Gender and the Canon: Making Room or Breaking Down the Walls?

It is helpful to situate the power and reach of vocabularies of genius in a more concrete setting: the UK classroom. Lucy Green’s 1997 exploration of music, composition, and gender is an often disturbing example of how networks of meaning concerning genius, originality, and creativity impact children. She describes marked differences in the way that teachers articulate the compositional efforts of “boys” and “girls” and, poignantly, in the way that they describe themselves. Though this binary division may give us pause today, the dominant discourses around femininity and masculinity Green identifies are still prevalent. Green describes certain “delineations” associated with musical practices and gender, in which “[m]asculinity is characterized by a confident, rational approach to composition based on creativity and genuine attainment through natural talent” and “femininity is constructed as lacking confidence in composition, as bound up with feelings on one hand and rules on the other, as conservative, traditional and attaining success only through hard work” (1997, p. 215).

The mention of “hard work” may sound like a compliment but this is misleading. Within the context of this masculine/feminine divide this is a deficient attribute when compared with the spontaneous and confident creativity of the boys. In a teacher questionnaire the boys were credited with “imagination, exploratory inclinations, inventiveness, creativity, improvisatory ability and natural talent” as opposed to the girls, who were “conservative, traditional and reliant on notation” (1997, p. 195). In assessing the work of girls not one was described “inspired, creative, imaginative or brilliant” (1997, p. 218). Green’s argument is not that schools have taken a conscious decision to limit female creativity, rather they take part in the “wider field of gender and sexual politics” (1997, p. 192).

It is easy to observe in Green’s discussion that vocabularies of genius and originality are brought to bear on this gender binary, a vocabulary that has been valuing masculinity over femininity since at least the 18th century. Race is not Green’s primary focus here, but it would be valuable indeed to consider similar issues with such a lens. In particular, her discussion of the split Susan McClary (and Citron, 1993, p. 53) identify between the mind and body in Western classical music speaks to the racist discourses around supposedly “primitive” and physical—rather than cerebral—African cultures, not to mention other indigenous cultural practices and products within Europe. The move to present classical music, in McClary’s words, as “rational” and by “laying claim to such virtues as objectivity, universality, and transcendence” presents both a racialized and gendered discourse (1991, p. 17). This same claim to universality in higher music education has recently been robustly challenged by Philip Ewell (2021), who argues that music theory operates within an exclusionary “white racial frame” (c.f. Bradley, 2007).

Such criticisms have potentially deep consequences for the canon of works that are used as exemplars for composers learning their craft. DeNora and Mehan criticize Battersby’s attempts to “sensitize us to a hitherto unrecognized proportion of ‘gifted’ or ‘genius’ women” through arguing for greater recognition. There is a link here to what has been labeled the “add-women-and-stir” approach (Lamb et al., 2002, p. 666). The problem is that this is trying to funnel women—and people of color—into a template designed for white men. For DeNora and Mehan “this position does not consider the ways in which the ability to recognize hitherto overlooked instances of the category of ‘genius’ (in this case women) is simultaneously transforming the shape of that category to add to the canon is also to transform it” (1994, p. 170). For example, celebrating epic artistic gestures with huge forces and long durations already excludes the many who were never able to access such resources. Allsup advocates for the “idea that public education is supposed to prepare us for what might be—that schools and universities are expected to transform a culture, to innovate, reimagine, and liberate” (2016, p. 40). The classroom, for him, can be part of this transformation, finding new ways of conceptualizing creativity outside of canon, outside of racialized and gendered hierarchies, outside of “the work” as we know it. Co-composition is already something of a resistive act against singular conceptions of creativity, though anyone who has run or participated in a class that makes use of co-composition will know that this can bring significant challenges for students and teachers alike.

There has been some response from scholars working within higher music education who, through their focus on musical literacy, analysis, music theory, and score-based music composition, make the argument that there are still aspects of the canon to be preserved. Much of this debate was in response to an article in the Guardian newspaper by Charlotte C. Gill that described an emphasis on teaching music notation as elitist, and notation itself as a “cryptic, tricky language—rather like Latin” (Gill, 2017). Julian Horton, in response, argues for the continuing value of music analysis and theoretical understanding against those who would see it as ahistorical and “solipsistic” (2020, p. 2).

One of the epiphenomena of this movement is a move toward the defense of canons, if not the canon. Horton and Ian Pace argue for canons as a means of resisting the presence of late capitalism in all forms of human interaction: musical autonomy and the canon as a collection of works honored for their artistic rather than market value in this view becomes a perpetual source of inspiration in an otherwise drab and market-driven world (Pace, 2016a).¹⁶ There is more than a little hint of Adornian superstition of popular culture, as well as the feeling that there is a tension between classical music’s “dominant” position within traditional music curricula and its seeming irrelevance to the course of much wider society. The questions of canons and their elasticity will be picked up again in the conclusion, but this question of genre is important and requires further discussion.