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This book brings together a diverse group of music theorists who issue queer challenges to both music theory and musicology and show that queerness is integral to music-theoretical practice. Through the lenses of queer temporality, queer narratology, and queer music analysis, chapters examine a wide variety of artists and composers, including Sun Ra, Cowell, Czernowin, Henze, Schubert, and Schumann; theories ranging from Schenker to queer shame, disability studies, and posthumanism; and authors such as Edward Cone and Edward Prime-Stevenson.
List of contents
- Introduction: Queer Ear
- Gavin S.k. Lee
- 1 Queer and Critical Race Theory, Figuring Out Music Theory
- Gavin S.K. Lee, Philip Ewell, and Robert Hatten
- Queer Music Analysis
- 2 Music Analysis; Queer Academy
- James Currie
- 3 Queering Schubert's "Der Atlas": Reflections on Positionality and Close Reading
- David Bretherton
- 4 The Expression of Queerness in Hans Werner Henze's Music
- Federica Marsico
- 5 Multiplicities, Truth, Ethics: a queering analysis of Chaya Czernowin's Anea Crystal
- Judith Lochhead
- Queer Temporality
- 6 Sun Ra's Fletcher Henderson
- Chris Stover
- 7 The Chronographic Fallacy of Unilinear Music Theory, Or, Un(Re)productive Temporality in Dichterliebe
- Gavin S.K. Lee
- 8 Queering Musical Chrononormativity: Percussion Works of the West Coast Group
- Bill Solomon
- Queer Narratology
- 9 Queer Sexuality and Musical Narrative
- Fred Everett Maus
- 10 "Legendary In-Reading": Musical Meaning, Analysis, and Biography in Edward Prime-Stevenson's Music Criticism and Sexology
- Kristin Franseen
- 11 Animating Musical Agency
- Vivian Luong
- Index
About the author
Gavin S.K. Lee is Assistant Professor of Music at Soochow University. His research on queer music studies and global musical modernisms, particularly in Asian geographies, has appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Current Musicology. He is the author of the forthcoming Estrangement from Ethnicity: Music and Sinophone Alienation and editor of Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music. In recent years, Lee has presented guest lectures on three continents at universities in the US, Australia, and Taiwan.
Summary
Through provisional, idiosyncratic, and non-normative listening practices, Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory counters music theory's continuing tendencies towards rationality, unity, unilinearity, teleology, and logical certainty. In this volume, editor Gavin S.K. Lee brings together a diverse group of music theorists who issue queer challenges to both music theory and musicology and show that queerness is integral to music-theoretical practice. These investigations of the "queer ear" and queer soundings, while drawing upon a broad range of approaches, are united by the repurposing of "hard" music-theoretical apparatuses, as well as "soft" apparatuses like narratology and cultural theory, for queer ends. Such repurposings contribute to the search for general principles--or a theory--of queering that counters mainstream music theory's proclivities, instead encouraging everyone to experiment with queer ways of listening.
Through the lenses of queer temporality, queer narratology, and queer music analysis, the essays examine a wide variety of artists and composers, including Sun Ra, Cowell, Czernowin, Henze, Schubert, and Schumann; theories ranging from Schenker to queer shame, disability studies, and posthumanism; and authors such as Edward Cone and Edward Prime-Stevenson. Together, they rethink the field's major tenets, examine hidden histories, and view listening practices from the perspective of non-normative subjectivities. Ultimately, Queer Ear works to queer the field of music theory while paying heed to the ways in which music theory intersects with diverse, embodied LGBTQ lives.
Additional text
The first monograph on queer music theory, and a much-needed contribution to the field. The essays in Queer Ear challenge us to recognize the importance of gender, sexuality, and race in analysis, while breaking down the traditional divide between music theory and musicology.
