Abstract:The opening of Julia Wolfe’s Four Marys is striking for its highly visceral gestures. Wolfe reinforces the physicality of her work with her evocative tempo marking for the opening, “Breathing, think accordion”, and her program notes are also replete with images of breath and breathing. Wolfe’s references to breath and organicism lend Four Marys to a musical analysis that connects the work’s opening gestures to her attention to the embodiment of music through performance. Theoretical analyses that take into account the physicality of performance and considerations of body in composition open new avenues for feminist analyses of sexual difference in music.
In this paper, I consider the suitability of feminist theories of body and I draw upon music theorists that look to the body and subjectivity as analytical models for Wolfe’s opening of Four Marys. I also examine the viability and politics of theorizing the body as a location of musical difference. Finally, building on my discussion of this literature, I offer an analysis of the opening of Four Marys that prioritizes theories and observations of body, musical gesture and performance as analytical tools.
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