Susan McClary

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Susan Kaye McClary (born October 2, 1946) is an American musicologist and music theorist who helped shape “new musicology” by bringing feminist perspectives into the study of music. She is a professor of musicology at Case Western Reserve University and is widely known for blending cultural analysis with music theory.

McClary grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. She earned a BA from Southern Illinois University in 1968, and then went to Harvard University, where she completed an MA in 1971 and a PhD in 1976. Her doctoral work explored the shift from modal to tonal organization in Monteverdi’s music, and parts of that research were later expanded into her 2004 book Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal.

Her career has included teaching posts at UCLA (where she held the title of Distinguished Professor Emerita from 1994 to 2011), the University of Minnesota, McGill University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Oslo, among others. She has also advised many doctoral students and has been a prominent voice in rethinking how music relates to culture, gender, and society.

McClary’s best-known book is Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991). In it, she argues that traditional music theory carries gendered assumptions and that musical form and tonal practice can express gender and sexual identities. She examines a wide range of music—from the European canon to popular genres—to show how social meanings are produced through music.

In addition to Feminine Endings, she has written several influential works, including Georges Bizet: Carmen, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, and Modal Subjectivities, as well as essays and books on Reading Music, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music, and many other topics. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, and she has supervised over fifty doctoral dissertations.

McClary was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 1995 and has received honorary doctorates from McGill University, Southern Illinois University, and the Cleveland Institute of Music. Her scholarship is known for its bold, sometimes controversial, arguments about how music reflects and shapes social power and identity.

She is married to musicologist Robert Walser.