Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (review)

One way to identify the topic of these thirteen essays by a group of mostly musicologists might be "the new calculus of homo/hetero." The phrase was coined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in a project aimed at reopening questions abruptly foreclosed by the turn of the twentieth century's "radical condensation of sexual categories" into the single, neatly symmetrical pair thus named.¹ The stakes that attach to envisaging more complicated identity terrains (recall, e.g., those teeming with zoophiles, onanists, inverts) are the very terms by which modern knowledge is structured, as Sedgwick demonstrates at length in and intimates by her title Epistemology of the Closet. And as the present collection attests, the questions and challenges taken up by that seminal 1990 book still have the power to inspire new and provocative inquiries. The best essays in Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell's rich collection Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity continue Sedgwick's project through a historically aware "modernist hermeneutics of identity" (14) focused on "episodes" spanning 1870 to 1950, a crucial formative period for "the new calculus of homo/hetero." And in this collection that "approaches modern sexuality by way of music" (dust jacket), the "episodes" all highlight various figures or groups from music worlds in the United States and Europe.

But why examine modern sexuality through music? Because music has evidently played a special role in the articulation of modern sexual identity. More specifically, as Fuller and Whitesell note in a smart introductory essay, "Secret Passages," modern times have witnessed the forging of "a link between musicality and queerness as related forms of suspect sexuality" (8). It is a link that has been explored in virtually every utterance in the field of lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer (lgbtq) musicology since its founding by the late Philip Brett. Indeed, one of Brett's inaugural acts was his brilliant theorization of the musicality-homosexuality link and its implications in a paper that was eventually published as "Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet" in the groundbreaking 1994 collection Queering the Pitch.² Like most brilliant works, Brett's musicality-homosexuality formulation was less the revelation of a completely new idea than the eloquent articulation of an idea that had been in the air. But don't just take my word on this point: have a look at Queer Episodes' cover illustration, an extraordinary depiction by Paul Cadmus of music's connection (if not equivalence) to forbidden, queer eroticism. The painting, an homage to Reynaldo Hahn, is dated 1963.³

lgbtq musicology insiders are less apt to be surprised by this collection's focus on sexuality via music than by its focus on individual musical figures and communities. Queer Episodes is the second entry in a genre in which Queering the Pitch was the first: of collected essays in lgbtq musicology. Notably, the architects of Queering the Pitch had taken pains to avoid any appearance of focusing on individual musical figures. "[U]ncovering 'facts' of sexual preference is not the point here," declared the coeditors in their preface. "The concern in this book," they explained, "is less with identities than with representations, performances, and roles." Writing in lgbtq musicology's early years, Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas were keen to counter the charge that their project was one of "outing composers and making unproblematized connections between sexual identities and musical works."⁴ Eight years on, Fuller and Whitesell would adopt the very approach from which Brett, Wood, and Thomas had so carefully distanced themselves. The introduction to Queer Episodes argues for recognition of "queer communities and individuals" as "a necessary and engaging aspect of queer musicology" and underscores the need "for a considered and rigorous approach to biographical research into sexual identity" (6–7). Different times call for different tactics. But it should also be noted that, just as concept-centered inquiries can provide useful perspectives onto queer communities and individuals, so can Queer...