Recently, musicologists Linda Austern and Suzanne Cusick have examined the socio-cultural implications of gender issues in Renaissance music. Drawing on Cusick's research on gender-based binary oppositions in Italy and Austern's studies of women and music in England, I propose a related set of gender binary oppositions in English society. I apply these oppositions in detail to two specific works from the Elizabethan madrigal and lute song repertoire, then examine the remaining pieces from these collections as a whole and find that an overlap of four particular oppositions better captures the contradictory nature of the music. Examining pieces that fall into each category, I observe how the composer manipulates each to complicate the piece's gender character. I conclude that while binary oppositions grasp the artistic and political trends of an era, a closer look at the tensions at work between them provides a more nuanced view of the music's gender character.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.31094 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Campbell, Annette. |
| Contributors | Cumming, Julie (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Faculty of Music.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001811015, proquestno: MQ70274, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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