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AS A UNIQUE HUMAN EXPRESSION THAT combines our bodily and cultural identity with idiosyncratic creativity, music provides an interesting setting for gender performance and negotiation in all sociohistorical and cultural contexts. In this article I will discuss the relevance of five ontological stances to the study of gender negotiation in musical performance. My aim is to put forth an analytical concept, "musical gender," that emphasizes music as a specific site and context for gender performance and analysis. I claim that music, in its creation and performance, provides new perspectives for the study of gender.
The ontological stances to music that I discuss here are primarily based on cross-cultural, ethnomusicological literature. They are: (1) music is, like language, a primary modeling system, that is, a system that guides or forms our perceptions of the world or a system on which we model the world around us; (2) music is a bodily art; (3) music is most often publicly performed and, thus, subject to social control; (4) music exists only in performance, even though the norms of performativity are brought to bear on the performer (see note 36); and (5) music has the ability to alter one's state of mind. Naturally, these are not the only characteristics one could propose about music. As all ethnomusicologists know, the conceptualization of music -- that is, which kinds of sounds are regarded as music and which are thought to be the effects and functions of music -- vary greatly from one culture to another.
The ideas presented in this article have arisen from gender-based field studies I have made in two different cultures: Nepal and Finland. In Finland, the country where I have lived and worked most of my life, I have studied three different musical subcultures focusing on gender issues: (1) the career and public reception of the composer Kaija Saariaho, (2) all-male music making at the Finnish front during the Second World War, and (3) musical life stories collected from students of music and musicology.(1) In Nepal I have lived and worked mainly among the Gurung people who live in the mountains of central Nepal.(2)
To readers working in musicology who are not familiar with ethnomusicological scholarship, it may appear strange to see such a variety of examples...