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Music and Gender. Pirkko Moisala and Beverly Diamond, eds. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 376 pp.
Music and Gender provides a mixed bag of delights, insights, and provocations. It is composed as a collection of 14 chapters, divided into four parts: "Music Performance and Performativity," "Telling Lives," "Gendered Musical Sites in the Redefinition of Nations," and "Technologies in Gendered Motion." Each section is preceded by a short introduction by the editors, who also provide an informative general introduction. There is an epilogue by Marcia Herndon (who died in 1997) entitled "The Place of Gender within Complex, Dynamic Musical Systems" and a foreword by Ellen Koskoff.
The chapters in Music and Gender cover an incredibly wide range of topics and parts of the world, yet, the broad common thread, music and gender, is not lost on the diversity of topics or locations of study. There are, however, clear differences in perspective, including the way the concept of "gender" is interpreted, the role of ideology in the analysis, or "the position" of the researcher or writer in relation to the subject matter. Koskoff places these differences in perspective in a positive light in her foreword:
Music and Gender is perhaps the first ethnomusicalogical collection to combine a...