Introduction

Biddle, Ian; Gibson, Kirsten

doi:10.4324/9781315091419-1

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“…The essays in Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson's Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (2009) are even more thought-provoking in their examination of gender in relation to masculinity and queer sexualities – an emphasis long overdue in studies of nineteenth-century British music, and one that is therefore particularly illuminating. This collection builds on the ground-breaking work of an earlier essay collection, Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, edited by Philip Butt et al (1994), and, like the essays in Queering the Pitch , many of these essays examine the ways that music qua music was constructed as feminine and therefore effeminate and how male composers and performers either suffered from stigma or endeavored to construct themselves as particularly manly and virile.…”

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The Condition of Music in Victorian Scholarship

Peak

2016

Victorian Literature and Culture

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Many Victorian commentators, from Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin on, saw music as the most primitive of all the arts, an inarticulate precursor of language, and yet many Victorians, particularly towards the end of the century, also saw music as the purest of all art forms. The tremendous tension between these two views meant that music provided, and provides, an ideal way to understand more completely Victorian ideas about evolution, gender, and race in relation to aesthetics, although scholarship on music has only begun to consider those relationships. But as Vernon Lee long ago pointed out, in a series of thoughtful essays about music published in Fraser's Magazine and other periodicals in the 1870s and 1880s, music has always been slower to develop than other arts or fields of study. This is in fact why musicologists speak of “nineteenth-century music,” rather than Victorian music: the Romantic period in music, for example, is starting as the Romantic period in literature had largely ended; the English Musical Renaissance comes after the renaissance period in British literature; and so on. Musicology, likewise, is a comparatively young field, and the study of nineteenth-century British music – long limited to Gilbert and Sullivan, if considered at all – younger yet. Studies of literature that engage with music as an important part of the historical context of a given text depend on developments in musicology for a proper understanding of that context, which is why such works are comparatively few. Why music should be slower to develop than other fields is a question outside the scope of this essay, but the good news is that in the past ten years a number of useful and valuable works of scholarship on nineteenth-century British music have appeared, examining not only neglected composers and musical works, but also performers, concert organizers, music publishers, instruments and their history, and evolutionary, Orientalist, and nationalist discourses about music. This scholarship, valuable in itself, not only expands our knowledge of musicology and cultural history; by pointing out some of the deep connections between literature and music in the Victorian period, such scholarship also suggests new ways to think about literary forms, canon formation, and aesthetic theories.

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The Condition of Music in Victorian Scholarship

Peak

2016

Victorian Literature and Culture

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‘This Is to Enrage You’

Amico

2023

Ethnomusicology, Queerness, Masculinity

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The fundamental utility of rage as a motivator for early AIDS activists is contrasted with the double silencing marking ethnomusicology’s relationship to same-sex desire: it is virtually non-existent in the discipline’s literature, and the erasure has generated no response, enraged or otherwise, within academia. Additionally, two themes animating ensuing discussions are presented. First, the field’s belated acceptance of ‘gender’ as a site of inquiry, overwhelmingly used as a shorthand for ‘studies of/by women’, is revealed as related to the creation of a veneer of ‘diversity’ that functions to keep men/masculinity immune from examination. And second, ethnomusicology’s self-construction as the ethical other to musicology is exposed as resting not on epistemological/methodological desiderata, but an intense homophobic drive to construct a masculine disciplinary identity in contradistinction to musicology’s assumed femininity.

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We Don’t Need Another He(te)ro

Amico

2023

Ethnomusicology, Queerness, Masculinity

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This chapter explores in greater detail the motivations for and processes of the construction of masculinity within ethnomusicology. Understanding the centuries-long feminization of music in Western culture, anthropology and its methodology—fieldwork—are revealed as utilized in the creation of a specifically academic masculinity. However, while fieldwork is instrumental in the creation of one facet of masculinity (i.e., representation of a self marked by bravado, courage, intrepidness; the ‘anthropologist as hero’), it is argued that for the largely white, privileged male academic, recourse to such stereotypes alone is insufficient. As such, it is intellect and rationality, manifesting via the use and production of Theory (itself coded as masculine) that allow for the maintaining of power over the musical, the racialized Other, and the positivistic, feminized musicologist.

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Introduction

Cited by 4 publications

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The Condition of Music in Victorian Scholarship

The Condition of Music in Victorian Scholarship

‘This Is to Enrage You’

We Don’t Need Another He(te)ro

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