Keywords

In 2010, Karen Barad (they) write:

This ‘beginning’, like all beginnings, is always already threaded through with anticipation of where it is going but will never simply reach and of a past that has yet to come. It is not merely that the future and the past are not ‘there’ and never sit still, but that the present is not simply here-now. (2010, 244)

This Beginning: All over the Place (Sally Macarthur)

In 2022, a new co-edited publication about women composers—A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds (Kouvaras et al. 2022)—is released. I receive a copy and find myself transported back to the 1980s and 90s. In those last two decades of the twentieth century, foreshadowed by Elizabeth Wood (1980) and confirmed a decade later by Susan McClary (1993), research on music, gender, and sexuality emerges as a new field in musicology, with most of the trailblazing critical work appearing in the 1990s, owing much to musicologists Susan McClary, Elizabeth Wood, Marcia Citron, Eva Rieger, Judith Lochhead, Suzanne Cusick, Ruth Solie, Philip Brett, Lawrence Kramer, Fred Maus, Ellen Koskoff, composer, Pauline Oliveros, and others. A Century of Composition by Women (Kouvaras et al. 2022) is a mixture of historical research, incorporating a focus on specific composers—reminding me of many others of its ilk (e.g., Ammer 1980; Bowers and Tick 1986; Bloch and Neuls-Bates 1979; Briscoe 1987, 1997; Jezic 1988/94; Pendle 1991; Fuller 1994; and Sadie and Samuel 1994)—statistical information, and theoretically grounded research—the latter exhibiting sophistication in how it connects music with feminist, queer, and critical theories (this new book cites some of the critical work in musicology from the 1990s, including: McClary 1991; Citron 1993; Solie 1993; and Brett et al. 1994).

As I engage with this new book by Kouvaras et al. (2022), Karen Barad’s thought comes to mind: there ‘is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then’ (2014, 168). The work from the 80s and 90s is diffracted through Kouvaras et al. (2022), spawning multiple and different versions of itself, endlessly diffusing the fleeting moments of the there-then and here-now through emergent and infinite futures. This new book opens onto a research field that, although now well-established, does not sit still. I become entangled in the book and the previous research simultaneously. I intra-act with the book, using the word ‘intra-action’ to distinguish it from interaction. The latter presupposes that entities and beings exist prior to their encounters with each other. Intra-action, as Barad (2007, ix), identifying as ‘they’, explain, ‘is to lack an independent self-contained existence’. Feminist and critical work in music on gender and sexuality and my entanglements with it ‘do not preexist their intra-actions; rather, individuals [and physical and discursive material, including the book and myself] emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating’ (Barad 2007, ix).

According to Barad, the concept of intra-action shifts the emphasis from the traditional notion of causality to reconceptualising matter in terms of its relationality, vitality, dynamism, and agency (Barad 2007, 33). Zabroska et al. (2011, 710) enlarge Barad’s point, suggesting that all matter—human and non-human—is inseparable, constituting each other ‘like ripples on a pond, or waves in the ocean’. As I intra-act with this new book, I am caught up in the non-linear time it produces. I re-turn (deliberately hyphenated) to the earlier research in the spirit of Barad (2014, 168)—not to reflect but to turn ‘it over and over again’—as an event of time that is diffracted through itself, enfolding the past, present, and future through myself and the research in which I am entangled (Barad 2010, 260–61). As I intra-act with the previous research and its various manifestations in the book, I create different materialisations and new diffraction patterns. As Barad (2014, 168) says, there is ‘nothing that is new; there is nothing that is not new’. What occurs in the slice of time of the 80s and 90s is never finished or closed.

Prior to the excavation effort in the 1970s and 80s, which unearths music by women composers from the past, music composed by women is virtually unknown. The early historical research lays foundations for the work-to-come, which is always in a state of becoming. Some of this foundational work is disseminated and diffracted through a critical lens. According to Bozalek and Murris (2022, 54), diffraction, in a Baradian sense, is ‘part of wave behaviour—what waves can do—whether they are light, water or sound waves. … When waves overlap or encounter obstructions, they form patterns of difference.’ If we transpose this idea to feminist musicology, as suggested by Wood ([1988] 1994, xiii), patterns of difference emerge when women’s music is added to the repertory. As Wood writes, the music of women composers from the past gives us the opportunity ‘to meet musicians whose lives and works are exemplary models—not merely symbols—of women’s contributions both to music’s traditions and also to the ongoing process of cultural change’ (xiii).

In the late 1980s and 90s, feminist musicology develops a strong critical perspective (drawing on other disciplines as well as music), showing us how to think differently, not just about women’s music, but about music in general. Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings (1991) is exemplary in this regard. It demonstrates how music can be read along feminist theoretical lines and, against the chorus of resistance in mainstream musicology, that music, in general, can be read as a cultural text, even music that is deemed to lack cultural meanings, such as pure, abstract, instrumental music. McClary proposes that all music can be read in terms of its ideological assumptions and as interpretations of culture. In this view, if culture functions on a binary system, as McClary shows, music emulates this system, producing its own binary structures, including labels that are based on stereotypes, such as masculine and feminine cadences, and masculine and feminine themes (McClary 1991) in which the feminine is conceived as passive and the masculine active. If society is hierarchically structured according to a feudal system transitioning into an industrial system, then the music of the day, such as J. S. Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto No. 5, as McClary elucidates in another publication (McClary 1987, 13–62), can be read to pattern itself on this system while, as McClary also shows, to subvert it. In her interpretation of the Brandenburg 5, the concertino resembles the ruling class, the ripieno, the middle class, and the continuo, the servant class but, to complicate that reading, the harpsichord, belonging to the servant class, emerges, with its technically challenging, brilliant cadenza passages, as a ‘ruler’ in its own right. And, if attitudes towards women are misogynist and sexist, then the idea of the ‘madwoman’s discourse’ can be legitimately read, as McClary (1991) does, into the sound of early twentieth-century atonal music; here she makes an example of Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909). Similarly, McClary draws out the misogyny and violence, heard as ‘murderous rage’, from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (1824).

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the individual composers whose works are singled out for these cultural readings are products of their own socio-historical contexts. Similarly, McClary, who interprets these works, is a product of her own particular context. And, as I become entangled in McClary’s interpretations and the music associated with them, I, too, bring my own cultural background to the music and to McClary’s interpretations. The individuals themselves may or may not be aware of the cultural meanings that they are absorbing, reproducing, and incorporating as material in their music/interpretations. Cultural meanings are everywhere (and keep changing) whether we are conscious of them or not. The murderous rage in Beethoven’s Ninth, heard by McClary as ‘one of the most horrifying moments in the history of music’ (McClary 1991, 128), is not so much about the individual composer as it is about the attitudes towards women that are circulating in the collective unconscious. They are then diffracted through the symphony and through the cultural/feminist analysis performed by McClary. However, McClary’s cultural interpretations, which she acknowledges are one of many ways to interpret music, are not definitive and have never been intended to be read in that way (Giocondo 2018).

