not de¬ scribed, the situation in the song is open to multiple readings - for instance, as depict¬ ing an interracial couple, or in fact any couple that is not widely represented in society at large.26 Armatrading undercuts the ugliness of the events she describes with a bright, boun¬ cy dance rhythm established by the electric organ; in addition, rather than lingering on the harassment, she swiftly describes the incident in each of the song’s three verses with a syllabic setting, getting the narrative out as fast as possible. Only on the last two lines does she switch to a more extended singing style (“But I said aha/What we got is the best”), lingering on the word “best.” She repeats this line once in the last two verses to emphasize the speaker’s complete confidence about the rightness of the relationship, rather than focusing on the depressing bigotry of those commenting on “morals” and “the state of affairs.” Armatrading’s ambiguous use of “I” and “you” in this song allows listeners to hear a description of gay experience, as well as other readings.27

“I

HAD SOMEBODY SAY ONCE I WAS WAY TOO BLACK AND

SOMEONE ANSWERS SHE’S NOT BLACK ENOUGH

FOR

ME”

While Armatrading frequently addresses issues of power in her music that involve gen¬ der or sexuality (matters that she tends to steer clear of in interviews), she rarely writes songs whose texts directly address issues of race. This feature of her music has both in¬ trigued and puzzled many of her fans who perceive her as an artist willing to speak for subordinated groups. In a 1982 interview published in the alternative periodical Mother Jones, Armatrading was asked why she, as the daughter of working-class, West Indian immigrants, did not “reflect more of the racial and economic turmoil in her adopted Britain.” She responded:

If you want to get into the racial problem, I’ve never found it a problem. I always bring it down to individuals, so if somebody does something [cruel] I don’t say it’s because he’s black or he’s white: it just becomes “I don’t like that person” or “They don’t like me.” It’s personalities, not color. My older brother got heavily into a

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Black Power political thing. He didn’t like to read anything unless it was written by a black person. But I could never see it like he did.28

The lyrics of her spngs are indeed notably bereft of statements on race; I know of only one song from all of her recordings that directly addresses issues of race in its lyrics.29 (In recent years, Armatrading’s political alliances have become more overt; she per¬ formed on a concert for Nelson Mandela and has promoted the work of the human rights organization Amnesty International.30) Her 1979 song “How Cruel” begins with a bold, three-note instrumental motive which is immediately followed by a graphic opening verse:

Some people want to see my blood gush out And others want to watch while I cry 7 26

I had somebody say once I was way too black And someone answers she’s not black enough for me

The song continues by describing various malicious incidents directed toward this fe¬ male narrator because of her race (“I bought a house and the neighbors moved”; “They’ll put the skin of the fruit on the ground/And I slip and fall”). The chorus re¬ peats the line “Oh how cruel to make a girl cry” three times; Armatrading sings these lines in an expressionless voice positioned in the song’s highest register. In a quasi¬ recitative fashion, several of the vocal melodies consist of strings of repeated pitches with one or two higher or lower pitches that alter the melodic landscape. The rhythm section maintains an agitated backbeat throughout, and the song concludes with a shrieking, unsettling saxophone solo, which can perhaps be heard as expressing the anger underneath the narrator’s unruffled exterior. Though none of Armatrading’s other songs addresses the issue of racism as directly as “How Cruel,” I would argue that her music is very much a product of her racial and ethnic identity. Not only does she sing in what is unmistakably the voice of a black woman, but I wish to suggest that the myriad musical styles of Armatrading’s songs also relate to her status as a black diasporic.31 Stuart Hall has suggested that hybrid forms are inevitably a part of the diaspora aesthetic. Speaking as a black British critical theo¬ rist whose origins are Caribbean, Hall identifies popular culture as one of the few sites in which black diasporics were traditionally permitted entry:

[I]n black popular culture, strictly speaking, ethnographically speaking, there are no pure forms at all. Always these forms are the product of partial synchronization, of engagement across cultural boundaries, or the confluence of more than one cul-

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tural tradition, of the negotiations of dominant and subordinate positions, of the subterranean strategies of recoding and transcoding, of critical signification, of signifying.... [T]hey must always be heard, not simply as the recovery of a lost dia¬ logue bearing clues for the production of new musics..., but as what they are adaptations, molded to the mixed, contradictory, hybrid spaces of popular culture.32

Armatrading’s music lushly illustrates Hall’s description of black popular culture as a hybrid space. Examples of her songs that prominently incorporate diverse musical styles are the reggae-influenced “Bottom to the Top” and “Rosie”;33 the jazz- and blues-inscribed “Steppin’ Out”; and her folk-based “All the Way from America.” She employs African percussion on several cuts of her second recording, Back to the Night, and includes the Kronos String Quartet, known for their performances of avant-garde music, on her most recent recording, What’s Inside. In much of her music, a number of styles collide and blend in a single tune, as, for example, in the virtuosic “Kissin’ and aHuggin"' on Show Some Emotion, which brings together hard-edged rock, jazz, and pop.34 Hall's notion that hybridity is part of a diasporic aesthetic provides one way to un¬ derstand how Armatrading’s music negotiates her identity - by drawing upon disparate musical sources and styles, Armatrading is able to construct an identity that is both black and British. Through her singular compositional abilities, Armatrading not only frees her songs from the constraints of how popular music customarily circulates no¬ tions of gender, race, and sexuality, but also succeeds in presenting a more flexible and thus ultimately liberating vision of what it can mean to be a black, British, and female musician.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference Feminist Theory and Music 2: A Continuing Dialogue, Eastman School of Music, June 1993. I would like to thank Roberta Lamb, Martha Mockus, and Jane Sugarman for their responses to my essay, Elaine Barkin for her astute suggestions, Lydia Hamessley for her unending encouragement and thoughtful suggestions for its improvement, and Anton Vishio for his advice about the musical transcriptions and for the many absorbing conversations we’ve had about Armatra¬ ding and her work. 1.

Richard Harrington, “Eclectic, Electric Armatrading,” in The Washington Post (20 February 1982): Sec. C, 3.

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Sexuality

Armatrading writes and arranges all of her songs and, since her 1986 album Sleight of Hand, has produced or co-produced her recordings.

3.

Stephen Demorest, “The Uncommon Artistry of Joan Armatrading,” The New York Times (24 December 1978): Sec. 2, 22. One count is that she has received over twenty gold records in seven countries. Cited in David Collins, “Joan Armatrading,” in Contemporary Musicians: Profiles of the People in Music 4 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1991): 8.

4.

Dominic Pride, Billboard 107/24 (17 June 1995): 14.

5.

Sean Mayes, Joan Armatrading: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990), 51; quoted in Lucy O’Brien, She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Bock, Pop and Soul (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 206. In a 1992 interview, Armatrading reiterated her opposition to projecting an alluring image, declaring that “I wouldn’t even begin to attempt all that Madonna showy, glitzy, glamorous stuff.... It’s just not me. I’d look ridiculous. You’ve got to do what you feel comfortable with” (quoted in O’Brien, 186).

6.

128

Armatrading’s 1985 album Secret Secrets lists the late Robert Mapplethorpe as the photographer; in Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievements of Robert Mapplethorpe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), Arthur C. Danto also identifies the photographer as Mapplethorpe (149). In light of recent critiques of Mapplethorpe’s work as racially fetishistic, it is interesting to note that Secret Secrets is the only album cover on which Armatrading is wearing a dress, which falls above the knee, rather than pants. See Kobena Mercer, “Just Looking for Trouble: Robert Mapplethorpe and Fantasies of Race,” in Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate, Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh, eds. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 92-110.

7.

Martha Mockus discusses the politics of image and gender in k.d. lang’s music and in country music more generally in “Queer Thoughts on Country Music and k.d. lang,” Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, eds. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 257-71. Of course, it is probably significant that both women are out lesbians.

8.

Mayes, 33; quoted in O’Brien, 185-86.

9.

A musical genre in which black male singers from the West Indies have won recogni¬ tion and acceptance in the United States is reggae, which became widely popular in the 1960s and 1970s.

10.

Joan Armatrading, quoted in Barbara Graustark, Newsweek 95/6 (11 February 1980): 94.

11.

David Lewin explores the relationship between gender and register in his essay “Wo¬ men’s Voices and the Fundamental Bass,” Journal of Musicology 10 (1992): 464-82. He notes that our association of women’s and men’s musical voices with respectively higher and lower registers is a matter of cultural conditioning. One example of such conditioning is given in Julia Eklund Koza’s article, “Big Boys Don’t Cry (or Sing): Gender, Misogyny, and Homophobia in College Choral Methods Texts,” The Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning 4-5 (1993-1994): 48-64, which provides an overview of textbooks that maintain that boys are less

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interested than girls in participating in choral ensembles because they associate high voices with an undesirable femininity. r2.

Suzanne G. Cusick’s notion of a lesbian relationship as a “continuous circulation of power” is suggestive in terms of Armatrading’s music which regularly moves between high and low registers; my reading of “Heaven” recasts the subjects of Cusick’s ques¬ tion “who’s on top?” from physical postures to registral relations. Cusick, “On a Les¬ bian Relationship With Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight,” in Queering the Pitch, 67-83.

13-

My transcription uses the notation of a downward arrow on the pitches sung to “out,” “know,” “do,” and “Oh” to indicate a “bent note” or a note that is inflected so the exact pitch is indeterminate. It uses a line from a stemmed note to an unstemmed note to indicate a slide between two pitches on a single word, which occurs on “cell” and “care.”

14.

The melody in this passage works in rhythmic dissonance with the percussion, which maintains the 4/4 time signature. Here Armatrading studiously avoids starting phrases on the beat until she reaches the chorus, whose simple eighth-note, syllabic setting resolves the rhythmic tension.

15.

It is significant that, unlike many pop songs, “Love and Affection” does not contain a chorus but is through-composed, which results in a propulsive rather than recursive musical narrative.

16.

Harrington.

17.

Ruthe Stein, “A British Singing Star is on the Rise Here,” in San Francisco Chronicle (4 September 1980): 43. Armatrading’s desire for privacy is legendary; an early nickname given to her by the British press was “Joan Armorplating” (Harrington).

18.

Quoted in Tom Lanham, “Joan Armatrading: Shy Rising Star Eschews the Glare of Global Fame,” in San Francisco Chronicle (19 May 1985): DAT, 30.

19.

Quoted in Nancy Stetson, “Watching and Waiting,” in Chicago Tribune (14 September 1992) : Sec. 5, 3.

20. In her analysis of the meaning of popular music in the lives of lesbian and bisexual women, Barbara Brady interviewed one informant, Amanda, who rejects the so-called “women’s music” of the 1970s such as Holly Near’s because she perceives it to be aligned with a sexually conservative brand of feminism. Amanda does, however, fondly recall the importance of Joan Armatrading’s music during her “coming-out period.” See Bradby, “Lesbians and Popular Music: Does It Matter Who Is Singing?” in Outwrite: Lesbianism and Popular Culture, ed. Gabriele Griffin (London: Pluto Press, 1993) : 161-162. 21.

