Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality

Susan McClary's essays bring feminist thinking to the study of music. Ranging from early seventeenth-century opera to rock and performance art, the collection asks how ideas about gender and sexuality are built into the music we hear and into the way we write about it. McClary argues that conventional musicology often hides its own assumptions, and she shows how listening closely to the sounds, structures and stories of a piece can reveal much about power and desire. The chapters are clear, lively and deliberately provocative, meant to challenge specialists and general readers alike to hear familiar works differently.