Despite this, McClary’s transformational interpretations become the centre of a power play that pits the musicological conservatives and future-oriented thinkers against one another. Even worse, the misogyny and violence that McClary exposes in some of her analyses are now turned upon herself. The whistle blower, it seems, must be punished. McClary becomes the target of vicious attacks and, in the discursive space, amid a highly charged, polarised debate, she is mercilessly maligned and abused in ways that are, as I diffract this information through the present chapter, completely unacceptable. As McClary later reports (McClary 2019, 11–12), she receives threats of rape and even death, and the police remove her from her apartment to safety. Is this a common practice for feminist academics who study culture, gender, and sexuality in other disciplines? Or is it only particular to male-dominated disciplines such as music and musicology? Is it particularly evident in music with its inflated, narcissistic, star system?

The violence that targets her as an individual and, in so doing, displays a very ugly side to musicology, prompts me to ask: is mainstream musicology taking misogyny, sexism, and violence to new heights? We could argue that it is a misogynist and sexist attitude, caught up in a competitive play for power in the neoliberal setting of music in higher education that triggers the violence heaped upon McClary. Yet, some higher education music institutions, such as Stony Brook University in New York, have a much more positive story to tell as Judith Lochhead and Jennifer Shaw explain below, prompting me to ask: what are the ingredients needed to make a musicological environment productive, a happy place to work, a place that is characterised by a strong sense of collegiality and respect regardless of a person’s gender and sexuality, and regardless of working as a feminist theorist? Is such a utopian ideal possible in today’s neoliberal university?

In this chapter, instead of adding to the abundance of research that now exists for women composers, we explore something else, asking: does identifying as a feminist and/or queer researcher in music have negative consequences for the researcher? Despite McClary’s ability to withdraw from feminist work and turn her attention to projects that do not have ideological overtones, her experience shows that working as a feminist in musicology has dire consequences, displaying a side of musicology that has no regard for university policies, let alone the law. However, as this chapter illustrates, each researcher, as conveyed in their reflections, has a different story to tell. Each—Susan McClary, Elizabeth Wood, Judith Lochhead, Jennifer Shaw, and Gillian Rodger—is chosen because they represent two countries (the US and Australia) that are separated by the Pacific Ocean, thereby giving a glimpse into a geographical as well as a generational exchange. They each have a unique set of circumstances to do with their employment status (tenured professor, full-time lecturer, part-time, adjunct, guest, visiting, independent scholar, administrator, etc.), whether they work inside the higher education music system or in other (related) disciplines, whether they overtly identify as a feminist or keep a relatively feminist-neutral/low profile, whether they identify as a feminist and/or a lesbian, and whether they have other intersectional attributes that would marginalise them. Now that feminist and queer research is well-established in music, we also wonder whether there are fewer obstacles to overcome in this third decade of the twenty-first century than there are in the 1990s. Four of the scholars (McClary, Wood, Lochhead and Rodger) are each asked to write a reflection piece on their experiences of working as a feminist/queer musicologist and one (Shaw) is asked to reflect upon her experience as a former higher degree research student at Stony Brook University; her reflection in Interlude 2 is intended to intra-act with Judith Lochhead’s reflection piece. The five scholars are asked open-ended trigger questions, including: is it difficult to pioneer and/or to work in the field of gender and/or sexuality in music? How does working in this field impact your careers as academics and/or as independent scholars? What obstacles do you encounter? What strategies do you adopt for countering any obstacles? Is identity still an important issue in music?

Reflections and Diffractions

In what follows, I (Macarthur) diffractively engage with my contributors’ reflections, in the spirit of Barad (2010), drawing out and highlighting a past that is over while simultaneously here-now, understanding that we are ‘entering a past that was never there for the “taking” … [that the] past is never “here” or “there”, objectively fixed and static’ (Murris and Zhao 2022, 112). The past keeps changing as it comes into the future. As Murris and Zhao (2022, 112–113) put it:

We can’t go back to a past (that never was), delete-and-insert-the-new-kind-of-activity, but a diffractive engagement with a humanist past that has also brought many achievements and gains while re-turning as a methodology enables disruption of some of the deep inequalities that human-centredness and human exceptionalism bring to research design and analysis through the binaries it assumes are neither neutral, nor simply given.

The remainder of the chapter unfolds as a series of reflections and diffractions with two interludes: Reflection 1 (McClary), Diffraction 1 (Macarthur), Interlude 1 (Macarthur), Reflection 2 (Wood), Diffraction 2 (Macarthur), Interlude 2 (Shaw), A Brief Thought (Macarthur), Reflection 3 (Lochhead), Diffraction 3 (Macarthur), Reflection 4 (Rodger), Diffraction 4 (Macarthur), and Conclusion (Macarthur). There are at least two generations of scholars represented here with McClary, Wood and Lochhead representing an older generation and Shaw and Rodger a younger generation. McClary, Wood, Lochhead, and Rodger have all worked with methodologies that disrupt the usual way of analysing and thinking about music. Three of the authors are pioneers in the 1990s: Susan McClary pioneers a feminist and critical musicology; Elizabeth Wood pioneers a feminist/critical and queer musicology; and Judith Lochhead pioneers inventive ways to analyse recent music, mostly making music by women composers her examples. The other two co-contributors work in the field as teachers and/or scholars and/or in university executive governance roles. It is important to draw attention to Gillian Rodger’s highly original contribution to the field of variety theatre (2010; 2018) in which she teases out the gender-bending, trans- performative, fluid, feminist, and non-binary aspects of identity, while Jennifer Shaw brings the perspective of a feminist and critical musicologist to Interlude 2. Belonging to the older generation, Macarthur, too, since the 1990s, has written extensively on music and feminism, using inventive approaches drawn from feminist and poststructuralist theories and new materialist philosophy. Through this research, we, the author and co-contributors, already entangled in each other’s careers, create more diffraction patterns and events of non-linear time, intra-acting as academics in music in higher education and specifically thinking about the ramifications of studying gender, sexuality, and music.

Reflection 1: Susan McClary

When Sally invited us to reflect on our experiences as feminist musicologists, I encountered a great many mixed feelings. On the one hand, Feminine Endings has been translated into at least eleven languages. But on the other, the uproar that greeted that book’s release was such that I felt pressed to abandon feminist scholarship decades ago.

I had anticipated backlash from male scholars, of course, and their hysterical responses would not have deterred me. I had not, however, expected the vehement denunciations from other feminists. Recall Paula Higgins’s ‘Guerrilla Musicology’ (1993)—an essay so impassioned that it attracted the attention of Barbara Tomlinson, a scholar of rhetoric who wrote an entire book—Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist (2010)—centred on this and other such responses to my work. Higgins published a forthright attack; many others wrote withering reviews I think of as ‘Tis pity she’s an essentialist’ responses. Female composers also took umbrage at what they saw as my shoving them back into the pigeonhole of the ‘woman composer’. Realising that I was doing more harm than good, I turned my research agendas elsewhere.

Every few years I have dared to trot something out, but the climate has not changed very much. In 2017 I delivered the inaugural (endowed) address for the Committee on the Status of Women and Gender of the American Musicological Society. So vicious were the emails I received afterwards from prominent women scholars that I declined the honorarium. When Peter Sellars invited me to participate in the Ojai Music Festival along with him in 2016, young women composers reacted to my presence as if the very Devil had materialised in front of them.

