This thesis investigates the role of gender in popular music, exploring the possibility of a feminine mode of writing. It focuses on the work of four leading female singer-songwriters, namely Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush and Tori Amos, whose songs are analyzed as textual entities. Building a theoretical bridge between musicology and feminist theory, the relationship between the text and the body is examined. The discursive perspective of this research allows pieces of popular music to be considered not only as ideologically signifying cultural commodities but also as textually signifying entities of words, music and images complementing (rather than supplementing) one another; in other words, that their cultural and ideological embodiments may be musicologically interpreted in tandem. My analysis of popular music pieces created and envoiced by these four artists departs from the presumption of the significance of gender-consciousness informing this word-music-image entity, located simultaneously at a representational and textual/musical level. Throughout this thesis, different female subjectivities are discussed, drawing primarily upon French feminism. Theories which establish a foundation for my arguments are Julia Kristeva’s the semiotic, Luce Irigaray’s feminine multiplicity and Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine, as well as Joan Riviere’s womanliness as masquerade. The resulting multilayered discourse acquires an interdisciplinary character, drawing upon and seeking to contribute to fields such as feminist musicology, popular music studies and gender theory. It also aims to shed light on issues from which gendered discourses arise, both in general terms and in the specific realm of music. This thesis concludes by discussing the extent to which female musicians achieved the feminization of popular music through manipulating both the lyrical and musical structures imposed by dominant discourses.

This study focuses in detail on instrumental chamber music produced by women in the early twentieth century, a particularly fertile and under-represented period with regard to this topic and it draws on aspects of women’s history, British music history and feminist musicology. It argues that the Cobbett competitions instigated by Walter Willson Cobbett in 1905 and the formation of the Society of Women Musicians in 1911 contributed to the explosion of instrumental music, including phantasies, written by women in this period. It highlights women’s place in British musical society leading up to and during the First World War and investigates the relationship between Cobbett, the Society of Women Musicians and women composers themselves. Chamber works for a variety of instrumental combinations by six composers, Adela Maddison (1866-1929), Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), Morfydd Owen (1891-1918), Ethel Barns (1880-1948), Alice Verne-Bredt (1868-1958) and Susan Spain-Dunk (1880-1962) (all at different stages in their compositional careers at this time) are analysed. This is undertaken particularly with reference to their formal procedures, an issue much discussed by contemporary sources. The individual composers’ reactions (or lack of them) to the debate instigated by the Society of Women Musicians on the future of women’s music is considered in relation to their lives, careers and chamber music itself. As the composers in this study were not a cohesive group, creatively or ideologically, the dissertation draws on primary sources, especially the archives of the Society of Women Musicians and Marion Scott, as well as the writings of contemporary commentators, to assess the legacy of the chamber works produced.