William Cheng
Amy Cimini
James Currie
Roger Grant
Nadine Hubbs, co-chair
Kevin Korsyn
Gavin Lee, co-chair
Judith Peraino
“Queer music theory” is a fantastically nebulous concept. On the one hand, the academic subfield of music theory has become increasingly interested in queer studies during a time in which queer theorists have had occasion to ask “what’s queer about queer studies now?” (the titular question of a recent Social Text special issue). On the other, the conjunction of queer theory with music theory demands a reinvestigation of what is meant by music theory in the first place. Bringing these two forms of inquiry together, this session aims to generate discussion on music, queerness, and theory, opening up new paths of inquiry at their points of intersection. We hope to provide methods for thinking through the concept, practice, and politics of “queer music theory,” asking how queer theory and music theory might be brought into new productive conversations.
The conundrum of queer music theory is approached first by asking: what is “music theory”? The crux of the issue here relates once again to the hoary problematic of the purely musical. After Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, we are familiar with the marginalization/universalization dialectic that forces otherness into a minute space of irrelevance—for music theory, this arguably means stuffing “queerness” into “musical practice”—and maintaining that closet by unleashing repressing forces when queerness seeps into “music theory.” However expressed, the problematic of queer music theory is not merely one of definition, but also of epistemological policing. The challenge of this panel lies in the questioning of epistemic boundaries: How is musical unity heteronormative? Is formalism queer? What is queer musical temporality and timbre?
A further consideration, informed by Sedgwick, is how queer music theory should negotiate queer studies’ charge of anti-normativity. A queer music theory with general applicability may be attractive for the challenge it poses to varied normativities beyond the sexual. However, this ubiquity also arguably robs queer music theory of its relevance to LGBTQ-identified knowledges, practices, and lives. We address the problematic of the particularity of queer lives versus the broader applicability of queer music theory.
This 3h joint session of alternative format comprises 6 position papers and 2 responses (William Cheng; Kevin Korsyn), each followed by floor discussion.
Nadine Hubbs, co-chair
Kevin Korsyn
Gavin Lee, co-chair
Judith Peraino
“Queer music theory” is a fantastically nebulous concept. On the one hand, the academic subfield of music theory has become increasingly interested in queer studies during a time in which queer theorists have had occasion to ask “what’s queer about queer studies now?” (the titular question of a recent Social Text special issue). On the other, the conjunction of queer theory with music theory demands a reinvestigation of what is meant by music theory in the first place. Bringing these two forms of inquiry together, this session aims to generate discussion on music, queerness, and theory, opening up new paths of inquiry at their points of intersection. We hope to provide methods for thinking through the concept, practice, and politics of “queer music theory,” asking how queer theory and music theory might be brought into new productive conversations.
The conundrum of queer music theory is approached first by asking: what is “music theory”? The crux of the issue here relates once again to the hoary problematic of the purely musical. After Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, we are familiar with the marginalization/universalization dialectic that forces otherness into a minute space of irrelevance—for music theory, this arguably means stuffing “queerness” into “musical practice”—and maintaining that closet by unleashing repressing forces when queerness seeps into “music theory.” However expressed, the problematic of queer music theory is not merely one of definition, but also of epistemological policing. The challenge of this panel lies in the questioning of epistemic boundaries: How is musical unity heteronormative? Is formalism queer? What is queer musical temporality and timbre?
A further consideration, informed by Sedgwick, is how queer music theory should negotiate queer studies’ charge of anti-normativity. A queer music theory with general applicability may be attractive for the challenge it poses to varied normativities beyond the sexual. However, this ubiquity also arguably robs queer music theory of its relevance to LGBTQ-identified knowledges, practices, and lives. We address the problematic of the particularity of queer lives versus the broader applicability of queer music theory.
This 3h joint session of alternative format comprises 6 position papers and 2 responses (William Cheng; Kevin Korsyn), each followed by floor discussion.
Nadine historizes the problematic of the broad applicability which stems from
queer theory’s anti-normative charge, re-examining the role of dominant American
middle-class culture in the success of the LGBTQ rights movement through an analysis
of David Allan Coe’s 1978 underground track “Fuck Aneta Briant,” a song of the Outlaw
country genre. Beyond the support of White middle-class Americans who love to identify
with outsiders and rebels, to the extent that it is no longer clear who is “queer,” working-
class people has a long history as sex and gender queers and allies. This study leads to an
examination of the definitions of queerness and queer music theory.
