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A Feminist Ethnomusicology Writings on Music and Gender A Feminist Ethnomusicology Writings on Music and Gender Ellen Koskoff Foreword by Suzanne Cusick A Feminist Ethnomusicology New Perspectives on Gender in Music Editorial Advisors Susan C. Cook Beverley Diamond A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book. A Feminist Ethnomusicology Writings on Music and Gender Ellen Koskoff Foreword by Suzanne Cusick University of Illinois Press Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koskoff, Ellen, author. A feminist ethnomusicology : writings on music and gender / Ellen Koskoff ; foreword by Suzanne Cusick. pages cm. — (New perspectives on gender in music) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-252-03849-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-252-08007-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-252-09640-2 (e-book) 1. Ethnomusicology. 2. Feminism and music. 3. Sex role in music. I. Title. ml3798.k67 2014 780.82—dc23 2013040306 To Rebecca, Lydia, and David, with the hope that you and your children will make a better world where we can be all we want to be Contents Foreword by Suzanne Cusick ix Preface xiii Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 Part I: 1976–1990 Chapter 1 From Women to Gender 13 Chapter 2 Introduction to Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective 31 Chapter 3 Both In and Between: Women’s Musical Roles in Ritual Life 44 Part II: 1990–2000 Chapter 4 Shifting Realities 59 Chapter 5 Gender, Power, and Music 76 Chapter 6 Miriam Sings Her Song: The Self and the Other in Anthropological Discourse 90 Chapter 7 The Language of the Heart: Music in Lubavitcher Life 105 Chapter 8 When Women Play: The Relationship between Musical Instruments and Gender Style 122 Chapter 9 “Well, That’s Why We Won’t Take You, Okay?”: Women, Representation, and the Myth of the Unitary Self 133 Part III: 2000–2012 Chapter 10 Unresolved Issues 145 Chapter 11 The Ins and Outs on In and Out 157 Chapter 12 Out in Left Field/Left Out of the Field: Postmodern Scholarship, Feminist/Gender Studies, Musicology, and Ethnomusicology, 1990–2005 168 Chapter 13 Imaginary Conversations 180 Notes 191 References 199 Index 227 Foreword Suzanne Cusick With A Feminist Ethnomusicology, Ellen Koskoff has given us an intellectu- ally eclectic, rigorously self-aware, lucidly written, and sometimes hilarious guide to how the paradoxical interdiscipline of feminist ethnomusicology has developed over the past forty years. Koskoff herself describes the book as a kind of intellectual memoir that shows the process of change in a thor- oughly intersectional professional life, but I would argue that it is more like an autoethnography, for it is firmly based in her own participant observation amid the creation of a feminist ethnomusicology from multiple disciplines, conversations, and concerns over a lifetime of “face-to-face talking, laughing, listening, eating, musicking.” To Koskoff, such shared interactions between embodied, constantly changing human beings constitute the essence of field- work, which she posits as an ideal method both for ethnomusicology and for feminism—as well as the method for acquiring and developing knowledge that is the “most fun.” There is ample fun in this autoethnography, and not only because Koskoff has peppered some of the essays with sidesplitting anecdotes that present mo- ments of shared, nonverbal recognition of sameness-difference as explosions of laughter. Koskoff’s chronological account of her own path to a feminist ethnomusicology tacks deftly between such anecdotes and brilliantly distilled, utterly reader-friendly exegeses of the political, theoretical, and disciplinary concerns that shaped her own thought and practice, as well as that of her sisters in feminist music scholarship. The result is that complicated, emotion- ally, and politically fraught encounters between music and anthropology, ethnomusicology and gender studies, historical musicology and ethnomusi- cology, any and all of those and cultural studies, literary theory, or the several x Foreword “post-” disciplines are made easy to grasp. They seem like the personal and intellectual adventure of one engaged (and highly engaging) person. Once a little girl whose curiosity was piqued by the joy-filled faces of singing men whom she passed on her way to school, and who would later be troubled by a teacher’s instruction to make her whole native state one color on a map, that person would spend her adulthood pondering, in the real and virtual company of others, music, gender, sameness-and-difference, and what it meant to feel both inside and outside a picture that ought rightly to be rich with differences. As a text, A Feminist Ethnomusicology is rich with differences, whether interrogated intellectually, mediated by laughter or music, angrily refused, or respectfully acknowledged. By far the most significant of these is the stark contradiction between feminism’s inherent commitment to political action on behalf of gender equality and ethnomusicology’s