Yet there have also been bright moments. Sally began bringing me to Australia on a regular basis—a set of adventures I will sorely miss with my compromised mobility. Communities of musicologists in other parts of the world have laboured to have Feminine Endings appear in their own languages. And European composers have sought me out precisely because of the ways I deal with gender-related issues in music. The late Kaija Saariaho, whose recent death at age 70 inspired worldwide mourning, reached out to ask me to write program notes for one of her opera premieres. The brilliant Olga Neuwirth has done the same.

I wish I were able to present a straightforward struggle-to-triumph narrative.

But I decided to go instead with this cautionary tale. If there had been no such resistance, I would have continued writing about and analysing music by contemporary women; that project stalled at the starting gate and has had trouble gaining traction ever since. Internecine struggles have consequences.

Diffraction 1: Sally Macarthur

Just as musicians, musicologists and analysts have agency, if we read McClary’s work with imagination, so, too, does music and the discursive material in which it is entangled.

McClary’s intra-actions with music and its conservative outlook disrupt histories of misogyny, sexism, and racism. Ego-driven humanism, as scholars in other fields, such as the environmental humanities, have emphasised, is destroying the world (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Steffen et al. 2015). Ego-driven humanism is destroying music with its star system giving rise to heightened forms of megalomania and narcissism as it strives to create the original voice or tear down McClary’s brilliant scholarship. If we imagine that music and its cultural analyses by McClary have lives of their own, escaping the clutches of egotistical patriarchy (which applies not just to men but also to women), which competes for supremacy as music’s central intelligence, we also think of McClary, whose ground-breaking critical work challenges us to think differently. Her approach is to enter an equal partnership with music. In equal partnership, the analyst (McClary) and music reconfigure one another, working from within. This idea extends to readers/the multiplicity (me included) as we intra-act with music and McClary’s ‘inventive and generative provocations’ (Bozalek and Murris 2022, 54). As insiders, music and analyst (McClary) reconfigure Music Analysis (the discipline) in higher education. New ways to think about music are intra-actively generated, creating difference. McClary’s readings are diffracted across time, disrupting the continuity of western music’s grand narrative, the divides between one musical genre and another, all binary divisions that cause separations, and the idea that Western classical music should be forever hermetically sealed in a box labelled ‘autonomous’. While McClary herself may feel personally weighed down by the negative reactions to her work, history will tell another story: that the struggle is, perhaps, worth it. Her work cannot be ‘unsaid’ or ‘unheard’ or ‘undone’: it is already reconfiguring music as it entangles with the multiplicity and creates a life of its own.

Interlude 1: Entanglements with the ‘There-Then-Here-Now’ (Sally Macarthur)

In 1991, Susan McClary publishes the book—Feminine Endings (1991)—that will forever change musicology and the way we think about music. It moves into my bookshelf as I am about to depart for London to attend the first ever international Gender and Music Conference at Kings College London (5–7 July 1991). I have not long enrolled in my PhD at Sydney University and I greet McClary’s book with both horror and amazement: horror because I may need to find a new topic for my PhD; and amazement because everything I am thinking of researching for my PhD (or so it seems) is already ‘in the bag’, researched and written by McClary. In London, I interview McClary, a keynote speaker at the conference, for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). I am nervous, especially if McClary ventures into unfamiliar territory, given that I am at the beginning of my own research. But McClary is generous and explains the relationships between music and feminist theory in terms that I easily understand. The recorded interview is transported back to Australia, along with interviews with some of the other luminary keynote speakers, including musicologists, Marcia Citron and Elizabeth Wood, and the conference organisers, composer, Nicola LeFanu and musicologist, Sophie Fuller. All interviews are broadcast across Australia, linking in with the papers presented at the first Australian Composing Women’s Festival held in Adelaide later that year (September 1991). The meetings with McClary and Wood prompt me to enrol in postgraduate reading courses on feminist theory and cultural theory at Sydney University. I become an inter/intradisciplinary researcher. Later, McClary accepts my invitations to come to Australia and present her cutting-edge work at conferences and seminars (the ‘mountain’ comes to Australia).

In 1975, I meet Elizabeth Wood at Adelaide University, where Wood is employed as a sessional lecturer and undertaking a PhD. It is a transformative meeting that blossoms into an enduring friendship. By the time I meet up again with Wood (London, 1991), almost 20 years has elapsed. In the intervening twenty years, Wood has been residing in New York. At the 1991 conference in London, Wood, like McClary, is a keynote speaker. She is by then recognised as a distinguished, international figure in musicology. As Macarthur and Szuster (2017, 46) write, she is ‘one of the founding voices in the new musicology in which she contributed pioneering work on women’s music, Ethel Smyth, feminist theory and work in queer, lesbian and gay studies’. She holds Bachelor’s degrees in English literature (with Honours) and musicology (with Honours) from Adelaide University, and a PhD, with a pathbreaking dissertation on Australian opera, from the same university. Wood is awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in New York. As noted in Macarthur and Szuster (2017, 46–47), in 1997 Wood wins the inaugural Philip Brett Award of the Gay and Lesbian Study Group of the American Musicological Society. The awarding committee state that her work

places autobiography, music, and gay and lesbian politics in intricate, shifting relationship to each other … [that] the complexity of Wood’s thought … is closer to sophisticated literary writing than to conventional musicology, [establishing] her as a leader in innovative and imaginative musicology generally. (Hamessley et al. 1997)

Wood’s remarkable contribution to gay and lesbian/queer musicology is presented in the form of analyses that ‘listen’ for the lesbian voice, using highly imaginative conceptual tools: for example, the Sapphonic voice (Wood 1994); the lesbian fugue (1993/95); and the sonogram or sonography (derived from medical science), used to map the performative struggles of the militant suffrage movement (Wood 1995). These concepts are treated as more than just metaphors. They are also performative. That is, they both per-form the theory that underlies the concept and in-form the structure of its elaboration (e.g., ‘Lesbian Fugue’ is written in the form of a fugue; and ‘Decomposition’ is written as a lament). As I previously argue (Macarthur and Szuster 2017, 53–54), Wood’s theoretical frameworks are loosely connected with poststructuralist thought, but they are also immanent in the Deleuzian sense, exemplifying the ‘creation of concepts’. Despite this, Wood’s reflections on her career for this chapter highlight her outsider status to music/musicology in higher education as an independent scholar. This is hard to fathom given her impeccable academic credentials and her superior grasp of the discipline’s methodologies, such as those used in historical and archival work. As Szuster (2017, 51) notes, confirmed below by Wood, Wood’s archival work on Australian opera already marginalises her in her new country of residence given that Australian music has no traction in the United States (US). She is also doubly marginalised when she works on American women composers given their marginal status in relation to women composers in Europe and the United Kingdom (UK). Wood’s marginal status in musicology is reinforced given her interdisciplinary work, making her employable in English literature and women’s studies departments rather than in music departments. I wonder whether Wood’s outsider status to musicology/music in higher education impacts the way she is treated: it appears that she does not pose a direct threat to the discipline in the same way that McClary does, the latter working in tenured positions/leadership roles in higher education/music departments. Wood does not encounter the malicious treatment that is meted out to McClary, but she does experience more subtle forms of discrimination, sexism, and misogyny.

