Description

This course is aimed at advanced graduate students and is intended as an introduction to queer theory in its application to historical musicology and the theoretical literature, which attempts to address issues of queer theory within the Western Musical Canon. While the important work of integrating queer composers and musicians into the Western art-music canon continues to move apace and to make itself heard and felt in classrooms and textbooks, we cannot afford to ignore the socio-historical conditions that led to such a long period of neglect. This course will therefore not be a queer history of music but rather will examine the enduring utility of approaching music from a queer perspective. Considering music as both a process and a product, some of the questions this course will address include among others: • Does music possess a content beyond its purely musical syntax and structure or does it imitate action and experience? • Can a composer’s queerness be detected in his/her music? • Does a queer listener hear, or interpret, differently the compositions of a queer composer