| Contents |
Queer and Critical Race Theory, Figuring Out Music Theory / Gavin S.K. Lee, Philip Ewell, and Robert Hatten -- Queer music analysis. Music Analysis; Queer Academy / James Currie ; Queering Schubert's "Der Atlas" : Reflections on Positionality and Close Reading / David Bretherton ; The Expression of Queerness in Hans Werner Henze's Music / Federica Marsico ; Multiplicities, Truth, Ethics : a queering analysis of Chaya Czernowin's Anea Crystal / Judith Lochhead -- Queer temporality. Sun Ra's Fletcher Henderson / Chris Stover ; The Chronographic Fallacy of Unilinear Music Theory, Or, Un(Re)productive Temporality in Dichterliebe / Gavin S. K. Lee ; Queering Musical Chrononormativity : Percussion Works of the West Coast Group / Bill Solomon -- Queer narratology. Queer Sexuality and Musical Narrative / Fred Everett Maus ; "Legendary In-Reading" : Musical Meaning, Analysis, and Biography in Edward Prime-Stevenson's Music Criticism and Sexology / Kristin Franseen ; Animating Indeterminate Agency / Vivian Luong. |
| Abstract |
"Queer Ear brings together for the first time a collection of music theorists who issue queer challenges to both music theory and musicology. To queer musicology, which has often presumed that music theory has nothing valuable to contribute to queer music studies, we demonstrate how music theory can be appropriated for queer ends. We show that queerness is integral to our music-theoretical practice, and can change the field of music theory. Queers have always listened widely, repurposing straight sounds for the "queer ear," a concept which stands in contrast with queer soundings, by queer composers, who are also investigated in this volume. Privileging provisional, idiosyncratic, and nonnormative listening practices, a queer ear enables us to counter music theory's hoary and continuing tendencies towards rationality, unity, unilinearity, teleology, and logical certainty. What unites the investigation of queer ear and queer soundings is the repurposing of "hard" music-theoretical apparatuses, as well as "soft" apparatuses like narratology and cultural theory, for queer ends. These repurposings contribute to the search for general principles-or a "theory"-of queering that counters mainstream music theory's proclivities, encouraging everyone to experiment with queer ways of listening instead. But ultimately, the queer ear is an expression of what queers have always had to do, often learning from a young age to collect scraps from our families's heteronormative table, recycling and reusing bits and pieces of an often hostile world to build habitable futures for ourselves. Through the lenses of queer temporality, queer narratology, and queer music analyses, we examine a wide variety of sounds from Sun Ra to Cowell, Czernowin, and Henze, as well as Schubert and Schumann; theories ranging from Schenker to queer shame, disability studies, and posthumanism; and writings from Edward Cone to Edward Prime-Stevenson"-- Provided by publisher. |
