I AM NOT A MUSE
Juliet Fraser

I AM NOT A MUSE.

Silent. Passive. In service of another's creativity.

I AM NOT A MUSE.

A woman. A body. Animated only by the male gaze.

No. There is too much baggage here. From the nine goddesses of the Greeks, Dante's chaste infatuation with Beatrice or the self-mythology of Gala-Dalí, since time immemorial the artist-muse relationship has been gendered and wildly unequal. As Germaine Greer wrote,

'The muse in her purest aspect is the feminine part of the male artist, with which he must have intercourse if he is to bring into being a new work. She is the anima to his animus, the yin to his yang, except that, in a reversal of gender roles, she penetrates or inspires him and he gestates and brings forth, from the womb of the mind.'1

She doesn't mean literal intercourse, incidentally; rather, a psychic penetration. But after the creative act, how do we find our couple? He lies back to admire his seminal new work and she is, what? Flexing an aching wrist?

Second-wave feminists did sterling work challenging the metaphor of the muse, and along with it many other dreadful archetypes. In her essay 'The Re-Vision of the Muse', looking specifically at the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn and Olga Broumas, Mary J. Carruthers observes that:

'Poetic tradition has not given women a language in which they can readily imagine their lives with integrity and completeness. From muse to mother to mistress, women in poetry supply what is missing to men. They are the Other term in the universal dichotomy of oppositions between which the male universe swings.'2

How to escape this dichotomy? How to create a new language? For many female artists, the solution has been to annex the metaphor rather than abandon it, to become both muse and midwife to their own creative practices. As the feminist art historian Josephine Withers said of Lynda Benglis, 'No longer a handmaiden, mistress, or model, she has become her own inspiration and her own muse.'3

There is, however, a difference between the artist-muse relationship in visual arts or poetry and the artist-muse relationship between say, a choreographer and a dancer or a composer and a performer. A muse inspiring a painting or a poem is not required for the transmission of the finished art work: it exists, and the audience observes it. If I am a muse inspiring a composer with. my voice, I suppose. at what point in the process do I shift into the role of the performer? When does the passive role become active? And if my role is in fact active from the beginning, am I not simply being an appropriately engaged performer? Why call me a muse? Is it a compliment?

It's the sense of being boxed in that rankles. Muses are, at best, celebrated for having inspired someone else's creative output. (Take, for example, Alice Liddell who, at the age of 80, received an honorary doctorate for having inspired, when she was 10 years old and under pretty dodgy circumstances, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland). Rare are the instances of a muse who blooms into an artist in their own right.

In a recent email exchange, I asked Joan La Barbara what the word 'muse' meant to her. Her reply illustrates perfectly this straitjacketing:

'Ah yes, being the 'muse' has its advantages and drawbacks. The primary problem - or quandary - is whether one stays in that category or reaches out and tries one's hand at putting one's own ideas out there in the arena, calling oneself a 'composer'. I did get hit with a few barbs when I began composing. Milton Babbitt, for instance, famously never called me a composer, rather preferring to use the term 'performance artist' indicating that it was somehow a lesser category and did not rise to the heights of being a 'real' composer.'4

This may be your basic misogyny at work, but it is notoriously hard to escape the role of the muse; to cross over from muse to artist is somehow to transgress.

To be clear, no composer has ever referred to me publicly as their muse. This is a role foisted on me by third-party observers and it troubles me precisely because it fortifies the worst assumptions about the composerperformer relationship: it reinforces a tedious gender norm and a tired hierarchy that diminishes the agency of the performer. (Arguably, it therefore also diminishes the street cred of the composer!) Currently this archetype most often appears in conversation about my work with Rebecca Saunders. Is it because we're both women that people dare to give the word air? Does the word become any less problematic in that context? I suspect that Rebecca would shudder at its use for she is equally rigorous about getting to know the playing and the personality of every performer with whom she works. It is surely sound, above all, that is her muse, never a person.

