Queer Relationships with Music and an Experiential Hermeneutics for Musical Meaning

Abstract

T he 1990s saw the emergence of a queer musicology that employed the slippages and transgressions of queer experience— those authentic to our experience, and those ascribed to it in sociohistorical discourse— as tools in the construction of a framework for apprehending the sprawling category of " musical meaning. " There emerged a queer way of experiencing musical works, structures, and performances and a queer way of identifying music's intersections with social structures of power. Together, these approaches ulti-mately gave rise to queer forms of relationship with music modeled on relation-ships between queer people. Musical meanings were found via processes that mirrored the body interactions, affective states, and interpretative practices that shape queer ways of being with other queers and being in the world. 1 More than two decades on, queer musicology's radical interventions re-tain immense salience, mapping a path through one of our discipline's longest-standing and most complex dilemmas: How might we reconcile immediate, embodied musical experience with hermeneutics, criticism, and analysis? From the beginning, musicology has sought to balance feelings with facts, magic with science, responsive passion with analytical precision in the hope that such bal-ance will afford a clear-eyed perspective on musical truth and musical meaning. Guido Adler's vintage instruction is, after all, directed toward the scholar who is also the " true friend " of music, the scientist who must bring all of his or her 1 The body of work that makes up queer and feminist musicology's " fi rst generation " is too vast to account for or even summarize here, with multiple scholars and diverse theoretical approaches play-ing key developmental roles, from gender and postcolonial studies to critical race theory. I include the work of several leaders in the fi eld from the early 1990s through today, but my references are by no means comprehensive. From the vast " early " literature that I do not reference, Philip Brett's scholar-ship on Britten and Susan McClary's writings on gender and the common practice tradition continue to inspire many queer musicologists.