Quoted in Carol Cooper, “Joan Armatrading,” in Mother Jones 7/5 (June 1982): 30. Martha Mockus observes a similar strategy at work in k.d. lang’s lyrics which tend to use the pronouns “I-you” avoiding the use of “he” (261).

22.

Harrington.

23.

Stein, 43.

24. Cooper identifies Armatrading’s audience as predominately white and middle-aged, with a sizable feminist and gay following (30). According to a reviewer of Armatrading’s July 1996 concert at Cain Park in Cleveland, Ohio, “the audience consisted of mostly

129

Race,

Voice,

AND

Sexuality

lesbians, lesbian-friendly gay guys, a slew of pre- and post-Woodstock hippies, and a few yuppies.” Bryanna Fish, “Singer Blends Old and New Material at Cain Park Show,” Gay People’s Chronicle: An Independent Chronicle of the Ohio Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community (19 July 1996): 20. 25. Mayes, 51; quoted in O’Brien, 206. 26. A lesbian friend hears the scene as clearly depicting a gay couple; the display of physical affection which results in the jeers from a faceless crowd portrays what is to her a routine incident. In contrast, I hear the ridicule of the crowd as also applicable to a mixed-race situation. 27.

Armatrading presents non-heterosexual pairings more literally in “Me Myself I” (“I wanna have a boyfriend and a girl for laughs”) and “Tell Tale” (“I saw ya/Kissing all the boys/And I saw ya/Kissing all the girls/But you got obsessed/With the boys”).

28. Cooper, 30. 29. Her song “Get in the Sun,” from Show Some Emotion, refers to skin color and arguably to race (“Turn me over/I’m brown enough”). 30. Chris Heim, “Idol Thoughts,” in Chicago Tribune (17 August 1990): Sec. 5, 3. 7 30

31.

Armatrading’s sense of displacement began at an early age: when she was three, her parents, Amos and Beryl Armatrading, and her two older brothers moved from the West Indies to England, leaving her behind in the care of her grandparents. She was sent to join her parents four years later, identified by a nametag which she wore around her neck (O’Brien, 184).

32. Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” in Black Popular Culture, a project by Michele Wallace, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992): 28. 33. Before Armatrading cut her first album, she played in a Jamaican band in Birmingham (Collins, 7-8). 34. Armatrading counts among her influences Marianne Faithfull, Nat King Cole, Tommy Steele, and Van Morrison (Demorest, cf., n. 3.).

Ellie

Appendix

Discography of Recordings by Joan Armatrading

Whatever’s for Us, A&M SP-3227. 1972. Back to the Night, A&M SP-3141. 1975. Joan Armatrading, A&M SP-4588. 1976. Show Some Emotion, A&M SP-3273. 1977. To the Limit, A&M SP-4732. 1978. How Cruel, A&M SP-3302.1979. Steppin Out, A&M SP-4749. 1979Me Myself I, A&M CD 3316. 1980. Walk Under Ladders, A&M SP-4876. 1981. The Key, A&M SP-4912. 1983. Track Record, A&M SP-4987. 1983. Secret Secrets, A&M SP-5040. 1985. Sleight of Hand, A&M 395130-1. 1986. A&M 25th Anniversary Classics, vol. 21, A&M CD 2519. 1987. The Shouting Stage, A&M 5211. 1988. Hearts and Flowers, A&M 75021 5298 2. 1990. Square the Circle, A&M 750215388 2. 1992. What's Inside, RCA Victor 74321-27269-2. 1995.

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Singing for Myself Carmen and the Rhetoric of Musical Resistance

Especially in Bizet's operatic representation, Carmen stands as one of the paradigmatic outsiders of nineteenth-century European high culture. A Gypsy, a cigarette-smoking woman, a criminal — specifically a smuggler, a professional border-transgressor who audaciously takes control of the gaze as she exerts her power over Don Jose — she threatens the stability of cultural barriers, particularly sexual norms.1 Even her name, in Nelly Furman’s suggestive interpretation, signals a border-crossing, since in Andalusia, “a carmen is a villa or country house, a residence between town and country, between culture and nature.”2 And like so many of her sisters, she dies for her trespasses. Musically, too, the opera breached conventional borders — in part by mixing styles, incorporating a gaudy exoticism borrowed largely from the popular cabaret music of the time;3 in part by bringing murder onto the placidly middle-class stage of the Opera-Comique.4 Yet although Bizet’s opera, when new, was decried by musical conservatives largely because of this double challenge to operatic (or at least operacomique) integrity, more recently these same elements have been charged with serv¬ ing to uphold patriarchal Western values.5 Carmen s exoticism is seen as a form of cul¬ tural imperialism; and some feminist critics have seen the death of the heroine as one more instance of opera’s ‘undoing of women.’ Susan McClary argues, for instance, that through its “deadly narrative strategies,”6 it causes “the listener not only to accept Carmen’s death as ‘inevitable,’ but actually to desire it.”7 McClary’s critique, as usual, is powerful, but like so many attempts to talk about music and ideology, it slides over the distinction between representation and endorsement. Thus, for instance, she offers considerable insight into the opera’s rep¬ resentation (that it “articulates... a whole range of late nineteenth-century symptoms of cultural paranoia”).8 But that is only a first step. Once we realize that the late nine-

Singing

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teenth century’s paranoia appears in the opera, we still need to ask how its symptoms are represented. The “Gypsy-as-outsider” trope, for instance, had several competing meanings in early nineteenth-century art. One thinks of the contrast between the negative pole of “Gypsy-as-threat” in, say, Jane Austen, and the positive pole of “Gypsy-as-anti-bourgeois-ideal” in, say, Pushkin’s The Gypsies - a pole that may be racist at base, too, but one that is nonetheless significantly different in the way it positions its reader ideologically. Thus, for instance, according to the nineteenthcentury ethnographer Charles G. Leland:

[Gypsies can] teach the lesson of freedom and nature. Never were such lessons more needed than at present. I do not say that culture is opposed to the per¬ ception of nature; I would show with all my power that the higher our cul¬ ture the more we are really qualified to appreciate beauty and freedom. But gates must be opened for this, and unfortunately the gates as yet are very few, while Philistinism in every form makes it a business of closing every opening to the true fairy-land of delight.9

134 He thus bemoans the destruction of Gypsy culture: soon there will be no Gypsies left, j ust as there “will be no more wild parrots_The people of self-conscious culture and mart and factory are banishing the wilder sort.”10 Probably not coincidentally, Merimee not only admired, but even translated, Pushkin’s poem.11 Then, too, Bizet’s portrayal of the sexually independent but ethi¬ cally upright Gypsy Queen Mab in La Jolie Fille de Perth - intellectually and socially she’s the opera’s most adept character, the one who engineers the happy denouement - suggests that he was not apt to drift automatically toward the negative pole, either. Indeed, Carmen and the smugglers seem to stand in for their creators in the stirring hymn to “la liberte” that closes Act 2: Bizet was an ardent republican, and his libret¬ tists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy were also the librettists for Offenbach’s anti¬ authoritarian operettas.12 The question remains, then: Bizet’s opera takes up the “paranoia” about out¬ siders; but how does it deploy its intended audience with respect to that paranoia? On this issue, discussions of the opera have been less convincing. This is perhaps not surprising. Theorists of music have excelled at elucidating music’s rules of configura¬ tion, the conventional interpretive strategies which audiences use to predict the future course of events. But writers on music have been less adroit when it comes to issues of signification, the strategies that allow us to draw meaning from or take a position on particular musical elements.13 There’s been little study, for instance, of how musical structures might mirror the rhetorical functions that are performed in

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narrative by such devices as manipulation of person and point of view; nor do we know much about how music encodes the various modes of irony that serve as one of the crucial literary wedges between representation and endorsement. Indeed, some critics have argued that music lacks such finesse. Winton Dean, for instance, argues that music cannot mirror the “novelist’s device of putting the story into the mouth of one of the characters.”14 Jeremy Tambling argues more broadly that “nineteenthcentury opera, unlike the novel of that period, introduces the reader to fairly simple worlds, with people whose motivation can remain uninspected_The art-form allows for little interiority beyond that which can be suggested in musical terms, and then it is not clear that music is a subtle enough medium to suggest gradations of meaning.”15 My essay will thus have a double focus. On the theoretical level, it will apply narrative theory to music, in an attempt to move toward the development of a rheto¬ ric of musical endorsement and resistance, specifically by exploring a musical analog to the first/third person distinction, and asking what rhetorical effects this distinction can have. At the same time, on the interpretive level, I will offer the groundwork for a reading of Carmen that recuperates not only her resistance, but also Bizet’s willing endorsement of her anti-social acts.16

Let’s begin by looking at the way in which the disruptive popular musical material I mentioned enters the opera. Of course, it enters primarily through Carmen:17 and for that reason, Catherine Clement has argued that it represents one of the ways in which “Bizet, Meilhac, and Halevy [the librettists]... confine their representation of wom¬ an.”18 I would like to offer a different reading, one that begins with the observation that the stereotyped exotic images are not only associated with Carmen; more significantly, to a large extent she actually “presents” them. For even within the world of the opera, Carmen is almost consistently portrayed as singing.19 Now this representation of Carmen as a singer has a number of powerful thematic resonances. Within nineteenth-century opera, for instance, singing is a marked mode of dis¬ course. As a consequence, the aesthetic quality of a character’s singing when she or he sings as a character (one thinks of Tannhauser or Offenbach’s Orphee) usually plays a role in our judgment of his or her ethical character, even though - as the instances of Don Giovanni and Iago remind us - it is not always the kind of neat, one-to-one re¬ lationship we find, say, in Meistersinger, where Walther’s and Beckmesser’s talents line up smartly with their moral values. At the same time, of course, there is a counter¬ vailing tradition that treats singers and theatrical performers in general - especially

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women — as morally loose. Then, too, the versatility of Carmen’s singing appears to be a musical analog to her versatility with languages in the novella — a polyglossia which, especially given the novel’s proto-Bakhtinian spirit and Merimee’s high respect for hnguistic fluency, serves as a significant evaluative marker as well. McClary, oddly, refers to this as a kind of “discursive perversity,” suggesting that Bizet is using it to criticize, rather than to praise, Carmen.20 It is worth noting that in Merimee’s fiction, however, lack of linguistic flexibility almost always leads to trouble, whether it be the social embarrassment in the world of the novel caused by the misunderstanding of the word caporali at the beginning of Colomba, or the fooling of the reader caused by the misunderstanding of the epigraph to “Lokis.” But I want to pay attention not to these thematic resonances, but rather to the formal — one might even say, grammatical — impact of Carmen’s position as a singer. In particular, I want to consider the way in which it intersects with Carmen’s “subject position,” conceived in terms of her agency, and more specifically in terms of her agency in self-presentation: that is, the way Carmen’s position as a singer ties in with the kind of control she has over her public characterization. And to get to that

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formal issue, I need to make a literary-theoretical detour to discuss the way that the agency of a literary character is tied to formal attributes in literary representation. Of course, even before the recent deconstruction of the subject, talking about the “agency” of any literary character has been difficult, since characters do not exist and hence have no real agency at all: in a non-trivial sense, the author is the only true choice-maker present in a story. Yet readers often get the feehng that the self-presentation of various literary characters is, in fact, differentially represented in a text. Indeed, this is one of the crucial intuitions supporting Bakhtin’s conception of the polyphonic novel, especially what he calls the “free self-elucidation of the character’s points of view.”21 One way to come to terms with this doubleness is to start from the observa¬ tion that all fiction - indeed, all representational art — is “imitation” in the sense that it pretends to be something that it is not. An invented narrative, for instance, is pre¬ sented as if it were a true account of a singer’s self-discovery. As a result, the reading experience exists on two levels at once. We can treat the work neither simply as what it is, nor simply as what it appears to be: we must be aware of both aspects at once. We are hardly responding appropriately to James Cain’s Serenade if we try to look up The New York Times review of the Metropolitan Opera debut of its hero, John Howard Sharp; but neither should we refuse to sympathize with his agonies over his sexual identity merely because he is an invented character. The proper response treats Serenade as both “real” and “unreal” at once.