The old binaries are falling away and we spend a lot of time within our musical communities discussing, and practising, messier, blurrier ways of making and working together. We are generally adept at interrogating the embedded tropes and hierarchies that no longer serve or adequately reflect our creative relationships, so why does this one persist? Does anything I have said so far surprise anyone? Do we not already know that to cast someone in the role of the muse is problematic? Perhaps it is just one more sign that classical music, certainly, and new music too, regrettably, are still working to shrug off the language of the past.

Language is a power tool: it conveys, bestows or denies power. For example, we are doing much positive dismantling of the old fixed hierarchies when we use terms such as 'co-composition' or 'collaboration' with precision. On the other hand, I would be reinforcing tiresome and inaccurate hierarchies were I to refer to Mark Knoop as 'my accompanist'. To cast someone in the role of the muse is to confer upon them the full burdensome imprint of this archetype.

Greer distinguishes between the muse and the subject. This is terminology I can get behind. A subject (rather than an object) is seen for what it is; indeed, it may be studied to be understood, its individual traits carefully examined and revisited over time. There is a slow craft at work, which implies commitment and respect. If somebody writes a piece of music for me, of course I am, in some way, 'the inspiration'. I am completely comfortable with the idea of inspiring work - that is a beautiful thing to me, and anyway a thing that I cannot control - but I do not want to be objectified or mythologised. It's the twenty-first century and I am a feminist: THE MUSE IS DEAD. (In fact, I thought Arlene Croce had killed her off in 19965, but maybe it'll take nine swipes to terminate this Gorgon.)

I AM NOT A DIVA.

Is this not simply the 'whore' archetype in disguise? The diva is expected to role-play, that's for sure; a sexual advance is all too often hovering behind the handshake or the invitation to dinner, and money isn't far behind in some people's transactional mindsets. A diva is expected to be demanding, difficult and over-emotional. (Obviously she only gets away with that behaviour if she is also considered beautiful and/or sexy.) The diva is the method actor of the opera world: the role doesn't stop when you come off stage; it's relentless. It is also archaic: it is born of the intensely hierarchical and patriarchal structures of 19th-century opera. But since so many of those structures unfortunately persist in opera today, a feminist defence of the modern-day diva could hold water: sometimes making demands before one arrives or stamping one's foot during rehearsals is the only way to avoid an intolerable or inequitable working environment.

Maria Callas remains a diva icon, one of the few prima donnas to be cursed with global celebrity, to carry social and cultural capital in equal measure. According to Vlado Kotnik,

'Callas was a muse, but a misused one, overtaken by the fantasies of directors who, through her, were at once renewing opera and criticising it. The masochist in her - unsure of her own power and longing for protective guidance - consented to the exploitation.'6

I wonder what she would say about that; it's pretty loaded language.

One imagines a diva as having quite a bit of power, but perhaps there isn't all that much room to manoeuvre at the top of a pedestal. If I were to become a diva, I'd be taking my cue from Giuditta Pasta. Listen to the contract she signed with King's Theatre in London in 1826:

'In all the operas in which Madame Pasta will perform, she alone will have the choice of the actors and the distribution of the roles, the absolute direction for all that regards the rehearsals and all that concerns the mise en scene of the said operas. No one will have the right to intervene in rehearsals, nor to meddle in anything concerning the performance of those operas.'7

She transcended the diva. She was THE BOSS!

So, we need a fresh campaign to kill the muse but apparently it's nothing new to kill off the diva. As Catherine Clément says:

'Humiliated, hunted, driven mad, burnt alive, stabbed, committing suicide - Violetta, Sieglinde, Lucia, Brünnhilde, Aida, Norma, Mélisande, Liù, Butterfly, Isolde, Lulu, and so many others. All sopranos, and all dead.'8

ENTER THE WITCH

I've decided I want to be a witch. I realised with some horror that...