Gendering in Music: An Autoethnographic-Phenomenological Tale

Abstract

Gendering in music in my autoethnographic-phenomenological tale is drawn heavily from my personal experiences highlighting music composition and performance, deciphering gender norms through musical utterances illuminated in my mother’s lullabies and my grandmother’s lamentations as musical rhetoric. While the foregoing forms part of my creative space, reflexivity borders the self as located within cultural praxis. Result of the study reveals that vignettes of my musical journey create socio-cultural representations rooted with phenomenological nuances that are magnified through entrainment and association, forming ideological patterns articulated through uniform and regular rhythmic pulse, for instance, as mirrored in the narratives of people’s common ideologies and struggles for emancipation that are illuminated in melodic kundiman songs, depicting gendering in music as a social-construct viewed from the lens of critical discourse. In conclusion, this tale foregrounds self-culture relationship and understanding where patterns of meanings utter gendered norms in musical tales affecting thoughts, emotions, and forming socio-cultural resonances and representations.