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This duality generates multiple audiences — in particular, what I call the au¬ thorial and narrative audiences. First, an author cannot make any rhetorical decisions (conscious or unconscious) without relying on prior assumptions about his or her readers’ knowledge and beliefs: their values, experiences, habits, familiarity with artis¬ tic conventions. In Serenade, for instance, Cain made his literary decisions based on the assumption that his readers would know something about the ways Hollywood’s val¬ ues conflict with those of the Metropolitan Opera. How could he make such an as¬ sumption without knowing his actual readers? As authors have always done, he could only make the best judgment he could and design his novel for a hypothetical audi¬ ence that I call the authorial audience. In this regard, his novel is not unlike any other public communication: physicists and editorial writers, too, write with an authorial audience in mind. But fiction, because of its imitative nature, brings another audience into play. Since a novel generally imitates some nonfictional form, the narrator (ex¬ plicit or implicit) generally imitates an author and writes for an imitation audience that I call the narrative audience: an audience that, in the case of Serenade, believes that con¬ ductor Winston Hawes really exists. To read the novel, we must not only join Cain’s authorial audience (which treats the novel as what it is - a novel), but at the same time pretend to be members of Sharp’s narrative audience (which treats the text as if it were what it pretends to be — a true account). When I talk about Carmen’s agency, then, I will be referring to Carmen as perceived by the narrative, rather than the authorial, audience.22 That is, for the authorial audience, all the words — all the rhetorical choices - have been made by the author, and are thus equally “mediated.”23 In our role as narrative audience, though, we can distinguish between levels of mediation - between degrees to which the char¬ acters have been given the power to choose their own discursive practices.24 And this activity in turn involves distinguishing between degrees of a narrator’s intervention. How are those differences of degree in fact marked in a text? Let me begin by clarifying a few terms. First, we have direct (or quoted) thought or speech, exempli¬ fied, say, by the sentence “Don Jose looked at her and said to himself, ‘She’s a beauti¬ ful woman!”’ Second, we have indirect (or reported) speech or thought, as in the sentence “Don Jose looked at her and said to himself she was a beautiful woman.” Finally we have what is known as the style indirect libre (or represented thought), as in: “Don Jose looked at her. What a beautiful woman!” And now let me begin with a point on which most narrative critics agree: there is no way to remove the narrator’s filter from a reported speech act. Or, to put it in Ann Banfield’s Chomskyan terms, there is no transformational relationship that allows you to move from indirect (or reported) speech acts to direct speech acts.25 Suppose I say, for instance, “In 1891, George Bernard Shaw said that Giulia Ravogli’s portrayal of Carmen in a performance

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conducted by Randegger was misguided.” In such a report, I am not making any claim about Shaw’s use of the term “misguided” — I’m only making a claim about my interpretation of the content of Shaw’s response. (For the record, Shaw’s words hap¬ pened to be: “Giulia’s Carmen is real; and her reality reduced the catastrophe to ab¬ surdity. The idea of poor Lubert [the Don Jose] killing her was ridiculous: nobody be¬ lieved that she was dead: she could have taken him up and thrown him at Randegger’s head without exciting the least surprise, especially among those who are good judges of conducting.”)26 But I would like to go a step further (and here I depart from Banfield): even the style indirect libre — what Banfield calls “represented speech and thought” or what Dorrit Cohn calls “narrated monologue” — always has signs that betray a narrator’s intervention.27 That is, even when what a character is thinking is being “accurately” represented, there are choices about how to represent it that are outside the character’s control. Thus, for instance, in a famous scene in Proust’s Swann in Love, Swann hstens to the Vinteuil sonata, with its famous “little phrase,” at a charity performance at Mme. de St. Euverte’s: “Ces charmes d’une tristesse intime, c’etait eux qu’elle

138

essayait d’imiter, de recreer.” (“Those charms of an intimate sorrow, that was what the phrase tried to imitate, to create again.”)28 The thoughts are clearly Swann’s: but it is not easy to distinguish Proust’s rhetoric (or, more accurately, his narrator’s) from his protagonist’s. To put it in starker, even more schematic terms: unless narration is in the first person — whether on the macro-level (a first-person narration) or on the micro-level (“accurately” quoted speech or thought)29 — we can always see the evi¬ dence of the narrator’s choice not only in what to present, but also in how to present it: representation (as opposed to mere Western Unionism) always requires a repre¬ senter.30 I don’t mean, of course, to lump together all third-person accounts, to erase, for instance, the crucial differences in the continuum between the style indirect libre and simple indirect reported speech.31 There are radical differences in our distance from, say, Thea Kronborg in Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark (where the omniscient third-person narrator brings us very close to the protagonist’s thoughts) and from Ned Beaumont in Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key (where the narrator systematically avoids moving beneath his exterior). But the break between first and third person is far sharper and more significant. Take Cather’s descriptions of Thea at Panther Canon: “There was certainly no kindly Providence that directed one’s life; and one’s parents did not in the least care what became of one, so long as one did not misbe¬ have and endanger their comfort.”32 Even here, Cather’s narrator is in some measure taking responsibility for Thea’s discourse, acting like a solicitous date who insists on

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transmitting your desires to the waiter. In that scene (as opposed to Thea’s conversa¬ tions with Fred), Thea is being silenced by being “spoken for.” The play of first and third person is, similarly, behind much of Lolita s affect at least, for those increasingly rare readers who, in the 1990s, can still, as narrative au¬ dience, summon up some sympathy for a child abuser. For the novel is fueled by the shock that comes in those few moments when she speaks for herself, phrases that are usually simple (“You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”),33 but that show the gulf between her and Humbert’s construction of her, and that show how much she’s been silenced by the text that purports to glorify her. This textual silencing, of course, is metaphorically tied to the very literal silenc¬ ing during Lolita’s years of imprisonment — as Humbert realizes in one of his key moments of self-discovery as he hears “the melody of children at play”: “Then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”34 First and third person differentiation also has its role in Merimee’s novella Carmen. While Don Jose and Carmen are, on the authorial level, equally constructed without any “real” choice, the situation is not the same on the narrative level. Here there is a radical difference in the presentation of Don Jose (who is allowed to speak for himself in the first person for most of the novella) and Carmen (who is largely filtered through the agency of others). Indeed, the act of narrative filtration not only silences a character, but deafens him or her as well. For while Thea has access to the thoughts of her parents’ betrayal, she has no access to the narrator’s wording of those thoughts. In fact, we can use ac¬ cess as a loose operational heuristic to distinguish the kind of agency I’m getting at here. Let’s take as a brief example a moment in the climactic exchange between Gabriel and Gretta in Joyce’s The Dead. Gretta is telling him about the young man who used to sing The Lass of Aughrim:

• — It was a person I used to know in Galway when I was living with my grandmother, she said. The smile passed away from Gabriel’s face. A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins. — Someone you were in love with? he asked ironically.35

Since it is a part of the narrative to which they have access, it is quite possible for Gretta and Gabriel to enter into a dialogue about the word “love” here, and it is no surprise when they do so a few moments later. After Gabriel re-asks the question

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(“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey”), Gretta offers an alternative phrasing: “I was great with him at that time.”36 But they could not enter into an equivalent dialogue about whether the fires of Gabriel’s lust were really “dull,” since access to that particular word is denied them. I shall return to the question of access shortly.

My claim here is that there is a musical parallel to this third-person/first-person dis¬ tinction, although it is rarely recognized as such; and it appears most clearly in Carmen precisely in the space opened up by those moments of tasteless exoticism that Dahlhaus has called “musical genre painting.”37 Granted, describing that space is awkward — even the metaphor of space is awkward, since literature and music em¬ ploy “space” in different ways. In particular, the relations between author, implied author, and narrator do not have precise parallels in music.38 Still, even working with fairly loose analogies, we can see how the spht between first and third person operates

140

in Carmen. Assuming that we are listening to opera as a representational art form — not, for instance, as a purely musical flow of melody encouraged by the amputated aria collections (and even more by the Puccini-Without-Words discs) that are so popular today — what, in fact, is its generic structure? I would argue (and I realize this is a controversial claim) that in its zero-degree form, nineteenth-century opera can be seen as a narrative, rather than a dramatic, genre. Certainly, the libretto viewed on its own has the outward manifestations of drama; but in terms of the full score, the text is more profitably seen as inserted dialogue — direct reported speech — within a musical fabric that serves as narrator’s commentary.39 I liken it to a narrator’s commentary, rather than to authorial commentary, because if it were put into words — for instance, “Tristan and Isolde are getting increasingly excited now” — they would be the equi¬ valent of the narrator’s, not the author’s, words in a literary text. That commentary may be externalized, as Hammett’s is in The Glass Key that’s the case, for instance, when Wagner chooses slithery, snakelike music to “de¬ scribe” the dragon Fafner. It may, alternatively, be a musical equivalent of the style in¬ direct lihre, as when Verdi, in II Trovatore, inserts the theme of Azucena’s “Stride la vampa” into the fabric of the “Racconto” in order to reflect a shift in Azucena’s in¬ ternal state of mind, or when, in the final moments of Otello, he restates the kiss mo¬ tive from the first act.40 But just as Cather’s narrator using style indirect lihre has taken the responsibility for transforming Thea’s thoughts into verbal images, so here Verdi’s narrators have taken the responsibility for transforming Azucena’s and Otello’s