Gavin Lee examines musical ambiguity as queer phenomenology. Queer persons are rebuffed by the normative world of people and objects and directed towards alternative forms of personal attachments, experiencing a “wonky” phenomenology of ambiguity through that redirection. The contradiction of musical embodiment in a work about Buddhist disembodiment (the queer composer John Sharpley’s Emptiness) is read as one modality of ambiguity, which is also discerned elsewhere in meter, harmony, and form. With an understanding of ambiguity as queer phenomenology, the resistance to musical ambiguity is read as heteronormative.
James Currie applies a theory of cruising as formalism—a social formation that functions without the participants having to get to know the various realities that constitute the content of the humans they are coming into relationship with—to a re- evaluation of the contemporary pejorative connotation of musical formalism. An examination of the formalism inherent in the social life of cruising affords a re-evaluation of the scripting of musical formalism as resistant to sociality, offering new insights to how musical form was always closer to human social life than anyone had thought.
Roger Mathew Grant examines musical formalism along the lines once coyly suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell—as a practice of “decadent aesthetes” who spend their time reveling in the inexorable complexities of art’s intangible qualities. Drawing on Mitchell and other literary theorists invested in formal analysis, a recontextualization of contemporary American music theory alongside queer practices of decadence and antiquarianism affords a re-evaluation of music theorists as cultural guardians rather than as “pedants” who spend hours measuring phrase lengths and codifying grammars.
Judith Peraino considers music theory’s deferral of live musical time in relation to the urge towards the audio/visual capture of popular music concerts among the “smart phone” generation, drawing in particular on the phenomenological redirection found in queer temporality andthe mediation of time by the technological “actor- network.” Musical time, embodiment, sociality, and text are profoundly altered by the lens of “tiny screens,” through which music is deferred to a time that is both “past” and “future” but never “present.”
Naomi Andre examines the conjunction of vocal timbre with gender, skin color, and historical narrative. The changing expression of masculinity from castrati to women’s operatic voices in the early nineteenth century is elucidated as a site of queer analysis. Further, the intersection of race with gender and sexuality, as expressed in vocal timbre, affords an examination of how new non-minstrel portrayals in operas composed since the 1980s provoke a re-examination of the “folk” as evinced in Gershwin’s conception of Porgy and Bess as an “American Folk Opera.”
Gavin Lee examines musical ambiguity as queer phenomenology. Queer persons are rebuffed by the normative world of people and objects and directed towards alternative forms of personal attachments, experiencing a “wonky” phenomenology of ambiguity through that redirection. The contradiction of musical embodiment in a work about Buddhist disembodiment (the queer composer John Sharpley’s Emptiness) is read as one modality of ambiguity, which is also discerned elsewhere in meter, harmony, and form. With an understanding of ambiguity as queer phenomenology, the resistance to musical ambiguity is read as heteronormative.
James Currie applies a theory of cruising as formalism—a social formation that functions without the participants having to get to know the various realities that constitute the content of the humans they are coming into relationship with—to a re- evaluation of the contemporary pejorative connotation of musical formalism. An examination of the formalism inherent in the social life of cruising affords a re-evaluation of the scripting of musical formalism as resistant to sociality, offering new insights to how musical form was always closer to human social life than anyone had thought.
Roger Mathew Grant examines musical formalism along the lines once coyly suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell—as a practice of “decadent aesthetes” who spend their time reveling in the inexorable complexities of art’s intangible qualities. Drawing on Mitchell and other literary theorists invested in formal analysis, a recontextualization of contemporary American music theory alongside queer practices of decadence and antiquarianism affords a re-evaluation of music theorists as cultural guardians rather than as “pedants” who spend hours measuring phrase lengths and codifying grammars.
Judith Peraino considers music theory’s deferral of live musical time in relation to the urge towards the audio/visual capture of popular music concerts among the “smart phone” generation, drawing in particular on the phenomenological redirection found in queer temporality andthe mediation of time by the technological “actor- network.” Musical time, embodiment, sociality, and text are profoundly altered by the lens of “tiny screens,” through which music is deferred to a time that is both “past” and “future” but never “present.”
Naomi Andre examines the conjunction of vocal timbre with gender, skin color, and historical narrative. The changing expression of masculinity from castrati to women’s operatic voices in the early nineteenth century is elucidated as a site of queer analysis. Further, the intersection of race with gender and sexuality, as expressed in vocal timbre, affords an examination of how new non-minstrel portrayals in operas composed since the 1980s provoke a re-examination of the “folk” as evinced in Gershwin’s conception of Porgy and Bess as an “American Folk Opera.”
