Music: Queer/Gender Non-Conforming Composers

Music and queerness interact in many different ways. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness brings together many topics and scholarly disciplines, reflecting the diversity of current research and methodology. Each of the book's six sections exemplifies a particular rhetoric of queer musicstudies. The section "Kinds of Music" explores queer interactions with specific musics such as EDM, hip hop, and country. "Versions" explores queer meanings that emerge in the creation of a version of a pre-existing text, for instance in musical settings of Biblical texts or practices of karaoke."Voices and Sounds" turns in various ways to the materiality of music and sound. "Lives" focuses on interactions of people's lives with music and queerness. "Histories" addresses moments in the past, beginning with times when present conceptualizations of sexuality had not yet developed and movingto cases studies of more recent history, including the creation of pop songs in response to HIV/AIDS and the Eurovision song contest. The final section, "Cross-cultural Queerness," asks how to understand gender and sexuality in locations where recent Euro-American concepts may not beappropriate.

Aficionados of music, dance, opera, and musical theater will relish this new volume by the scholars of GLBTQ featuring over 200 articles showcasing composers, singers, musicians, dancers, and choreographers across eras and styles. Read about Hildegard of Bingen, whose Symphonia expressed both spiritual and physical desire for the Virgin Mary, and George Frideric Handel, who not only created roles for castrati but was behind the Venetian opera's preoccupation with gender ambiguity. Discover Alban Berg's Lulu, opera's first openly lesbian character. And don't forget Kiss Me Kate, the hit 1948 Broadway musical: written by Cole Porter, married, though openly gay; produced by a gay man; directed by John C. Wilson, Noël Coward's ex-lover; and featuring Harold Lang, who had affairs with Leonard Bernstein and Gore Vidal. No single volume has ever achieved the breadth of this scholarly, yet eminently readable compendium, which includes: overviews of genres, such as opera, ballet, cabaret, modern dance, rock, disco, and hip-hop; discussions of topics like glam rock, music videos, and AIDS activism; and fascinating biographical entries on hundreds of figures such as Peter Tchaikovsky, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Diaghilev, Bessie Smith, Aaron Copland, Stephen Sondheim, Alvin Ailey, Rufus Wainwright, and Ani DiFranco.

Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity approaches modern sexuality by way of music. Through the hidden or lost stories of composers, scholars, patrons, performers, audiences, repertoires, venues, and specific works, this intriguing volume explores points of intersection between music and queerness in Europe and the United States in the years 1870 to 1950--a period when dramatic changes in musical expression and in the expression of individual sexual identity played similar roles in washing away the certainties of the past. Pursuing the shadowy, obscured tracks of queerness, contributors unravel connections among dissident identities and concrete aspects of musical style, gestures, and personae. On one end of the spectrum are intense, private connections and tantalizing details of musical expression: romantic correspondence between Eugenie Schumann (a daughter of Clara and Robert) and the singer Marie Fillunger; John Ireland's confessional letters to a close friend of an illicit passion for young choristers; closet formations in the music of composers such as Maurice Ravel, Edward Elgar, and Camille Saint-Sens. their repercussions: the craze for male impersonators in American vaudeville between 1870 and 1930; the politics of appropriation implicit in showy transcriptions by pianists such as Liberace; the increasingly homophobic reception accorded Tchaikovsky's music in the early twentieth century. The authors also explore how traces of queerness can mark communities, such as groups of German men who fashioned homosexual identities by way of the cult of Wagner or women musicians who were assigned suspect or deviant status by virtue of being jazz instrumentalists. Throughout these discussions, music provides the accompaniment for confrontations between disparate conventions of social propriety and diverse forms of sexual identity. These provocative essays open the consideration of music and sexuality to an exciting new sense of inbetweenness, passage, and diversion.