What has Opera done to Women? is the focus of Clement's thougths, short essays on the oppressive emotive cauldron Divas inhabit. The world of Opera scholarship is only (within the last ten years) has seen the vigours of social and political perspectives discussed. Writers like Susan McClary, Linda Hutcheon,Tom Sutchliffe,and Anthony Arblaster have deeply thought works scouring the social dimensions of Opera left unattended since its inception. Clement brings a wealth of intellectual sensibilities as well, a Lacanian, feminist who traverses inside the singers mind while she is singing it seems. And saying, "this is not a nice place to sing." And what does Opera grant it's women always fated for death and domesitication,or prison . Clement's readings traverse the traditional operatic repertoire giving you the opera's narrative as she comments and reflects. The section "Tetralogy of the Ring" incites the chauvinistic world of Wagner,how all gods have power, but the Man-Gods can strip the Woman-Gods of their power when they choose to rebel, as Wotan does to Brunnhilde in Wagner's "Die Walkure" in the "Ring". Songs of Lunatics is what women in opera potray as in Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" Girls who leap into space, Tosca and Melisande. Or in Bizet's "Carmen" who has no fixed place, her lightness is always in darkness away from lechery and exploitation. You will feel Clement's compassion for Opera's oppressed cadre,and her wrath in speaking of opera's deeply prejudiced phallocentricism. Indeed this has been the most profound book on opera. It makes you rethink all you have ever known, or didn't know on this most cloistered self-preserved realm of music drama. I had wished Clement had ventured into this century for there are profound examples of positive even rebellious roles of women, as in Alexander Goehr's "Behold The Sun" set in Anabaptist Germany of the 1500's, or Luigi Nono's "Like a Burgeoning Light of Love" with a text by Louise Michel ,where three women visit the war fields of this century and comment.

This text was a required reading for a college course I took, and it basically summarizes why college isn't taken as seriously as it once was. This purely indulgent, pretentious work ruins any chance of an actual point with jumbled phrases such as "...neither an autonomous activity nor an automatic indicator of the economic infrastructure..." Personally, this is thoroughly unreadable and unenjoyable; it was much more of a chore to get through than it was worth. Attali needs to quit with the literary masturbation and realize that while having a large vocabulary is admirable, he should perhaps learn to "eschew obfuscation", pun fully intended.

... because it is so outrageous to be brilliantly thought provoking. Sometimes I think he is out to lunch and I am not confident that he understands everything he wrote. (or maybe the translation is not right.) Still, the mythology he presents is detailed and well developed and whether you agree with it or not, is fascinating.

There is a lot of coverage of European classical music in terms of "Who is paying whom" as well as the current recording industry. He also gets some things wrong, such as his coverage of Free Jazz (Carly Bley is black?), to which he nevertheless is sympathetic towards.

Therefore, I don't know how much you can trust his conclusions, but at the same time it gets the reader's mind to consider all sorts of new facets, and that is why this book is great.

Sometimes lazy people like to use phrases like "literary{wind} " to justify their inability to understand difficult topics, or to cover for their own, lacking, vocabularies. The foregoing review did just that. The fact is, sometimes precise thought demands precise language.

Anyway, this book provides valuable insight into the relationship of fringe art/music, and the future of society. Attali postulates that society is founded upon the idea that bad noise must be subverted. Therefore, all forces effecting social change, at some time, have been subverted. Given time though, they find their way into society by way of, here, music, and begin to cause change.

This is a very interesting and well conceived book. A great read for philosophy student and musician alike. It puts a new spin on the effect of music on culture, and the reciprocal relationship between art and society. Good stuff.

In closing, and in response to the previous reviewer, "college isn't taken as seriously as it once was" simply because the hallowed halls are clogged with students who readily dismiss works of sound thought because they don't like having to look up words or work for their own enlightenment.ENDs

You know, I don't think this author's or any author's physical appearance is either here or there. And please, let's not take ridicule for "ardent hatred". If you fed an English dictionary into a computer program that generated random permutations, one of the more improbable combinations of words it might spit out could be: "as if pointing out the sexual agenda in the 9th Symphony needed an apology". "The sexual agenda in the 9th Symphony"?

This book is better than Feminine Endings. Its conclusions and assumptions are less questionable, but it also explains her approach in Feminine Endings. Only a very basic knowledge of music theory is necessary, I imagine you could have a friend in their first year of music theory explain it to you while you listened to the music she discusses. Yet she explains more than most first year theory classes would.

If you ever met Susan McCalry, you'd find it hard to believe that this petite, soft-spoken, witty woman could inspire such ardent hatred from scores of musicologists. Moreover, the sociological and feminist concepts that she brings to bear on Western art music are already old hat in literary and art criticism. But musicology is, to a large extent, still in denial about Modernism, so Post-Modernism is way beyond the pale. So McClary's first book, "Feminine Endings," rocked the world of musicology to its hardbound, white-male foundation, and provoked round after round of McClary-bashing. Her new book, based on a series of lectures given at UC Berkeley, therefore occasionally sounds a bit defensive. (At one point she notes that she *can* say something nice about Beethoven, as if pointing out the sexual agenda in the 9th Symphony needed an apology.) For any reasonably intelligent reader who has wondered how Western music works, this new book is superb at explaining those mechanisms. McClary uses her usual catholic tastes to discuss everything from Vivaldi to the Blues, and you will come away understand how both of them function, and why we feel moved when listening to either one. Armed with her usual wit and unusual perceptivity, McClary lays bare the workings of Western music with clarity and grace. In the process, she nearly redeems musicology as a discipline worth taking seriously. You go, girl.

