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In this case, Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. It is sad to announce that queer musicology is in its infancy, and rather puzzling too, since, let's face it, the music world is positively swarming with gay men. So this book is rather a mixed bag, but it's very exciting and provided a tremendous amount of food for thought.
I think of myself primarily as a reader, my main "I" is a reading "I" and the main thing in life for me is literature. Over the years I have become particularly aware of the specific identities I hold as a reader: a woman/female reader (the one I'll have noticed first, some time in childhood), a bisexual, a Jew (one I'm very much aware of at the moment, sparked off by my reaction to Hill's "September Song" and also The Merchant of Venice). There is also a host of other aspects to my identity which may come into play, whether trivial ones (as a reader who has always had unusually long hair) or more fundamental ones (as a vegan). I am now becoming aware of how much I read as a musician. I don't just mean that I zoom in on any mention of music in the text, for instance the motif of the young lady at the piano, which is common in the nineteenth-century novel, but the way my response to the text is coloured by my thinking as a musician, my attitude towards reading and interpreting and performing and otherwise participating in the pleasure of the text, whether literary or musical.
Of course, I have always been aware that my approach to music is very much a literary one: I grew up singing in choirs from the age of nine, I've discovered many poets through singing them, it was inevitable. I'm obsessed by the dark interplay of sexuality and power in Britten's opera, something I've found little discussion of (probably because I've not looked much as yet, but most of what I've found has been a rather dull analysis of the music alone), and I'm currently fascinated by Dowland's songs. My formal musical education hasn't been to that high a level, alas - technically I studied "History of Music in the Arts" as an outside subject for my first two years at uni, but the teaching was abysmal and I was too ill to attend most of the lectures - so I'm going to have to teach myself as I go along. I think I have a clue as to why Dowland intrigues me now I've dipped into queer musicology. The pleasure provided by his songs seems to me to be a feminine one, "the swooning, dissolvent woman's pleasure I had, heretofore, seen but never experienced" the transsexual Evelyn/Eve describes in Carter's The Passion of New Eve (p.147). The sighing suspensions, always deferring and prolonging pleasure; the lilting assymetry of his rhythms and phrases; the way the music shimmers and shifts restlessly, instead of pounding to a suitably masculine conclusion.
As far as I am aware, this is typical of early modern music and in particularly the English song of that period, but my knowledge of that is rather scanty. I've heard a few bits and pieces, I own the Elizabethan Song Book edited by Auden, but my main treasure is two books of Dowland songs for low voice (i.e. I can actually sing them)![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ordre_et_beaute found me. I know a little more of early modern literature, though I've only really done undergrad work on the drama of the period and haven't looked at the poetry in years. Gender-bending is what it's all about, and Dowland certainly has great fun playing with the paradoxical ideal of the male lover voicing a desire that is almost masochistic, languishing for his beloved's sake, when his real intention is to dominate the (presumed and, I believe, usually) lady of his attentions, who never gets a voice of her own. He doesn't really want to spend his entire time swooning at her feet, he wants to get a leg over. Not to mention the downright bizarre way religion is woven into the already strange eroticism present in such poetry.
Searching around for decent recordings of Dowland to show people, of which my favourite is here (one good thing about songs is that the tracks on the CD are all fairly short, so Amazon's excerpts cover most of them), I noticed that as many women as men sing him. The texts position the singer as male, and ST has just informed me that as far as she knows, the pun on "die", which is a staple of this genre, refers only to male orgasm. Yet the music is all set for seduction by a woman singer, and indeed the breathily excited build up to the long, yearning "die" in "Come Again: Sweet Love Doth Now Invite" seems ideally suited to a female voice. I'll definitely be looking further into all of this, and once ST's got her book in I am going to drag her round to my flat and sing Dowland at her.
Incidentally, Craft's article "Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest", which may be found on JSTOR, constructs puns as being inherently homoerotic. They've certainly struck me as a very male form of joke, not because I've analysed them but because I've noticed that men adore making puns while women do so far less often. The literature of this period is crawling with puns, and you can't sing a bar without stumbling across innnuendo in these songs. First port of call might be to look at the woman poets and see what they're doing with all of this, apart from generally subverting it delightfully. The first encounter of early modern poetry that I can remember is a stunning choral setting of Aphra Behn, after all.