Reflection 2: Elizabeth Wood

My teaching experiences in departments of music at the universities of Adelaide, South Australia and New York City, and in women’s studies and LGBTQ studies at various colleges and universities in New York, are totally different from most musicologists. Although I was a ‘trained musicologist’ with years of study in English Literature and History, I was rarely employed to teach music history or music research, and very rarely in a music/musicology department. I was mostly employed to fill in for missing/absent/sabbatical full-time faculty: for example, at Adelaide University, filling in for Richard Meale. In addition to teaching his course in twentieth-century music composition, I devised and gave another course, Music and the Arts in France, 1890s through 1925, which I ‘sold’ to the professor (in those days, along British lines, there was only ‘one’ professor, the rest were ranked lecturers). I was told by the same professor, ‘don’t be too successful’, during that course. I had no idea what he meant, until it became quite clear I would never get a job in Adelaide so long as the professor was there.

The professor was a leering, creepy misogynist who took personal pride in having gifted women students (there were many) but not enough to mentor us into the profession. He was jealous of me, I learned. Room for only one musicologist, and that was him. One faculty job came up in my time there: it was between me and a young male composer much less qualified, and he got the position. I was told that one of the committee members said, ‘Oh, she’s married. She doesn’t need a job’, and that was that. When two of my academic supporters, Tim Mares in English, and Fay Gale, then Vice-Chancellor, both learned of this, they regretted not putting themselves on the committee. They, and I, learned through this that it was time to make sure that all women applicants had women on their job and tenure and nominating committees.

I was also warned not to do a doctorate on Australian anything, as that would kill a future academic job. I chose to do an archive-based doctorate on Australian opera. Early signs of a perverse streak. It was never published, nor was it subsequently acknowledged by leading scholars of Australian music (such as Roger Covell), although some musicologists found it useful for their own Australian research.

When Barry S. Brook, who founded and chaired the PhD Program in musicology at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, came to Adelaide in 1974, he advised me to leave Australia and head for the US. Brook recommended me for a Fulbright (for which I was successful) but when I was interviewed by the Fulbright committee in Adelaide, their first question was, ‘If you got this, what would you do about your children?’ I replied, ‘Do you ask men that same question too?’ and they changed the subject.

When I completed those 8 years of doctoral research and writing, in 1978 (awarded the PhD in 1979), I had to beg the professor for a letter of reference. I never received the Australian examiners’ reports on the thesis. I discovered decades later that the professor had registered me as an MA thesis in the Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology (DDM) (American Musicological Society 2023). I had not known that this existed. After I left Adelaide, my doctorate was never registered. There was no record I had been awarded a PhD in 1979. Weird. I was puzzled and miffed when feminist colleagues introduced me as an MA or PhD graduate student when I presented at conferences. My ignorance about registering a doctorate may now sound wilful, but I had practically forgotten my Australian research by then because it had proven of negligible value to my career in the US.

The only musicologists in the US who knew about my Australian dissertation (or me!) were Barry S. Brook and Richard Crawford, who read it on my first trip to NYC and were encouraging. I soon met Adrienne Fried Block, Judith Tick, Vivian Perlis, Jane Bowers, and Carol Neuls-Bates. I was shy about meeting people. I remember waiting to meet the great Maynard Solomon at an American Musicological Society (AMS) meeting, and he just brushed me aside like a moth!

Had I not gone to New York City in 1977, where I immediately encountered second-wave feminist activism, revolutionary feminist research across all the academic disciplines, and a blazing lesbian and gay rights movement, I doubt I would have had the opportunity to do my kind of writing at all. Then at Minneapolis in 1991, at the first conference on Feminist Theory and Music (FTM), where I first met Susan McClary, I began a more public involvement with musicology. I had given speeches and published essays about women in music, women composers, over the years but in FTM I found an intellectual and critical home among like-minded musicologists. In 2022, FTM celebrated 30 years of feminist engagement and inspiration.

Of the few music department chairs who invited me to talk with students about ‘Sapphonics’, it was Judy Lochhead who welcomed me to Stony Brook, and Gillian Rodger who brought me to Milwaukee. It was feminist academics who offered me adjunct teaching positions and invited me to give papers. I was witness to some of the filth thrown at McClary. With the award of a Macarthur ‘Genius’ fellowship, she was singled out as a shining star and simultaneously punished for it. I don’t think any other feminist scholar in US music was treated so viciously. That is her story to tell.

Personally, I think that male envy—of a more successful woman, a smarter woman, a radical unsettling intellectual woman—played a big part.

In retirement like most of those old friends in musicology, I have little contact now with the AMS and very little knowledge of any influence my work may have had. I don’t know if it is still read or referred to by young scholars. I hope so. But it is rather old-fashioned by now. I was told, at the turn of the twenty-first century by several gay and lesbian friends in music that lesbian and gay sexuality ‘stuff’ was ‘over’.

An instance of shaming and bullying I experienced in the US was from a female dean at Sarah Lawrence College. She was deeply antagonistic to lesbian studies, and to me, under a veneer of sneering attention. I was admonished for not lunching ‘often enough with the men in the faculty dining room, if I wanted to get on there’. The timing and manner of her dismissing me was deliberately humiliating. The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, based at the City University of New York (CUNY) Grad Center, never included my course curricula I sent in for their annual report. I never learned why not. I have had queers in the closet walk out of my public lectures in Adelaide and NYC, notably at Columbia University. This brings me to saying that after an initial attempt to participate in the AMS, with a paper on Australian women composers, I quickly realised that nobody was at all interested in anything to do with Australian music! My well-earned credentials in Australia were useless! What irony.

My cowriter and coeditor and beloved friend, the late Philip Brett, was British-born, gay, an expert on Benjamin Britten. He and I always agreed that we could do our work on homosexuality only because we lived and worked outside our homophobic homelands. Only in America was there a context and an audience for it, in the late 80s. But Philip took knocks for his work in both the US and the UK, and also for his decision, made with his partner, to leave the more prestigious UC Berkeley for UC Riverside. It was finally Susan McClary who master-minded Philip’s move to UCLA, to the position and prestige he had long deserved. After he died, I kind of left musicology. We had done what we wanted to do, which was to help change—with several others—our profession.

My work on Ethel Smyth drew a blank from the British musical establishment, or what she used to term The Male Machine, until last year, when Glyndebourne commissioned a programme article from me for the 2022 season and world premiere production of Ethel Smyth’s opera, Les Naufrageurs (The Wreckers) (1906). One year ago, Glyndebourne welcomed us generously. It was a career-topping experience of a superb professional realisation of this masterpiece, lavishly produced, with a new translation, new edition, total absorption in the work by a gifted conductor, designer, director, and so on, a wholly satisfying reward for me, in terms of wider recognition for the music of Ethel Smyth.

In the US and elsewhere I’ve had many close personal and professional associations with musicians who’ve produced and performed Smyth’s music. But with the British, I always knew that sexuality was the sticking point. To my surprise sometimes a host, say, with family papers related to Smyth, made snide remarks—to my face, with others present, after a speech or at a reception or dinner as their guest of honour—about ‘that lesbian stuff’. Or later denied they had ever owned such papers. Or refused to let me see them or make copies. I was not invited back. I got used to this. I understood it because Philip had similar experiences. During their lifetimes, Britten and Smyth were ‘cases’ best kept firmly in the closet. Smyth had the double whammy: a woman, a lesbian. In her day, the British gay music population, including Britten himself, worked to keep the woman, the lesbian, off the record.

