Music into action: performing gender on the

Viennese concert stage, 1790–1810

Author: Tia DeNoraPresentation: Stephen Flach

Music into action:

Key question emerging from Tia DeNora’s Music Into Action: Can elements contained within music effect cultural change or does music merely reflect the social? Thesis: The case study of Viennese Piano performance (c1780-1810) exemplifies that music does not merely ‘reflect’ the social, but is an “active ingredient” that contributes to the structuring of social relations. Applied to Case Study: Elite music during 19th century provided a resource that afforded the thinking through of gender difference in the post-enlightenment modern era.

Proposes New Theory (need for new methodologies)

Draw on the sociology of music:Concepts such as

• actors• agents• mobilize structures to reproduce organization

• focus on interrelations between cultural elements

• Proposing a shift from:– reading what music says about the social to what it makes possible (or

affords)

• Proposes the study of music as a performed and appropriated constitutive medium

Integral Concepts to DeNora’s Approach

1) Gesture• extra-musical content• source of affordances• material within the music or a

physical movement involved in its performance

• musical or performative gesture is interpreted as “thing” outside of the music

Integral Concepts to DeNora’s Approach

2) Affordance • can be thought of as

providing a resource that something is “done” with

• depends on appropriational acts and response (i.e. how the “user” or audience connects the musical or performative gesture with other things

Case Study

Beethoven’s piano works c. 1790-1810

• To demonstrate that music does not merely reflect the social, but provides resources for structuring social relations

• Key: Beethoven and his music consistently read as masculine.

• DeNora is concerned with HOW Beethoven’s music acted as a formative medium for social life.

Before Beethoven (c. 1796)

• piano was predominantly the province of women

• performance associated amateurs

• men and women performed the same works

Enter Beethoven

• first example of gender segregation in piano performance

• due to technical agility, etc., women excluded from performing Beethoven’s pieces (linked to pre-existing notions of bodily decorum)

Process of Affordance

• Beethoven mobilized pre-existing notions of masculinity linked to the sublime– Sublime linked to artistic genius

• Viewed as a masculine trait

• Performance of his works provided a workspace and a set of resources to audiences– In other words “afforded” action – interpretation and

reconceptualization of gender relations which was then put into practice

Affordance formula:

extra musical gestures+

music read as “doing” the thing it points to+

acted upon

How case study demonstrates differerence from previous theories:

• Not matched to pre-existing notions of hegemonic masculinity

• Provided resources (“afforded”) the creation of a masculinity that became hegemonic in the 19th c.

• Links not present at the outset

Critique• Does not offer a clear definition of affordance,

nor does she give effective examples.

• Does not allow for agency within the performer, who may interpret the work satirically.

• Does her case study demonstrate that the performance of Beethoven’s piano works in the late 18th and early 19th century “forged” “new notions of gender difference” without allying itself with pre-existing notions of masculinity?