Feminist Scream Singing

[GraysAnalogy]

m.youtube.com/watch?v=OzsGmdmhDTI

So erm... What do you think?

And why have they got music sheets like is there any need

Sorry, couldn't deal with the assault on my ears longer than halfway through. Just no.

The fuck is feminist about that?

I have no idea

More info www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/dec/02/feminism-ontroerend-goed-sirens-soho-theatre

I just don't understand. I'm trying to, I really am.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=rbs7q5E5mHE

When you get to 2 minutes you will laugh or your jaw will drop

Jeez Grays…that should have come with a health warning….

It might make more sense if you saw the entire show. It's 3 minutes of snippets, not in sequence, from an hour long show. From those snippets and the review, or rather the comments on the review it seemed to be Trying Very Hard To Make Obvious Points for an audience who probably had already thought of them and agrees anyway.

It's an Edinburgh Fringe show, not one I saw and not a theatre group I'm likely to track down if they are here this year.

It got 4 stars from The Guardian but a 4 star review from any of the newspapers who cover the Fringe means nothing. The Skinny and locally published listings mags are far more reliable.

That snippet wasn't as bad as other shows I've seen. Parts of the atonal noises were quite interesting. I actually liked the singing at the miming of the handjob part. I have definitely seen worse but it's obligatory to see something appalling every year.

No 20th/21st century music aficionados here, huh? I realise this sounds, erm, unfamiliar, but it's actually quite typical for the genre. Just for context, this happened nearly 60 years ago.
Warning - elitist academic wank to follow: it's definitely not mainstream discourse, but there has been a lot of research in feminist musicology and psychoanalysis on the way the female voice is used and portrayed in western classical music, especially on the preponderance of vocalise (wordless singing) in parts written for female singers, eg. coloratura, female vocalise choruses in works by Debussy, say, or Ligeti, or Berio (see "The Great Gig in the Sky for a modern, non-classical example). This is often tied in with a fundamental dichotomy between the voice (corporeal, natural and therefore female, the mother's voice, Kristeva's concept of the chora etc.) and language (Derrida's phallogocentrism, Lacan's nom-de-père). So this does have a background in feminist discourse, albeit rather a niche discourse. The other point would be the characterisation of sirens, the most famous, if not the oldest female singers in western literature, as deadly seductresses. The sirens do not make music in the Apollinian sense, they are not artists, they sing for men and they sing to kill. Combine that with the conspicuous dearth of female composers in Western classical music, and you've got yourself a whole field of feminist analysis.

I'll shut up now.

or Ligeti, or Berio (see "The Great Gig in the Sky for a modern, non-classical example)

Yes indeed, it is. And I can see the connection from coloratura as well. I was expecting it to be dreadful from the descriptions but I agree it was familiar and I quite liked it.

The only contemporary composer I can think of instantly is Sally Beamish.

To my shame, I've only really know a couple of Beamish' concertos (which gave off a strong Shostakovich vibe to me - not that there's anything wrong with that!) but she has written a couple of operas as well, is that right? I think Sofia Gubaidulina is one of the very few contemporary female composers consistently featured as "just a composer" instead of "women in music", but I could be wrong. Personally, I'm a big fan of the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth - I saw her American Lulu last year and her "Bählamms Fest" (libretto by Elfriede Jelinek, based on Leonora Carrington's "The Baa-Lamb's Holiday") is absolutely brilliant.