It's a very strange thing when "extremely harsh criticism" is cited as evidence of value. Is it just possibly that this book was harshly criticized because it deserves to be, because it is a very sorry excuse for a work of musical--and, for that matter, sociological--scholarship? I think it IS possible. I think it is more than possible; I think it is quite likely. It is "readable" for non-musicians not in spite of its "scholarly content", but only in that it lacks "scholarly content"; it is not particularly well written. Obviously, it has its partisan proponents--the sort of people who don't like having to think subtly or deeply but who still want to be taken seriously, the sort of pseudo-intellectual people who want to have it both ways--, but this is no recommendation.

This book changed me from a Stravinsky-like "music has no meaning" stance. I still don't think that music is sad or happy or like a day in the country, things are more complicated than that, but I no longer feel that music is an empty if beautiful vessel. Instead music, like all actions (and non-actions), is political. I only give it a four because I would recommend her next book far more.

I assigned this book to my WOMEN AND MUSIC class when I taught at the University of Tennessee. It opened their eyes and ears. They have an entirely new and valuable perspective. A must read for any musician! Dr. Benjamin Boone, California State University Fresno

Just as music theory, divorced from musicology and composition, has become an academic dumping ground for failed musicians, so musicology, divorced from music theory, has been overridden by amateur, inept "sociologists". This book is a case in point. (Oh and "Gender"--for what it's worth--is a GRAMMATICAL term. Humans and other animals don't have genders; they have sexes.)

(Ah, another aside: Now I happen to know a particular institution which at least until very recently irrationally discriminated against woman composers (that is, on the basis of their sex, not on the basis of their music or ability), and I don't suppose this institution is anomalous in this regard. Woman composer shouldn't have it tougher than men composers--men composers have it tough enough, and we should hear and read more of the outstanding woman composers of the present and past, but as someone below points out, to do so we'll have to look elsewhere than in this book.)

Not nearly as witty as its precursor, "Edna Distracted: Masculinist Perspectives on Declension and Skiing", still a truly self-important book everyone must read--or drop. Sure to secure tenure.

Why do people never think of women when they think of composers? This book does not directly address this issue, but the view of great music being produced only by men only for public listening needs challenging, and this book is one of a small number successfully making a serious effort to do so. If you have any interest in how culture (particularly music) works hand in hand with social power, you will find the perspectives in this book informative, revealing, and even fascinating.

Who would deny "how very central music is to our understanding of ourselves"? Must we therefore also accept the conclusions drawn from this premise in [this book]: "Music passes from the separate sphere of the marginal-if-beautiful into the realities of the social world. If music thereby loses its aura, it is granted both the powers and responsibilities of a genuinely political medium." But if music is a "genuinely political medium," it must have a political message. What is that message? Can music that exploits folk elements in a way that led Bartok "to a new conception of the chromatic scale" properly fulfill its political "responsibilities"? Or is this only possible where an affiliation with folk song has the opposite implication, where it acts as an immunizing agent against the tendencies proscribed in the 1948 Resolution of the CCCP, "atonality, dissonances and disharmony"? Can "the powers and responsibilities of a genuinely political medium" as manifested in the music of the past have any relevance for our time? Whatever political meaning the Eroica Symphony may have had for Beethoven and may have for us stands utterly opposed to that which the Nazis were able to find in this same work and which enabled them to exploit it for their own political purposes. It has been suggested that "without words or strong folk elements, it is doubtful if music can convey a clear epic meaning." Die Meistersinger has both, but this did not prevent the Nazis from politically exploiting the work in ways that were totally at odds with what the American critic, Paul Rosenfeld, saw as its inherent content. He was revolted by "the image of an audience of Nazi porkers self-righteously taking in the concluding scene of the music drama, identifying their sinister Fascist state with the bright democratic order figured there, adopting the composer as their prophet and justifying their ways to men with his vision." How can a single work impart such totally different political messages and serve such totally different political purposes? There is, however, no ambiguity at all about what it means to "grant" to music "the powers and responsibilities of a genuinely political medium." To deprive music of its private and personal meaning for us would be to deprive us of privacy and personality, and there is no ambiguity about the political meaning of this--there is no ambiguity about the spiritual deprivation that permits a composer to say, in response to the Central Committee's Resolution, "How could it have happened that I failed to introduce a single folk song in the score of my opera? It seems strange and almost incredible to me, and can be explained only as a manifestation of my inherent snobbishness" (Muradeli). Or, "the absence, in my works, of the interpretation of folk art, that great spirit by which our people lives, has been with utmost clarity and definiteness pointed out by the Central Committee....I am deeply grateful for it" (Shostakovich). Or "I must admit that I, too, have indulged in atonality....In the future I hope to get rid of this mannerism" (Prokofiev).

George Perle, "The Listening Composer"