Pyero Talone

McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
On the third chapter of her book, Sexual Politics in Classical Music, Susan
McClary will argue that classical music is bound up with issues of gender construction
and the channeling of desire no less than literature, visual art and even pop music. The
author rejects the idea that classical music is concerned exclusively with loftier matters
and that it remains essentially pure, ineffable and emphatically not concerned with
mundane issues. According to her, the tendency to deny the body and to identify
with pure mind underlies virtually every aspect of patriarchal Western culture and also
exists in our academic music disciplines.
In order to make her point, McClary examines on this chapter not only the
particular musical constructions of gender and desire, but also the ways in which the
denial of the erotic both operates within specific compositions and also influences their
traditional receptions. While analyzing George Bizets Carmen (1875), McClary pays
considerable attention to the semiotic constructions of various characters and to the
ways in which inherited conventions of musical representation and formal paradigms
predispose this opera to particular narrative treatments of gender and sexuality. It is
important to point out, as McClary says, that this opera is not simply an artifact from the
past but it is a work that still holds places of honor in our classical Top 40 and continues
to influence our notions of social organization.
McClary states that the opera diverges from the novella written by Merime by
restructuring the original narrative strategy. This shift influences the sexual politics of
the opera profoundly. While in the novella solitary Carmen is sought after by two
principal men, her husband and the bullfighter, the opera is organized in terms of the
traditional Western dichotomy between proper and improper constructions of female
sexuality, between the virgin and the whore. Carmen is, according to McClary, the
dissonant Other. While submissive Micalas music is simple, lyrical, diatonic and with
rhythms innocent of physicality, Carmens music is slippery, unpredictable, maddening
and ground in the physical impulses of exotic, pseudogipsy dance.
As McClary states, Carmens music is marked by chromatic excesses. Her
melodic lines tease and taunt, forcing the attention to dwell on the moment on the

erogenous zones of her inflected melodies. Her erratic means of descending through the
tetrachord on Habanera reveals her as a master of seductive rhetoric. As Dahlhaus
says, she is incapable of attaining lyric urgency and can parody lyricism but she
cannot make it her own. While she is portrayed as monstrous, Jos - with his well
behaved discourse of masculine European classical music is a dangerously weak link
in the patriarchal chain of command.
The powers of transcendence (Jos) win Carmens intolerable insubordination in
the end, when Carmen is killed by Jos. The spectators witness the event firsthand and by means of Bizets musical strategies - not only accept Carmens death as inevitable
but actually desire it as they long for the triumph of the major triad over the maddening
slippery chromatic floor.
McClary admits other interpretations to the opera as she sees more issues
besides gender involved in its violent closure. The threats of the racial Other and of
popular culture against the necessity for white bourgeois codes of behavior to reign
supreme in the face of the darker races is an example. The Other was viewed,
according to McClary, with desire, envy, contempt and fear and had projected onto them
the erotic qualities nineteenth-century Europeans denied themselves. In McClarys
opinion, the fact that Jos is not satisfactorily aligned with patriarchy can make the
opera a bitter critique of European patriarchal forms of gender construction, although
someone (a colonial, nonwhite, non-Christian, lower-class female character) actually
has to die as a result of his mind/body crisis.
McClary concludes that no one wins within the structures of traditional modes of
organizing gender and sexuality. She states that classical music is perhaps our cultural
medium most centrally concerned with the denial of the body, with enacting the ritual
repudiation of the erotic. Examining the treatment of such issues might contribute to the
creation of new models of gender and desire: models that, according to the author, do
not pit mind against body, that do not demand shame or death as the price for sexual
pleasure.
In my opinion, McClarys critique on how our music disciplines deny the fact
that music has a cultural meaning is very accurate. In both musicology and theory
classes, we still study music only on its own terms, denying the expressive
components of the instrumental repertory. Even when dealing with texted music, we
ignore the words or dramatic situations. By avoiding questions of significance and
denying the presence of expressive components in music, I believe we are contributing

to the erroneous thought that classical music is concerned exclusively with lofty
matters.
McClarys analysis on Bizets Carmen - a racial Other created by a male fantasy
from a society that denies itself sexuality - reminded me of another Carmen: Brazilian
celebrity Carmen Miranda and her career in Hollywood in 1930-50s. The spicy Latina
stereotype personified with her exotic Latin accent and emblematic fruit hat was the
perfect example of Tropicalism, or the portrayal of Latin Americans as exotic
foreigners. Much like Bizets lack of effort in trying to ascertain how the culture of the
ethnic group in question actually was, Hollywoods version of a Brazilian woman had
nothing to do with how Brazilians acted, sounded or looked like. As McClary says, the
identity of the group in question was not so important as the fact that it was exotic with
respect to Europe (or to Hollywood).

1. According to McClary, what is the role of our academic disciplines in the

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construction of gender and sexuality in music?

What changes did Bizet make when adapting Merimes novella to an opera?
How is Carmens musical discourse different than Micalas?
How is Carmens musical discourse different than Joss?
Why does the opera have a happy ending? Why does this ending provide both

satisfaction and impotence?

6. What is the racial Other?
7. Why is Jos not satisfactorily aligned with patriarchy? (Critique of European
gender construction?)
8. Do you agree that if erotic impulses were valued as positive, the whole repertory
would be radically different?