Extras

Autobiographical Lens

When I first began integrating my own feminist commentary into my art as an undergraduate composer at Florida State University, it came from a place of personal experiences, inspiration, and fascination. I found myself attracted to certain mythological goddesses or feminine tropes, but not in a way that emphasized beauty, grace, or softness. I composed a piece for English horn and fixed media in 2018 called “Siren,” that explored the dark, the grotesque, the deadly side of the sirens, instead of the beautiful and seductive quality of the siren song. At the time, I did not know why. It was an almost indignant approach, as if I was some declarant female composer who could, in fact, write music that was beyond “pretty.” As the only female composer in my class of undergraduate composition majors, my music did not have the luxury of being absolute. It was programmatic because it was mine, inseparable from my identity as a gender minority. But after, and through, ongoing personal traumatic experiences as a victim of sexual assault, I lean into the programmatic nature of femininity and my music, but curate it how I want it seen, from the autobiographical lens of my experience.

During the earlier years of my undergrad, I had leaned into my role as the girl in the program and wrote the pretty music expected of me. The expectation of women composers to write ‘pretty’ music stems from long-held gendered perceptions of masculinity and femininity in musical language. The semiotics of masculine and feminine themes infiltrate listeners’ ears, critical commentary, and music theory curriculum, even today. Women’s historian Amanda Harris postulates that the lack of female composer recognition in the 20th century, even by feminists themselves, “is indicative of the efficacy of accepted notions of the gendered nature of creative musical brilliance.” Not only did the lack of recognition stifle the advancement of women composers throughout history, it perpetuated a prevailing semiotic understanding (created by men) of what the feminine sounds like, musically speaking. Adolf Bernhard Marx, 19th century composer and musicologist, coined the signifiers of binary themes in a gendered manner by stating that the primary, triumphant, memorable theme is of a ‘masculine’ quality, and the secondary, softer, derivative theme is that of a ‘feminine’ quality. 

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With an increase in interest and participation in composition by women at the turn of the nineteenth century, “George Upton’s Women in Music, published in 1880, [...] sought to trivialize and undermine the achievements of what was considered an alarming number of new women composers in the realm of ‘serious’ classical music.” This semiotic understanding of feminine music and the “denial of women’s creative abilities in music” persisted into the 20th century. Psychologist Carl Seashore, in research conducted for his 1940 article “Why No Great Women Composers” and 1948 book In Search of the Beautiful in Music, “claimed that due to their passive nature women could never be creatively equal to men.” These ideas regarding the creative capacity of women and the expectation of an antiquated feminine aesthetic continue to persist in music analysis and appreciation today. By accepting antiquated signifiers for music in this gendered way—socially, academically, theoretically, compositionally—we influence and perpetuate sexism in music on the sides of both the creator and the listener. 

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I reject this. I know of its damaging effects not only as a researcher but as a participant. As a young woman composer, I wrote the pretty, secondary, derivative, weaker music because I felt constricted to these gendered semiotics of music. These ideas have the dangerous power to infiltrate the minds of young women and lead them to believe they, themselves, are the secondary, derivative, and weaker sex, wherein their beauty is their only redeeming quality. I believed this. This infiltrated my mind as a young woman even to the point of believing if a man considered me beautiful, I ought to submit to him. This mindset left me feeling paralyzed and powerless in the face of sexual assault and harassment in multiple traumatic experiences at the ages of 21, 23, and 24. 

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The first of these experiences triggered a turning point in my identity, my mission, and my music. It fueled me to compose music of power and resilience, challenging the idea that feminine music is only beautiful. I made it ugly and strong. My “Siren” song was dissonant and powerful, with more depth and intellect than I had ever composed. I emphasized the power of the sirens in the myth, rather than their beauty, because in the moment of my sexual assault, I felt powerless. When I had not yet been able to put this goal into words, Fernanda Navarro encouraged me to consider that the strong, the powerful, the dissonant could be “feminine” too. This sparked my mission to continue to use my work as a means to recontextualize femininity in music and beyond. 

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I bring this identity and mission as a stronger and more experienced feminist and composer to my master’s degree at the University of North Texas. Through two years of research, composition, and autoethnography, I have a more thorough breadth and scope of feminist art, criticism, and history. As a woman, I have had the misfortune of another sexual assault and learning more of the experiences of my fellow women on college campuses and beyond struggle with their own trauma of being a sexual assault victim. My research and my experience have given me even more precision of intention and autobiographical perspective. My goals in creating feminist music are to recontextualize feminine tropes and modernize gender perceptions to a place where “femininity” exists as a word that includes strength, power, and resilience, so that women, and society as a whole, can believe that femininity can be as strong as it is pretty, secondary to none, and derivative of no man.