I think of myself primarily as a reader, my main "I" is a reading "I" and the main thing in life for me is literature. Over the years I have become particularly aware of the specific identities I hold as a reader: a woman/female reader (the one I'll have noticed first, some time in childhood), a bisexual, a Jew (one I'm very much aware of at the moment, sparked off by my reaction to Hill's "September Song" and also The Merchant of Venice). There is also a host of other aspects to my identity which may come into play, whether trivial ones (as a reader who has always had unusually long hair) or more fundamental ones (as a vegan). I am now becoming aware of how much I read as a musician. I don't just mean that I zoom in on any mention of music in the text, for instance the motif of the young lady at the piano, which is common in the nineteenth-century novel, but the way my response to the text is coloured by my thinking as a musician, my attitude towards reading and interpreting and performing and otherwise participating in the pleasure of the text, whether literary or musical.
Of course, I have always been aware that my approach to music is very much a literary one: I grew up singing in choirs from the age of nine, I've discovered many poets through singing them, it was inevitable. I'm obsessed by the dark interplay of sexuality and power in Britten's opera, something I've found little discussion of (probably because I've not looked much as yet, but most of what I've found has been a rather dull analysis of the music alone), and I'm currently fascinated by Dowland's songs. My formal musical education hasn't been to that high a level, alas - technically I studied "History of Music in the Arts" as an outside subject for my first two years at uni, but the teaching was abysmal and I was too ill to attend most of the lectures - so I'm going to have to teach myself as I go along. I think I have a clue as to why Dowland intrigues me now I've dipped into queer musicology. The pleasure provided by his songs seems to me to be a feminine one, "the swooning, dissolvent woman's pleasure I had, heretofore, seen but never experienced" the transsexual Evelyn/Eve describes in Carter's The Passion of New Eve (p.147). The sighing suspensions, always deferring and prolonging pleasure; the lilting assymetry of his rhythms and phrases; the way the music shimmers and shifts restlessly, instead of pounding to a suitably masculine conclusion.
As far as I am aware, this is typical of early modern music and in particularly the English song of that period, but my knowledge of that is rather scanty. I've heard a few bits and pieces, I own the Elizabethan Song Book edited by Auden, but my main treasure is two books of Dowland songs for low voice (i.e. I can actually sing them)
ordre_et_beaute found me. I know a little more of early modern literature, though I've only really done undergrad work on the drama of the period and haven't looked at the poetry in years. Gender-bending is what it's all about, and Dowland certainly has great fun playing with the paradoxical ideal of the male lover voicing a desire that is almost masochistic, languishing for his beloved's sake, when his real intention is to dominate the (presumed and, I believe, usually) lady of his attentions, who never gets a voice of her own. He doesn't really want to spend his entire time swooning at her feet, he wants to get a leg over. Not to mention the downright bizarre way religion is woven into the already strange eroticism present in such poetry.Searching around for decent recordings of Dowland to show people, of which my favourite is here (one good thing about songs is that the tracks on the CD are all fairly short, so Amazon's excerpts cover most of them), I noticed that as many women as men sing him. The texts position the singer as male, and ST has just informed me that as far as she knows, the pun on "die", which is a staple of this genre, refers only to male orgasm. Yet the music is all set for seduction by a woman singer, and indeed the breathily excited build up to the long, yearning "die" in "Come Again: Sweet Love Doth Now Invite" seems ideally suited to a female voice. I'll definitely be looking further into all of this, and once ST's got her book in I am going to drag her round to my flat and sing Dowland at her.
Incidentally, Craft's article "Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest", which may be found on JSTOR, constructs puns as being inherently homoerotic. They've certainly struck me as a very male form of joke, not because I've analysed them but because I've noticed that men adore making puns while women do so far less often. The literature of this period is crawling with puns, and you can't sing a bar without stumbling across innnuendo in these songs. First port of call might be to look at the woman poets and see what they're doing with all of this, apart from generally subverting it delightfully. The first encounter of early modern poetry that I can remember is a stunning choral setting of Aphra Behn, after all.