Diffraction 2: Sally Macarthur

If we read with imagination Wood’s work, which is itself already replete with high levels of innovation, as with McClary’s work, we tune into the agential material of music and the idea that music gives flight to a lesbian voice as it entangles with the human (Wood/the multiplicity) and the more-than-human (discursive material, recordings, scores) with which it intra-acts. Wood’s intra-actions with music disrupt histories of sexism, misogyny, and compulsory heterosexuality, bringing homosexuality and queer culture out of the closet into the open. It takes a brave scholar to ‘come out’ to musicology when, to do so, threatens job security. Sexuality matters when power oppresses it, silences it, murders it. Sexuality is not simply a social marker and nor is it simply physical/material matter. But when it attaches to the body as bodily matter, it matters. Wood shows us how, as mattering, sexuality is driven by desire, acting in, on and through the body, connecting with music, entangling itself with music. Lesbian sexuality as Sapphonic voice, lesbian fugue, and sonography (Wood’s inventive conceptual tools) releases the heterogeneous, the intra-connected practices that undo notions of music as a unified, universal phenomenon. In Wood’s imaginative readings that listen for the lesbian voice, we experience difference as it attaches itself to the specified histories of the performer and the composer: without these readings, the composer, Ethel Smyth, is otherwise invisible/marginalised in the musical canon. Yet, as also alluded to by Wood, Smyth’s unequal positioning as a lesbian composer, which is entangled with Wood’s lesbian positioning as an outsider musicologist, could threaten the very difference that she is seeking to expose and to elevate. But the power of the lesbian voice in its multiplicity is transformative for all of musicology. The lesbian voice of music in the 1990s triggers an ongoing state of dynamic change, undermining intersectionality (Tomlinson 2019), and producing more and more unstable boundaries as gender categories proliferate, fragile breaks in the voice appear, unstable identities emerge as listeners and creators move in and out of the (intra-sectional, multiply-gendered)/lesbian assemblage, and bodies begin to speak, sing, and make music in a thousand different sexes/voices. Wood’s pathbreaking work focuses on what the lesbian (voice) can do in music, while triggering future possibilities and, as we might imagine, to quote Cameron-Lewis (2019, 846), attending ‘to the multiple forces that intra-act in the doing’. Wood’s work presages new thought about sexuality, that it is ‘a force that is yet to be announced and only arrives through relationship’ (Cameron-Lewis, 846).

Interlude 2: Entanglements with the ‘There-Then-Here-Now’ (Jennifer Shaw)

Revisiting musicology in the mid-1980s and 90s, the time when I was a student, seems like a tourist’s distant recollection of travels to a foreign land. This was a land of homogeneity. As an undergraduate at the University of Sydney, women did not feature as composers, historians or authors; they were objects of curiosity in western musicology, providing inspirational subject matter for madrigals and song cycles, and occasional footnotes as dedicatees, commissioners and as premiere singer/pianist performing works of the great masters. But that was the landscape of those times. I was also studying English, German, and Law, and while Gwen Harwood and Sylvia Plath had made it onto the poetry reading lists, German Romanticism was thoroughly masculine, and legal doctrine and case law was dominated by the ‘reasonable man’—the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ (McGuire v Western Morning News 1903). And even though my law school cohort was the first in which female students outnumbered male, we were still all being taught to think as the ‘reasonable man’.

Stony Brook University, New York (SUNY), where I arrived in 1989, was a new land in all ways. Stony Brook faculty included established, distinguished scholars, Judy Lochhead among them. The student cohort was diverse in terms of background and nationality. Later, when I was involved as a graduate student representative on several selection committees, I came to realise that none of this was accidental: the Stony Brook Music Department had gone through some challenges, and, perhaps, as a result, consciously cultivated a strong and diverse culture in which talent, hard work and difference were respected and supported. I appreciate now how uncharacteristic of music schools, at the time, this enlightened attitude was.

But, also at that time, some of this ‘newness’ was a step too far for me. I distinctly remember informing my supervisor, Joe Auner, who was urging me to take the Music and Gender graduate seminar that, back in Australia, any reference to ‘music + gender’ on my transcript would be treated with derision. And (ca. 1991) it would have been. I audited the seminar instead (thereby avoiding the transcript issue), and avidly read my way through its extensive reading list. I devoured Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings (1991) and enjoyed seeing her in action when she was invited, shortly after its release, to speak to the Stony Brook graduate students and faculty. It was a great joy to hear her speak again on many occasions, including her always entertaining and illuminating visits to Australia for conferences and symposia.

Susan is undeniably brave and has suffered for many years for expressing her views; but how rewarding to see so much of her work and ideas now accepted in the mainstream. For me, those lectures by Susan and others by a calmly impressive Judith Butler were highly influential on my own development as a thinker.

Judy Lochhead was more subtle in her approach. In my MA and PhD studies, Judy’s post-1950 seminar, her music and phenomenology seminar, and her post-1950 string quartet seminar stand out. Judy pitched content at a level that was demanding for everyone. It wasn’t so much the content that was remarkable (although Judy had started to include the music of Joan Tower in those years), but it was Judy’s understated way of presenting big ideas and new ways of working that has left a lasting impression on me. Everyone was expected to come prepared to contribute and to lead discussion. We were encouraged to tackle difficult texts and our class of (mostly) orchestral string players struggled. We resorted to evening study sessions. We wrote weekly mini essays and anonymously submitted them and anonymously critiqued each other’s work—knowing full well that Judy was also submitting, anonymously, a weekly essay and could indeed be the anonymous ‘peer reviewer’ of our own essay. Judy’s way of thinking and working challenged my core preconceptions around goal-focused achievements and teacher-apprentice academic working relationships. I experienced Judy’s teaching-and-learning-by-example as profoundly disruptive at the time: it was if I had set my course and then found myself adrift. Attending and presenting at the Third Feminist Theory and Music International Conference, University of California at Riverside, June 1995 just confirmed for me that I needed to set a new course.

After working at Rice University in Houston, Texas, I returned to Australia, taking up positions at several universities before ending up at the University of Adelaide as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and, currently, as Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Academic). I use those lessons learnt at Stony Brook, especially from Judy, every day. Our curriculum (university-wide) is now more inclusive of women’s, Indigenous, and LGBTQI+ content and perspectives. Our research attempts to be ethical and inclusive, although research in the arts and humanities in Australia struggles to survive with little government or industry funding. I continue to draw on and learn from the example given by Judy of patience and quiet strength, counterbalanced by the need, as championed by Susan, to be brave and speak out.

A Brief Thought: Sally Macarthur

Judy Lochhead appears to have a ‘dream-run’ as a music professor in academia despite being a woman and a formidable academic. I wonder whether this is because she chooses not to ‘upset the applecart’ by making it visibly/publicly/widely known that what she is doing is subverting Music Analysis—which is generally regarded as a masculine discipline—by analysing music by ‘people who identity as women’. She tends not to broadcast this through a megaphone and does not explicitly undertake feminist/cultural interpretations of music. Her work does not threaten Music Analysis’s territory in the same way that McClary’s work does. Does leaving the binaries male/female intact mean that women are still understood as inferior? Is Lochhead’s approach a deliberate strategy used for avoiding conflict, discrimination, sexism, and misogyny?

