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itself, including meanings concerning the sex of a composer, was
not really given serious inquiry until the decade of the 1990’s. 2
Since then, several feminist musicologists have attempted to seek out methods for finding how
gender is encoded in the work of female composers and how to pinpoint the meaning of such
musical and cultural indicators. This task is fraught with many dangers. First of all, the
supposition that gender is encoded in a musical work, while true, is also hugely general and
immeasurably fluid. As Joan Scott notes, gender is both a matter of the “individual subject” and
the greater “social organization,” and the interrelationship between them. 3 Therefore, it is not
enough to examine the cultural influences, the power relations, the ideologies of decorum,
sexuality, and biology, but also how the individual responds to these external factors. Because of
this, understanding completely how a particular woman composer encodes her gender in her
work can be a treacherous endeavor. Treacherous because it leads the researcher into the trap of
stereotyping and relying on binary oppositions which are agents of patriarchal gender
differentiation as ancient as the origins of Western civilization. Many different approaches to
tackling this problem have surfaced over the last several years. Sally MacArthur notes a shift
from identifying tendencies in stylistic and aesthetic choices of female composers, such as Eva
Reiger’s list of similarities common to women’s music of the twentieth-century, to a broader
acceptance that, while concepts of “femininity” and “masculinity” exist as constructs, they
cannot be applied wholesale to individual composers. Composers, male or female, may utilize
these constructs, identify with them, or subvert them, but a composer’s identity (stylistic or
2 Sally Macarthur, Feminist Aesthetics in Music (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), 12.
3 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical
Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1067.
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