Lesbian and Gay Music
by Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood
VII. DIVAS AND DISCOS
The approach so far in this discussion has been along the traditional modernist lines of emphasizing production: the composer and, perhaps less so, the performer. An arguably better way of defining ‘lesbian and gay music’, and countering arguments about sexuality and gender’s being ‘inaudible in the notes themselves’, is to invert that model and, invoking the ‘politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating’ (Haraway 1991: 196), to consider both the audience and particular venues as creating (if only by contingency and for the moment) a label for the music.
In answer to the question ‘What is Gay Music?’ posed by Out magazine (November 1996, pp 108-14) to a number of musicians and people in the music business, Peter Rauhofer said ‘It’s all about the diva effect, an attitude that gay people immediately identify with’. This statement has a certain appeal as a generalization across 20th century homosexual cultures in the West, including both lesbians and gay males. Among affluent males the diva effect tends to produce a devotion to sopranos (Joan Sutherland or Maria Callas, most notably, the latter being central to Terrence McNally’s successful play, The Lisbon Traviata) and a subject position known as the Opera Queen, widely discussed and theorized (Bronski 1984, Koestenbaum 1993, Mordden 1984, Morris in Solie ed. 1993, Robinson 1994). Lesbian devotion may be equally intense, as instanced by the story of the young woman who committed suicide after being refused admission to Mary Garden’s dressing room (Castle in Blackmer
and Smith eds 1995: 25-26). It differs in attaching itself to dramatic sopranos, mezzo-sopranos or contraltos, especially if they are suspected of ‘belonging’ (like Garden) or if they cross-dress frequently in such roles as Orfeo, Octavian or the Poet in Ariadne auf Naxos. The tradition goes back beyond Garden (George Sand was ‘mad’ about Malibran, and both she and George Eliot found literary inspiration in the singing of Pauline Viardot-Garcia) and included among its celebrated divas Olive Fremstad, the famous butch Wagnerian soprano who is the heroine of Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and of Marcia Davenport’s Of Lena Geyer (Castle in Blackmer and Smith eds 1995, Wood in Brett, Wood and Thomas eds 1994).
The diva effect applies equally in popular music. If queer culture were religion, then Judy Garland would certainly be among its chief saints, its heaven ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ (a wish-fulfilling refuge from oppression), The Wizard of Oz a holy scripture, and ‘Friend of Dorothy’ the mantra of its votaries. Garland’s daughter, Liza Minelli, who starred in Cabaret, the musical adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, almost established an apostolic succession. Other notable divas might include Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Edith Piaf, Zarah Leander (the deep-voiced diva of the German scene), Bette Midler (who began her career in a New York bathhouse), Barbra Streisand, and Madonna. Whether these idols experienced same-sex liaisons or not is beside the point: more crucial are certain characteristics portrayed in their singing, such as vulnerability (or actual suffering) mixed with defiance, to which many of their fans relate. The quality of their humour is also an important ingredient. Several of the women singers already mentioned, notably k. d. lang, exploit the diva effect, possibly without quite reaching (or wanting) the status of a Garden, Callas, Ferrier, or Garland.
The diva effect also has some hold upon exclusively straight audiences; when it does occur, it is often imbued with camp elements of excess and style associated with homosexuals. Liberace, for instance, appealed to a broad (but not gay or lesbian) audience by developing a canny mixture of sentimentalism and transvestism around his candelabra and piano. His repertory included musical as well as sartorial camp, for example, his inspired cross-dressing of Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ in the haute couture of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ (for a cultural appraisal see Kopelson 1996:139-85 and Garber 1992). His manipulation of the ‘open secret’ was more extreme than that of any number of less flamboyant but also closeted gay musicians: the openly flaunted markings of a hidden identity allowed those who adored him to use their adoration (and his and their mother-love) to bolster their own sense of difference and superiority.
