Academic literature on the topic 'Susan mcclary'

Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message” has become a fixture in musicological accounts of Beethoven and the Ninth ever since its introduction to the discipline in an influential essay by Susan McClary. But though Rich’s work has been cited in numerous books and articles in the intervening decades, it has remained yoked to McClary’s text, with critics rarely considering the poem on its own terms. This paper considers what is at stake in our discipline’s reliance on Rich’s “Beethoven” poem. After taking stock of its use at the hands of musicologists since the publication of Feminine Endings, asking to what end authors reference Rich’s work, it returns to the poem in order to stage a more explicit confrontation with its text, reestablish its connections to contemporary discussions of Beethoven and feminism, and consider its significance to musicology.

Abstract This piece was written as a keynote to a conference, Music and Identity, held in Bergen, Norway, in September 2007 to commemorate the centennial of Edvard Grieg's death. Its author, Susan McClary, both reflects on issues of identity politics then and now——including the ways in which ethnicity and gender have operated in her own career——and explores how Grieg himself theorized his fusions between the German school of composition and Norwegian folk music. It concludes with an analysis of Grieg's ““Røøtnams-Knut,”” from his late collection Slååtter.

The aim of this research is to show how the “new” musicology differs from the “old” with regards to the creation of knowledge about music, which I refer to as “musicological epistemology”. If epistemology is described in the contemporary era as “justified, true belief” (Huemer 2002: 435), this dissertation discusses how McClary, acting as a “new” musicologist, has justified her “true beliefs” in order to create postmodern knowledge about music in the contemporary era, and how these “true beliefs” differ from “old”/modernist musicological opinions concerning the meaning of music. In this dissertation I have included short descriptions of how I believe the various categories of “old” musicology functioned epistemologically. In order to demonstrate how musicological epistemology has changed in the contemporary era, I have undertaken an epistemological analysis of four of McClary's core articles/musicological narratives included in Reading Music: Selected Essays (2007). I have chosen one article from each of McClary’s main subjects of discourse from 1983 to 2007, namely “interpretation and polemics”, “gender and sexuality”, “popular music” and “early music”, in order to ascertain the “nature, scope and limits” of the knowledge she creates through the writing of these narratives. I have found that McClary has incorporated a variety of postmodern debates into her musicological writing, which separates her, epistemologically, from the “old” musicology. This “old”/“new” musicological split is particularly established in my epistemological analysis of “The blasphemy of talking politics during Bach Year” (1987) in which McClary vehemently criticizes key aspects of the “old” musicology, as well as enunciates how she believes the “new” musicology should function epistemologically. The epistemological analysis of “The cultural work of the madrigal” (2007) shows McClary’s epistemology in its mature form. With regards to McClary’s epistemology, I have discovered that the knowledge she is creating is subject to the reader’s acceptance of the postmodern debates that inform her postmodern intellectual context (relativism, identity and deconstruction for example), which establish the conditions under which her work can be considered as knowledge. I have referred to this type of knowledge as “conditional knowledge”, specifically in the epistemological analysis of “Living to tell: Madonna’s resurrection of the fleshly” (1990). McClary’s knowledge is also subject to the contexts in which she situates these essays (a feminist context, for example), which I have referred to as “context-based knowledge” in my epistemological analysis of “Construction of subjectivity in Schubert’s music” (1994). These forms of knowledge admit a subjective viewpoint and are generally of a socially responsible nature. These elements clearly articulate McClary’s acknowledgement of her postmodern intellectual context with regards to Lyotard’s call for greater toleration and sensitivity in his seminal work La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (1979) (The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge), the essential aspects of which are also discussed in this dissertation. The micronarrative format of her knowledge also relates to Lyotard’s theories, as well as McClary’s open avoidance of grand narratives in her writing. Through my analyses I have affirmed that McClary has produced these postmodern forms of knowledge whilst adhering to the accepted principles of epistemic rigour. Postmodern theory has revealed a relativistic and subjective view of human language and knowledge. McClary, acknowledging this postmodern realization, has taken control of the production of musical meaning and is creating musical knowledge that is meaningful and useful to marginalized groups in the social and musical world.
Dissertation (MMus)--University of Pretoria, 2013.
Music
unrestricted

Two principal themes are engaged in this chapter: the recent history of Bach reception in which the composer’s autonomy is drastically reconfigured, and the nature of Bach’s pursuit of the musical subject as a primary signature of that autonomy nevertheless. The first of these themes, which takes its cue from Charles Burney’s reading of Bach in 1789, entails a reading of Susan McClary, Lydia Goehr, Richard Taruskin, and John Butt, in which Bach is (respectively) deconstructed in terms of contemporary political discourse, denied the autonomy of a work-based practice, construed as a dogmatic agent of anti-Enlightenment beliefs and identified as the fountainhead of an ultimately inhumane musical and cultural absolutism, and reconstructed as a composer of works that passionately mediate between his world and ours. This reading establishes a context for the second theme, in which Bach’s emancipation of the musical subject from “the very church composer against whose office his music rebelled” (Adorno) is identified by means of his late instrumental collections.