Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality

Though I often wished she would pause more on her musical excerpts, this book is very wise, and anyone interested in understanding meaning in music intellectually must read this book.

This book changed me from a Stravinsky-like "music has no meaning" stance. I still don't think that music is sad or happy or like a day in the country, things are more complicated than that, but I no longer feel that music is an empty if beautiful vessel. Instead music, like all actions (and non-actions), is political. I only give it a four because I would recommend her next book far more.

I assigned this book to my WOMEN AND MUSIC class when I taught at the University of Tennessee. It opened their eyes and ears. They have an entirely new and valuable perspective. A must read for any musician! Dr. Benjamin Boone, California State University Fresno

In Feminine Endings, Susan McClary went "outside the box," critically examining a lot of the unquestioned conventions of traditional musicology. This was a groundbreaking book, attempting to talk about "the semiotics of desire" and how composers/performers construct meaning through the creation and manipulation of musical pleasure. McClary received extremely harsh criticism for her rethinking of "classical" composers and musicology, the vehemence of which was, at times, shocking. This in itself indicated that Feminine Endings had touched a sensitive nerve (McClary herself characterizes her inquiry as one of Bluebeard's wives daring to open the forbidden door). While the musicology establishment mostly viewed McClary as a misguided heretic, many other scholars and critics found Feminine Endings brilliant, liberating, and a breath of fresh air (I'd vote for all three). While criticism of this book, published in 1991, still hasn't stopped, McClary indeed opened a door with Feminine Endings, providing a critical space for a variety of subsequent music criticism, including even traditional musicology, which found Feminine Endings too important to ignore. This book is aimed at a scholarly readership, though undergrad students (music majors and non-majors alike) can also get a lot out of these essays, which are very readable considering the scholarly content.

In FEMININE ENDINGS: MUSIC, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY, Susan McClary applies the insightful and provocative approach to music and its meanings that has made her one of the most widely read music scholars of the twentieth century, and for which she earned the prestigious MacArthur Award in 1995. McClary argues that music, being a fundamentally social phenomenon, constitutes a particular mode of social discourse. Music can articulate social meanings in various ways, and like any semiotic system it uses a defined, yet flexible, repertory of codes -- gestures, rhetorical devices, narrative strategies, associations with and allusions to extra-muical events or phenomena, and so on. While this would seem obvious to anyone who has ever heard a horn call, a funeral dirge, a national anthem, or a distinctive bolero, scholarly writing on music has until recently been reluctant to assess critically how meanings are inscribed, circulated, and mediated through musical practices. As McClary explains, the process by which musical sounds, phrases, and gestures assume meanings is complex and is open to modification, challenge, and redefinition. Therefore, critics who portray McClary's rich hermeneutic interventions as reductive or essentialist grossly misrepresent her line of argument. For as she demonstrates, there is nothing essential about musical meanings -- they are subject to the contingencies of time and place; they are shaped by contemporary social and historical realities; and they rely upon the formal and stylistic conventions specific to the musical traditions in which they participate. McClary brings these factors to bear on musical practices, and in so doing she engages music to perform a powerful cultural critique.