Queering the Pitch

by Brett; Phillip

• ISBN13: 9780415978842
• ISBN10: 041597884X
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2006-08-31
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The first edition of Queering the Pitch was published in early 1994. It was immediately hailed as a landmark and defining work, bringing new insights about gender, sexuality, and the body to the study of music, and introducing music and musicological inquiry to the exploding field of lesbian and gay studies, and queer theory. Newly revised and expanded, Queering the Pitch, 2nd Edition includes for the first time in its entirety the comprehensive and controversial essay, "Lesbian and Gay Music," written for Grove Dictionary by Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood. With fourteen essays strikingly diverse in method and subject matter, the book "makes beguiling and thought-provoking reading-it's fun, in fact. These writers love music deeply and have much to say about it" (Ruth A. Solie, JAMS). Book jacket.

Table of Contents

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION	vii
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION	ix
1 Queering the Pitch: A Posy of Definitions and Impersonations	1
Wayne Koestenbaum
Part One CANONS AND ARIAS
2 Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet	9	(18)
Philip Brett
3 Sapphonics	27	(40)
Elizabeth Wood
4 On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight	67	(18)
Suzanne G. Cusick
5 A Conversation with Ned Rorem	85	(30)
Lawrence D. Mass
Part Two CHRONICLES
6 Henry Lawes's Setting of Katherine Philips's Friendship Poetry in His Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues, 1655: A Musical Misreading?	115	(24)
Lydia Hamessley
7 Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato	139	(16)
Joke Dame
8 "Was George Frideric Handel Gay?": On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics	155	(50)
Gary C. Thomas
9 Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music	205	(30)
Susan McClary
10 Eros and Orientalism in Britten's Operas	235	(22)
Philip Brett
11 Queer Thoughts on Country Music and k.d. lang	257	(18)
Martha Mockus
Part Three CONSORTS
12 Lesbian Compositional Process: One Lover-Composer's Perspective	275	(22)
Jennifer Rycenga
13 Growing Up Female(s): Retrospective Thoughts on Musical Preferences and Meanings	297	(18)
Karen Pegley and Virginia Caputo
14 Authority and Freedom: Toward a Sociology of the Gay Choruses	315	(34)
Paul Attinello
Part Four CODA
Preface to "Lesbian and Gay Music"	349	(2)
Elizabeth Wood
15 Lesbian and Gay Music	351	(40)
Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood
INDEX	391	(14)
CONTRIBUTORS	405