Conference Agenda

Sound carries semiotic and social meanings, including sonic symbols that reinforce coercion and harm. In popular music, music invites, enforces, and evokes gender-based violence through coercive actions, trauma-triggers, and representational oppression (Chung 2020). In this paper, I explore how vocal sound symbolizes gender-based violence (GBV) and discrimination in modern Japan, as circulated through popular media culture and Japanese popular music (J-pop). Music becomes a vehicle for psychological and emotional abuse, reinforcing oppression, discrimination, coercion, and harassment under the framework of gender hegemony. Expanding on feminist approaches to vocal timbre (Heidemann 2016, Malawey 2020), I propose a listener-based model to examine the perception of affect in vocal timbre analysis.

In J-pop, misogyny is reinforced by a hyperfeminized vocal norm circulated in idol pop. With its high-sounding, sweet, nasal tone, the “kawaii” [cute] voice functions as a sonic representation of idealized girlhood under the male gaze. In female idol group AKB48’s “Heavy Rotation” (2010), members sing in unison with their “kawaii” voice, reinforcing a fetishized and objectified image of girlhood in both their sound and music video. Female artists resist to this sonic misogyny through transgressive vocal timbres—voices marked by rough, coarse, and grainy textures—a sonic form of resistance against gender hegemony. In singer-songwriter Sheena Ringo’s “Tsumi to batsu” [crime and punishment] (2000), she presents a distinctive high-energy voice using highly tensed phonation. Her vocal timbre embodies “shibui” [astringent], challenges the expectation of a polished, hyperfeminine vocal ideal. Sheena’s thick, grainy, and melismatic voice becomes a sonic symbol of resistance and empowerment for Japanese female artists who exist outside the expectations of feminine norms.

This paper concludes that vocal sound can perpetuate violence even when it appears “pleasant” or materially non-violent. Vocal sound produces violence through both its physical properties—amplitude, loudness, or vibration—and its affective and symbolic meanings.

In this paper, I present an analysis of David Lang’s Just (After Song of Songs), a 2014 work for vocal trio (SSA), viola, cello, and percussion. This work takes its text from the biblical Song of Songs, an ancient erotic dialogue between two (heterosexual) lovers. Despite its passionate source material, Just is written in a reserved, minimalist style with highly controlled and unchanging compositional processes.

Lang takes the erotic content of the Song of Songs and filters it to a text of attributes that are ascribed to the lovers. He then creates musical and textual oppositions so that the speaker of the text, the man or the woman, is clear. For instance, Lang precedes each attribute in the text with “just your” if spoken by the man (“just your love”) or “and my” if spoken by the woman (“and my love”). Additionally, the vocal parts set the text in one of two inversionally-related ways—a descending line for the man or an ascending one for the woman. As such, a musical gender binary emerges and acts as a central force in Lang’s composition of the work.

My analysis of the compositional processes and the work's relationship to the Song of Songs shows that, for a large part of the work, the gender of the speaker and the corresponding music are mismatched. I incorporate these mismatches with my analysis of the compositional processes and consideration of the performers’ embodiment to read this work as a site for the possibility of the emergence of a transfeminine subject.

Throughout this paper, I draw inspiration from scholarship on music and gender (Sofer 2022, Duguay 2024, Baitz 2022, Pennington 2022), writings by trans authors (Chu 2019, Stryker 1994), and my own transsexual experience to contemplate the politics of gender construction within composition and analysis.

One of many cultural myths in the Soviet Union was the myth of gender equality—that women had the same social standing and working expectations as men. However, the opposing forces of the belief behind this myth and sociocultural reality created a phenomenon known as the double burden: the expectation of both “gender equal” professional work and “womanly” domestic work. For women composers, the double burden formed through the expectation of keeping up with current trends and doctrines while composing music that was considered “socially acceptable” for a woman to write. Drawing from and building upon methodologies by Ellie Hisama, humanist scholar Joanna Kot, and literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, my presentation argues that the adherence to and deviations from gendered genre expectations with regard to form in the first movement of Varvara Gaigerova’s Suite for Viola and Piano demonstrates a notable musical response to gendered sociocultural expectations.

