Music and gender

Through the experiences of performers, composers, and ethnomusicologists working in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, "Music and Gender" explores how the uses and descriptions of music shift in response to rapid political, economic, or technological change. A cross-section of case studies from the Central African Republic, Finland, and Turkey addresses issues of how performance reflects gender and furthers other social goals, such as negotiating identity and transforming consciousness. Articles on Croatian and Serbian popular music and on the changing circumstances of women musicians in war-torn Ethiopia and post-Soviet Estonia consider the fate of fragile constructions of gender and nationhood in times of war or crisis.
Other essays consider the relationship of gender to digital sound technology - in terms of access to the field, interactions among musicians, and aesthetic decisions - and gender issues in writing the musical lives of women composers and performers. Articulating a theoretical agenda that encompasses perspectives from vastly different musical cultures, this important collection shows how music can help bridge the radical transformations of individuals, groups, and nations.

CONTENIDO:

Foreword
Introduction: Music and Gender - negotiating shifting worlds

Part I: Music performance and performativity
1. Performance and Modernity among BaAka Pygmies: A closer look at the mystique of egalitarian foragers in the rain forest
2. Local constructions of gender in a finnish pelimanni musicians group
3. The image of woman in turkish ballad poetry and music

Part II: Telling lives
4. The interpretation of gender issues in musical life stories of Prince Edward Islanders
5. Writing the biography of a black woman blues singer
6. Gender negotiation of the composer Kaija Saariaho in Finland: the woman composer as Nomadic Subject
7. Searching for data about european ladies' orchestras, 1870-1950

Part III: Gendered musical sites in the redefinition of nations
8. Defining women and men in the context of war: Images in Croatian popular music in the 1990s
9. Women, music, and "chains of the mind": Eritrea and the Tigray region of Ethiopia, 1972-93
10. Past and present gender roles in the traditional community on Kihnu Island in Estonia

Part IV: Technologies in gendered motion
11. Women mix engineers and the power of sound
12. Gender, voice, and place: Issues of negotiation in a "Technology in music program"
13. Cyborg experiences: contradictions and tensions of technology, nature, and the body in Hildegard Westerkamp's "Breathing Room"
14. No bodies there: Absence and presence in acousmatic performance

Epilogue: The place of gender within complex, dynamic musical systems

Contributors
Index