Transcript IHWM 3

Introduction to the History of
Western Music
Dan Grimley
[email protected]
Lecture 4. Identities.
Gender, sexuality, and the musical canon
Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934)
Videmus nunc per speculum in
ænigmate; tunc autem facie ad
faciem. Nunc cognosco ex parte;
tunc autem cognoscam, sicut et
cognitus sum. [Corinthians 12:12]
For now we shall see through a glass
darkly; but then face to face: now I
know in part, but then shall I know
even as also I am known
Letter to C. A. Barry, 19 June 1899,
‘The Enigma I will not explain—its
“dark saying” must be left
unguessed.’
Elgar: Ardent Imperialist or Swooning Decadent?
• As a Roman Catholic, as a musician, and as a tradesman’s son
without the benefit of either public school or university degree,
Elgar felt himself an outsider looking into the closed world of
Victorian middle-class society. To mitigate his feelings of exclusion,
Elgar modeled his public persona on the popular image of the
‘English Gentleman’: his bearing was rigid and quasi-military; he
strove for emotional reticence in society; his politics were Tory and
staunchly Imperialist; his clothing was immaculately tailored; and at
times he disavowed any knowledge of, or interest in, his own
unfashionable musical profession. [Byron Adams, ‘The “Dark Saying
of the Enigma”’p. 223]
• Gerald Cumberland [Charles Kenyon], Set Down in Malice (1919):
‘[Elgar’s] curious fastidiousness of style that is almost finicking …
and [his] innate and exaggerated delicacy, an almost feminine
shrinking’.
Masculinity and the Beethoven Paradigm
A B Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition (1845)
– The second subject [Seitensatz] serves as a contrast to the first,
energetic statement, though dependent and determined by it.
It is more of a tender nature, flexible rather than emphatically
constructed—in a way, the feminine as opposed to the
preceding masculine.
A B Marx, Ludwig van Beethoven: Leben und Schaffen (1859)
– Music, the Eternal Feminine, in Beethoven has become man—
spirit [Geist]. … Beethoven’s mother was a man.
Schumann, On Music and Musicians
– Beethoven plainly said: ‘Music must strike fire from the spirit of
a man; emotionalism is only meant for women’. Few
remember what he said; the majority aim at emotional effects.
They ought to be punished by being dressed in women’s
clothes.
Beethoven: Hero?
Alfred Heuss, Beethoven: Eine
Charakteristik (1921)
And now ... the hero looms before us
as a giant, fully in tune with himself,
both inwardly and outwardly a heroic
character of hugest proportion.
Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the
Construction of Meaning (1999)
The Eroica stands as a monument to its
own universality. It is absolute. Indeed, it
scratches out the name Napoleon that it
might name itself as the public identity of
the human spirit, trampling over all
privatised, feminised bodies from which it
may have been born, in a stance that
conflates the moral and political worlds as
an absolute, masculine gesture. [pp. 152-3]
A heroic counter-example: Ruth Crawford
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1901 born Ohio, 3 July, daughter of Methodist
minister
1921 moves to Chicago, trains as piano teacher;
begins to compose
1929 promoted by Paul Rosenfeld ‘foremost
woman composer of her generation’
1930 first woman awarded Guggenheim
Fellowship for composition; moves to New York to
study ‘dissonant counterpoint’ with Charles
Seeger
Visits Europe, 3 Sandberg Songs performed at
1933 ISCM Festival, Amsterdam
1931 returns to New York, marries Charles Seeger
1935 move to Washington DC, federal relief
agency
1936 devotes energies to folksong revival, less
time for free composition
1953 dies, 18 November
Gender, Musicology, and the Musical Canon
Suzanne Cusick, ‘Gender, Musicology and Feminism’
Patterns of exclusion and marginalisation:
– 22 February 1930, founding meeting of American
Musicological Society: Ruth Crawford excluded from maleonly room.