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thoughts into musical images, which are presented to us, so to speak, behind the char¬ acters’ backs. That is equally the case even if, as Abbate insists is the case with Salome, they ultimately serve to defend the character: the solicitous date can be just as aggravating when he orders what you really want. When a character chooses to sing within the world of the opera, however, the music is put in quotation marks — and it changes status in very much the way that quoted speech does in a novel, moving from narrative to dramatic.41 Now the phrase “putting the music in quotation marks” is perhaps misleading: it is certainly possible (and Verdi’s recollection of the “Stride la vampa” theme is a clear example) to “quote” music without creating the musical equivalent of quoted speech. What mat¬ ters is not repetition, but whether the music exists on the same level as the words in the libretto — that is, whether the characters have access to it on the level of the nar¬ rative audience. Except in some metafictional operas that are aimed precisely at disin¬ tegrating the distinction between narrative levels (for instance, the Marx Brothers’ proto-postmodem pastiche of U Trovatore in Night at the Opera), the characters do not have access to third-person music. Siegfried and Fafner can’t sit down over cappucci¬ no to discuss whether that slithery chromaticism really has the right touch; Tristan and Isolde can’t even complain about the unresolved chord at the nonclimax of their love duet. But Carmen’s singing-within-the-opera is available to the characters for discussion. And indeed, they make use of that availability. It becomes a topic of vexed conversation when she sings, rather than speaks, at her interrogation; similarly, when Don Jose, in response to the “Seguidilla,” tells Carmen that he had told her not to speak to him, she rephes, “Je ne te parle pas, je chante pour moi-meme” (“I’m not speaking to you; I’m singing for myself’).42 Much of Carmen’s music thus inhabits a different narrative plane than the music of the Prelude or Interludes. Take the ominous motive that first enters at the end of the Prelude - often dubbed the “fate motive,” but more neutrally called the “motto theme” to allow for those who don’t believe the opera is about fate. That ominous motive turns on the augmented second, an interval often used, espe¬ cially in the late nineteenth century, to create a veneer of exoticism through its con¬ ventional association with the folk music of the “Orient” (including Jewish and Gypsy music). Indeed, Steven Huebner has argued that the music is based on “the so-called gypsy scale,” and some commentators have even labeled it an authentic folk song.43 Similar attributive associations are in operation in the chromatic unrest of the “Habanera,”44 an unrest associated with a kind of threatening bad-girl sexua¬

lity _ what Jean-Pierre-Oscar Comettant, blasting the opera just after its premiere, called Carmen’s “uterine frenzies.”45 What is significant, though, is that these two uses of well-worn musical devices are not rhetorically parallel, since they have different

141

for

Singing

Myself

sources and are addressed to different audiences, and hence have different conse¬ quences. The motive in the Prelude is third-person music, and it is Bizet s narrator who has chosen to offer up these associations for the concert audience; the

Haba¬

nera” is first person, and it is Carmen herself who chooses to present herself in this way to the other characters in the opera. When Carmen speaks, then, of singing

for

herself, her words have a double meaning: singing to herself, but also singing with the aim of creating and controlling her own presentation of herself. McClary, too, recognizes this difference, but poses, I beheve, the wrong question about it. In her analysis of the “Habanera,” she asks, “When she sings, does she express herself, or is she just performing a number? Do we ever have access to ‘Carmen herself,’ or only to a stage person? Does Bizet deprive her of inferiority...?” To my way of thinking, the issue of interiority is secondary: Micaela has interiority, but because it is granted to her, even imposed on her, it serves as a kind of mental strip¬ tease that situates the audience as voyeurs. For this reason, her interiority does noth¬ ing to counteract her status as a stereotyped, angel-in-the-house foil: interiority here meshes comfortably with inferiority.46

142

What is striking about Carmen is that - to the extent that any artist ever gives choice to a character - Bizet gives her the choice of whether or not to show us her interiority. That is, on the level of the narrative audience, the use of first-person music provides Carmen with the power to escape from the narrator’s musical chaperonage and to choose how she is to present herself; whether that view is interior or not, whether it is sincere or not, whether it is socially proper or not, are her deci¬ sions, not the narrator’s.47 Thus, the crucial point in the much-discussed distinction between the idioms of Carmen and Micaela hes not so much in the different musical iconographies they employ — for instance, the raunchiness of Carmen’s body-oriented chromaticism and syncopation; the religiosity of Micaela’s far chaster music, with its chorale-like bass, prominent harp parts, and alternation of major with mixolydian which, with its dominant in the minor, lacks a strong leading tone, and hence mutes the kind of “sexuality” we find in Carmen’s music. Rather, it hes in the different re¬ lations between the characters and those musical icons — and in the different ways in which Bizet wished his listeners to interpret them.48 Micaela is, in a sense, trapped in¬ side the music that has been composed for her — to the extent that she is “sincere” it is because she has been granted no other musical option. Carmen, in contrast, has a choice of how she presents herself — including a choice of whether or not to be a

•

sincere.

>5

Now it is one thing to say that Carmen is represented with agency, and quite another to evaluate what she does with it. She is, after all, not the only character with significant first-person music in the opera — yet what she does with her opportunities

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is quite different from what Escamillo does, resorting to what might be called “dia¬ tonic subjectivity.” We need to ask, then, in addition, why she makes the choices she does. My aim here is not to offer a worked-out interpretation of the opera so much as offer the scaffolding for an informed interpretation — to argue that, however we come down in the end, our interpretation must account not only for Carmen’s characteriza¬ tions, but also for her own willful complicity in those characterizations. But I can sug¬ gest two directions for thinking about that interpretation, taking off from the twin is¬ sues of Carmen’s death and Carmen’s exotic music with which I began. First, for the narrative audience, Carmen’s death is not so much a murder as a suicide — she taunts Jose into killing her, preferring a freely chosen death to a life of wifely submission. Now it is worth asking ourselves what kind of cultural work such a representation of self-destruction serves. But in so doing, we should not repeat the mistake that, as Amy Mandelker has so persuasively pointed out, so many critics of Anna Karenina have made.49 We should not assume that women are incapable of the kind of culturally valorized “ideological” suicide represented, say, by Kirillov in Dos¬ toyevsky’s The Possessed. And we should certainly remember that in a certain literary tradition — which reached its peak in such writers as Hemingway and Camus — choos¬ ing your death is the ultimate act of (masculine) freedom. There is a tantalizing, if chilling, possibility that Virginia Woolf may, in fact, have been listening to this opera on the day before she chose to end her own life.50 Is it possible that Carmen is a macho-feminist-existentialist? To be sure, there is still a certain aesthetic satisfaction, a sense of closure, in her death. But when we talk, as McClary does, about the audi¬ ence’s desire for Carmen’s death, we need to ask whether that desire resides in the authorial or in the narrative audience - for it is quite possible that the two are not in sync. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, it is precisely the conflict between authorial and narrative desires - the authorial audience’s formal desire for the closure of death paradoxically coupled with the narrative audience’s ethical desire for the character to survive - that serves as one possible definition of canonical tragedy.51 Second, with regard to Carmen’s use of exoticism: to keep with Tolstoy for a moment. The Kreutzer Sonata, an insightful exploration of the effects of repression (especially gender repression), shows how restriction channels energies to the weak part of the cultural system - specifically, to whatever areas have been left unpatrolled. One sees a similar kind of economy operating in Merimee’s novella: when the pedan¬ tic and rather dense narrator first meets Carmen, she steals his watch (indeed, she nearly murders him). But that is only possible because the narrator tries to take ad¬ vantage of what he presumes, based on social cliches tied to her “exotic” look, to be her class vulnerability and her consequent sexual availability. When he wants to have his fortune told, he therefore insists on going to her house, rather than remaining in a

143

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Myself

public place — and in that privacy, she is able to turn the tables on him. In other words, she makes the most of the system that oppresses her. Bizet s Carmen — who is, as Nelly Furman has aptly remarked, a bricoleuse — similarly uses the cliches of exoti¬ cism from her culture in order to create a space for free action (and it is no accident that the second act ends with a high-spirited hymn to freedom) in her own world. Specifically, through her singing, she finds a way to take the social prejudices directed against her and harness them for her own purposes — to escape from jail, for instance, and to facilitate her smuggling. Since that is what Bizet himself did — pilfer the pop¬ ular culture of his time — to create Carmen, it is easy to see them as co-conspirators. It is even easier to do so if we pay more attention as we trace out the shaky border between the West and its “others,” and ask on which side the creators of Carmen stand. It is worth remembering that Halevy was Jewish; and that Bizet had married into his family. Furthermore, after the first production of Pecheurs de perles, Bizet was subtly condemned for “Jewishness” by the critic Jouvain in Le Figaro.52 We need to remember, as well, that Carmen is situated within a long cultural linking of Gypsies and Jews, a connection that reached a grim chmax in the Nazi programs of

144

extermination which sent both groups to concentrations camps.53 McClary and Clement both make the association;54 in Bizet’s own time, it was common as well, whether in Liszt’s famous book on Gypsy music (the first volume of which compares what it calls “The Two Wandering Races”)55 or in nineteenth-century ethnographer Leland’s work, which argued that “Among all the subdivisions of the human race, there are only two which have been, apparently from their beginning, set apart, mark¬ ed and cosmopohte, ever living among others, and yet reserved unto themselves. There are the Jew and the gypsy.”56 In George Ehot’s Spanish Gypsy, too, there is a connection of Gypsy and Jew, and Frank Dougherty argues for a connection between Eliot’s interest in Romany diaspora and Jewish diaspora.57 Hugo, as well, makes the connection in his ballade La Ronde du Sabbat: “Juifs, par Dieu ffappes,/Zingaris, bohemes,/Charges d’anathemes.”58 Indeed, in Merimee’s novel, the narrator at first mistakes Carmen for a Jew.59 Given this prevalent trope, it is not intuitively self-evi¬ dent that Carmen s creators would position themselves as “insiders” threatened by the Gypsy “other.” The opera may, in fact, be less about the need to contain the Carmens of the world than about the need to protect them from uncomprehending Don Joses, who themselves may be — hke their Basque forerunner — distant from the true centers of power, but whose complicity helped make our own century’s history of oppression possible.

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Thanks to Ann Ardis, Elaine Barkin, Lydia Hamessley, Fred Maus, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Jay Reise, David Rosen, Mary Ann Smart, and Ann Whitaker for their help in focusing the arguments in this paper. Thanks also to Kara Stanek for her invaluable research assistance.

1.

“Quels regards! quel effronterie!” murmurs Don Jose. Georges Bizet, Carmen, libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy (New York: Dover Publications, 1989), 101. For a discussion of the transgressive nature of Carmen’s cigarettes, see Richard Klein “The Devil in Carmen,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 5 (1993): 51-72; for an excellent discussion of Gypsies, history, and amne¬ sia, see Katie Trumpener, “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People without History’ in the Narratives of the West,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 843-84. “Everywhere the Gypsies appear in nineteenth-century narratives, they begin to hold up ordinary life, inducing local amnesias or retrievals of cultural memory, and causing black¬ outs or flashbacks in textual, historical, and genre memory as well” (869). This ob¬ servation has particular resonance with regard to Carmen. Clement sums it up well: “Carmen the Gypsy. Therefore, somewhat whore, somewhat Jewess, some¬ what Arab, entirely illegal, always on the margins of life.” Catherine Clement, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 49.

2.

Nelly Furman,“The Languages of Love in Carmen,” in Reading Opera, eds. Arthur Groos and Roger Parker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 174. More relevant to my discussion here, however, is the Latin meaning of“carmen”: song.

3.

