Female sonorities: Theoretical inquiries on the feminine voice and the musical experience; a study of three women.

Patriarchal ideologies and attitudes have obscured, concealed, and devalued women’s music over centuries. However important or vital their engagement, women’s role in music has been submitted to a historical process of invisibility. Either as composers, patrons and teachers, women role in Music history is still going through a historical revisionism that aims to proclaim their historical place within the musical history. Regarding the significant efforts, women creative role in music it is still regarded as something different that deals with problematics of misrepresentation and notions of ‘otherness’. This problematic approach to women-in music raises many questions relevant to my own research and my own role within music. I seek an approach to the study of women in music as a history within which female education, gender power relations and domestication converge, raising issues of colonialism and gender empowering.
By looking at female musical bodies as recipients of memory, capable of multiple incarnations, I design an analytical model of the nuances and cultural and creative implications surrounding women’s music work. I aim for a model of female musical identity proceeding from a non-prejudice theoretical frame that considers the multiple bodies implicated in the creative process of female performers and artists. By looking at the multiple strategies and socio-cultural frames used by selected female musicians I developed a scholarly perspective which can examine the creative process to reveal context, content and intention.