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The role of women in the musical world has been under very strict control for much of recorded history, and probably long before men began to document the way they viewed the world, but this is not to say that women have not shown themselves to be equally capable of demonstrating an abundance of concepts through the medium of musical performance. Indeed, certain figures stand out in the canon of musical genius precisely because of their female gender , but these are rare. Moreover, it can be observed that the majority of musical roles that were ‘given’ to women of this period were involved in the processes of performance rather than composition and it seems significant that certain social roles, both in other art forms and outside the arena of the arts, have similar characteristics. For example, in visual art women tended to be the subject of paintings as oppose to taking on the role of one who initiates and, so, chooses the necessary materials for a work, practically in terms of canvas and colours, and artistically in terms of subject. It is not too difficult to draw a comparison to the way women were expected to take care of any offspring that she would give birth to, the family unit being the subject of the man’s success as a father figure. This lack of notable female musicians who were given credit for the beginning of a creative process, rather than celebrated for their encompassment into the piece, becoming a result of such a process started and maintained my men, poses a very important question, given by Whitney Chadwick in discussion of another branch of the arts :-

Were women artists exceptional...or merely the tip of an iceberg, submerged by the demand of patriarchal culture that women produce children, not art, and confine their activities to the domestic, not the public, sphere?

In the nineteenth century, women understood and accepted their place among the ranks of musicians as part of a lifestyle that allowed them to behave in the way that their mothers and grandmothers had done before them. Their contribution to a musical tradition was monitored, cultivated from, and restrained by, their place in a wider societal context – the context of class. As Shepherd puts it :-

In this sense, music occupies contradictory positions in social structures of industrial capitalism... : music reaffirms the flux and concreteness of the social world at the same time that, through its categorisation and packaging, it denies them.

It follows, then, that music, as a means of oppressing women, is born of a cultural context : that of an industrial capitalist society whereby the ruling classes control according to need and circumstance. Men can be considered to be at the ‘top of the pile’ in Western gender hierarchy, for reasons discussed in this essay, and so, in the sphere of an attitude promoting capital growth and cultural reproduction, women must become one more object of control, just as the working classes become an object of control from those who conduct and conserve their own monetary power.

Given that women have had, and to some extent, continue to have, very different roles to those of men in the pursuits of art and music, due to the cultural preoccupations that dictated what they were expected to perform, it is clear that not only did their working practices radically differ from those of men but so did the resultant assumptions made about their characteristics, both as musicians and as individuals and members of a family and society. Because women were allowed only limited access to the expressive capabilities that music has to offer a partaker, i.e. they were authorized to express themselves only when serving as an instrument of male dominance, the vast majority of cultural ideas carried by music, within a performance itself and in the manner in which a performance is given, were those that served the needs of men, whether or not this was intentional on the part of any participant in the music-making process. This predominance of ideas that reflect only a male perspective on society is the crucial supporting block of a hypothetical, circular system whereby the ideas of men are transmitted to a mass audience through the medium of the fine arts , this influencing the way society constructs itself such that male dominance is accepted and, largely, supported so as to allow that faction of society to dictate the way that people should feel and think. Cultural assumptions are created by a network of factors, one of which is the arts, and these confirm and reinforce those suppositions, partly playing the role of a mirror on society through which men get to reflect upon their place in the grand scheme of things, and more importantly by systematically excluding particular ideologies and philosophies that may result in the instability of the current balance of power. As Lawrence Kramer puts it :-

Any listener who responds emotionally to a composition is implicitly investing in it with connotative content... poetic-language is non-referential, a prison house that constantly refers back to itself...

One of these viewpoints is that of a secular society in which the rules are governed by conscious, human thought alone, another being the idea of the inclusion of women’s artistic production into the mainstream to combat the concept of their essence as one of a possession, consumed by men as much to demonstrate their superiority over one another as to fulfil a desire to provide for and protect their female counterparts.

In the nineteenth century, men appeared to have the upper hand because they portrayed that idea in the way they wrote about the political and artistic movements of the time and then reinforced it by acting out the roles they had prepared for themselves, leaving females little choice but to follow this lead and play along with the game according to men’s rules. A sociologist would find it very hard to resist trying to find an explanation for why men felt that this play-acting as self-appointed rulers of a society was necessary and especially why it was so important for this pretence to saturate every part of nineteenth century culture. It could be the case that this saturation was the only way in which to ensure that the status-quo was maintainable, allowing men to squabble between themselves over who is the most dominant and, in an animalistic sort of way, who has the right to choose the best, most able partner to carry his future sons. But this contest between rival males conveniently fails to deal with the fact that, without female participation, in the form of delivering and bringing up offspring, the whole issue of who is the biggest, fattest ‘cat’ is pointless because, as Shepherd puts it, “modes of biological reproduction come to stand for modes of cultural reproduction” . Because they ultimately have a massive influence over the future generation in the way they choose to raise children, long before any exterior conditioning can affect them, it can be argued that women had, and still have, the true control over society and, specifically the way it will be shaped in years to come. Not only did women have the ability to decide how the balance of power may, or may not, shift in the future but they, through the teachings of their mothers and sisters, had domestic skills that were essential to the protection of physical health and strength. In short, the male population had something to be envious of owing to their less active role in biological reproduction and, possibly, took hold of certain aspects of the culture they lived in, dominating them and elevating themselves to a position of great importance in order to distract women from the true potency that continued to flourish in the female population. In other words, a predisposition in men to be distanced from one process, essential to the reproduction of human societies, leads to the tendency for men to compensate by controlling cultural processes of reproduction, and so this brought about a secondary controlling mechanism of biological and sexual ideologies by mapping them onto those cultural processes. This resulted in the necessity to devalue the role of mother and housekeeper to an object of mere consumerism – an effect and result Germaine Greer refers to as ‘cunt hatred’ .