As McClary points out about the opera’s early reception,“Most French commen¬ tators heard the score as a mishmash of unblendable elements.” Susan McClary, with a chapter by Peter Robinson, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 115. Indeed, Carl Dahlhaus has described the opera’s pio¬ neering role in the realist tradition in terms of its play of margin and center with regard to these popular elements: “a peripheral element (musical genre painting) became central, and a central element (lyrical dialogue and monologue) became peripheral.” Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music [1980], trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 281. See also Douglas C. Parker, Georges Bizet: His Life and Works (London: Kegan Paul,Trench, Trubner & Co., 1926), 233, who claims that Gaudier claims that Bizet took the theme of the last entr’acte from a “polo, sung by a serenading student in a musical piece called El Criado Fingido, composed in 1804 by Manuel Garcia, the father of Malibran and Mme.Viardot.” While much of the music is generically “exotic,” the precise nature of the exoticism is sometimes clouded. Indeed, du Locle, the director of the Opera-Comique when Carmen was first performed there, called the music “Cochin-Chinese and utterly incomprehensible.” Mina Curtiss, Bizet and his World (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 379.

4.

“Murder was never committed on the stage of the Opera-Comique under de

5.

This argument gains some force when one remembers that the Opera-Comique

Leuvan’s direction.” Curtiss, 351. was a distinctly bourgeois institution (see McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen, espe-

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cially chapter 2); but as I pointed out in note 4, the situation is complicated by the fact that Carmen was initially viewed as a shock to the institution, not as a reificaton of its principles. 6.

Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: Uni¬ versity of Minnesota Press, 1991), 79-

7. Ibid., 62. In her excellent and more recent book Georges Bizet: Carmen, McClary modifies this position, suggesting not that the opera “causes” us to desire Car¬ men’s death, but rather that it “invites” us to do so (no). Still, while McClary is less sure now about Bizet’s intentions, she still seems to operate on the assumption that the defense of Carmen as a character requires a kind of resisting reading. 8. McClary, Feminine Endings, 63.

9. Charles G. Leland, The Gypsies (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co. [The River¬ side Press, Cambridge], 1882), 14.

10. Ibid., 15. Of course, authors need not choose one or the other of these images: George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, for instance, plays with both of them. At first, the Gypsies represent for Maggie a positive fantasy; but in the end, their reality turns out to be threatening. For a fuller discussion of this dual mythology, see Steven Huebner,“Carmen as corrida de toros,”Journal of Musicological Research 13 (1993): 10 and especially Trumpener.

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Needless to say, most of the mythology about Gypsies, both positive and negative — and, in particular, the mythology about their sexual abandon — is false to their culture; see, for instance, Anne Sutherland’s discussion of purity status among the Rom in “The Body as Social Symbol Among the Rom,” in the Anthropology of the Body, A.S.A. Monograph 15, ed.John Blacking (London:Academic Press, 1977): 375-90. Note in particular her discussion of borders: “On the one hand, the Rom are aware that they live within a society that de¬ spises them and erects its own boundaries against them. To improve their situa¬ tion in this society they often need to counter these prejudices and boundaries. On the other hand, they see themselves as morally superior to outsiders. They covet their separateness and are aware that outsiders’ prejudices and misconcep¬ tions help to keep them separate. Thus the most important boundary, that be¬ tween Rom and gaje, is one that is forever being crossed for economic and politi¬ cal reasons. It is appropriate, then, that they would choose a metaphor which approximates this experience, that they would divide the body in such a way that the boundary (at the waist) is equally a difficult one to maintain. The physical ex¬ perience of their bodies is similar to the widest social experience in an awareness of crossing boundaries. When these boundaries are crossed, the controls are most manifest” (389).

11. Merimee did not, apparently, become familiar with The Gypsies until several years after writing Carmen according to Alan W. Raitt, in Prosper Merimee (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 280. Nonetheless, his enthusiasm for Pushkin’s poem suggests a sympathy for Pushkin’s viewpoint.

12. As Steven Huebner has aptly pointed out, the hymn to liberty is the “largest cho¬ ral stretch in the work” (10).

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13. For further discussion of the difference between configuration and coherence, see my Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation [1987] (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998).

14. Winton Dean, Bizet, 3rd ed. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1975), 212. 15. Jeremy Tambling, Opera, Ideology and Film (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 22. 16. Some differences of interpretation may well be tied to differences in the edition; certainly, Dean, in his “The True Carmen?,” in Essays on Opera (Oxford: Claren¬ don Press, 1990), 294, condemns Oeser’s edition in part because “Oeser has only a shaky idea of what the opera is about_He is convinced that Escamillo is the great love of Carmen’s life.... Unfortunately this is no laughing matter; the consequences are grave. Since there is no evidence for his thesis.. .Oeser sets about supplying some, shamelessly cooking the stage directions by inserting passages for which he can claim no au¬ thority; some of them are flagrantly at variance with the music.”

17. For a different position, see Anne Shaw Faulkner (Mrs. Marx E. Oberndorfer), What We Hear in Music: A Course of Study in Music Appreciation and History For Use In High Schools, Normal Schools, Colleges, and Universities. Also for Special Courses in Conservatories, Music Clubs, and the Home, 12th rev. ed. (Camden: Educational De¬ partment, RCAVictor Division, 1943): “Carmen may rightly be considered na¬ tional opera, for, although the work of a French composer, the spirit of the Span¬ ish folk has been reflected in every measure of this music” (364).

18. Clement, 49. 19. Indeed, as McClary points out - although she does not follow it up the way I do — the Act 3 Trio is the only number Carmen sings “that is not primarily a song for public performance” (Georges Bizet, 101). Of course, the observation that Car¬ men is full of what I have elsewhere called fictional music is hardly a new one: see, for instance, Dahlhaus’ observation that “Carmen is exceptionally well en¬ dowed with musical numbers which are to some extent ‘real’ music, which is be¬ ing‘quoted’ on the stage.” Carl Dahlhaus, Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 90. Indeed, as I have suggested, this is one of the reasons why Carmen counts as “realist” for Dahlhaus. For an excellent study of fictional music in Carmen - one that uses, among other things, Laura Mulvey’s feminist film theory to come to conclusions dia¬ metrically opposed to my own - see also Rose Theresa, “Carmen the Feminist? The Uses of Phenomenal Music and Other Pleasures in Bizet’s Carmen,” paper read at the Mid-Atlantic Chapter Meeting of the American Musicological Soci¬ ety, West Chester, Pennsylvania, 27 March 1993. For other discussions, from dif¬ ferent theoretical perspectives, of the use of music within the world of opera, see Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Mary Ann Smart, “ ‘Dalla Tomba Uscita’: Representations of Madness in Early Nineteenth-Century Opera,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1994); EdwardT. Cone,“The World of Opera and its Inhabitants,” in Music: A View from Delft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 125-38; and the responses to Cone by Peter Kivy,“Opera

747

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Talk: A Philosophical‘Phantasie,’” Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991): 63-77; David Rosen, “Cone’s and Kivy’s ‘World of Opera,’” Cambridge Opera Journal 4 (1992): 61-74; and Peter Kivy,“Composers and‘Composers’: A Response to David Rosen,” Cambridge Opera Journal 4 (1992): 179-86.

20. McClary, Georges Bizet, 57. 21. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1973), 55; italics in original.

22. To use James Phelan’s terminology, I will be talking about Carmen’s mimetic rather than her synthetic dimension. James Phelan, Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative (Chicago: University of Chi¬ cago Press, 1989). For a fuller discussion of the narrative and authorial audiences, see my Before Reading.

23. This is, of course, something of a simplification, since even the agency of the au¬ thor is filtered through the demands of editors and publishers, not to mention the actions of typesetters and proofreaders.

24. Genette’s notion that an author might “delegate” certain powers to a narrator is perhaps useful here. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited [1983], trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 73. In any case, see also his remark: “The style of L’Etranger in fiction is the way Meursault expresses himself,

148

and in reality it is the way he is made to express himself by an author whom we have no justification for distinguishing from Mr. Albert Camus, a writer of the French language, etc.” (140).

25. See Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Lan¬ guage of Fiction (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), especially chapter 1. Indirect speech cannot be “properly considered a word for word reproduction of the speaker’s style, lexical choices, and even pronunciation” (36).

26. George Bernard Shaw, Music in London, i8go-g4, vol. 1 (New York:Vienna House, 1973), 179.

27. See also Cohn’s distinction between psycho-narration (for instance, “Don Jose thought she was dangerous”), narrated monologue (more or less equivalent to style indirect libre) (“She was dangerous,” intended as a representation of Don Jose’s thoughts rather than as a statement of “truth”) and quoted monologue (“Don Jose thought: ‘She’s dangerous’). Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). I would argue that only in the last of these can we assume an equation between the narrator’s language and the character’s. As Cohn puts it, “By leaving the relation¬ ship between words and thoughts latent, the narrated monologue casts a pecu¬ liarly penumbral light on the figural consciousness” (103). “The continued em¬ ployment of third-person references indicates, no matter how unobtrusively, the continued presence of a narrator. And it is his identification - but not his identity with the character’s mentality that is supremely enhanced by this technique” (112). See also Genette’s response to Cohn (Revisited, especially chapters 9 and 10), and to Benveniste’s and Banfield’s claim that narration without narrators is possible (Revisited, 98-99).

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28. Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du temps perdu, vol. I ([Paris]: Gallimard/Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1954), 349; my translation.

29. See Genette: Production of speech in fiction is, on the whole, “based Actively on the same contracts, and presenting Actively the same difficulties, as genuine repro¬ duction. The same contracts: for example, quotation marks indicate (promise) a literal quotaAon, a subordinate clause in indirect style allows more freedom, etc.” (Revisited, 50). There are, of course, as Genette realizes, instances where unreliable narrators falsely report on conversations, too; I am bracketing such instances for the current discussion.

30. Of course, one can argue that even direct quoted speech is always Altered, too: see BanAeld, 248.

31. On this difference, see BanAeld, in particular chapter 2. 32. Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), 242. 33. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (NewYork: G. P. Putnam’s, 1955), 286. 34. Ibid., 310. 35. James Joyce, The Dead, ed. Daniel R. Schwarz (Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martins Press, 1994), 55.

36. Ibid., 56. 37. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 281. 38. Edward Cone’s suggestions in The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of Cali¬ fornia Press, 1974) deal with some of these issues, but his scheme is needlessly cumbersome and does not offer a useful frame for discussing the issues of repre¬ sented subjectivity that I am dealing with here.

39. Although he does not see a musical parallel to the author/narrator distinction, Zoppelli takes much the same position, although his views in other respects dif¬ fer from mine. Luca Zoppelli, “Narrative Elements in Donizetti’s Operas,” trans. Wilham Ashbrook, The Opera Quarterly 10 (1993): 23-32 (see note 41). In her “Opera; or, the Envoicing ofWomen,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of Califor¬ nia Press, 1993), 225-58, Abbate, in contrast, critiques approaches such as the one I am taking here because they involve “an automatic sexing of operatic music as the voice of a male observer” (239). There is nothing automatic about it, how¬ ever: it happens to be a historically contingent condition that most canonical op¬ eratic music has been written by men. (There may be, by the way, operas in which the narradve — as opposed to the authorial — voice is female.)

