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It has been noted in the chapters above that all music is biased because it comes about as a result of human interactions, no more or less than a form of expressing the biased laws and ideals of people. To some extent, this overly simplifies the situation though, because often the musical intention is not one of a specific communication of ideas, let alone one that is designed to uphold one set of beliefs over another. Some have contended that the conscious intention of a music and its creator is beside the point because it has an effect on the society in which it was created simply in its existence, and this has a knock-on effect on more remote groups and individuals, but because the nature of music criticism is often very negative, particularly in study of gender issues in music, this seems like a somewhat shallow argument, similar to that of the well-known pesky Chinese butterfly whose wing movements cause hurricanes on the other side of the globe. Looking back on the history, as we know it, it becomes very tempting to pigeon-hole entire movements, and all pieces that we see as being appropriate to that movement, whether the composer associated himself with the fitting ideals or not, as meaning or being one thing or another and, in the course of this study, it has become apparent that many well-respected musicologists have taken certain ideas about the nature of music, and its place in society, as being as both fixed and constant. For example, such academics seem to often assume, when they criticise the music of men, that those musicians each work as another cog in the machine that keeps their gender on the top of the social hierarchy whether they intend to do so or not, and in making that assumption, then look for evidence that this is the case. In other words, the musical analyses are, themselves, biased and prejudiced, at least to a point, because they come to a composition with preconceived ideas about what to expect from it and what may or may not be read into it. Feminist criticism seems to be particularly guilty for coming to conclusions about pieces that tell us much more about the politics of the critic than about the nature of the music and its context in a larger society. For example, Ruth Solie notes in Musicology and Difference :-

If identities are a matter of social role, we may be able to study the mechanisms – including musical ones – by which those roles are delineated, communicated, learned, and perhaps challenged.

In the following paragraphs, she attempts to highlight some of the ways that these identities are communicated in music, whole compositions and sections of pieces becoming, in her eyes, musical essays on cultural issues, and specifically on how women should be oppressed by society (in the eyes of mankind), because she, and her comrades, believe that men have come to rule culture through such forms of media. Her belief seems reasonably justifiable, this most clearly explained by way of a circular system whereby a musician is influenced by the society around him and his personal desire to gain control of certain elements of that collection of individuals, the resultant musical outpouring, in turn, influencing society and its overall sense of morality through a collective interpretation, part rejection and part acceptance of the individual’s viewpoint, but is often taken to an extreme whereby sensible musical discourse is lost in the thick of a dogmatic political agenda. Solie’s “differences” are actually produced in representation rather than merely reflected, as if to be some pre-existent reality, in this circular relationship between ideology and representation in which each creates and reinforces the other. But this viewpoint is unashamedly prejudiced because, in order to hold weight and ‘prove’ anything about the music that can be studied using its principles as guidelines, the musicologist must assume that all people of the male gender have, at very least, a tendency to act out the ‘masculine’ role of the creator of culture and ideology due to some biological handicap that impairs their potency as true architects of society’s groups.

In the pursuit of proving such theories, it seems that many musicologists will make outrageous assumptions about the extra-musical meanings of very specific aspects of a composition, down to criticising its form, themes, tonal structure, and any other feature that springs to a prejudice mind in search of evidence. Melinda Boyd falls into just such a school of analytic thought, as demonstrated in her article concerned with gender differences in Liebesfrüling, this being a particularly easy target because it is the only publication that Robert and Clara Schumann produced together :-

The majority of songs in Liebesfrüling fail to convey specific gender roles : the dominant male and passive female. This is not to say that gender connotations are not present but they become more open to interpretation.