equally inherent commitment to the dispassionate understanding of music’s importance in human lives. Although this contradiction seems to have bedeviled Koskoff through many years of fieldwork, it haunts her book very productively: her essays show how she negotiated it by bravely confronting other differences that, in their overlapping, both constituted the contradiction and implied its possible resolutions. Among the most important conflicts fruitfully ex- plored are the conflicting yet overlapping histories, premises, and aims of Western-oriented feminist theory versus mainstream anthropological theory; historical musicology’s emphasis on textwork and elite Western musics versus ethnomusicology’s emphasis on fieldwork and nonelite, non-Western musics; “second-wave” versus “third-wave” feminisms; performance theory versus performativity theory; “genderist” versus “feminist” analysis; knowledge developed from fieldwork versus the desire to create broad, cross-cultural theories of gender’s interaction with musicking; insider versus outsider perspectives; academic versus activist feminisms; Lubavitcher versus non- Lubavitcher understandings of the sound of a woman’s voice; cultural studies theory versus anthropological theories of culture; and recent ethnomusicol- ogy’s fascination with global systems of commodified human and cultural circulation versus fieldwork’s emphasis on “everyday, sometimes tedious, sometimes miraculous human interactions,” with their “gendered lessons of compassion, respect for the individual and for the process of life.” Koskoff works through these differences from a position of being “in be- tween” discourses—a condition she learned to theorize as characterizing both women and music by a combination of textwork with anthropologist Sherry Ortner’s writing and fieldwork among Lubavitcher Jews, for whom music is “the language of the heart,” mediating between the corrupt and the pure, Foreword xi the earthly and the divine, the inside and the outside. In the end, she affirms feminism and ethnomusicology as always having shared certain qualities that she valued—a commitment to social justice, to understanding others, and to the struggle for equilibrium in relationships based on difference. In the end, she succeeds in presenting the sometimes vexed and contentious, sometimes harmonious or playful, always productive relationship of feminism with ethnomusicology as a parable of just such equilibrium. But this book is richer than all that. It is a magnificent (and, dare I say, wonderfully historicized) survey of the field; a stunning textual performance of clear-headed, down-to-earth, rigorously self-aware thought in the act of engaging intensely with real human life; and a passionate argument for the continuing importance of encounters between human persons, in all our complexity. It adumbrates theoretical moves that have yet to be developed. To read A Feminist Ethnomusicology is to witness a person of great intellect, empathy, and honesty think, with love and humor, about music, gender, social justice, and power: it is, therefore, to encounter the sensibility that makes a feminist music scholar. Most of all, to read it is like “face-to-face talking, laughing, listening” with Koskoff herself, a privilege I have intermittently enjoyed over many years. Koskoff challenges readers to think new thoughts, rethink old ones, remember long-buried feelings, and open ourselves more to the astonishing variety of the world—and she makes it fun. But don’t trust me: read her for yourself. Preface While it is certainly an honor to have one’s articles published in a collection such as this, the preparation of this manuscript has also resulted in a curious moment for me. In assembling these articles for publication, I have had to go back over the past forty years of my life, to revel again in excitement and hope, to sigh over missed opportunities, to reconnect with the work of old friends and colleagues—some of whom have passed on—to lament upon awkward arguments or turns of phrase, and to reflect upon shared progress and continuing challenges. Though written for others, this book has also al- lowed me to reconnect with my earlier self—always a worthwhile experience. Although I am hopeful that scholars in other fields will read and use this work, its primary focus, orientation, and perspective is that of ethnomu- sicology—that music discipline I love and that I define here as a close, yet sometimes contentious, marriage between music and anthropology. Cen- tral to this endeavor is fieldwork. Although far from perfect, fieldwork—the face-to-face talking, laughing, listening, crying, eating, musicking, and all the rest—is still, for me, the best and most direct way to learn about others and their musics, and I privilege it here over other methods of learning and documenting. More than anything else, though, this collection presents my understand- ings and interpretations of disciplinary and social intersections that have characterized music and gender studies over the past four decades.
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