Queering Musical Biography in the Writings of Edward Prime-Stevenson and Rosa Newmarch

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-118
Author(s):  
Kristin M. Franseen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
Biographical Knowledge

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.

The Doctor Faustus Dossier

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Daub
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Doctor Faustus ◽  
Public Lives ◽  
Nazi Era ◽  
The Impact

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the impact that these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.

Introduction: Onna Monogatari

Tanaka Kinuyo ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Irene González-López ◽  
Michael Smith
Keyword(s):  
Professional Development ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World History ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
The World ◽  
Female Authorship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Studio System

The introduction presents an overview of Tanaka’s life and career vis-a-vis the history of twentieth-century Japan, emphasising how women participated in and were affected by legal, political and socio-economic changes. Through Tanaka’s professional development, it revisits the evolution of the Japanese studio system and stardom, and explains the importance of women as subjects within the films, consumers of the industry, and professionals behind the scenes. This historical overview highlights Japan’s negotiation of modernity and tradition, often played out through symbolic dichotomies of gender and sexuality. By underscoring women’s new routes of mobility, the authors challenge the simplified image of Japanese oppressed women. The second part of the introduction posits director Tanaka as an outstanding, yet understudied, figure in the world history of women filmmaking. Her case inspires compelling questions around labels such as female authorship, star-as-author, and director-as-star and their role in advancing the production and acknowledgement of women filmmaking.

The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (review)

Notes ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 844-848
Author(s):  
J. Peter (James Peter) Burkholder
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of

‘Britten Minor’: Constructing the Modernist Canon

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-290
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER CHOWRIMOOTOO
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Musical Modernism

AbstractIn the last few decades, established narratives of twentieth-century music – with Schoenberg and his disciples at the centre and others on the periphery – have come under considerable fire: some have denounced the modernist canon itself as narrow and esoteric, while others have sought to restore marginalized ‘minor’ composers to a supposedly rightful centrality. In this article, I revisit the mid-century process of canon formation in order to excavate a deeper, less divisive understanding of its history. Using Benjamin Britten as a case study, I sketch a more ambivalent and reciprocal relationship between major and minor composers than has often been suggested. After illuminating key tropes in Britten's mid-century reception, I examine how the composer and his critics fashioned his canonical minority and, in the process, helped to construct the ‘majority’ of his modernist counterparts. I argue that, far from marginalizing his oeuvre, Britten's ambivalent, peripheral, and even diminutive relationship with the ‘major’ figures of musical modernism was central both to his mid-century appeal and his enduring place in the canon. Ultimately, I suggest that attending to Britten's complex and self-conscious canonical negotiations can teach us a lot not just about his own role in history, but also about the wider ways that twentieth-century canons are negotiated, mediated, transmitted, and performed.

A Worthwhile Effort? History of Organized Youth Sport in the United States

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
David K. Wiggins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Youth Sports ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Youth Sport ◽  
The United States ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Sports Programs ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the evolution of highly organized youth sports in the United States. Through an examination of both secondary and primary source material, an analysis is made of children's participation in sport from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Particular attention is paid to the types of sports programs established for children as well as the various discussions involving the supposed benefits and negative aspects of youth sports. Included is information on Progressive Reformers, youth sport programs outside of educational institutions, and guidelines, reports, assessments, and scholarly evaluation of children and their involvement in sport.

scholarly journals BORIS TISHCHENKO. THE TWELVE. CREATION HISTORY AND BASIC COMPOSING PRINCIPLES

Globus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2(59)) ◽  
pp. 15-18
Author(s):  
Yuri Serov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Music Score ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
Clean Air ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Symphonic Music

The article is devoted to the history of the creation and music score of the ballet Twelve based on the poem by A. Blok by the outstanding Russian composer of the second half of the twentieth century Boris Ivanovich Tishchenko. The ballet was staged by the famous Soviet choreographer Leonid Jacobson back in 1964 and became, in fact, the first avant-garde ballet in the Soviet Union. Critics noted Tishchenko’s bright modern symphonic music and Jacobson’s free plastics, which “became a breath of clean air in the rarefied atmosphere of classical epigonism”.

Queer Encounters in the Music of Billy Strayhorn

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 771-824 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Barg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Queer Identity ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Complex Relationships

AbstractThis article addresses issues of queer identity, aesthetics, and history in jazz through a focus on two midcentury works composed and/or arranged by Billy Strayhorn: a set of four pieces written in 1953 for an Off-Broadway production of Federico García-Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in Their Garden (Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín); and several movements from the Strayhorn-Ellington adaptation of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite (1960). My study considers how the two works engage artistic figures, themes, topics, and aesthetic practices that have strong queer historical affiliations. These include failed or impossible love, masking, stylized exotica, and other liminal spheres of identificatory ambiguity and reversal. Taken together, these works enable a positioning of Strayhorn within modernist queer cultural history and, more specifically, within the history of African American gay cultural production. At the same time, through showing how queerness inhabits jazz's past, my analyses of Strayhorn's queer musical encounters provide a critical vantage point from which to examine historical and cultural understandings of jazz at midcentury and, more broadly, the complex relationships between social identities (race, sexuality, gender) and composition, arrangement, and collaboration in twentieth-century music.

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