[Smt-talk] Gender Terminology in Music Theory

[JAY RAHN]

In French versification theory ca. 1500, the end of a line is either feminine or masculine depending on whether the second last syllable or the last syllable is accented. In French, a grammatically masculine word might or might not refer to something that is semantically gendered masculine and a grammatically feminine word might or might not refer to something that is semantically gendered as feminine. 

In aristocratic chansons of the time, a cadence at the end of both kinds of line generally proceeds from a weaker to a stronger part of the measure . However, often in songs that are idiomatically most similar to subsequent chansons populaires (e.g., Faisons bonne chere), a line with a feminine ending proceeds from a stronger to a weaker part of the musical metre. 

Does anyone know whether, and if so, how and when, the phonological/prosodic terms were adopted to deal with musical metre and phrase structure?

Jay Rahn, York University       
On Tuesday, April 29, 2014 5:47:23 PM, Michael Morse <mwmorse at bell.net> wrote:
 
Like "sexist," the attributions "masculine" and "feminine" are ascriptive, not descriptive. Adjectives have no direct prescriptive power in reality, despite their undeniable if merely occasional affective influence; that matter was sorted out in 1324 by William of Ockham. Today, 1991 is every bit as much ancient history as 1324.
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>MW Morse
>z. Zeit freier Kunstler
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>> From: Jennifer.Bain at Dal.Ca
>> So to refer to a cadence that ends on a strong metric position as
>> masculine and one that ends on a weak metric position as feminine is not
>> sexist...? Didn't we sort this out in 1991?
>> 
>> Jennifer
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