40. For a discussion of the use of quotation in II Trovatore, see Smart, chapter 6. 41. As I have suggested, Zoppelli takes a similar position: he, too, sees operatic music as predominantly narrative, with stage music serving as a discursive break. But he is loose with the direct/indirect discourse distinction. More important, since he is interested in the ways in which opera can get us to share a character’s vision — rather than the ways in which opera can allow a character to voice his or her position - he deals with moments where the main character is listening, rather than singing. In addition, partly because of a merging of the authorial and narraAve audiences, he also exaggerates the rhetorical power of such moments: “Be¬ cause stage music is also within the frame of the Active action, in those cases

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character and spectator share the same vision; they share a moment of reality, of ‘direct discourse’ in the midst of the ‘indirect discourse’ of operatic language. In this manner the spectator lives the event with absolute immediacy - as through the eyes of the character — and shares his reactions to it” (24). That may be the case in the particular instances he chooses, but it is not always the case that such moments of onstage music have the same effect; indeed, as I have argued else¬ where, such moments can have the effect of creating ironic distance between the characters and the audience(s). Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Rimskii and Salieri,” in O Rush Studia litteraria slavica in honorem Hugh McLean, eds. Simon Karlinsky, James L. Rice, and Barry P. Scherr (Oakland: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1995), 57-66.

42. Bizet, Carmen, 168, my translation. 43. Huebner, 6. See Faulkner: “This theme is an old folk song of Spain which dates back to a legendary story of Mohammedan tradition. According to this tale the Devil on being cast out of Paradise could recall only one strain of the Heavenly music, and this theme was called the Asbein or Devil’s Strain. It was only sung in whispers by the folk of Spain. It is here used by Bizet with great dramatic signifi¬ cance” (416). As McClary astutely notes (Georges Bizet, 104), the connection be¬ tween the augmented second and Carmen’s Gypsy ethnicity is made explicit in the confrontation of Jose and Escamillo, when Bizet uses the interval in identify¬

150

ing her as a zingara.

44. Bizet modeled this aria on a popular song by Spanish Cuban composer Sebastian Yradier. It is not clear whether, on the narrative level, this song is to be read as a song Carmen has written or simply as one she has chosen. In either case, though, the particulars of the music represent her choice, not the narrator’s.

45. Jean-Pierre-Oscar Comettant, quoted in Curtiss, 404. 46. McClary, Georges Bizet, 75; emphasis added. For an almost diametrically opposed reading of the role of voyeurism in the opera, although one that starts with very similar observations, see Theresa.

47. Despite similarities in our interests, this position is quite different from the one enunciated in Abbate “Opera; or the Envoicing of Women.” Abbate, taking what she sees as the “explicitly authorial voice” of women’s singing voices, asks whether “opera, far from being a revenge-tragedy that Clement calls ‘the undoing of women,’ is a genre that so displaces the authorial musical voice onto female char1

acters and female singers that it largely reverses a conventional opposition of male (speaking) subject and female (observed) object” (228-29). I am less interested in the singers, in what she calls the “performed genre,” than Abbate is. In addition, I am less concerned with the common attributes of opera as a genre than with the differences among certain operas. Then, too, when it comes to analyzing subjec¬ tivity in the text (as Abbate does in her analysis of Salome), the issue is our identifi¬ cation with the character’s vision or point of view, not with the character’s choice (see, for instance, 251).

48. This is a distinction between what Jay Reise and I have elsewhere called the at¬ tributive and the synthetic levels of listening; see Peter J. Rabinowitz and Jay Reise, “The Phonograph Behind the Door: Some Thoughts on Musical Literacy,” in Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice, ed. Sarah Lawall (Austin: Univer-

Peter

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.

Rabinowitz

sity of Texas Press, 1994), 287-308. For a different use of similar terminology, see Benjamin Boretz, “Musical Cosmology,” Perspectives of New Music 15 (1977): 122-32.

49. Amy Mandelker, Framing Anna Karenina: 'Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Vic¬ torian Novel (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1993), 95-96.

50. Leonard Woolf apparently did listen to it, but it is unclear whether Virginia was hstening as well. Bet Inglis,“From the Readers: Leonard and Virginia Woolf and Music,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 41 (1993): 1.

51. Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Pleasure in Conflict: Mahler’s Sixth,Tragedy, and Musical Form,” Comparative Literature Studies 18 (1981): 306-13.

52. Curtiss, 139. For those who know Wagner primarily as an anti-Semite, the link¬ ing of Wagnerianism and Jewishness may seem odd. In fact, though, Wagner was enthusiastic about Fromental Halevy’s opera La Juive; more interesting, there were rumors in the late nineteenth century that Wagner was, in fact, Jewish — al¬ though apparently the pubhc discussion of those rumors (including caricatures) did not first appear until 1869, after Jouvain’s review. Ernest Newman, The Life of Richard Wagner: Volume Two: 1848-1860 (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937), 613.

53. For a discussion of the differences in Nazi approaches to Jews and Gypsies - in particular, the Nazi preference for pure rather than mixed-blooded Gypsies — see Trumpener, especially 853-57.

54. McClary, Georges Bizet, 65; Clement, 49. 55. Franz Liszt, The Gipsy in Music, 2 vols., trans. Edwin Evans (London:William Reeves, n.d.)

56. Leland, 18. Gypsies are also, according to Leland,“the only race except the Jew, which has penetrated into every village which European civilization has ever touched. He who speaks Romany needs to be a stranger in few lands, for on ev¬ ery road in Europe and America, in Western Asia, and even in Northern Africa, he will meet those with whom a very few words may at once estabhsh a peculiar understanding” (25). It is thus consistent that, when pointing out how Gypsies can be identified by the corners of their eyes, he offers, as a parallel example, a description of how his Jewish friend Salaman can tell a Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Goyim apart “by the corners of their eyes” (200-01).

57. Frank Timothy Dougherty, “The Gypsies in Western Literature” (Ph.D. disserta¬ tion, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1980), 193.

58. Victor Hugo, Odes et Ballades (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 391. 59. Prosper Merimee, Nouvelles completes, tome 2 (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1965), 94.

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Redefining Yin and Yang Transformation of Gender/Sexual Politics in Chinese Music

If one "is" a woman, that is surely not all one is; for the term fails to be exhaustive, not because pregendered "person" transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but be¬ cause gender is not always constituted coherently or consis¬ tently in different historical contexts.... The notion of a univer¬ sal patriarchy has been widely criticized in recent years for its failure to account for the workings of gender oppression in the concrete cultural contexts in which it exists. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

Judith Butler stresses two variables that condition gender as one of the central cat¬ egories of analysis: transformativity of gender politics in different historical contexts and situated, localized gender politics in specific cultural contexts.1 Historicity and locality are two methodological lenses through which I will examine the transformation of gender and sexual politics in Chinese music. And although many feminist musicological studies have confirmed the consistency between a society's gender ideology and the gender ideology contained in its musical thought and practice, I suggest that it could be instruc¬ tive to explore the inconsistencies between the two for a more sophisticated under¬ standing of a given society's gender ideology and a deeper knowledge about the power and meaning of music.

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As contemporary Western feminist discourse on gender and music has increasingly become an essential constituent of music scholarship, a major challange ethnomusicologists face is identifying and articulating the culturally specified gender ideologies in the processes of applying hegemonic Western concepts of gender and sexuality in their study of diversified World music cultures. By emphasizing the "culturally specified gen¬ der ideologies," I am not proposing that each culture is an isolated authentic entity waiting to be "discovered" and added to the exotic palette of world gender ideologies.2 The "othering" of Third World culture and music as "absolute" difference or as un¬ knowable, even when "accompanied with modesty and self-deprecation,"3 has raised serious protests from "Westernized" non-Western scholars. Musicologist Kofi Agawu, in his attempt to demystify the Western notion of "African rhythm," challenges the West¬ ern-produced field of ethnomusicology: "When was the last time an ethnomusicologist went out to discover sameness rather than difference? When did we last encourage our students to go and do fieldwork not in order to come back and paint the picture of a different Africa but of an Africa that, after all the necessary adjustments have been made, is the 'same' as the West?"4 Rey Chow, a scholar of comparative literature edu¬ cated in Hong Kong and the U.S., warns us that "the attempt to deconstruct the hege¬ mony of patriarchal discourses through feminism is itself foreclosed by the emphasis on 'Chinese' as a mark of absolute difference."5 If difference is attributed to origin, tradi¬ 7 54

tion, separateness, hierarchy, or eternal "essentialism," then sameness can be attributed to change, modernity, communication, equality, or evolving identities. Difference deemphasizes time,6 sameness is contextualized in the postcolonial world. Nonetheless, in my dealings with Chinese materials, I see difference coexisting with sameness, and to claim sameness does not necessarily exclude the recognition of the persistence of differ¬ ence. Much of sameness is imparted through cultural contact and cultural interactions founded on unequal bases. Numerous studies have explored the impact of Western ideas, philosophy, literature, and art on Chinese society and culture since their introduc¬ tion into China, as superior models, at the end of the nineteenth century. Recently, gender has become a center of focus for critical analysis in Chinese contexts, and, inevi¬ tably, the transformation of historical gender ideologies into modern ones that derive their theoretical outlooks largely from nineteenth-century European romanticism, femi¬ nism, and Marxism has become a fascinating aspect of the discourse.7 In a similar man¬ ner, one could argue that Western gender ideologies were imported into Chinese music during the same period alongside Western aesthetics and compositional techniques; and after having been adapted to a Chinese social, political environment, they eventu¬ ally became part of, but did not replace, the Chinese music tradition.8 Thus, to under¬ stand gender ideologies in a culturally specific, but not exclusive, context of China, one

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also needs to be aware of their specific historical contexts. Central to my study is the ar¬ gument that gender/sexual politics in music representation have been conditioned by the search for a modern, scientific, and revolutionary China in semicolonial, nationalist, and communist discourses, situated in the clashes between Confucianism, Taoism, nine¬ teenth-century European romanticism, and the Chinese Communist Party's cultural po¬ licy since the 1930s. To better understand how gender ideologies in music (re)presentation have changed from late imperial to modern China,9 four examples will be explored: one excerpt from a traditional Kunqu (Kun opera), Flirtation Through the Zither, and three modern examples, the Yellow River Cantata, the song "The Nanni Valley," and the

Liang Shambo and Zhu Yingtai Violin Concerto.