Within the context at the time of composition, the first movement of the Suite for Viola and Piano expresses the double burden through gendered and non-gendered genre expectations, primarily by overlapping features of the more “masculine” sonata form and more “feminine” binary form. Both forms are identifiable with supporting characteristics throughout the work. However, phrase proportions, rhythm, phrase endings, and omitted material within these larger formal structures reveal “fissures”—small, unexpected elements or changes—that eventually expand to “fractures”—more overt, large deviations. In either case, Russian literary formalism provides a description of the contrasting, but in some ways simultaneous, readings: the overall structure (fabula) is familiar, but the navigation through it (syuzhet) creates a different perception. The resulting analysis expands to through the perspective of the piece’s greater context, demonstrating a musical double burden and encouraging consideration of what was acceptable for Gaigerova as an “equal” working composer.

In 1969, Jean and June Millington, two Filipina-American sisters, founded the band Fanny, the first all-female rock group signed to a major record label. From 1970–1974, they released five major albums, charted four Billboard hits, played their own instruments, and wrote their own songs. Fanny opened the door for subsequent women in rock; all-female groups that followed—the Bangles, Runaways, and Go-Go’s—all cite Fanny as a significant influence (Hart & Hart 2023, Danton 2018). David Bowie praised them as “one of the finest fucking rock bands of their time”(Danton 2018). The band folded in 1974 after persistent battles with sexism and racism in the music industry (Lola 2023, Byrne 2018). Despite their success and historical influence, Fanny has been largely forgotten with little or no recognition in history and theory texts or anthologies.

This paper aims to expand the rock canon by highlighting five Fanny songs that provide excellent teaching examples for core undergraduate theory and aural skills topics, including 12-bar blues, secondary dominants, chromatic mediants, song forms, and chord dictation. However, one practical barrier to teaching popular music by marginalized artists is access: sheet music and chord charts are often unavailable to browse or quickly adapt for classroom use. While MuseScore hosts over 22,000 official Beatles scores, none exist for Fanny. Online chord charts are similarly scarce, limiting both instructor preparation and student exploration—especially for non-majors or students with limited transcription experience.

The second objective demonstrates how free, publicly available, AI tools—including stem splitters and chord recognition tools—can be leveraged to create teaching materials, facilitate classroom exploration, and break down barriers for exploring marginalized artists’ music. Using Fanny as a case study, I provide a step-by-step guide for implementing these tools and share concrete teaching examples that can be adapted for use in core theory and aural skills courses.

The brass quintet is a heavily male–dominated genre; its performers and composers are disproportionately male, even when compared to the predominantly male world of Western art music. Due to the presumed masculinity of this genre, female performers and composers are expected to adhere to a standard of maleness. Female brass performers have few options when programming quintets by female composers; among these few is Joan Tower’s Copperwave. While Tower’s music has been studied using traditional post-tonal analytical techniques, her music has not been studied from a feminist perspective. In this paper, I investigate Joan Tower’s compositional approach to a male–dominated genre in Copperwave, considering texture, motivic transformation, and instrumentation with respect to the genre’s norms. This analysis is informed by Marian Kielian–Gilbert’s concept of positionality (Kielian–Gilbert 1994), Suzanne Cusick and Judy Lochhead’s analyses of gender(-ed) performance in chamber music (Cusick 1994) (Lochhead, 2023), and finally Ellie Hisama’s discussions of gender in the works of modernist female composers (Hisama 2001). I also consider my own personal experiences as a female brass player in addition to testimonies from female brass players who have performed the piece, who I reached through the Facebook group “Female / Trans / Non Binary Brass Players.” I do this in hopes of illuminating the unique ways in which Tower roots her compositional output within her gender identity and how performers interpret those decisions. With this research, I aim to encourage further study, particularly through a feminist lens, of brass chamber music and prompt further discussion of performance practice and gender identity within male–dominated genres.