Queering the Pitch

Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, Gary C Thomas, Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, Gary C Thomas

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135863814
• Édition: 2
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Music

When the first edition of Queering the Pitch was published in early 1994, it was immediately hailed as a landmark and defining work in the new field of Gay Musicology. In light of the explosion of Gay Musicology since 1994, a new edition of Queering the Pitch is timely and needed. In this new work, the editors are including a landmark essay by Philip Brett on Gay Musicology, its history and scope. The essay itself has become a cause celebre, and this will be its first full appearance in print. Along with this new historical essay, the editors are contributing a new introduction that outlines the changes that have occurred over the last decade as Gay Musicology has grown.

1
Queering the Pitch

A Posy of Definitions and Impersonations

Wayne Koestenbaum

To queer the pitch: to interfere with or spoil the business (of a tradesman or showman)....

1866 M. MACKINTOSH Stage Reminisc. The smoke and fumes of “blue fire” which had been used to illuminate the fight came up through the chinks of the stage, fit to choke a dozen Macbeths, and—pardon the little bit of professional slang—poor Jamie’s “pitch” was “queered” with a vengeance.

1875 T. FROST Circus Life The spot they select for their performance is their “pitch,” and any interruption of their feats, such as an accident, or the interference of a policeman, is said to “queer the pitch.”

SAYS A LESBIAN FRIEND, who wants to write unconventionally about Clara Schumann:

May music escape, for good, the fate of presumed straightness. May music at last be subject to the critic’s seduction.

By soda machines in the library’s basement the faces of fellow musicology students (my sometime cohort) look cloudy with ambition and compromise— even the queer ones, suspicious of what they consider my tortuous conduct, my betrayal of the musical closet’s heart- and head- and limb-constricting pact of silence. Though it’s flagrant to expect to earn a degree in my desires, I wish to enforce no separation between my musical and my sexual passions.

When I told my adviser about my passion for Clara Schumann, and the irregular manner in which I intend to express it, he scowled. I can’t deny the eerie magnetism of prohibition. I pit myself against it. His naysaying inspires me to declare, within earshot of music, “Dyke.”

I dreamt that the music department caught fire; outside it, I cavorted like Bertha Rochester in sultry, vindicated, mystic dance. In the dream, no scores burned, and the police, when they arrived, applauded.

My musical and my sexual passions are not necessarily identical, but I wish to assume no distinction between them.

queer, v. slang. To spoil, put out of order. Also, with a person as object: to spoil the reputation of, to put (a person) in bad odour (with someone); to spoil (a person’s) undertaking, changes, etc.

1913…“That queered me with the teacher.”

Says a male friend who has been working, for a decade, on a monograph of uncertain subject, perhaps Beethoven, or an ethnographic project that takes him to distant places, or a philosophical treatise on the nature of the composer’s voice (my friend is never specific about his interminable quest):

The night I saw my gods, the famous pianist ______, the famous conductor ______, the famous biographer of ______, at the St. Marks Baths, I began my book. After sex that night I felt the usual emptiness, a plainsong loss, as if I had been looted, ransacked; and then, in the midst of enervation I heard a phantom melody, a call to arms I’d heard many times but never until now understood, and I suddenly knew I had to explode and expose my life. In my monograph I speak about music’s origins in physiological patterns of tension and release; I don’t mention sex, but sex is there between the lines, waiting to be rescued by the right readers. And yet I lack the language to say all this effectively, properly; I lack conceptual tools. A new era is beginning and I am paradoxically saddened by this moment of regeneration, puzzled by the stacks of yellowed, thwarted pages on my escritoire, beside the glowering portrait of Beethoven, and the portrait of my mother and father on their wedding day.

I had not the luxury of saying “gay” in print or in the classroom. In my life I had not the luxury.

The spot they select for their performance is their “pitch,” and any interruption of their feats, such as an accident, or the interference of a policeman, is said to “queer the pitch.”

Says a woman friend, who specializes in American song:

I gave a talk on lesbian composers (the possibility, the prohibition) at a works-in-progress colloquium, and though no one usually attends these events, this time the whole department showed up in force. They came to quibble, to enforce standards. I could see standards in the smile of the lovely young straight woman, a scholarly star who teaches the Schoenberg seminar. She told me (in rarefied diction I dare not imitate) that music was independent of the body. In response I wanted to strip her naked and lick her body head to toe while humming Bessie Smith’s “I’ve Been Mistreated and I Don’t Like It.” The upholder of standards used the word civilized, a word that usually means I will soon be mortified.

My colleagues listened politely, phrased their objections respectfully: “Of course you understand my rebuttal’s reasonableness.” I pretended assent to the graduate student who chortled, “Your methodology is highly problematic.”

And the Wagnerian with the overbite said I was a lemming, that all of us in queer musicology were Susan McClary’s callow disciples, swallowing whole her dead-wrong assumptions. Mr. Overbite thought I was the enemy of music, the enemy of beauty. He misunderstood. My purpose is to return beauty, after long exile, to its rightful place in the discussion—to begin, at last, to speak about the beautiful.

The word “queer” opens beauty’s floodgates, enables a serious consideration of aesthetics. We are not the enemies of beauty. We want to speak, at last, about the beautiful.

In U.S. colloq. phr. to be queer for (someone or something): to be fond of or “keen on”; to be in love with.

