Song Character Analysis Worksheet - The University of North ...

and never wholly free of bodily involvement . . . surrounding us and rubbing against us.” 7
Shepherd further identified the voice as the “paradigm of sound [that] cannot help but
emphasize the social relatedness of individual and cultural existence. Symbolically, it is
our existence.” The existence of music then, like that of women, “is potentially threaten-
ing to men . . . [as] music reminds men of the fragile and atrophied nature of their control
over the world.” 8 The hegemonic reaction to this threat began in the eighteenth century
as an enlightened philosophy of formalism. Formalist thought attempts to reduce the
analytical elements of music to the objective and the quantifiable (i.e., pitch, rhythm, and
form) and to silence the communicative elements that provoke an interrelated reaction
(timbre and expression). 9
The struggle for control between the logical mind and the “feeling” heart is a
common dilemma for musical theatre audiences, particularly for those who “hear gender
relations through male, bourgeois ears.” 10 Martin Sutton, in his article “Patterns of
Meaning in the Musical,” described this struggle as tension between two stylistic modes
of the integrated musical format: the plot versus the musical number, or the listener’s
“super-ego” versus his “id.” The plot is conventional, predictable, a “realistic” social
7 Bowman, 386. Chapter 8 of Philosophical Perspectives summarizes current music philosophy
from pluralist perspectives, with particular emphasis on feminist writings. In Bowman’s view, Shepherd’s
“social text” furthers the view of music’s role as a mirror of its society; it illuminates subversive aspects of
culture that the hegemonic ideal denies, 359.
8 Shepherd, 159.
9 T. Wishart, “Musical Speaking, Musical Writing,” quoted in Shepherd, 160. Although music is
perceived historically as autonomous, gender designations are found throughout music theory, including
the use of masculine/feminine melodic themes and cadences in nineteenth-century sonata form analysis.
See Marcia J. Citron, “Feminist Approaches to Musicology” in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives
on Gender and Music, eds. Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
10 Shepherd, 169.
85