Melanie Lowe

Colliding Feminisms: Britney Spears, “Tweens,” and the Politics of Reception

Video-games, cartoon violence, and “shoot-em-up” action movies provoke school shootings. Ever-shrinking supermodels and actors encourage eating disorders. Heavy metal music lures boys to Satanism and suicide. Hollywood teaches girls passivity and submission. Or so we learn on the nightly news. Scores of studies that seem to support an influence of media content on audience beliefs and behavior drive our ever-current “blame-the-media” political climate. These high-profile studies, many of them policy oriented, typically conclude that the social wellbeing of a particular group is endangered by the frequent depiction of violence, sex, sexism, racism, consumerism, and even light “PG” violence or sexual innuendo. Concerning body image and the health of women and girls, effects researchers tend to concentrate most intensely on the role that advertising, fashion magazines, and celebrities—actors and supermodels in particular—play in shaping female body perception. Feminist writing, particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s, often argues that images of women in subordinate, passive, or even nontechnologically savvy roles encourage societal adherence to patriarchal notions of femininity. The popular press itself, typically the perpetrator in media crimes, now frequently toes the line. The cover of the February 14, 2000 People Weekly, for example, reads: “Pop princess Britney Spears: Too sexy too soon? Little girls love her, but her image makes some moms nervous.” The message is loud and clear: Mom, be nervous; be very, very nervous. Much recent academic literature in communications studies, however, challenges the direct influence of media content suggested by mainstream effects research. Connections between what an audience takes in and how it thinks and behaves are complex, ambiguous, and highly dependent on individual identity, family and peer groups, and social relationships. Postfeminist criticism likewise questions a cause-and-effect approach, particularly the images-of-women theorizing that dominated second-wave feminism. No longer do we assume an unproblematic relationship between image and audience, one in which the text clearly transmits meaning and the viewer easily decodes it. Taking cues from literary criticism, academic writers about film, comic books, literature, soap operas, professional wrestling—in short, nearly any and all artifacts of popular culture— increasingly understand meaning not as something intrinsic to a text but rather realized and performed by an audience. Meaning is constantly negotiated and highly dependent on context of consumption and identity of consumer. In this qualitative study of early adolescent girls and their complex relationship to singer Britney Spears, I engage this audience not as passive recipients of questionable material but as active agents in the creation of their own culture. The

The Century of Bach and Mozart: Perspectives on Historiography, Composition, Theory, and Performance (review)

credits Vivaldi with the use of harmonic extensions to call attention to specific texts in his sacred vocal works. That he often avoided (by a variety of different means) returning to the tonic except at the end of a movement is a point made repeatedly. (This is not surprising; it became a hallmark of later music.) Some of Vivaldi’s earliest works employ crude harmonic plans incorporating preparations for one key that resolve (unexpectedly) to a different key, for example, the brief Adagio with a cadence to a dominant on E (minor except for the final tierce de Picardie alteration), leading to a Sarabande in C major in the Trio Sonata op. 1, no. 3. This does not necessarily refute her point, however, because the opus was published in 1705 but was probably composed prior to Vivaldi’s acquaintance with Gasparini and at least three years ahead of Gasparini’s treatise. Also, she finds that in his approach to the sonata, Vivaldi often establishes three tonal areas, even in binary movements, and that the order of key regions he passes through is not always predictable. A series of individual chapters examines Vivaldi’s harmonic practice in relation to specific musical devices. The lament bass, for example, is said to produce “equilibrium” between the pursuit of new (musical) goals and the “consolidation of tonal centers” (p. 156). Its use is heavily concentrated in the earlier part of Vivaldi’s life (up to 1717). In the harmonic treatment of sequence, Brover-Lubovsky finds an apt application of Eric Chafe’s “counter-clockwise” circle of fifths—that is, sequences that move from subdominant to subdominant instead of dominant to dominant. Here, she holds, Gasparini’s influence is apparent. Heinichen’s influence comes into view in the use of secondary dominant sevenths (as for example the A and G in the sequence Bb-F-A-E-G-D . . . ; p. 183). Vivaldi also at times tightens the C by moving up by fourths or down by thirds (as in the aforementioned Trio Sonata). Contrary to the dismissive view that Vivaldi’s cyclical modulations are trite, she claims that they are important contributors to the “whirl pool” of dramatic effects through which he produces a sense of climax. A noteworthy sidelight is the attention she gives to Heinichen’s shifting views of modulation between 1711 and 1728 (p. 227). She views the subject of harmonic function by degree with fresh eyes, noting the occasional absence of a strong concentration on the dominant (e.g., in the Lauda Jerusalem, RV 609); the de-emphasis of the dominant, so that although it is present, it recedes to the background; an occasional concentration on the subdominant; an emphasis on the key of the mediant in works in a minor key (one-third of the repertory); and several other tonal plans that show little kinship to the textbook conduct of “tonal music.” She holds that tonal structure is somewhat dependent on key choice (pp. 257–62). Her summary statement (p. 276) is that in Vivaldi’s music she finds an “intricate quality [to] his tonal space and harmonic syntax.” Throughout, Brover-Lubovsky presents Vivaldi as someone who found his own way through the harmonic labyrinth by exploring every byway but somehow always finding his way out at the other side. She notes how frequently Vivaldi defied what is now the conventional wisdom of theories of harmony by favoring minor modes disproportionately to his contemporaries; by avoiding the tonic except in a final cadence; by employing a variety of “circles” in his modulatory schemes; by thinking outside the box of simple binary (tonic-dominant; majorrelative minor) contrasts; and by adapting his practice to the needs of its message. While it is unlikely that readers will agree with every claim she makes, the book is a monument to the variegated “tonal space” that existed before the formal study of “harmony” became a staple of composers’ lives.

