On A Lesbian Relationship with Music

Cusick, Suzanne G.

doi:10.4324/9781315090986-2

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The association of music and gendering has been extended beyond gender to sexuality and sexual identity since “musicality is next-door to sexuality” Cusick ( 1994 , p. 71), and “the history of Western music is a history of sexual anxiety, ambivalence, and negotiation” (1993). For McClary ( 1991 ), music is “strongly informed by erotic imagery” (p. 124).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Gender and Music Composition: A Study of Music, and the Gendering of Meanings

Sergeant

Himonides

2016

Front. Psychol.

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In this study claims that music communicates gendered meanings are considered, and relevant literature is reviewed. We first discuss the nature of meaning in music, and how it is constructed and construed. Examples of statements of gendering in the literature are cited, and the problems identified by writers who have questioned their validity are considered. We examine the concepts underlying terminology that has been used in inconsistent and contradictory ways. Three hypotheses are posed, and tested by means of two listening tasks. Results are presented that indicate that gendering is not inherent in musical structures, but is contributed to the perceptual event by the listener.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The imputed gendering of musical signs becomes even more complex when the connection is argued to extend beyond the boundaries of male/female heterosexuality to sexual orientation. Cusick ( 1994 ) describes the effects of “a Lesbian relationship with music” (pp. 67–83) and a “lesbian reception of music's message” (p. 67).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and Music Composition: A Study of Music, and the Gendering of Meanings

Sergeant

Himonides

2016

Front. Psychol.

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“…The merging of the musical and the erotic persists as Des Grieux recalls the effects of the performance on his body. Again evoking Helmholtz's "nervous piano" metaphor, Des Grieux feels his "nerves were so utterly unstrung that a maudlin song would just then have exasperated me, whilst another intoxicating melody might have made me lose my senses" (6). He feels his body "quivering from head to foot" (6).…”

Section: Music Physiology In Telenymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Again evoking Helmholtz's "nervous piano" metaphor, Des Grieux feels his "nerves were so utterly unstrung that a maudlin song would just then have exasperated me, whilst another intoxicating melody might have made me lose my senses" (6). He feels his body "quivering from head to foot" (6). While this passage verges on an expression of music's dangers, the conditional language here ("would have," "might have") suggests that while Des Grieux might be on the brink of exasperation, he remains safely in the realm of pleasurable quivering, in the "intoxicating" proximity to "senselessness.…”

Section: Music Physiology In Telenymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…5 As Suzanne Cusick writes, "If music isn't sexuality, for most of us it is psychically right next door." 6 Victorian thinkers often linked music to sexual transgression. From the cello jacket that Oscar Wilde wore to the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery 7 to the same-sex relationships of composers like Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Ethel Smyth 8 to the musical writings of aesthetes like Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds 9 to the socialscientific studies by "sexologists" like Edward Carpenter and Symonds that described "inverts" as "greatly attracted to music," 10 music and samesex desire regularly collided in the nineteenth-century imagination.…”

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Music Physiology, Erotic Encounters, and Queer Reading Practices inTeleny

Draucker¹

2021

Victorian Literature and Culture

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While music often appears as a “code” for sexual desire in Victorian literature, this article explores music's presence in a text for which no veiled language was needed: the anonymously published pornographic novella Teleny (1893). The authors of Teleny invoke emerging scientific discourses about music physiology to draw explicit parallels between musical and sexual encounters—as when the protagonist Camille orgasms in response to the vibrations of his lover's piano music. In such moments, Teleny offers an insistent defense of queer desire as a natural process rooted in the organic and often involuntary actions of the muscles and nerves—a particularly powerful intervention at a time when sexual “inversion” was most often denigrated as unnatural. In its use of biological science in the service of sexual representation—science that many twenty-first-century queer theorists might deem “essentialist”—Teleny presents a compelling challenge to scholars grappling with conversations about normativity, resistance, utopian desires, and idealized cultural objects.

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Improvisational Inqueery Inclusion, Intercorporeality, and the Classical Music Institution

Rowlands

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<p><strong>Improvisation has a long history as a part of the creative processes of performers and composers of European art music prior to the 20th century, commonly referred to as classical music. Despite this, it is typically excluded from the activities of the modern-day classical institution. In this thesis, I explore questions of why and how improvisation is excluded from classical music institutions today. I do so by engaging with concepts such as bodies, spaces, orientations, queering, and whiteness as they relate to the classical music institution and its construction as an ideological entity, and how improvisation — representing (in classical music) cultures, identities, and ideals associated with the constructed other — is an undesirable practice in this space. I discuss the role improvisation played in the development of counterpoint and the other practices of European musicians prior to the nineteenth century as well as attitudes and narratives that contributed to its decline in acceptance within the institution. I use qualitative data collected in interviews and practical focus groups I conducted with classically trained musicians to highlight some of its exclusionary and marginalizing structures. I also draw on this data to examine how these structures work to maintain the white, cisgender, heteronormative maleness of the space, while remaining hostile to bodies and ideals that exist deviant from those norms. I reflect on my own experience as an improvisor in conjunction with literature concerned with improvisation, embodiment, and phenomenology to conceive of improvisation as an intimately social, intercorporeal interaction between empathetically attuned human bodies. Finally, I consider how improvisation may be mobilised, alongside perspectives such as antiracism, to subvert and deconstruct unjust institutional structures and apply this consideration to the implementation of an inclusive and subversive final performance I called an “Inter-Creative Space.”</strong></p>

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On A Lesbian Relationship with Music

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Gender and Music Composition: A Study of Music, and the Gendering of Meanings

Gender and Music Composition: A Study of Music, and the Gendering of Meanings

Music Physiology, Erotic Encounters, and Queer Reading Practices inTeleny

Improvisational Inqueery Inclusion, Intercorporeality, and the Classical Music Institution

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