Music Studies and Musicology

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MUSIC STUDIES AND MUSICOLOGY

Despite the widespread presence of LGBT people in the world of music as creators, performers, and listeners, musical scholarship avoided consideration of sexualities and genders and the possibility of their impact on musical work until fairly recently. This can be ascribed to musicology's roots in a formalist transcendental aesthetic (rooted in nineteenth-century German pedagogy), as well as to the homophobic and transphobic panic embedded in attitudes toward such a suspiciously emotional and sensual activity as music. Since the late 1980s, however, a dramatic wave of increasingly self-assured writings have firmly established the topic in music as well as in associated disciplines.

Early Work

Beginning in the post-Stonewall Riots context of the mid-1970s, several works of scholarship on LGBT topics began to appear. Some of these, especially those focusing on rock music, were associated with the rise of cultural studies; scholars in the then-new area of popular culture found it natural to pay a great deal of attention to popular music, especially in terms of lyrics, images of performers, and audience reception. However, most of these writers were not associated with academic music departments, nor did their writings tend to use the technical languages or formal methods associated with musicology.

The first person to present and publish LGBT studies in the smaller and more conservative world of academic musicology was Philip Brett, a scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. His first writings in the area, beginning in the late 1970s, focused on gay British composer Benjamin Britten. Not limited to the biographical, they also considered social and philosophical aspects of the "open secret" that characterized Britten's public career, a concept that continued to interest Brett throughout his professional life. From the beginning, Brett wrote in a carefully modulated blend of technical musical rhetoric, history, cultural theory, and subjective analysis, establishing an unusually broad-based model for musicological inquiry that became highly influential.

Breakthroughs

LGBT music studies remained relatively uncommon for some years; it took musicology's general breakthrough into cultural theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s (in the form of the so-called "new musicology"), instigated by feminist musicologist Susan McClary, among others, for more extensive work to appear. At the 1988 meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS), Maynard Solomon presented evidence suggesting that Franz Schubert might have participated in male homosexual circles in early nineteenth-century Vienna. This initiated a highly charged, ongoing debate over social and musical interpretation, which has involved numerous scholars writing for a number of newspapers and journals, most significantly a special issue of the journal Nineteenth-Century Music in 1993. At the 1989 meeting, Brett was again an agent of change; having organized informal gatherings in previous years, he finally and officially founded the Gay and Lesbian Study Group (GLSG) of the AMS.

The 1990 AMS meeting in Oakland, California, included a session called "Composers and Sexuality," with papers presented by Brett, McClary, and Gary C. Thomas, and received a standing ovation. At the same gathering, a second organizational meeting of the GLSG established an organizational structure with equal representation of women and men, a regular series of meetings with presentations, and the GLSG Newsletter under the editorship of Frances Feldon and Paul Attinello. Notable scholars associated with this group included Elizabeth Wood, Mitchell Morris, Suzanne Cusick, Byron Adams, and Lydia Hamessley, among many others. The immediate influence of the group on its parent organization can be seen in Malcolm Hicks's 1991 article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society—the first of its kind to appear in that relatively conservative periodical—and in 1996 the establishment of the Philip Brett Award for lesbian or gay scholarly publications.

The inclusion of articles on LGBT topics by Brett, Wood, and Morris in R. A. Solie's Musicology and Difference, published in 1993, as well as the 1994 publication of the anthology Queering the Pitch under the joint editorship of Brett, Wood, and Thomas, permanently established the subdiscipline in the academic world. In fact, attention to gender included queer topics from the outset, perhaps because feminism and queer theory struck musicology at the same time, but also because of the various androgynies deeply embedded in the gender discourse of music. In the 1990s increasing publicity led to dramatic public arguments about revered historical figures (such as Schubert and George Frideric Handel) and problems in musical meaning, fanned by indignant newspaper debates. Other professional organizations for music scholars, including the Society for Ethnomusicology (notably Carolina Robertson and Brian Currid) and the Society for Music Theory (notably Fred Maus and Nadine Hubbs), began to expand their activities in LGBT studies.

