Towards a new era?

Ella Fitzgerald, a pioneer in jazz singing

Singing is the most common and accepted musical activity for a woman in most cultures. And there are many musical fields still today in which women are mainly present by their voice, one of them being jazz or occasionally for example reggae.

Judy Mowatt, one of the very rare 'Rastawomen'

Lucy Green describes in Music, Gender, Education “the image of the mother privately singing to her baby, the practice which is allowed in all known cultures, and which must be one of the few universal customs of humanity.” (Green, 29) She further mentions the division of private music making (lullabies) and public singing, and concludes, saying: “thus the age-old dichotomy of woman as whore/madonna is reproduced in her musical practice as a singer”. (Green, 29)

The division of women’s roles makes me think of Walter Benjamin, even if he doesn’t discuss the woman’s position in The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction.

Julia Fischer, the archetype of the modern performer:
mostly known as a violinist, she also perfectly masters the piano

Benjamin thinks of the ritual as an almost spiritual process, creating a strong bond between the performer and the audience. This ritual follows certain very precise rules, which brings us back to the first purposes of music serving religion and celebrating the gods. These rules could not for a long time be broken by feminine presence on stage, as bringing a woman would have made the ritual less spiritual.

Adorno and Horkheimer don't discuss women's position in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment and Mass Industry. But in another context, when discussing with Horkheimer, Adorno states: "I suppose that bourgeois sexual taboos are connected with the jus primae noctis. Women should acquire the right to dispose of their own bodies. Human beings become their own property. That is threatened by sexuality and this sets the scene for the perennial war between the sexes." (Adorno/Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto, 10)

There have been several feministic research projects based on Adorno's writings, as discussed for instance in Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno (a collective work edited by Renée Heberle).

It seems that Adorno’s philosophy has some ideas in common with feminists thinking, in the aspect of challenging the dualism that structures Western thinking.

This dualism traditionally gives only two roles to woman: a mother or an entertainer. One can imagine that maybe in dividing culture into art and mass culture as he did, Adorno would have agreed that women are often seen as an object in mass culture, where as in artistic creations, women can also be the ones who create, simply as human beings.

                 Kaija Saariaho, to my knowing only the second woman                    
      to have her opera programmed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York

When looking at the role of women today in mass culture, we easily see, like in most video clips, that women often are objectified.

In a recent open letter, the singer Sinéad O'Connor addresses words of advice to her young colleague Miley Cyrus, who seems willing to play the role of a provocative sexual object, whereas O'Connor thinks that she is talented enough to create herself a career as a real artist without lowering herself to the demands of mass culture and the consumers society.

Sinéad O’Connor certainly knows what she is talking about, and her open letter is warm and wise. But maybe Miley Cyrus also is more aware of her situation than it seems. As Bethany Klein describes in her article The new radio: music licensing as a response to industry woe, becoming ‘the sound of commerce’ can now be a badge of honor, not a shame (Klein, 469). Klein discusses the complex and unexpected new situation, created by economical needs and interests, in radio and television advertising.  Even if based on commercial needs, the situation can also be used by — and helpful for — artists. 

Let’s, not only hope, but rather work constructively in order for the new generation of women artists in all fields to break the conventionally narrow categories and find more space to create and perform music from their own standpoint -not as they are expected to do, or as they have been taught to do.

Claire Chase, flutist, arts entrepreneur and founder of the International Contemporary Ensemble,
recently awarded the Mc Arthur Genius Prize for her innovative work