Abstracts - American Musicological Society

6 Thursday Morning: Session 1- 5
AMS/SEM/SMT New Orleans 2012
unique ways the voice is used for gender construction in these genres. More specifically, this is an analysis of sound aesthetics
and other performative aspects demonstrating the sound and image of an ideal woman in East Asia. For example, in Peking
Opera, there are distinct role types for and/or portraying women, each of which represents a specific ideal female; the costumes,
movements and vocalizations are all stylized so as to depict a particular category of woman. Likewise, the male actors
performing women’s roles in kabuki do not merely attempt to “act like a woman” but rather create and construct an “ideal
female likeness” (Mezur 2005) both visually and aurally. P’ansori also provides an interesting case to investigate verbal expressions
of gender ideals as both men and women play all characters in any given story, creating a transgendered space, with little
or no change in physicality, timbre or pitch to distinguish between male and female characters. By comparing and contrasting
these East Asian arts, we can better understand why the ideals developed as they did, why they have continued through
time despite remarkable changes in the “real” world in terms of women and their ideal roles, and how the vocalizations reflect
significant information of the nations of origin.
Yoko Ono and the Gendered Global Voice
Kara Attrep (Bowling Green State University)
Trained in both Western classical music and in Japanese instruments and vocal styles, Yoko Ono’s musical education was
eclectic and diverse. From her avant-garde work with Fluxus in New York in the early 1960s up until the present, Ono has
pushed the boundaries of vocal technique incorporating sounds from all around the globe and influencing younger female
vocalists in a multitude of genres. This paper examines the misunderstandings surrounding some of her early pieces and the
gendered and racial manner in which these pieces are understood and interpreted. Often, Ono’s performing voice is conflated
with her own being—she is her voice. This characterization has led critics, especially in the days right after her marriage to
John Lennon, to define Ono as strange, “other” worldly and even “evil.” It is this conflation of the body with the voice that
has led many to either revere or disparage Ono’s vocal performances. I seek to reconcile the seemingly contradictory readings/
hearings of Ono’s body and voice. Several scholars have examined the gendered and racial aspects of Ono’s performances.
However, I seek to expand these studies and explore the mapping of gendered and racialized identities onto Yoko Ono’s voice
and, by extension, body. By tracing these mappings, I show the complex interconnection between identity, the voice, and the
body through Ono’s performances. Additionally, I examine how Ono’s voice becomes a model for critiquing and labeling
contemporary female artists from around the globe, whose voices and lives are often judged in relation to Ono’s.
A Queer Organology of the Harp
Henry Spiller (University of California, Davis)
Long hours practicing and performing behind a concert pedal harp have convinced me that it is perhaps the West’s queerest
musical instrument. In this paper, I examine some of the harp’s history and characteristics in light of critical theories of sexual
identities and desire (e.g. Foucault, Lacan, Sedgwick, and Butler) to explore the question: how does a musical instrument
become correlated with sexual identities? I argue that players and listeners find it viable to map non-hegemonic desires and
sexual identities to the many ambiguities that surround the harp: its equivocal phallic imagery (does it represent the player’s
own phallus, or does it penetrate his spread legs?); the deceptive enharmonic pedalings that allow the essentially diatonic harp
to “pass” as a chromatic instrument and the closeting of the ungraceful mechanism that enables this chicanery; the feminine
associations that both enabled female harpists to break the gender barrier of professional orchestras and contributed to the
harp’s marginal placement and role in the orchestra; and the commonly-held and frequently-denied assumption, at least in the
late twentieth century, that any male harpist is gay. In line with Foucault’s argument that pre-modern sensibilities regarded
homosexual behaviors as discrete acts rather than components of stable identities, I propose that the harp’s history of ambiguity
has long lent itself to enacting a variety of alternative desires and identities, including assertive women, gentle men,
womanizers, and even asexuality, but which many in the twentieth century, in keeping with modern sexual politics, conflated
into a monolithic homosexual identity.
A Journey of Identity: Jennifer Leitham’s Challenge to Normative Gender Hierarchies of Jazz
Randy Drake (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Jennifer Leitham, a transgender bassist, complicates easy theories about the performance of gender, music, identity, and
subjectivity in jazz. Leitham established her career for many years as a male performer in jazz, but in 2001, she could no longer
tolerate her male identity and changed her sex. The movement of her identity from a perceived normative gender identity of
male, through transgender, to a perceived normative gender of female, represents a deep challenge to the normative subject
position of jazz. Jazz music has been slow to disengage representations of identity related to its historical development among
heterosexual African American males. Yet in contrast to this normative position, there are other musicians who address jazz