In her book, Music as Social Discourse , Marcia Citron argues that, because works are socially biased and men have used the arts, among other things, to forward their own cause in a way that convinces a mass audience to participate in a particular behavioural pattern, then the important social variables such as power, class, gender and race etc. are likely to be mapped to function as a means of representing societal ideologies of desirable, rather than realistic, status and behaviour. Therefore, music functions as a picture of the ideal situation, according to the ruling groups of a unique time and place, or as Chadwick puts it, as “individual expression or as reflection of pre-existent social realities, divorced from actual history or social conditions.” We see this in action in our modern world, in drama on television, radio and other forms of mass media whereby the situations that are shown and discussed in pictures, be them political or ‘romantic’ , come in line with the ideal according to our cultural, social conditioning. Alternatively, we are shown the antithesis of societal paradise, as we would wish it to be, which, by way of presentation, is designed to instil the same conclusion in the audience. Moreover, society dictates these ideals of desirability in conjunction with art and music because they are both presented and reinforced in art. As Richard Leppert puts it in Art and the Committed Eye :-

A significant portion of our conscious and unconscious understanding of ourselves and our immediate world is framed by the imagery of advertising – this urging what sort of bodies to have and to desire or to build. It influences our sense of self, our belief systems, our individuality and our status as beings.

The imagery of “advertising” is biased because its creators are human and, therefore, they have the motive of the reproduction of their personal ideology to conserve and reinforce that ethic. Music, as a form of this advertising, employs, by way of a culturally learned group of musicians, a number of approaches to indicate what we should understand to be the picture of idealism and the opposite, sometimes using irony to bring the point across with more conviction. In Schumann’s Frauenliebe und –leben, cycle the final song describes the speaker’s heartbreak on finding that her husband is dead. She views this partly as a betrayal on the part of her beloved, and Schumann’s music demonstrates this unfathomable hurt in the way he constructs the vocal phrase and piano accompaniment. The song is quite chromatic, the keyboard part remaining pretty much static throughout, giving the impression of solemnity. The vocal line is recitative-like in its repetition of notes, whole phrases being comprised of a very small number of notes and confined to a minimal range. On the surface this is a song of profound despair, and this is demonstrated both in the general atmosphere of the music and in the word painting that can be heard at certain points, specifically in bars 20-21 where, on the main syllable of “verlornes” – “lost”, the vocal line rises, supported by a plummeting base, as the speaker recalls times of “joy”, this appearing on the first note of the following bar where the vocal line drops to a C# . Clearly, the text describes a very sad situation and also reflects the speaker’s state of mind but tells us little of how we can view this song from a cultural standpoint until we hear the postlude, a solo piano version of the main melodic and harmonic content of the first song of the cycle. This return to the opening material is as good as saying that the whole drama, over the death of a lover, is nothing more than one link in a chain of similar circumstances and that, actually, those events and the feelings associated with them are quite normal and acceptable because they are common to all members of society since, as Gerald Abraham points out, “Schumann conceived his songs in connected groups or cycles” . In other words, the female speaker’s outlook on life in the final song was certainly not one that the audience is invited to envy but, by bringing back the opening melody of the cycle before the speaker has had chance to dwell on her misfortune, Schumann destroys the notion that the predicament is anything but normal. Effectively, the cycle resolves as a large-scale cadence telling us that the narrative describes an acceptable state of affairs and so, if this had not been done, the audience may have been left with a sense of wanting – of deep-seated unrest that they could presume was permanent and final.

