As if things weren't already tense enough between the sexes, here comes Germaine Greer, the feminist writer, to tell us that men and women have deep and possibly irreconcilable differences in the way they think about and buy classical music.
Writing in a recent issue of BBC Music magazine, a British monthly devoted to serious music, Ms. Greer says that men, who constitute the vast majority of serious record collectors, buy recordings out of a desire not for personal aesthetic pleasure, but for control, dominion, possession, power.
"They buy every version of every symphony or sonata principally in order to own it. [Men] like nothing better than . . . comparing and contrasting single passages from every known recording of 'Les Illuminations' or whatever, much as little boys once used to deploy populations of lead soldiers." Male collectors, she concludes, question each other about their latest CD purchases "in much the same way that dogs sniff each other's bottoms."
How insulting.
How unattractive.
How true.
Let's be candid. Think of the most obsessive record collectors you know. The ones who say things like, "My sense is that the opening bars of the Colin Davis 'Rosamunde' on DG are fractionally more robust than the Kempe version, but still in all . . . "
You don't know anybody like that? Count your blessings. The rest of you will know that it's only men who talk this way.
Even those serious collectors who are rational, and who talk more or less normally, acknowledge there is something dark and mysterious about their affliction.
"I don't know, I would say that all those LPs do look impressive all lined up there, alphabetically, on the shelves," says Ken Jacobsen, a lawyer and record reviewer on Connecticut Public Radio. He owns about 10,000 vinyl albums. "But I'm just a novice with CDs. I probably don't have more than 1,500 or so. I've slowed down quite a lot."
Still, for many male readers of BBC Music, Ms. Greer's charges struck a sensitive nerve. An unprecedented two-page spread of letters in the current issue crackles with such snappy rejoinders as:
"Her comments are totally uncalled for."
" . . . feminist twaddle . . ."
"Can anyone switch this woman off?"
Leaving aside the wounded feelings of a few well-heeled audiophiles, there are some legitimate questions.
Why do women seem to be such reluctant purchasers of classical recordings (surveys indicate that between two-thirds and three-fourths of classical CD buyers are men and that the readers of classical-recording magazines, notably Gramophone, are as much as 95 percent male) when the gender differential for pop music is negligible?
The answer may be tied to the atmosphere of music stores, to male egos and to the important but poorly understood dynamics of shopping.
Would women be more inclined to buy discs if there were a more inviting ambience?
One answer comes to us from, of all places, Victoria's Secret. The esteemed lingerie retailer began playing classical music over its store sound systems in the early '80s. Women customers began expressing interest in the pieces being played, which led the store to put out its own CD, with selections performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.
The disc sold almost as briskly as camisoles. The company put out a total of five. The discs were quietly displayed on the counters but otherwise not promoted. Each sold more than 1 million copies, making them among the best-selling classical discs of the CD era. (They are now available as a boxed set). The company has recently put out an all-Mozart disc and an all-Schubert disc, along with several seasonal Christmas discs. Each is selling as fast as it can be stocked.
The Victoria's Secret albums are compilation albums -- that is, discs with short selections from various composers, chosen with the idea of imparting a unified feel or mood.
These are not the classical pieces you're "supposed" to know, but simply pieces you might enjoy. The composers include such figures as Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Ravel and Liszt.
What about the underlying point -- can it be that the sexes perceive and understand music in fundamentally different ways?
There is some unofficial conventional wisdom on this -- that women are drawn to lyrical, sentimental music while men prefer aggressive, even martial music. This view is supposedly confirmed by the fact that male attendance at symphony concerts goes up when brass quintets -- whose repertoire includes marches and other loud, vigorous stuff -- are playing.
But the cliches are not very useful -- after all, men buy the majority of Puccini recordings, too.
In "Music and Male Hegemony," an essay in "Music and Society," writer John Shepherd suggests that men are simultaneously drawn to, and afraid of, music, for reasons having to do with social control.
Among Mr. Shepherd's insights:
"Male hegemony is constituted through strategies whereby men render silent and inert a social world that is bubbling, evanescent, and constantly rubbing up against us. . . . The existence of music, like the existence of women, is potentially threatening to men to the extent that it . . . insists on the social relatedness of human worlds, and as a consequence implicitly demands that individuals respond. When this happens music reminds men of the fragile and atrophied nature of their control over the world."
So much for just digging a piece because it sounds good.
For many music-loving women, the issue is much less complicated.
"I certainly don't collect recordings with the idea of collecting per se," says Georgia Greenberg, a Manhattan-based writer and composer. "I just think this [issue] is partly economics, since a lot of women don't have the money that men do. And it's partly a question of leisure time, in the sense that we tend to have less of it than men. But I don't think we really hear music differently. I have my favorites, of course -- Copland, Brahms, Beethoven, Debussy. But I listen to a lot of things and I listen for pleasure. I generally just collect around."