Marion Gook
Marianne Kielian-Gilbert
Gavin Lee, chair
Judith Lochhead
Fred Maus
2014’s “Queer Music Theory” special session discussed what is or can be specifically queer about music theory. With its traditional concern for musical form (broadly construed as the subject of music theory), music theory may provoke debate about how form mediates cultural “content”; a capacious notion of “content” can comprise sexuality, other types of identity, the dissolution of cultural categories themselves, and the very emergence of new conceptions of form. This broad cultural vista lends itself to a far-reaching investigation of the “meta” level at which musical form operates—on the level of mediation and epistemology; it is at this meta level that we investigate the queering of musical form.
Marianne Kielian-Gilbert
Gavin Lee, chair
Judith Lochhead
Fred Maus
2014’s “Queer Music Theory” special session discussed what is or can be specifically queer about music theory. With its traditional concern for musical form (broadly construed as the subject of music theory), music theory may provoke debate about how form mediates cultural “content”; a capacious notion of “content” can comprise sexuality, other types of identity, the dissolution of cultural categories themselves, and the very emergence of new conceptions of form. This broad cultural vista lends itself to a far-reaching investigation of the “meta” level at which musical form operates—on the level of mediation and epistemology; it is at this meta level that we investigate the queering of musical form.
At the inception of what we might recognize as queer music theory, musical form was brought together with sexuality content, most famously in the work of Susan McClary (1991) and Philip Brett (1997). This content was broadly narratological in that it commented on the nature of gender and sexuality as manifest in musical form. In so far as this work can be seen as addressing the content “in” form, as if form were a chalice for content, it unwittingly supports the conceptual separation of musical form from sexuality. One way to approach the hoary issue of form versus content is to address the notion of form as content, and to do so not merely on the level of producing empirical cultural content through hermeneutics, but by analyzing how form mediates sexuality-cultural content. What is it about the nature of musical form that avails it of content? How does the analysis of form mediate content?
Aside from the mediation of sexuality content, the queering of musical form takes place also on the level of rethinking the conceptual frame of what cultural content comprises—the very content which is mediated by form. This issue is of critical importance in that the outcome of form’s mediation depends crucially on what we think is being mediated. A key factor in this reconceptualization of cultural content has to do with cultural perspectives. We are familiar with the import of cultural “difference,” but difference is not as obvious as it may seem—perhaps “difference” itself can be queered? The cultural content called “difference” can be further parsed through: the cultural totality that cultural differences form, the emergence or production of difference, and the dissolution of difference. Musical form does not contain this difference, so much as form is predicated on an epistemology of cultural difference.