Part of the reason why the point made above was relatively straightforward to put across is because the genre of art song lends itself very well to discussions of composer intentions, narrative representation and, on analysing both the score and the auditory finished products, resultant interpretation. However, the latter category is considerably more difficult to pin down owing to the many differing ways in which we understand what Citron calls ‘Pre-classification and Pre-evaluation’ . Pre-classification, according to Citron, is the setting up of certain expectations and assumptions based on culturally understood meanings of value of a particular category of musical expression. In listening to a song cycle, one understands what to expect from the piece in terms of instrumentation and the composition’s cultural role; indeed these factors dictate what is and is not an art-song cycle, or symphony or whatever, according to the language we use to describe musical works. The piece is classified into a particular genre area before a single note is played to the audience and the knowledge of this pre-classification sets up an agenda for the aesthetic and intellectual issues that will become central to that piece. It tells an audience what to expect from the work that they are about to hear and how to interpret it in accordance with similarly classified works that they have already been subjected to and according to the contemporary range of opinions on such matters. In other words, the audience will assume a cultural position in relation to the piece, simply because it is a song cycle, and so this assumption leads them to decide how relevant the ideas contained within that individual work are and how to interpret them, i.e. be able to construct a pre-evaluation and use this as the basis for any further judgement. Citron writes “The exclusionist property of genre is critical toward understanding its cultural power.” and in doing so points out the importance of art song not only being a musical drama played out with pianoforte and voice but also a genre separate from all other forms of musical drama, in order to maintain a certain reverence that elevates it to a status that allows its particular cultural functions to take place. In reality, art song has a very similar role to that of opera, as far as its method and successfulness in communicating a story and all the baggage that goes with it are concerned, whether or not the subject happens to run in a chronological, linear order, and so manipulating and reflecting the natural tensions brought about by the various levels of narrative. For example, in the Schumann’s opera Genoveva (1848-1850), the witch, Margareta, by means of several deceptive mirages, convinces the homecoming knight that his wife has been faithless and, the traditional image of a witch being that of a sexless being , this is, presumably, supposed to be a direct comparison to the conventional, truly devotional feminine image that is the hero’s wedded partner. The way that the sequence of events is dealt with in practical terms is very different and so this affects both the manner in which the music is performed and, so, the resultant social context. Opera, however, requires a much larger venue than art song, usually greater instrumentation and vocal forces and, because the audience is required to suspend their perception of reality in favour of devouring the world that is put before them on stage, convincing dress, makeup, props and stage dress. This all makes for a quite different musical and dramatic experience so, even though many of the gender roles that are played out are similar to those in art song, the way that the pieces are consumed in such a production alters the functionality of those roles and their utility. As Einstein puts it :-

Song does not have to come to terms with many externals or traditional paraphernalia as opera does and so it is considered a legitimate fusion of music and poetry in which the romantic era expressed itself most purely and freely.

Song’s special place in the cultural hotbed of the Romantic period is largely due to its particular social functions that grew out of the genre’s binding together of music and poetry. Song, as opposed to opera, is able to communicate cultural ideas through a series of images and situations described to the audience in text and musical accompaniment , carried to the ear as abstract principles rather than as physical objects that can be both seen and heard. Operatic performances allow the audience to have a fly-on-the-wall perspective on a situation that is unfolding on the stage and, in doing so, constricts its role as a means of cultural mould due to its increased level of transparency. Although the characters can be manipulated to dress and behave in a contemporary (idealistic) manner, their every move is open to inspection and criticism by the opera-goers in a way that is not possible in the performance of art-song. In lied, the poet only gives the reader one minuscule part of a story, focusing on parts that are particularly important for either narrative or artistic reasons, as if to be shining a spotlight into the minds and hearts of characters in an opera . The musicians, and consequently the listeners, are obliged to fill in any gaps that are hindering an interpretation or understanding of the piece in such a way that they can only hope to turn to external influences to do so, influences that are, themselves, affected by the creative ways that men alter their surroundings, and any representation of it, possibly so as to underline imagined differences between the sexes. For example, in Op. 31 No. 1, Die Löwenbraut , the actual speaker changes at different stages in the song, the piece starting from the point of view of a narrator and then, with a change of key, meter and tempo, we hear the voice of the main character, the lion’s bride, only for the song to return to the point of view of the narrator, both the textual and the musical content displaying a ternary structure. However, even when the speaker is that of the bride, we hear that voice as quoted by the narrator so this works on both a storytelling and a fly-on-the-wall manner simultaneously. So, the way in which art-song is transmitted to the audience, performed by a solo voice and usually only accompanied by keyboard, itself verifies the musical and poetic function of detailing a narrative from the perspective of one, insular being. Furthermore, this performance practice highlights the importance of the way lieder are composed and how the audience understands the situation described in the plot in accordance with that compositional practice. To some extent, this understanding actually reduces the composer’s ability to manipulate an audience’s susceptibility to gender ideologies because they have a working knowledge of how such ideas are carried, rather like one who fails to be shocked by the climaxes of a horror movie after seeing similar scenes in many other films that attempt to pray on the audiences preconceived expectations, desensitising oneself to them. Of course, this rule can work both ways because the circle of experience leading to knowledge and expectation, and back, is easily unbalanced by an artist who has either very original writing style or an unconventional way of interpreting his surroundings, especially if he is acutely aware of how he is viewed in terms of a particular genre type.