Perhaps a discussion of gender imaging in a song that is, according to the analyst, ‘sexless’ is to become a tool of the machine that reinforces such stereotypes rather than reveals them. The existence of gender roles and imagery in poetry and song is undeniable but the question is when and how to interpret it. Making observations about current and past associations with relation to song is one necessary method of evaluating the artist’s ideas but it is important not to get carried away by forcing works into a particular gender environment based on a contemporary, personal agenda, avoiding any dogmatic attempt to pigeon-hole works according to socially constructed criteria that may or may not be present in the actual work in the spotlight. In this particular cycle, the composers refrained from specifying the gender of the singer(s) required for a performance of the work and the gender of the speaker or speakers is seldom explicit in the poetry, especially any female character that may be heard. Many parts of the text, written by Rückert, appear to be from the point of view of a male poet and his female beloved, either separately, alternatively or occasionally together but this is not clear and as a result the gender identity of the speaker is ambiguous or transmutable at most points. Boyd says of the sections of the cycle that Robert Schumann wrote “...the underlying semiotic codes are often enigmatic or open to interpretation.” and then goes on to describe these poems as having a heavy use of metaphor relating to creativity and nature. In becoming aroused by the springtime motion, the poet, apparently, controls his nature, which, according to Boyd, stands for overt sexuality, keeping the female beloved attached to him. Turning to the specifics of the fifth song of the cycle, she remarks that “...the drawing in of creative power is reversed as the female is literally filled and drunk as she listens passively [and] she is drowned in him.” and points out that it, along with numbers 9 and 10 (also written by Robert), has explicit male persona texts deduced by gender-specific pronouns that identify the poem’s addressee. In taking the poetic phrase “Und wie sie, davon trunken,” literally, Boyd conveniently rejects the semiotics that she had previously spoken of, which could have explained the passage as containing nothing more than an extremely romantic gesture, in favour of suggesting that Schumann was making reference to, what sounds like, an act of rape. In her discussion of song 9, Boyd homes in on one aspect of the fifth stanza that reads as follows :-

...Alle Ströme haben Ihren Lauf auf Erden bloß, Um sich zu begraben Sehnend in des Meeres Schoß...

Here she points out that, although the sea can be viewed as a traditional symbol of immensity or eternity, sexual connotations characterise it as being feminine and so, once again, Schumann was using his creativity as a musician to demonstrate the supposed naturalism of a femininity that succumbs to the needs and wants of men. But, it must be noted that such symbols are only partly learned, for it is inevitable that a society that concerns itself with sexuality and gender roles would conclude such metaphors due to their obvious simplicity. In other words, those meanings are often planted, for an academic end, by the analyst rather than intended by the poet or musician such as other images that had well known meanings at the time and were exploited as such in art . Of course, the conscious intentions of the composer have relatively little significance when we study a music’s overall effect on society at large, but it is equally meaningless to attempt to explain every possible cultural end to a composition because this runs to virtual infinity in cases where the music has enjoyed a large audience for any length of time. So, Boyd seems to be taking sexual stereotyping as a given constant and using those to gender-ise characters and events in song as oppose to pointing out how gender roles are actually represented in the music. She writes about poetry that contains either ambiguous or implicit gender references in a negative light, as if there is more to the story than just what is seen (or heard) on the surface. Perhaps if we dig deep enough we would find evidence of sexual stereotyping in all music but, in the case of the Schumann lieder, a public survey measuring the response of twentieth century listeners to the musical and textual content, separately and together, may clarify whether or not Melinda Boyd’s conclusions are justified. Clearly, such a study would be limited to a degree whereby an academic could only ever get an idea of how the music of the Romantics is received today but if the cultural significance of gender stereotyping in the music is a major factor governing the way such songs were written and are heard by contemporary audiences, we would expect a fairly large proportion of people in the survey to respond with comments on this matter.

Furthermore, the work of feminist musicologists often fails to give a true picture of how compositions are relevant on a societal scale because of other symptoms of their blinkered approach to the study, analysis and criticism of music by men. Possibly the main downfall of feminist musicology is the irony that gender issues in music are far from exclusive in the way that they influence composers and performers of and listeners to composition. As Chadwick puts it :-

...some feminist art historians began to question the ahistoricity of writing about women artists as if gender were a more binding point of connection between women than class, race and historical context...

Many other equally important aspects of the cultures that give rise to music are either side-stepped or ignored totally by the academics that these historians question because they are considered irrelevant when it comes to proving that men really do write music for their own benefit and in order to exclude women from a boys-only fellowship. This is largely due to many music critics, whether feminist or not, forgetting that, in order to give an insight into a musical / cultural phenomenon, they must, themselves, either be part of the culture that they comment on to the degree that they are influenced by the same variables as any other participant in a musical event, or totally withdrawn from that society whereby comments can be made with very limited understanding of what the people who are involved actually experience. The field of ethnomusicology has to come to terms with a similar dilemma to the latter in the way that its students are required to say something interesting and insightful about a music that is completely foreign to them without overdoing the use of comparison to Western musical procedure, because those musical ‘rules’, both technically and culturally, simply do not apply in many cases. So, feminist criticism must also find a way to discuss the inner workings of a vast pillar of musical output that has been, predominantly, erected by the male section of our society, without allowing personal political viewpoints hinder an perceptive study, in a way that recognizes the cultural importance of this imbalance, its affect on music of the past and present, and how these factors are connected to a larger picture that encompasses concerns from the technical issues surrounding humanity’s manipulation of an acoustic environment, to the way these change our perception of ourselves and those around us.