Faculty Sponsor
Jessica Ray King
Final Abstract for URS Program
Women are difficult to locate in traditional histories of western music, especially performers and particularly instrumentalists. The relationship between a female performer, the instrument she played, and her audience was especially fraught, constituting a complicated web of gendered relations and power dynamics. An examination of the contexts in which women played instruments in medieval to early modern Europe elucidates how women in these societies interacted with music and musical institutions. While women were generally excluded from musical institutions and discouraged from playing most musical instruments, many women nevertheless chose to take up an instrument outside of professional contexts. From the Renaissance onward, amateur music-making was a popular pastime for the men and women of Europe’s middle to upper classes. There were also women who earned a living making music but were not part of professional music-making institutions, a class of itinerant musicians known as jongleress or Spielfrau. Both elite and working-class women were subject to patriarchal scrutiny in the context of their music-making, which usually manifested as social limitations on which types of instruments were considered acceptable for them to play. There were also some women who were members of the professional class of musicians. The most famous of these were the women who played in the orchestra of the Ospedale della Pietá in Venice, who garnered wide acclaim at the same time as they were objectified by the men who witnessed their performances. This phenomenon corresponds to a wider trend which conflated female musical performance with sexual performance, a relationship which was especially charged when a woman played an instrument, as it introduced the eroticism of touch into the performance. The conflation of music and sexual desire served as a means to regulate women’s behavior in the context of musical performance, which is itself a unique nexus of power. While instrumental performance allowed some women unique modes of expression and in some cases employment, the gendering of these instruments and women’s relation to them served as a means to reinforce patriarchal control over the place of women in the public sphere.
Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Document Type
Article
Included in
Ethnomusicology Commons, European History Commons, History of Gender Commons, Medieval History Commons, Musicology Commons, Women's History Commons, Women's Studies Commons