Reflection 3: Trajectories of Change: Judith Lochhead

I came of ‘scholarly age’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s during second-wave feminism in the US. While largely focused on the circumstances of white, middle-class women, this movement did promote transformational policies and cultural changes that would eventually affect a broader array of people. Required reading included Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and, for me, Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976). The first inklings of my own feminist scholarship in music were in graduate school. During a seminar with Leo Treitler on Alban Berg’s Lulu, I was provoked by George Perle’s account of Lulu through the trope of the femme fatale. The issues surrounding Lulu as a femme fatale are already present in Frank Wedekind’s Lulu Plays—Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box-- but Perle adopted this stereotype without comment. Dinnerstein’s book provided a useful perspective on the contradictory aspects of the femme fatale figure of Lulu as both with and without agency, as the object of both desire and dread.

My commitment to feminist-inspired music scholarship and to critical perspectives on recent music came together in my decision to study, teach and publish on music created by women during ‘our time’. Nowadays, I would use the phrase ‘created by people who identify as women’. My study and teaching of recent music has and does include some creators who are not women—a strategy meant to explore and present to students a broad array of musical styles, creative practices, and creator perspectives. My publications have increasingly focused on the music of women, including notably in Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music (2015) which includes analyses of the music of four women: Sofia Gubaidulina, Kaija Saariaho, Stacy Garrop, and Anna Clyne. In another publication (Lochhead 2020), I have remarked on the reluctance of one potential editor to publish a book including only composers who are women. Some of my recent articles continue this focus, with analyses of works by Chaya Czernowin and Liza Lim. These publications do not, however, thematise the music of these creators as women, that is do not focus on their music as ‘different’. My decision to focus on the music of women is based in several personal experiences and theories.

During the 1980s and 90s two professional activities were centrally involved in shaping my decision to focus on the music-creating activities of composers who are women. The first was as a member of the US-based Society for Music Theory. For a 1985 meeting of the Society for Music Theory in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada), I proposed study sessions on feminist theory and music scholarship. I gave a history of the formation of the Committee on the Status of Women (now the Committee on Feminist Issues and Gender Equity) (Lochhead 2023). In those study sessions, which eventually led to the creation of the Society’s Committee on the Status of Women, participants read and discussed then recent feminist science scholarship (such as writings by Evelyn Fox Keller, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, etc.). Much of the work of these feminist writers intersected with the pioneering feminist scholarship in music by such writers as Jane Bowers, Judith Tick, Diane Peacock Jezic, Adrienne Fried Block, and Ellen Koskoff, to name a few. The music scholarship of these writers was focused on recovering the lost musical voices of composers of the past who were women and on revealing the social and epistemological conditions of the past that suppressed our knowledge of these creators and blunted the creative practices of women. This work of ‘recovery’ made me realise how important it is to ensure that the creative voices of women in the present are heard and promoted. In my music analytical work, the goal is to build an archive of writing about the creative practices of women in the present and to generate scholarly discussions about those practices.

The second professional activity was as a faculty member at Stony Brook University. During the late 1980s until the mid-1990s, I organised and promoted a Concert of Music by Women each March, during what in the US is designated as Women’s History Month. As part of this activity, I would speak with the composers. Often (but not always) they would express some concern about having their music singled out as part of an event in which inclusion was based solely on one’s gender identity. While I pointed out that a concert of music only by men was unmarked and hence seen as ‘unproblematic’, these composers still wanted their music to be considered ‘as’ music—not as music by a ‘woman’ composer. I felt (and still feel) that these composers’ concerns should not be dismissed, and hence, I made the decision to focus on their music ‘as music’. My consideration of music ‘as music’ does not mean that social aspects of creative practice are excluded. I write about how music can be studied as sonic structures embedded in social contexts (Lochhead 2015).

Another contributing factor to my scholarly goals came from my mother, Carolyn Lochhead, who entered college as a first-year student at California State University at Fullerton, California, the same year I started as a first-year student at the University of California at Los Angeles. She studied early childhood education and later began her own preschool in Southern California. She and I would discuss educational theories, and from her I learned about different perspectives on ‘special education’. The strategy known as ‘mainstreaming’ involves placing students with special needs in classes with students without special needs, on the theory that the ‘difference’ of special needs children would not be thematised. A similar theory circulated in higher education—should we teach classes focused solely on the music and music making of women or should we ‘mainstream’ their music and music making into classes/seminars organised around such themes as historical era, musical style, genre, and so on. I took these educational theories and applied them to my scholarship—mainstreaming the creative practices of women to celebrate their concrete achievements and not to frame their music as somehow ‘different’.

Nowadays, issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class have broadened and deepened scholarly thinking about the creative practices of music. My own scholarship considers the intersectional nature of identities and their ramifications for creative practices. While still tending to focus on the music of creators who are women, I have broadened my scholarly goals, framing it as ‘responsible scholarship’ (Lochhead 2021) of the present that focuses on the diversity of creative voices and initiates scholarly conversations about the music of diverse creators.

Diffraction 3: Sally Macarthur

If we read Lochhead’s work diffractively, recognising that music teems with waveforms that generate its materiality as vibrational/physical/sounding phenomena, giving a sense that music is animate and has agency, as with McClary’s and Wood’s work, we tune into diffractive patterns—the bending and spreading of waves when they encounter obstruction (Bozalek and Murris 2022, 54)—that produce differences that matter. The specific experimental/analytical circumstances of Lochhead’s work, as it entangles with her analytical apparatus, is a heightened sense of the performative nature of musical identity as it emerges through its entanglements with human identities. If traditional analytical practices focus on the score and make structure their primary concern, Lochhead makes the sounding phenomena of music her focus, extending the tools of analysis to take account of all of music’s soundings which, as I have previously noted (Macarthur 2016, 186), include digitally produced sounds alongside acoustic and other timbral phenomena. As we intra-act with Lochhead and her analytical intra-actions, which amount to ‘interpretative “performances” of the working procedures’ (Lochhead 2016, 9) of music, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that music itself has the capacity to think. As a thinking, breathing, sounding phenomenon, music becomes entangled in social justice issues: entangled in music, Lochhead chooses to focus her attention on music composed by ‘people who identify as women’ but downplays the ethical significance of this focus. Yet, as Barad (2010, 265) reminds us, if entanglements are ‘relations of obligation – being bound to the other – enfolded traces of othering’, then Lochhead’s analytical performances, as constitutions of the ‘Other’—in this case, the ‘Other’ being music composed by ‘people who identify as women’—is threaded through herself/ourselves as a diffraction of identity. By its very nature, says Barad, ‘matter entails an exposure to the “Other”’ (265). As a responsible (and response-able) researcher, Lochhead enters the world of ethics as an integral part of her work (which is also an integral part of my work as I intra-act with Lochhead’s work), a responsibility that is ongoing, continuously enabling responsiveness to new ideas/situations. As I read Lochhead’s and Barad’s work, side by side, I am drawn into an ‘othering’ process that commits to an ethics of entanglement (Barad 2010, 266), to a rupturing and reconfiguring of music which, in its diffracting of gender, highlights the creativity of ‘people who identify as women’.