It is well known that the dominant ideology in traditional China, Confucianism, is mi¬ sogynist. Confucius' infamous statement "only women and villains are hard to keep," has been a popular expression among all classes of Chinese society for more than two thousand years. Until the early twentieth century, Chinese women had no right to go to school, to choose their mates, to divorce, or to express their opinions publicly. In fact, they were told that they should obey their fathers as girls, obey their husbands as wives, and obey their sons as widows. It is surprising then, under these circumstances, that there should be any space for alternatives in imagery and representation created by artistic Chinese women and men, as some recent studies have shown. Kang-i Sun Chang, in her study on women poets of the late Ming (ca. 1550-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) Dynasties, discovered that during these periods more than three thousand women poets had collections of their poems published. Furthermore, this flourishing of women's poems was due mostly to male scholars' contribution to their compilation, publication, and distribution.10 Male scholars, marginalized by the political power at the imperial court, identified themselves with cainu (talented women) who were dissatisfied with what life had to offer them or resentful of their unhappy arranged marriages. In the meantime, women poets also identified with male scholars by adopting their appre¬ ciation of nature, Taoism, art, and literati styles, even their clothes, which in turn created a "stylistic androgyny" in women's poems.11 Such androgynous identity in poetic voice as well as gender-boundary crossing in artistic expression was paralleled by the popular operatic form chuanqi (legendary fantastique),12 originating in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). The majority of chuanqi in¬ volve love stories between a young scholar and a beautiful young woman. The lovers must overcome many obstacles, including parental opposition, natural disasters, separa-

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tion caused by war, misunderstanding, or change of social status before they can hap¬ pily reunite and marry each other. In these love stories there exists a general ideal of "cross-sexual mirroring characteristics," as described by Keith McMahon in his research on a type of popular novel - the story of "the scholar and the beauty" [caizi jiaren] which was directly derived from chuanqi in the mid-seventeenth century.13 This ideal¬ ism, McMahon summarizes, "is grounded in a formulaic symmetry or equivalence that patterns the lovers' path to marriage. Yin and yang interchange; woman impersonates man, and man resembles woman. Such similarity and mirror opposition imply a perfect dovetailing of male and female, sometimes neutralizing sexual difference and at other times creating an outright exchange of sexual characteristics."14 Most interestingly, women in these chuanqi stories, as well as in the "scholar-beauty" love stories, have "a power of self-determination and self-invention that exceeds not only normal female roles but male ones as well."15

Chuanqi scripts were widely used in the different styles of traditional opera popu¬ lar during the Ming Dynasty.16 In opera the "equivalence, identity, and complementari¬ ty" which form the symmetry between the two sexes are further crystallized through music and embodied voices.17 During the first peak period of Chinese opera in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368),18 female performers took the leading position in operatic perfor¬ mances by playing both female and male roles.19 In the Qing Dynasty, however, females 156

were gradually excluded from performances and replaced by male performers. Thus in Peking opera, which developed since mid-Qing (from ca. 1790), all female roles were played by males until the early 1900s when women started to join the performances' due to the influence of the women's liberation movement. But if we look at the more >

archaic form of opera, Kunqu (Kun opera),20 which originated in the late Yuan Dynasty, traces of the earlier performance practice become evident. Even now in Kunqu, young male roles are sung by females,21 and there is no differentiation in timbre, register, or musical characteristics between the young heroine's or the young hero's vocal lines. In fact, in traditional operas, instead of highlighting the contrast between the sexes, musical differentiation is most apparent between the young and the old. Tunes for the old woman's role are closer in range and characteristics to those of the old man's rather than those of the young woman's role. The old woman's role uses chest voice in sing¬ ing, as does the old man's role, while both the young woman's and the young man's roles use head voice. (I will return to the issue of gender vs. age later.) The gender-ambiguous characteristics in Chinese opera can be seen in Example 1 (in cipher notation) from Flirtation Through the Zither, a well-known excerpt from the late sixteenth-century chuanqi, Yu Zan Ji (The Story of the Jade Hairpin), written by Gao Lian. The story takes place during the end of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279). It tells of the engagement, since their childhood, of the girl Chen Jiaolian to the scholar

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Pan Bizheng. War, however, forces Chen to become a Taoist nun and to find refuge in a Taoist temple. Later she encounters Pan, who, after failing the imperial exam,22 comes to visit his aunt who is head of the temple. The young lovers meet "through" the sound of the qin (seven-stringed zither). When the aunt discovers the attraction she forces her nephew to leave and take the imperial exam again. Chen escapes from the temple and goes after Pan to express her undying love for him. After Pan passes the imperial exam, they get married. In the opera script, the "formulaic symmetry" of Chen and Pan is first represented by their similar family background, then by their similar unfortunate fates (Chen had to become a nun, Pan failed his exam). As in many other chuanqi, Chen is a strong-willed, capable woman. Not only does she excel at skills that had convention¬ ally been in the male scholar's domain, such as playing the qin,23 she is also brave and courageous enough to break the rules of society and tradition in order to pursue her own interests. The following duet is sung when Pan first meets Chen; she is playing the

qin alone in the garden, not realizing that Pan is present. In the lyrics, Chen expresses her loneliness and Pan his attraction to Chen upon seeing her. At the end of this duet, Pan interrupts Chen's playing, and they introduce themselves to each other.24 (See Ex¬ ample 1.) In the exchanges of the two different voices, as shown in my transcription, there is no indication of sex or gender differences. Similar musical characteristics - lyrical, melismatic, slow pace - unify the whole passage. In fact, in the actual performance, the role of Pan is sung by a female singer with an almost identical timbre to that of Chen; occa¬ sionally at the lower range the voice becomes thicker. This kind of "cross-sexual" pre¬ sentation, often accompanied by an active female subjectivity, provides even more evi¬ dence for the "profound instability of gendering" in traditional China (and Chinese music).25 In her discussion of the essence of yin/yang, Tani Barlow elaborates on Man¬ fred Porkert's analysis. "The forces of yin and yang are many things: logical relationships (like up and down, in and out, husband and wife), practical forces, 'designations for the polar aspects of effects,' and in a social sense, powers that inscribe hierarchy (i.e., yang subordinates yin because it encloses the lesser force into itself), but yin/yang is neither as totalistic nor as ontologically binary as the Western stereotype would have it."26 In Concluding her examination of the relationship between the Confucianist feudal patriar¬ chal society, the Taoist androgynous ideal person, and the hidden feminine face of the Chinese man who is "his mother's son," Julia Kristeva remarks: "whether as a result of the vestiges of the first (matrilineal) family model, of the subtle presence of Taoism, or of the internal complexity of Confucianism itself, hierarchical paternal/paternalistic ritu¬ alism is clearly and constantly accompanied by customs and practices that allow the yin to slip through."27 Through their different perspectives of political history and philoso¬ phy, both Barlow and Kristeva come to realize the complexity of determining gender or-

757

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5 32 3 561:2 I 62 3 ) 6- 5 I 62 1 2 25116 22 22 5655 I 6 - ) [continues] Example 1: Flirtation Through the Zither, Chen and Pan. der and dividing gender territory in different aspects of traditional China. Yin and yang are undoubtedly hierarchical, but we need to recall that visually they are presented as two equal, complementary parts unified in one circle. This complementarity has a pro¬ found impact on Chinese aesthetics and arts, if not also in social political realms, in which the combination of yin and yang is held as the optimum of beauty and perfec¬ tion.28

During the second half of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth century, the traditional notion of complementarity and the traditional ambivalence toward mascu¬ line/feminine roles were fundamentally disassembled and reshaped by imperialist canons and nationalist anxieties, as well as by the appropriation of colonialist categories of sex binarisms as part of the Westernization processes in searching for and constructing a new, scientific, and modern China. Western aesthetics and a binary gender ideology have even penetrated the most traditional form of Chinese music, the opera. In Peking

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opera, one of the leading opera genres29 in artistic innovation, many reforms have taken place since the 1920s. Western opera repertories were adapted, and the differentiation of musical characteristics for each role type30 - particularly between female and male roles, by regulating distinct voice range, register, and melodic styles - has been consid¬ ered the most successful aspect of Peking opera music, as well as a major achievement in modernizing and enriching the traditional form.31 The attempt to fix yin and yang, the effort to "correct" the historical ambivalence in gender difference and instability in artistic representation, needs to be viewed in the context of radical social and political changes, including those of the women's liberation movement, in semicolonial and, later, communist China.32 Ironically, in connection with the search for women's identity and emancipation, "female passivity, biological inferior¬ ity, intellectual inability, organic sexuality, and social absence"33 became dominant tropes in the representation of women. In new literature after the May Fourth Move¬ ment in 1919,34 woman was represented as "one half of the Western, exclusionary, essentialized, male/female binary."35 She often either must die, commit suicide, or be¬ come mad in her encounter with man and society. This new mode of representing women as victimized and subservient was subsequently adopted in the nationalist and communist discourses on national salvation and state construction. To demonstrate my point I offer two examples from the period of the end of the 1930s to the early 1940s, a time when both the resistance war against Japan and the civil war between nationalists and communists intensified. Since the birth of Chinese modern music at the beginning of the twentieth century under the influence of Western art music, national salvation has been a prevailing theme in the compositions of new generations of Chinese composers and songwriters. As a contrast to the creation of the new revolutionary masculine voice in songs of the masses,36 a new type of female subjectivity appeared in vocal music, which was lyrical, narrative, plaintive, and sorrowful. This new female subjectivity was then further embod¬ ied by the female voice, crystallized in soft, melismatic melodies with delicate ornamen¬ tation. Women in these songs were victims of the Sino-Japan war, their survival threat¬ ened or terminated by the foreign invaders. What is more, in these vocal compositions, the female body was doubly inscribed: with the damaged integrity of the Chinese na¬ tion and a sacrifice to restore that integrity. The "Lament of the Yellow River," a move¬ ment from the Yellow River Cantata (1939), is the most influential work in this realm. Both its lyricist and composer, Guang Weiran and Xian Xinghai,37 were communist art¬ ists active in Yanan, the communists' headquarters during the Sino-Japan war. In this cantata, Western musical forms and techniques were employed to express modern Chi¬ nese national feelings. Moreover, the Western practice of molding the notion of nation on gender and sexual norms also became evident.38 The Yellow River, a metaphorical

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image of the Chinese nation,39 is transformed through the musical narrative into a series of different gendered characteristics: virile, glorious, joyous, miserable, ravaged, en¬ raged, and finally victorious. Particularly in the "Lament," the Chinese nation's suffering is embodied by an anonymous countrywoman whose child is killed by the Japanese and who, herself, is raped by a Japanese soldier. Ultimately, at the end of her lament, she throws herself into the Yellow River. The complexity of this lamenting woman's identity and the symbolic meanings of her lament deserve further scrutiny. First, this is a patronized female voice and female subjectivity representing a modern gender ideology that originated in the West. In the composition this female voice is framed by male vocal passages and a masculinized sec¬ tion. The movement introducing the lament is a duet between two men who escaped from their occupied hometown; the movement following the lament, immediately after the woman has jumped into the Yellow River, is an agitated canon, "Defend the Yellow River!" sung by the entire chorus. Sandwiched between these two powerful, heroic, and active musical images is the helpless, hopeless soprano's voice: "Thundering wind, please don't cry! Darkening clouds, please don't hide! The water of the Yellow River, please don't sob! Tonight I will throw myself into your arms, to wash away my thousand and thousand layers of sorrow and suffering from injustice!" So irrational and incapable was this broken-hearted woman that she could not present herself, but had to be en¬

