ABSTRACT

Nearly 20 years ago, a senior scholar of the European musics we then called “Renaissance” advised me (in the friendliest possible way) against trying to be both a scholar of early music and a feminist. To combine early music scholarship with scholarship about gender and sexuality would amount to professional suicide, he suggested, for I would become a living category error: unrecognizable to institutional musicology, I would be unwelcome within it, unpublishable and unemployable. I received his remarks with the combination of outward pleasantness and inner rage to which women of my generation were trained. Outwardly I smiled a bit frostily; inwardly I raged, I burned. For my mentor's advice tapped a spring of pure fury that fueled my determination to someday prove him wrong. Ungrateful for his warning, unwelcoming of the interlocking institutions of heterosexual decorum from within which it had come, in my heart I donned the silvery black garb of Monteverdi's ingrate. Clad in ashen veils, my heart and my intellect began the dance of cold fury my culture assigned to women who refuse the advice and patronage of powerful men. Dancing toward an underworld of politicized musicality and scholarship, intellectual disobedience, and freely chosen marginality that my mentor had meant to define as a professional hell, I discovered an underworld filled with people of my ilk.