ABSTRACT
Feminist scholarship in music has been much slower to develop than feminist scholarship in other disciplines. The 'new' musicology is introducing different ways of thinking about music which acknowledge the body as an important agent and participant in the musical experience. Attention is now increasingly focused on the pleasurable, sensuous and even sexual nature of music. The human body to which women in Western culture are tied is analogous in physicality to music. The auditory world of music, construed as feminine because of its association with bodily functions, has been positioned as language's 'other' because it cannot mean precisely what it means and exists only in temporal space. The identity of the body with music and of music, in turn, with the feminised other is set up along similar lines to the rigidly dichotomised mind/body split which valorises the mind. Music as a physical presence has been largely ignored in theoretical discourses on Western art music.