Interlude 3: Introducing Gillian Rodger: Sally Macarthur

Australian-born, Gillian Rodger, resident for all her professional, academic career in the US, completes a Master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin Madison and a doctorate in ethnomusicology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee where she also teaches courses on women, gender, sexuality, and music. Having taught these courses for more than thirty years, we wonder what the experience is like and whether things have improved over the years.

Reflection 4: Teaching Music, Gender, and Sexuality in US Higher Education: Gillian Rodger

I came to the US for the first time in the late-1980s and, after a brief period back in Melbourne, Australia, I settled in the US in the early 1990s. I noticed that there were a relatively small number of female professors, particularly those at the senior level. I suspect that this gender imbalance in the US was the same, if not worse, in Australia. My female professors were remarkable scholars and served as strong role models and mentors for the female graduate students. We turned to these women for advice and support, even after graduating, and their amazing work allowed us to assign readings to our own students that reflected balance in gender, if not always in academic content. We were also aware that our male professors no longer dismissed our aspirations, and most of these men were also outstanding mentors and advocates for female students.

My graduate school coursework was traditionalist. Susan McClary’s work was just beginning to impact musicology when I came to the US—Feminine Endings (1991) was published in my second year of graduate study. As much as many of us wanted to focus on issues of gender and sexuality, we were cautioned by our professors that this new area would negatively impact our ability to find a job after graduation. While issues relating to women’s musical practices were acceptable in US ethnomusicology before the 1990s, questions relating to sexuality were not, and the 1990s saw the first work in this area. This included my dissertation that focused on male impersonation in late nineteenth-century US popular entertainment.

As I began to apply for jobs at US universities, I felt increasing pressure to conform to US gender norms. I was advised to wear skirts and jackets for interviews, which I resisted, not having worn a dress since I graduated from high school; I opted for pants suits instead. This advice was a persistent theme through the seven years I was on the job market. It might be better, one well-meaning professor suggested, if I wasn’t so obviously identifiable as a lesbian. I am not convinced, however, that my sexuality was the reason it took me so long to find an academic position. This was a period in which the contraction of US higher education was in its early stages, and there were fewer job vacancies than there had been in the previous decade. My research area was also problematic. I was an ethnomusicologist who was not qualified to work as a music practitioner and lead an ensemble.

In the 1990s, if questions relating to gender and sexuality and music were being embraced and avidly pursued by graduate students, they were much less welcomed by undergraduate students. I began teaching in the early 1990s, sometimes as a teaching assistant, and sometimes as the instructor of undergraduate classes for non-majors. Students generally came to the classes knowing little about music, but expecting the class to be easy and that they would be introduced to the ‘greats’ of music from the past. They did not welcome discussions of the cultural context that shaped the art music of Western Europe and the US, or of the systematic exclusion of portions of the population from access to much of that music. They were often actively hostile to discussions of gender and music, both in the context of operas and other musical works, as well as in relation to who could and couldn’t be considered a composer. The assigned textbooks included works by a small number of women (Hildegard of Bingen, Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn and Amy Beach), and undergraduates seemed happy to accept these rare exceptions as great, but probably not as great as Mozart or Beethoven or Mahler.

Discussions of gender were a little easier in the World Musics class for non-majors. I don’t recall any push back from undergraduates when teaching about gendered music traditions in non-European context. At the same time, students in this class wanted to experience ‘authenticity’ in the music, and often had a view of non-European musics that distressingly aligned with the earliest generations of comparative musicologists who cemented the view that ‘foreign’ traditions were locked in a distant and relatively undeveloped past. Teaching modern, urban sub-Saharan Africa with commercial popular music traditions was a struggle, even as students generally enjoyed the music. The problem, as with Western art traditions, was not the sound, but rather the complexity of the context. Students were no more ready to consider the effects of colonial interventions into other parts of the globe than they were ready to think about gender inequities in their own society, or in societies to which they felt a connection.

After a short period of teaching at the University of Michigan, I was appointed to a tenure-track position at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), where I taught a class on Women and Music, which included gender/sexuality, as well as World Musics, and other classes in Western Art traditions. I continued to face some resistance and it inevitably came from white male students. There were topics that I learned would elicit a chilly reception—for example, the position of women in nineteenth-century music, or discussions of homosexual composers. Students continued to desire ‘authenticity’ in the World Musics class—being music majors did not change that need—and were just as resistant to complex discussions involving power relations as non-majors had been a decade earlier.

This situation changed around 2010. I became aware of this shift when I completed a semester without eliciting scowls and hostile body language from any of the young men in the class. I then noticed young men nodding in agreement as I talked about gender inequities and, to be honest, I found it a little unsettling. After close to two decades of resistance and hostility, I wasn’t sure what to do with their agreement. I was happy that the young men who chose to be music majors were open to discussions of historical inequity in the tradition in which they sought to be active, and that none of them seemed to take these discussions personally. I was also happy that both male and female students asked questions during class, asking for more specific details or for clarification. As a result of these questions, I have become adept at discussing the changes in gender construction from the early modern period (one sex model) through the nineteenth century (two-sex model) to more contemporary fluid models that also include sexuality and avoid hard binaries.

More recently, I have found young women being more resistant to learning about historical models of gender, especially in historical periods where the gender models feel more familiar to them. Young female students are quick to blame Fanny Mendelssohn for not being active as a public performer, wanting to view her as inferior to Clara Schumann. But they also assume that Clara Schumann must have had inferior composing skills because so few of her works are represented in the textbook. I suspect they resist discussing gender inequities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because they do not want to think about the restrictions that they continue to feel in their own lives due to gender and/or social class.

I encountered this early in my career at UWM when teaching the Women and Music class. The students who signed up for this class were almost exclusively female. Many of them had taken Women’s Studies classes and classified themselves as feminist, but what they wanted from me was celebration. When we discussed gender inequities, a good proportion of the students blamed my generation for not fixing everything for them. After all, they reasoned, women had had the vote for almost a century in the US, so equity should have been achieved. They were also uncomfortable with complex and intersectional narratives, especially those relating to class and race and sometimes also sexuality. Early in my career I found this resistance frustrating, but, after thirty years of teaching in the US, I have come to understand that pre-college study of history is a celebratory exercise; students are ill prepared for a historical narrative that critiques the official history and presents alternative and contradictory narratives. I am grateful for the resistance I have met from students, both male and female, over the years because it has forced me to learn a more complex history and to continually reconsider how I present it in my classes.

The enrolment for Women and Music was always relatively small, but for the last decade we have not been able to offer the class because we couldn’t meet minimum enrolment levels. My graduate students are now also less interested in these topics, although they are happy to consider questions of gender as it intersects with race or social class or nationalism. This allows me to continue to find ways to include these discussions in graduate-level seminars and to help students think about the ways that gender and sexuality continue to provoke anxiety in US culture.

Given the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade, and the anti-trans legislation in conservative states, discussions about gender, sexuality and other social power relations continue to be timely, and my goal is to provide the richest historical context for current debates possible. My goal is to show the students which arguments have been the most persistent through history, to examine the ways in which these have changed subtly (or not) over time, and to provide them with a framework for thinking about all social power relations. This is increasingly dangerous work, and there are now some topics I am not willing to explore deeply unless I trust the members of my class.

