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Abstract

As a dicispline music education is tone deaf -- it does not know how to sing feminist, it refuses to hear the symphonic chorus murmuring beneath the surface. This chapter illustrates the difficulty of speaking directly to the very issues promlematic to gender and music education. In this way, it is not unlike the "Gender Enriches Curriculum" non-conference described in this book's introduction, where White lesbians and heterosexual women of color raised the politics of speaking directly, of who speaks and in what context. Just as I was both participant in and critic of what began as "Gender Enriches Curriculum", I am at once a participant and feminist critic of music education (making me both tone deaf and a symphonic singer). This doubled position focuses my interest on finding the means for artistry, reserach, and pedagogy to be interal to musical sense-making in ways that consider the varied realities of students, teachers, and musicians in those contested sites where music is made. As was evident at the nonconference, this is a very real struggle. "Tone Deaf/Symphonies Singing" does not utilizes a linear argument because to do so would misrepresent and oversimplify the gender question in music, since neither mmusic nor gender is linear. Like the oversimplified but pleasant commerical jingles that numb the creative mind, easy answers to complez pedagogical and political questions do not suffice. Although there are innumerable patterns in which this text on gender and music curricula can be read -- because it is not linear -- the textual motives have been assembled here in a particular order because that is necessary for a book; therefore, you will read my specific version from a particular time, a particular political act.

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