160

veloped and presented by her countrymen: her lament is introduced by the authorita¬ tive voice of a male narrator at the beginning of the movement. "Friends, we have to win back our hometown! What happened to the hometown is so shocking! Who has no wife and children, who can tolerate the enemies' humiliation? My dear countrymen! Now please listen to a woman's sorrowful song." Thus we are invited, as Susan McClary describes in her analysis of Monteverdi's Lamento della Nlnfa, to "witness and experi¬ ence" a woman's emotion and subjectivity (this time not caused by her excess sexuality but by the devastation after her rape) presented within the frame of male subjectivity.40 This mode of representation has departed quite far from the sensibility of strong and self-empowered women and female subjectivity in the literary and musical traditions of late imperial China. Second, the creation of this lamenting woman who represents a victimized female subjectivity resulted in part from the impact of Western culture. In European operatic traditions, the lament has been an important expressive musical form since Monteverdi's "Lament" from Arianna (1608). Most of the lamenters celebrated in dramatic works af¬ ter Monteverdi's L'Orfeo have been females. However, in Chinese culture, for example in literary or operatic traditions, the lament had not been assigned to an exclusive fe¬ male identity until the twentieth century. The "Lament of the Yellow River" was the first in an invented modern tradition in which the lament became a female property ex-

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clusively. On the other hand, the victimization of women is also rooted in the tradi¬ tional Confucian teaching of woman's chastity which posits suicide as the most honor¬ able way for a woman to defend her chastity, as a triumph instead of a victimization. Ironically, this oppressive concept from patriarchal China, strongly criticized by postMay Fourth Chinese intellectuals and the Chinese Communist Party, is revalidated in the process of the nationalist discourse. Third, a complex relationship between an eroticized national identity and the fe¬ male body emerges in this lament. We must not forget that the female subjectivity in the lament is constructed by a male poet and composer, and the "hometown" is also based on a male's imagination and interpretation. In contemporaneous literature, Chi¬ nese female writers expressed ambivalent feelings toward the male's notion of "home¬ land." However, as Lydia Liu observes in her study of the female body and nationalist discourse in Chinese literature of the 1930s, "the raped woman often serves as a pow¬ erful trope in anti-Japanese propaganda. Her victimization is used to represent-or more precisely, to eroticize - China's own plight."41 Similarly, in this lament, the Chinese na¬ tion's shame is feminized and identified with a woman's raped body. The raped woman does not represent the nation, which is represented by the Yellow River and her coun¬ trymen; she represents only the nation's humiliation, shame, and suffering. In order to eradicate that shame, the woman has to die. Her death, in turn, becomes an atonement to the national salvation movement, the violation by foreigners of the homeland-asfemale-body "requires its citizens and allies to rush to her defense."42 An organic link between, on the one hand, imported Western ideas and musical practices of represent¬ ing victimized female subjectivity embodied in a female voice and representing an eroti¬ cized homeland via a female body, and, on the other, the Confucian notion of chastity is extraordinarily well-realized through the suicide of the semicolonial woman. The sym¬ bolic meanings of the lament are even further generalized due to this woman's anonym¬ ity. She is not a woman but represents a generic national female subject; her individual identity has been lost within the rhetoric of the nation. In the processes of resituating Chinese women in modern Chinese society and re¬ defining gender/sexual politics in the context of twentieth-century culture, women are often presented musically as the subordinated "other." Since the 1940s, women often represent traditional rural China, the peasants, the supporters of revolution, the masses being led, the students being instructed, and the minorities. In contrast, patriarchal men are represented as the urban progressives, the modernists, the workers, the revolution¬ aries, the saviors, the party leaders, the teachers, and the Han nationals. The story of a well-known song, "The Nanni Valley,"43 is an apt illustration. This song was composed by Ma Ke in Yanan in 1943 for the occasion of the Chinese New Year's celebration. Its lyrics praise the heroes of the revolutionary army who transformed the poor mountain-

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ous area into a paradise known as Jiangnan.44 At the end of the song we hear "Let's go ahead, present the flowers to these models." The song is patterned after Chinese folk song and dance structures and melodic features, particularly those of yangge, the popu¬ lar song and dance form of the region. Originally "The Nanni Valley" was sung as a yangge song in a yangge dance pre¬ sented to the local troops by students from Yanan's Lu Xun Arts Institute. There was no particular indication of gender in the lyrics and music, except that the models were evi¬ dently male soldiers. In subsequent years, Guo Lanying, a famous folksinger, added this song to her repertory, and the song become popular through her singing. In the early 1960s, in order to canonize the Chinese Communist Party's role in modern Chinese his¬ tory, a music and dance epic, "The East is Red," was put together to reconstruct the his¬ tory of Chinese revolution through the use of historical songs composed during the first half of the twentieth century. Later, in 1964, a film of the performance was made and distributed nationwide. "The Nanni Valley," sung by Guo Lanying, was included in the epic. What is intriguing is that, although the original context and content (presenting flowers to the model soldiers in Yanan) were kept in the re-creation of the song, the identity of the singer-presenters was changed. Instead of the students from the arts in¬ stitute, the new presenters are now a group of peasant women who, with flower basket in hand, dance around and praise the male soldiers, and at the end they offer their 162

flower baskets to the soldiers. Although the men do not sing or dance, they clearly oc¬ cupy the central position in the scene. The women sing in a high nasal voice, which is considered ultra-feminine, and the melody becomes very smooth through numerous "feminine" ornaments and glissandi adopted.from the folk-song style of singing. Fur¬ thermore, Chinese traditional instruments accompany the song.45 Thus, a hierarchical gender structure is effectively created in this musical reinterpretation and representation of history by means of essentializing the male/female duality. Women are relegated to a subservient social status in this scene through two associations: first, with the peasant class, which in Marxist teaching is a subservient class, in contrast to the male's associa¬ tion with the soldier class, which is considered part of the worker class by Chinese com¬ munists; second, with the folk-song melody and traditional instruments, which are popularly regarded as secondary to Western instruments and Westernized music, in con¬ trast to the soldiers' association, in the immediately following number, with Western in¬ struments and Western-style music. This representation, thus, reveals a profound con¬ viction about gender politics in the Chinese communist revolution: although women's liberation was essential to the revolution led by men, women's place in the revolution would ultimately be a subservient one 46 "The Nanni Valley" came into the spotlight again at the end of the 1980s due to its reappropriation by the rock star Cui Jian.47 Cui reorchestrated it with his rock band

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and sang it with a rough, boorish voice in a low range. He eliminated all the feminine ornaments trademarked by Guo Lanying's rendition so that the melody became disjunct and broken. The result is a totally masculinized satirical rock song protesting the hypoc¬ risy of communism. Cui's version, it was said, shocked orthodox communist leaders; as a result, the song was immediately banned, confirming the power of gender ideology in music. Additionally, what is most threatening to the old revolutionaries in Cui's cover of the song is that it shakes the foundation of the established communist social order, challenging present gender/sexual politics by radically reversing the gender/sexual identity of the voice. This rejection of the song's original subservient feminine/female identity is perceived by many as a symbol of the broader rejection of passivity and ob¬ scurantism under the current totalitarian political system.

"The Lament of the Yellow River" and "The Nanni Valley" illustrate the evolution of gender ideologies in twentieth-century China, how that evolution has contributed to the musical construction of women as "other," and how the binary gender ideology of the West began to appear in musical narratives. In my final example I examine these issues from another perspective, that is, how Chinese traditional gender ideology persists tena¬ ciously yet coexists with new foreign imports, and how conflicts and negotiations be¬ tween different gender politics have been reflected in musical compositions. Chinese intellectuals, in the intensive, century-long process of creating and defin¬ ing a new national culture, have been constantly experiencing what Jean and John Comaroff have called the "colonialization of consciousness" and the "consciousness of colonialization."48 In importing signs, forms, and ideas from the West, Chinese compos¬ ers and musicians have both appropriated and contested the universality of an essentialized male/female binarism in their musical creativeness. One of the best examples to illustrate my point is the Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai Violin Concerto, composed in 1959 by He Zhanhao and Chen Gang, and known outside of China as the "Butterfly Lovers' Concerto." This single-movement concerto in sonata form is an instrumental re-adaptation of an indigenous opera, of the same title, that belongs to the tradition of Shaoxing xi, a kind of local opera popular in the Shanghai area.49 The love story of Liang Shanbo (a young scholar) and Zhu Yingtai (a clever and beautiful young woman) first appeared in the Ming Dynasty as a chuanqi script; thereafter, many local operas included the story in their repertories. As a typical chuanqi female character, Zhu has a remarkable leading role. She persuades her parents to let her cross-dress as a man in order to go to school; she falls in love with her classmate Liang and enjoys intimacy with him through a

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"brotherly friendship"; she discloses her identity to her teacher's wife and asks her to be matchmaker; she expresses her love openly to Liang through metaphors during their farewell after their three-year study and, in the name of her sister, engages herself to Liang; she refuses the marriage arranged by her parents and joins Liang, after he dies of heartbreak, by throwing herself into Liang's tomb. The two lovers are finally reunited in transfiguration as a pair of butterflies. The whole opera revolves around Zhu's desires and actions: she loves, plots, rejects, and decides. She is active in spheres normally offlimits to women, both intellectually and physically. Meanwhile, she never loses her fem¬ ininity or female identity. Just like many other young scholar characters in chuanqi, Liang is presented as a feminine man: he is beautiful, sentimental, not as talented as Zhu, and frail. In short, this opera is yet another example of gender crossing, of yin and yang exchange, in traditional China. What happens when such an opera becomes a model for a violin concerto? The "Butterfly Lovers' Concerto" has been considered by Chinese music critics to be one of the most successful explorations of "nationalizing Western orchestral music" since its premiere in 1959.50 Its use of melodic and rhythmic materials from traditions of

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164

having "best expressed the dramatic conflict contained within the story." It is intriguing, then, to look at what has been highlighted in the concerto as the dramatic conflict and how this conflict interacts with the principle of sonata form in relation to the notion of gender. The violin concerto is dominated by the tri-partite sonata form: exposition, devel¬ opment, and recapitulation. The musical narrative of this concerto, however, conflicts with the model from European classical music. The structural terms of absolute music (of sonata form's exposition, development, and recapitulation) are substituted in the concerto by the Chinese narrative titles of Love, Protest, and Transfiguration which highlight three scenes from the opera: "Becoming Sworn Brothers," "Rejecting the Ar¬ ranged Marriage," and "Transforming into Butterflies." After a brief introduction, the exposition (Love) presents a primary love theme in G zhi mode,51 which contains a dia¬ logue between the violin and cello expressing the romantic friendship that developed between the two young lovers as "brothers" (Example 2). The lively second theme, a rondo in E zhi mode, reveals the young lovers as innocent students (Example 3). Finally, a lyrical farewell theme, derived from the love theme melodically but remaining in E zhi mode, closes the exposition with a weeping sound (Example 4). In the development section (Protest), the first climax is built on the conflict be¬ tween the protest theme of the heroine, derived from the rondo in the exposition, and

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