1956 J. BALDWIN Giovanni’s Room Actually, I’m sort of queer for girls myself.

Says a straight male professor, tenured, who works on Tchaikovsky:

When, as a child, I heard a local orchestra play the “Pathétique,” I stared at the scroll above the stage, and ever since, I have connected Tchaikovsky with hiddenness, circularity, and entrapment. Most concert halls have similar scrolls, like rolled-up diplomas, or utopian sheaves of wheat in old-time Soviet propaganda drawings. These scrolls enjoin me to listen to echoes, hidden inscriptions, and to devote myself—a straight man, out of place, pensive and huge, with the wrong haircut and the wrong shoes and the wrong tastes—to the involuted discourse of homosexuality.

I am not queer but the word explains me. I am not queer but the concept abuts my life. It will be a miracle if the neglected inscriptions are not, by now, illegible.

Hence, queerdom.

1977 Daily Express This is a groin-directed compound of mime, ballet and freak show which, as a mere heterosexual, I take to be a celebration of the erotic imagery of queerdom.

Says a distinguished scholar of my acquaintance:

These “queer” characters have no solid musicological schooling. And anyone without the proper training should simply keep his mouth shut. Far too much is published. Best if these charlatans confessed their sexual secrets and left it at that. One can’t crudely transpose sexuality—the history of which none of these people, Foucault’s dupes, truly understands—onto music; one can’t reduce music to the wet, pat, slick generalizations that these cheaply politicized gonzos go for. I say, purge ’em.

In nightmares these arrivistes prod me; I see their sticky, uncredentialed, overreaching fingers moving toward the musicological pie.

Purge ’em.

To put (one) out; to make (one) feel queer.

1845 W. CORY Lett. & Jrnls. Hallam was rather queered (it not being in his line to do anything so conspicuous).

1894 Outing It queered me to think what would happen if they were to lose foothold.

Says a chorister friend, an endearingly femme bass:

The two coming-outs rhyme. “I’m musical” hurts—and heals—as much as “I’m queer.” With delight and horror I introduce myself as a musician, an identity (an inkling, a structure) I wear next to my skin. Music takes me back: in grammar school I learned recorder, and those first piping notes, antecedents of everything I’ve grown to love, remain the scariest, sexiest, most compromising emanations ever to rush from my body, though for years I denied the power of sound—like spunk, but diffuse, emerging slowly and continuously, not in a rash jet. I’ve never heard anyone explain how music is shadowed by the sexual, or why “I’m a musician” seems as rude, queer, and necessary as “Blow me.” Do I need proof that I’m a musician? Can musicianship be revoked? Was I born musical? Were you? Aren’t your instincts intertwined—folkways too knotted and abysmal to articulate—with music?

Were you born musical? Is it a proclivity you wear next to your skin?

queerister, obs. form of CHORISTER.

Says a semiretired professional accompanist, a lesbian assumed by many to be closeted, though in conversation with me she has been consistently unbuttoned and frank:

I, too, wanted to shove the norm off its throne: I hearkened to any ruination, to any smart troublemaking, but in the accompanist’s life there is scant space for reversal. The soloist can flounder, but the accompanist must keep perfect time.

Screw the old boys. Ignore their condemnations, in advance. If you listen for the soon-to-come dismissal, you will never say a word.

Think instead of the queer students: silently queer, bruised and attentive, faithful to the full phrase, to the metronome and the composer’s intention. To you, queer music students of 1948, this book is retrospectively dedicated.

And to you, present-day scholars, dreamers in and out of the university, I extend only this mild injunction:

Explain why I am an accompanist; explain these soaring episodes I’ve spent a lifetime fitting into my fingers. Explain the art of listening, of voicing, of blending; of imposing variations on sameness, and sameness on variation. Explain why I am musical. Explain “musical.” Leave me out of the picture entirely, if you wish, but explain the hole that’s left in music when my kind are missing.

Part One
Canons and Arias

2
Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet

Philip Brett

IN 1968, A YEAR BEFORE STONEWALL and the emergence of gay resistance, the sociologist Mary Mcintosh published a remarkable article entitled "The Homosexual Role" embracing a position that would now be called anti-essentialist.¹ Noting the difficulties that science had encountered in its efforts to promote the conception of homosexuality as a medical condition, she proposed that

this conception and the behaviour that it supports operate as a form of social control in a society in which homosexuality is condemned. Furthermore, the uncritical acceptance of the conception by social scientists can be traced to their concern with homosexuality as a social problem. They have tended to accept the popular definition of what the problem is, and they have been implicated in the process of social control.²

An antiessentialist approach to homosexuality was further developed in gay studies as a result of a similar thrust in the feminist criticism of gender. It received a powerful endorsement from Michel Foucault, whose position has recently been outlined by David Halperin as follows:

Foucault did for “sexuality” what feminist critics had done for “gender.” That is, Foucault detached “sexuality” from the physical and biological sciences (just as feminists had detached “gender” from the facts of anatomical sex, of somatic dimorphism) and treated it, instead, as “the set of effects produced in bodies, behaviors, and social relations by a certain deployment” of “a complex political technology.” He divorced “sexuality” from “nature” and interpreted it, instead, as a cultural production.³

There is of course one major problem with this approach. In an ag...