McClary works mainly with 'masterpieces:' Carmen. There hasn't been a New Criticism in music studies. This has enabled the survival of large pieces of nineteenth century aesthetic theory in musicology and the philosophy of music. Without going into detail, I think it is easy to see how instrumental music can appear to be nonrepresentational, a type of pure abstraction detached from the social, in a way that literature and film, except maybe at their most experimental, cannot. This problem is recognized by all but the most conservative critics of McClary, and she and others have written about it at length (for example: McClary and Walser, McClary 1991: 3-34, Kerman). However, it is vital to acknowledge the backwardness of musicology with regard to cultural and feminist theory, especially in comparison to literary, film, and performance studies. Millet, Mulvey, and Showalter are hardly revolutionary figures in the `90s. In this way, McClary's work clearly draws on, and is comparable in importance to, Laura Mulvey's work on film and Elaine Showalter's 'gynocriticism.' McClary, like Millet, brought feminist concerns into a field accustomed to thinking of art as abstract and universal, insisting not only on the analysis of the representation of women in canonical works and the appreciation of women composers, but also on the gendered nature of the processes of musical signification themselves.

The impact of this book can perhaps be best compared to that of Kate Millet's Sexual Politics in the late `60s. In this essay, I will analyze the reception of Feminine Endings by examining the reviews it has received in the academic journals representing each of these fields. When it appeared in 1991, Susan McClary's book Feminine Endings had a profound impact on the study of music, both in musicology (which has traditionally concerned itself with the history and formal analysis of European classical music), and in those interdisciplinary fields which can include music among their objects of study: American Studies, Popular Culture, Cultural Studies, and Women's Studies. The Reception of Susan McClary's Feminine Endings

Mcclary feminine endings