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 ultimately gave rise to queer forms of relationship with music modeled on relationships 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 retain immense salience, mapping a path through one of our discipline's longeststanding 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 balance 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

Electroacoustic Voices: Sounds Queer, and Why It Matters

“…39 Sarah Hankins identifies this arousal as fundamental to a queer relationship with music: 'Arousal opens, extends, and receives; it dissolves boundaries not only between our bodies and objects in the outside world but also between different and even contradictory parts of our selves'. 40 This arousal may call to mind the modern definition of 'queer' if one imagines the arousal of a listener for a voice of the same gender. But gender and sexuality is not what makes listening and arousal through listening queer: it's the destabilised delineation between self/other and subject/objectthe unsettling of tidy, socially-situated boundaries.…”