– Charles Seeger: excluded Crawford ‘to avoid the incipient
criticism that musicology was “woman’s work”’
Some Conclusions:
• Gender usually conflated with biological sex, but actually a
system of assigning social roles, power, and prestige
• Sustained by web of metaphors and cultural practices
associated with ‘the masculine’ and ‘the feminine’
• Judith Butler: gender not fixed identity, but performative:
embodied practice
Queering the Pitch: the Schubert Controversy #1
Maynard Solomon, ‘Schubert and the Peacocks of
Benvenuto Cellini’ (19th Century Music, 1989)
Schubert’s music conventionally figured ‘feminine’
Grove, Dictionary of Music (1882)
Another equally true saying of Schumann is that, compared with Beethoven,
Schubert is as a woman to a man. For it must be confessed that one’s attitude
towards him is almost always that of sympathy, attraction, and love, rarely
that of embarrassment or fear. Here and there only … does he compel his
listeners with an irresistible power; and yet how different is this compulsion
from the strong, fierce, merciless coercion, with which Beethoven forces you
along and bows and bends you to his will.
Contemporary accounts of Schubert’s character [Johann
Mayrhofer, 1829] suggest dual personality: hedonism vs
creativity
The Schubert Controversy #2
Solomon’s evidence :
– Failed courtship with Therese Grob, c. 1814-6
– No evidence of other romantic interest in women in
Schubert circle, Kreissle von Hellborn: ‘Schubert was
somewhat indifferent to the charms of the fair sex’.
– Lodged with Franz von Schober, Autumn 1816—1824;
correspondence reveals richly homosocial order of
Schubert circle (Benvenuto Cellini: allegorical figure of
‘peacocks’, young attractive men dressed as women)
– Clandestine homosexual subculture common in
European cities in early nineteenth-century
– Schubert’s ‘true’ nature has remained ‘hazy, shadowy,
and unfocused’.
The Schubert Controversy #3
Rita Steblin, ‘Schubert’s Sexuality Reconsidered’ (1993)
– ‘Aversion to Marriage’: product of unease surrounding
promulgation of 1815 Ehe-Consens Gesetz
– Members of Schubert circle associated with 1817/8 Beyträge zur
Bildung für Jünglinge, manual devoted to Socratic male
brotherhood
– Homosexuality not as heavily legislated or discriminated against as
later in 19th century
– Schubert maintained close relations with number of female
members of circle including actress Sophie Müller; singers Nanette
Schechner, Fanny von Hügel. And evidence of infatuation with
daughter of aristocratic patron, Karoline Esterházy, 1818-24
– Bird symbolism (Cellini’s peacocks): cure for venereal disease,
caught in open air. Quack remedy but no coded reference to young
men.
The Schubert Controversy #4
Susan McClary, Response to Steblin (1993)
– Context for opening up of debate in 1970s and 80s (Gay
rights); right-wing shift in early 1990s.
– Debate reflects two areas of concern: biography and music
criticism
– Do we really need to know about a composer’s sex life?
Does this kind of knowledge matter?
– ‘As musicology begins to break away from the ideology of
music’s autonomy, we are likely to encounter more and
more evidence of how is production and reception were
shaped by matters connected with sexuality.’
– BUT there is no essentialist link between sexual preference
(or gender, class, or ethnic identity, for that matter) and
modes of cultural expression.
The Schubert Controversy #5
• Philip Brett, Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire
(1993)
– The domestic space that Schubert so typically occupied is also the sphere
of the feminine in the West, and part of the power of a homoerotic
Schubert is focused in the incoherent nexus of ideas that connects
gender liminality with deviant sexuality.
Robert Schumann, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
• Schubert is a more feminized composer compared to the other
[Beethoven]; far more loquacious, softer, broader; compared to
Beethoven he is a child, sporting among the giants. … To be sure, he
brings in his powerful passages, and works in masses; and still he is more
feminine than masculine, for he pleads and persuades where the man
commands.
• ‘homoerotic’ reading of Grand Duo [slow movement of Sonata in C, D.
812]
• Piano duet playing: performative site of homoerotic pleasure and
desire