Susan McClary on Beethoven's 9th or A Clockwork Orange RAW

For instance, Susan McClary has found Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony a musical hymn to rape, which will no doubt surprise all those with less androphobic ears, who hear something quite different in it, something of cosmic grandeur. Says McClary, “The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music… which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist…” Sounds almost as bad as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, doesn’t it?

Although I write a lot of satire, I didn’t make this up. You can find McClary’s analysis in Minnesota Composers’ Forum Newsletter, January 1987. She also doesn’t like Western classic music in general, because of its “phallic violence” and “pelvic pounding.”

I insist I did not invent McClary or any of her ravings. Honest to God. Some Femigogues just happen to sound like satire when you quote them verbatim. As for the female masterpieces set against old Ludwig, they only appear inferior, the Feminist revisionists say, because all of us have had our perceptions warped by the “patriarchal brainwashing” of our “phallocentric” culture. (“All of us” includies many female art critics, like Camille Paglia, who angrily claims this argument has crossed the line to an idiot caricature of Feminism) Maybe we all need a long de-programming at a Feminist re-education camp. Then we will realize that Hildegarde of Bingen not only outclassed Beethoven but wrote more first-rate music than Mozart, Bach and Scott Joplin together, and without any rape fantasies creeping in.

She goes on to conclude that "The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment" (129). 

McClary suggests that sonata form may be interpreted as sexist ormisogynistic and imperialistic, and that, "tonality itself - with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax - is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire." 

"What is remarkable about this movement is that Schubert conceives of and executes a musical narrative that does not enact the more standard model in which a self strives to define identity through the consolidation of ego boundaries...in a Beethovian world such a passage would sound vulnerable, its tonal identity not safely anchored; and its ambiguity would probably precipitate a crisis, thereby justifying the violence needed to put things right again."