Even the great composer’s incomparable Ninth Symphony can be the object of mad feminist ravings in academe. In the Wall Street Journal, Stuart Isacoff describes:
a new breed of musicologist who sees the organizing principle of Western art music — its reliance on the gravitational pull of tonal centers, and the artful control of musical tension and resolution — as a direct reflection of the male libido and its primal urge toward domination. One of the leading figures of this school of thought, Susan McClary, found in the opening movement of Beethoven’s masterpiece the “murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release” . . . this sociological approach to musical analysis . . . thrives today on many college campuses, where scholarly rigor often takes a back seat to freakish conjecture — especially when this serves the ideological goal of reducing great works to the mere tinkerings of “dead white men.” (The irony, of course, is that cultures producing music free of those tonal principles — the presumptive ideal — generally turn out to be the most historically oppressive to women.)
But not to fret; as Isacoff writes, “Beethoven will survive.”
Hat tip: ADAGIO.