The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (review)

will appeal even to beginners, who will especially appreciate the latter’s carefully voiced examples. This chapter also includes a good selection of short French pieces for practice and study. For chapter 2, on the German style, Christensen adopts a slightly different approach, casting Heinichen as tutor-in-chief with Telemann providing the occasional realized example. The progression of topics, from the simplest chords through the most complex inversions, is similar to that in the French chapter, but there are enough interesting differences of opinion to warrant separate treatment. Heinichen has more to say than the French sources on some of the less evident aspects of continuo playing, for example, on passing notes and repeated chords, which Christensen wisely includes. Appended to this chapter are a dozen short Telemann arias with the composer’s own realizations, in addition to figured instrumental examples for practice from Telemann, Andreas Kirchhoff, and Johann Sebastian Bach. Italian continuo playing, which in Christensen’s view “was taught unsystematically,” is largely ignored, though the author notes that his suggestions for the “advanced German style” are equally applicable to Italian music of the same era (p. 7). And indeed, in a recent essay on continuo practice in Arcangelo Corelli, Lars Ulrik Mortensen makes a few of the same suggestions as Christensen, for example the observations that chords may be struck occasionally over rests in the bass and that fugal entries in the upper parts should be doubled in the continuo (Lars Ulrik Mortensen, “ ‘Unerringly tasteful’?: Harpsichord Continuo in Corelli’s Op. 5 Sonatas,” Early Music 24 [1996]: 665–79). In general, Italian witnesses to late-baroque continuo playing describe a more linear and more improvisatory practice than generally obtained north of the Alps. Christensen is clearly familiar with this manner of playing, but he does not spend much time explaining it here. Serious students of Italian continuo playing will want to keep handy Tharald Borgir’s excellent study, The Performance of the Basso Continuo in Italian Baroque Music (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987). It is more of a pity that the final chapter, on “other essential aspects of figured bass playing,” is so brief. Knowing how to realize chords properly is of course the most important thing but it is hardly everything one needs to know in good continuo playing. Some sense of style—whether it be elaborate embellishment or simply knowing when to play less and when to play more—is crucial. Alas, Christensen dispenses only general advice on the “niceties of the accompaniment” (Arnold’s fetching formulation), leaving the reader to absorb what she can from a handful of progressively more complex realizations. Such obeisance to historical authority makes sense in the earlier chapters but here it wears a bit thin. The examples from Georg Muffat, Heinichen, Telemann, and others are well chosen, but by their very nature as sources that fix notes and rhythms onto the page, such examples also inhibit the very creativity they are meant to engender. Layout, particularly of the many musical examples, is first-rate, although one might object to the cavalier treatment of texts in the vocal excerpts. The Telemann arias, shorn of their German texts, are given with translations only, and the occasional examples of recitative are inconsistently texted. Pages 139–40, for example, contain a translation and the music for a Telemann recitative, but no underlay of the German words, while page 61 presents a Boismortier recitative, this time with the French text underlaid but no translation. If sensitive accompaniment of recitatives means paying careful attention to the words, then why not supply everything one needs? The only other production problem I noticed is on page 134, where some musical examples from Muffat seem to be missing. These small caveats notwithstanding, this is an instructive and illuminating book, one which belongs on the music rack of even experienced continuo players. It should find a grateful audience among both teachers and practitioners of the art.