In the twenty-first century, Brett and Wood were again responsible for a turning point in the history of the subdiscipline, writing an article, "Gay and Lesbian Music," for the monumental second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 2001. The dictionary's editors were evidently not entirely comfortable with the topic; they cut the entry a great deal, and chief editor Stanley Sadie singled it out from over six thousand others as having given him "a great deal of trouble." Brett published a spirited defense in the BBC Music Magazine in early 2002; it was his last major act, as he abruptly fell ill, dying of cancer later that year.

Major Themes

Since the late 1980s, methodology, rhetoric, and research in LGBT musicology have developed with remarkable speed. Scholars have now published work in areas such as history, biography, anthropology, and sociology and have adopted a wide variety of approaches to aesthetics and interpretation. Significant projects have been concerned with the sexual and gender behaviors of canonic figures, ranging from the composers and performers of twelfth-century Notre Dame polyphony to twentieth-century Americans such as Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, and Ned Rorem. In these types of projects, musicologists have explored not only what sexuality and gender can tell us about music but what music can tell us about sexuality and gender. The rediscovery and reevaluation of the work of obscured historical figures, especially lesbian composers, has been part of the larger work by feminist scholars of returning women composers to history.

Popular music studies have generally started from solid evidence, including biographical information, interviews, performance images, and lyrics. A number of essay collections, both by single and multiple authors, have not only compared works, genres, and events involving LGBT artists such as k.d. lang and Jimmy Somerville, but have also looked at the root systems of queer culture that wind through the world of music; examples include books by John Gill (1995) and Lee Fleming (1996). More recently, studies have begun to take many of these tropes apart, attempting to follow the rapidly changing and increasingly complex gender roles and sexual identities disseminated all over the world by the music industry.

The methods and ideas that were once identified with ethnomusicology have become so intertwined with other aspects of the new musicology that it is now impossible to separate them. In addition to many of the above types of studies, scholars who define themselves as ethnomusicologists have also worked on sophisticated explorations of alternate genders and sexualities in non-Eurocentric cultures (such as Carolina Robertson's work on Polynesian cultures) and have consistently applied concepts of cultural and gender relativism.

Since music, through the involvement of performers and audiences, tends to be a social art, reception is another important area of study, encompassing both collective constructions of identity and personal subject positions (as in Cusick's influential article published in Queering the Pitch). This area includes investigations of such contexts as the establishment of women's music in the 1970s, the gay and lesbian choruses, and public reception of performers such as Phranc and Boy George.

Reexamined biographies have led to the question of why such studies might be significant—a particularly tricky discussion in music, where it is often more difficult to show evidence of LGBT meanings in the artwork than in, say, literature or the visual arts. Rethinking the tricky territory between formal and symbolic interpretations of sounds and scores has resulted in studies that connect constructed experience, musical creation, performance, and reception in a semiotic chain of queered meanings. Groundbreaking work of this type has included a number of articles about women, especially Cusick's contribution to Queering the Pitch, and work by the contributors to En Travesti, with their flamboyant exposure of the labyrinthine traditions linked to the "trouser roles" of opera. Wayne Koestenbaum's The Queen's Throat (1993) significantly opened up discussions about the personal experience of divas and voices, social-subcultural uses of images, and technical-historical knowledge. Among the most sophisticated studies of this kind is D. A. Miller's Place for Us (1998), which explores the ways that musical theater depicts the narcissistic pride and insecurity common to many gay men, implying a feedback between music and audience in a manner that recalls the work of Roland Barthes.

Ultimately, these studies have contributed to an increasingly common realization of the most obvious, and most startling, fact of all: that music is, and has always been, deeply and complexly associated with alternate sexualities and genders of every kind. LGBT studies have helped to revive discussion of the most difficult and most exciting conflicts that have existed in every musical culture—those that appear when the discipline faces the sensual, those endless battles between the formal and the flamboyant.