The figure of the siren has since classical times articulated relationships between sound, gender, and desire. Perhaps the most familiar examples are the sirens encountered by Ulysses/Odysseus during his journey home from the Trojan War, and the enduring popular culture figure of the mermaid. But the figure of the dangerous female whose power is embodied in the sound she creates is also found in manifold variations in many world cultures widely spread over space and time. This collection of papers on the theme of “music of the sirens” explores some of the many manifestations of the acoustically powerful female through twelve papers by authors from a variety of disciplines, framed by a introduction by the co-editors. The volume can thus be broadly seen as an interdisciplinary collaboration representing various approaches to the theme; the figure of the siren, whether a concrete depiction in a specific historical and geographical context or more broadly used as a fertile metaphor that opens up interpretive possibilities, ties the essays together.
The volume’s two editors, who in addition to their jointly authored introduction each have individual papers here as well, are respectively a musicologist and an ethnomusicologist. The other contributing authors come from a number of fields, primarily in the humanities, including classics, musicology, ethnomusicology, literature, and art history. Approaches in the various papers cover a diverse set of interpretive frames and methodologies ranging, to name just a few, from the literary-philological (Leofranc Holford-Strevens’s survey of classical language sources in “Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages”); a regional comparison of different ethnographic case studies (Henry John Drewal’s study of “Music for Mami Wata and Other Water Spirits in Africa,” with contributions by Charles Gore and Michelle Kisliuk); geographically focused historical-ethnographic studies (Henry Stobart’s re-interpretations of familiar [to Andeanist scholars] colonial-era iconographic sources and juxtaposition of this material with new data from his own fieldwork in highland Bolivia); interpretive psychoanalysis (Linda Phyllis Austern’s wide-ranging analysis of embodiments of acoustic pleasure and danger in various modern musical, literary, and iconographic sources); and critical readings of contemporary popular cultural texts (Thomasin LaMay and Robin Armstrong’s discussion of Mariah Carey, Shania Twain, and Lil’ Kim; Jeongwan Joe’s analysis of the cocktail siren figure in David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet).
As might be expected, the primary connective thread running through all the papers is the relationships between music, gender, desire, and power, with the connection between music and sexual attraction being an especially important theme. Several papers explore the implications of how it is the siren’s voice--emanating from an often hybrid, but always gendered, body--that makes her simultaneously desirable, powerful, and dangerous. The relation between the siren figure and water is another prominent theme, as is the inherently hybrid nature of the half human female-half animal form of sirens, both aquatic and terrestrial, in many cultures. Such sirens often mediate between different worlds or enact a transformation from one form to another, with their song or other acoustic expressions being the embodiment of their transformational power. While all the essays explore in one way or another the idea of the siren as acoustically powerful female, most of the authors do not necessarily find analysis of specific musical sounds to be necessary for their arguments. One exception is co-editor Inna Naroditskaya’s careful discussion (including musical score excerpts) of Russian composer Dargomyzhsky’s opera Rusalka, based on Pushkin’s drama of the same name. The relationship between the idea of the siren and ethnic or national identities is also a significant theme, as in Naroditskaya’s discussion of the use of the legendary rusalka figure in the creation of a Russian national mythology; in John Morgan O’Connell’s exploration of how a Greek singer known as “The Mermaid” in early Republican Turkey used the legend of the mermaid to negotiate her position as an ethnic minority within the new nation-state; and in Annegret Fauser’s account of the transformations of the Lorelei myth from its regional folkloric roots in the Rhine valley through literary versions into an important element--a “Teutonic icon”--in the forging of German national identity in the nineteenth century, culminating in the figures of the singing Rhine Maidens in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.
The editors seem to have given their authors free reign in regard to length in preparing their articles, and the papers in the volume range widely from around twenty pages to over fifty pages. Some of the longer papers could perhaps have benefited from being more focused on developing a concise argument, rather than spending so much space cataloging and citing so many examples. For readers interested in comparative research and in different representations of sirens over time from the classical period to today, however, the copious textual and iconographic examples cited and reproduced in those essays provide a wealth of information, and the generally careful scholarly apparatus of each essay allows interested readers to track down the original sources for further research.
Despite the diversity of approaches noted above, the collection is dominated as a whole by textual approaches to literary and iconographic sources, and so at first glance will perhaps seem more of interest to scholars in the humanities than those in the social sciences. But researchers in the area of music and gender, no matter their disciplinary allegiance, will find something of use here. The papers collectively constitute a multi-faceted meditation on the connections between sexual and aural allure, exploring as they do the many transformations of what is, given the wide temporal and geographical scope, arguably an archetype embodying primordial relationships between sound and desire. The editors are to be applauded for bringing together in such a coherent fashion in one volume essays exploring such widely divergent empirical material as classical Greek texts, nineteenth century Russian operas, contemporary ethnography in highland Bolivia, and album covers by Mariah Carey.
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[Review length: 962 words • Review posted on January 19, 2009]