ABSTRACT
The consumption of music has to be understood in light of several interlocking, mutually mediating but inevitably dialectical and different ways of defining this category of human activity. To begin first with the obvious, "music" constitutes certain phenomena experienced as sound via the sense of hearing; and second, speaking of western high culture, "music" refers to notated "instructions" for producing such sounds. Third, and here the story becomes more complex, music is a sight, and as a visual phenomenon it is richly semantic. It is a sight in performance, thus specifically seen as an embodied and humanly interactive, hence social, practice (except when performed for the self and outside the audition of others). It is an activity subject to the gaze, not least because music was theorized, both as social practice and sonority, as possessing sensual power. It was understood to act with dangerous immediacy on the
reason, to power, and to men. Put differently, in the texts to which I am referring musical practice as such - the actual making of music, the sonorities produced in performance - is consistently gendered: as Woman, as opposite, as enemy.
