Feminist Blog

Pauline Oliveros is a composer whose work and life I would like to get to know better.  


It seems like women have not played a significant role in the discussion of the American avant-garde thus far, with the exception of passing remarks about earlier composers Amy Beach and Ruth Crawford.  Particularly in the post-World War II 1950's music scene, women are more than underrepresented; they are simply nonexistent!


We did not really discuss this, but as we looked at American serialists like Milton Babbit the tone of serious music tipped dangerously to a “masculine” extreme.  Previously, in the Classical and Romantic eras strong, testosterone-driven, rationally conceived passages were carefully balanced with more lyrical, sensuous secondary thematic counterparts.  Sonata form can be viewed as the small prism of a delicate dance between the sexes: neither party seeks to overthrow or overbalance the either, at least not until the tonic key swoops in during the recapitulation and swallows up the realm of the feminine secondary theme.  I just played the Schumann Violin Sonata in D minor on my graduate recital last night, and this piece serves as a good example of a male who displays a multifaceted [albeit mentally unstable] personality that encompasses both masculine and feminine traits.


However, with Milton Babbit and ultra-rationalism, this dualism and nuance disappeared entirely.  The “serious” music of the 1950s swung dangerously (in my opinion) to the extreme of favoring elite academicism and posed a threat to the sentimentality of expression as a viable tool in musical execution.  This was a conservative, conformist decade riddled with gender stereotypes and a male-dominated approach to art.


Thus, Oliveros' distinction of two types of creative processes shed light on some concepts I had already been pondering for some time.  In “The Contribution of Women Composers,” she distinguishes two modes of creativity: “(1) active, purposeful creativity, resulting from cognitive thought, deliberate acting upon or willful shaping of materials, and (2) receptive creativity, during which the artist is like a channel through which material flows and seems to shape itself.”  (Interestingly, this theory has now been corroborated by Nobel prizewinner Daniel Kahneman in his new book Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011). 



She attributes this intuitive approach as a legitimate path that has too long been discredited and/or marginalized.


Artists who are locked into the analytical mode with little or no access to the intuitive mode are apt to produce one-sided works of art.  Certainly many of the totally determined, serial works of the post-war years seem to fit that category […] [We need] the recognition and re-evaluation of the intuitive mode as being equal to and as essential as the analytical mode for an expression of wholeness in creative work.  Oppression of women has also meant devaluation of intuition, which is culturally assigned to women’s roles (Gann 162-163).