After three decades of teaching about gender and sexuality in the US, I have observed a lot of change. Things are easier now, and undergraduates have a more sophisticated understanding of these issues than the undergraduates I encountered early in my career. I find it easier to deal with the resistance I meet from young female students than hostility from male students in part because I am more sympathetic to the reasons for that resistance. I continue to be disappointed that so few students are interested in taking a class that explicitly covers topics related to gender, sexuality and music, but I have found myriad ways to work those discussions into more general classes and thus reach a broader audience.

The political context for higher education in the US is more fraught, however, and more divided. It is hard not to look at efforts to dictate acceptable and non-acceptable subjects in some states and be concerned about what might happen in my own state. I am aware that the Arts is a much safer space than many academic disciplines for LGBTQ and gender-queer students but I continue to meet LGBTQ students who have developed a deep sense of shame growing up in the contexts of the suburbs or in small towns. Watching these students develop a more robust sense of themselves and throw off the shame while at the university brings me so much joy and I am pleased that my department is moving away from gender-specific designations for choirs, allowing gender-queer students to choose an option that feels comfortable for them. Our faculty is affirming of these students, and this also marks a significant shift. While there are reasons to be concerned, there are more reasons to celebrate the change that has occurred during the last three decades. Music has become much more open to discussions relating to gender and sexuality during my career, and the students are considerably more eager to explore these topics, and this marks real progress that gives me hope that reactionary forces will not succeed.

Diffraction 4: Sally Macarthur

If we read Rodger’s reflection diffractively, recognising that music flourishes as an ongoing, ever-changing web of entanglements with the human and the more-than-human, we are drawn to the idea that all matter is a process of materialisation, and that matter comes to matter through the processes of intra-activity (Barad 2007, 210). Rodger’s intra-actions with her students (and, as we might imagine, theirs with her), her own scholarship, music, music topics on gender, sexuality, race, and intersectionality (and more), and the discursive materials (readings, scores, and recordings) with which she/they are entangled, are not, as a counter-diffractive reading would assume, independently existing objects. Rather, in a Baradian sense, these objects and bodies produce each other in the doing of their learning and teaching. What matters, in this doing, is the change in the power dynamics of the classroom, which may oscillate between resistance and acceptance, and hostility and active participation. What matters in this oscillation between one pole and another, is the danger that is always lurking in the background as the teaching unfolds as a set of dynamics, moving sometimes precariously through time. Identities emerge out of the materialisations of the specific gendered and sexed bodies under discussion, each intra-acting with those who are actively participating, each emerging through their ongoing intra-activities as materialisations, each acquiring agency. Boundaries are in perpetual motion, producing separations. For Barad (2014) these separations entail the ‘cutting together-apart’ of the multiplicity: there is ‘no absolute separability, no absolute outside, only agential separability’ (Bozalek and Zhao 2022, 53). In Rodger’s case, the boundaries between the ‘real’ people in the classroom and the ‘ghosts’/composers/musicians from the past keep shifting and changing. In a similar vein to Lochhead, Rodger engages an ethics of entanglement which, as Barad would put it, ‘entails obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future’ (2010, 266) in which the past is not a given ‘but rather that the “past” is always already open to change’ (266). As Barad says, ‘our debt to those who are already dead and those who are not yet born cannot be disentangled from who we are’ (266). It seems to me that Rodger’s work in the classroom is an ongoing project that is caught up in a web of never-ending, ethical connections of the past with the future.

This Conclusion: Never Ending (Sally Macarthur)

In this chapter, I am intra-acting with diffraction, ‘not as a singular event that happens in space and time’ (Barad 2014, 169), but rather with a sense that the time we are talking about is ‘untimely’, ‘out of joint’, ‘broken apart in different directions’ with each moment emerging as an ‘infinite multiplicity’ (Barad 2014, 169). In this never-ending conclusion, I re-turn, with my contributors, to key moments in feminist and critical musicology, the matter and mattering of this chapter, to specifically shine a light on music as it connects with gender and sexuality. My point of departure for this chapter is a new anthology on women in music (Kouvaras et al. 2022) which, for the most part, stays in the ‘comfort zone’ of the already known and familiar. However, as I re-turn to the key moments of feminist and critical musicology, I do so not to establish a set of definitive conclusions about any patterns that may emerge in the narratives that are unfolded by each researcher, understanding that there is no absolute story to be told but, instead, to consider these stories, in which I am also entangled, in terms of what they say about the material impacts of doing feminist work in music.

It is undeniable that the work, as pioneered in the 1990s, is transformative—both there-then and here-now—for all of musicology. McClary’s work on gender and Wood’s work on sexuality change how things are done in the discipline, even as some of the discipline reacts against these changes. Lochhead’s work in Music Analysis, in which she is quietly subverting the discipline by analysing women’s music while appearing to be gender-neutral, also changes how music analysis is done, emphasising/accounting for music’s performative properties.

At the outset of this research, each contributor is asked, in antithesis to Barad’s new materialist/diffractive philosophy, to write a reflective piece, to consider how working in the field affects them personally. It soon becomes apparent that if the reflections are left to stand without diffractive interventions, some of these reflections would enact lines of descent, plummeting to a sense of hopelessness or to a sense that the work is no longer relevant: for example, McClary is stopped in her tracks at the ‘starting gate’; and Wood discovers that her work is (supposedly) ‘old-fashioned’, that the field has moved on. But their work has also moved on and continues to move on. McClary and Wood are caught up in the perpetual to and fro of their work as it entangles with the multiplicity, creating a life of its own. We also discover, in Wood’s and McClary’s accounts—as well as reading the other discursive material relating to their work—that the sidelining and/or bullying and/or sexism/misogyny/homophobia, produces a sense of resignation, a withdrawal from the work, a sense that it is too dangerous to do. If we let the reflections stand, it might even be the case that the bullies win the day, or that the field continues to lurch from one polar position to another. And, as it lurches back and forth, we also notice that the more outspoken the researcher is in relation to matters of gender and sexuality, and the idea that music is an interpretation of culture, the more reactive the discipline becomes. As a brilliant scholar at the top of her profession, bearing numerous awards, and an insider in higher education, McClary cannot be easily ignored; the field thus becomes polarised for its active/reactive stance.

Shifting to diffraction (from reflection) enables differences to appear that matter and the mapping of ‘the effects of difference rather than just where differences appear’ (Bozalek and Murris 2022, 54). What I have attempted to do, adopting a diffractive methodology, is to read each theorist’s position through (rather than against) another to creatively uncover insights that may not have been apparent previously. In the spirit of Barad, I have wanted to emphasise the affirmative as encounters of entanglement (rather than the negative as critique), reading what each researcher says, both here (in this chapter) and elsewhere, through one another. As a final word (which will never just be that), leaping off from the recent book on women in music by Kouvaras et al. (2022), I have been engaged in an ethics and politics of entanglement, ‘reworking the material effects of the past and the future’ (Barad 2010, 266) as a reconfiguring of key moments in feminist musicology. As we continue to engage in this work, the thick tangles of our conversations continue to be ‘threaded through us, the places and times from which we came but never arrived and never leave’ (Barad 2014, 184).