Another notable sphere of queer interest and sponsorship has been the dance floor. Disco is maligned in many quarters, but dance-club life throughout Europe and the United States was transformed in the 1970s with the advent of Gloria Gaynor, Patti Labelle, the Pointer Sisters, Sister Sledge, Donna Summer, Sylvester, The Village People, the Weather Girls and dozens more, to whose fast-and-heavy beat, colourfully synthesized sounds and comforting sentiments gay men and sometimes lesbians gyrated and celebrated ‘family’ in safe queer spaces that were close to realizing for the physicalized and sometimes transcendent moment what opera and The Wizard of Oz could only begin to suggest.
More localized and specialized forms, such as the even faster and louder House music of the 1980s, and later Acid and Techno, developed as Disco moved into the straight mainstream. In the 1990s gay dance music was strongly affected by the artistry of RuPaul, possibly the recording industry’s most successful drag queen. Like rock and roll before them, Disco and House were heavily derived from black performing styles and sounds, the African-American diva from Grace Jones to RuPaul being as important here as in the opera house. They momentarily displaced racial tensions to create an idealized arena for queer identity to be performed (Currid 1995). Even to consider Disco a category of music is inadequate: it is ‘also kinds of dancing, club, fashion, film, etc., in a word, a certain sensibility, manifest in music, clubs, etc., historically and culturally specific, ideologically and aesthetically determined — and worth thinking about’ (Dyer 1992: 149). This is as close as can be to gay music, one might think, yet its placing of queer performativity on the platform of black ‘diva-inity’ leads to a complicated play of identification, as Currid (1995) has shown.
Focus on a particular audience and its ‘situated knowledge’ may also undermine traditional critical arguments seeking to eradicate all identity in music save nationality. The New York Times review (by Paul Griffiths, 7 July 1998) of Kimper’s opera and the CRI recording of the music of lesbian coposers mentioned above, reaches the conclusion ‘that sexual preference, as well as sex, is inaudible’ and calls that conclusion ‘inevitable’. The response immediately suggests itself, ‘inaudible to whom’?
Modernist criticism, anxious to check the proliferation of meaning and keep forms of authority and canons of taste in place, puts the onus of proof on ‘the music itself’. But the notes cannot so easily be separated from their context (of performance, venue, genre and audience, as well as musical allusion): if stripped of all associations — an impossibility — they can yield no meaning.
In some few cases, such as the bizarre juxtapositions in Poulenc’s instrumental music, a homosexual sensibility is clearly audible, but then only to someone who has some grasp of the aesthetics of that much-discussed but uneasily defined phenomenon known as ‘camp’. Further, the orientalism or exoticism of a great range of 19th and 20th century music can be heard not simply as decorative acculturation but as an audible manifestation of some dissatisfaction with prevailing Western mores. More complicated musical strategies, such as the set of motivic and tonal interactions that signal the tragedy of internalized oppression in Peter Grimes, may be revealed as criticism involves itself more deeply and widely with such questions. Such markers, however, are possibly more prevalent in (closeted) homosexual culture in which classical music is so heavily implicated than in openly lesbian or gay music, such as Disco or the kinds of alternative women’s music mentioned above. Here, context exerts so powerful an influence as to overthrow conventional associations: even the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that quintessential model of heroic masculinity, met its gay destiny when, tricked out with a heavy beat and other accoutrements, it hit the Disco scene in the 1970s as ‘A Fifth of Beethoven’.
‘The identity of music is the sacred issue’, Philip Bohlman explains (referring to McClary 1991):
‘That women, working-class labourers, gays and lesbians, blacks, religious or ethnic communities, or anyone else should identify music in some other way or imagine music to embody completely different and differentiated cultural spaces, that becomes blasphemy against “what MUSIC is”.
Imagined in this way it may not be MUSIC anymore’ (Bohlman 1993: 417).
Accordingly, an important strategy among lesbian and gay critics is to insist on the possibility and the importance of different receptions of all kinds of music, an insistence which can undermine any authority or objectivity criticism might claim for itself, and of destroying the essentializing or minoritizing drive to confine lesbian and gay music criticism to style analysis. Suzanne Cusick, in an extremely radical statement quite early in the movement’s history (delivered at the first Feminist Theory and Music conference, 1991), insisted on, and explored, a special lesbian relationship to music itself (Brett, Wood and Thomas eds 1994). This gesture, going (in the gentlest manner) all the way, so to speak, prepared the ground for a good deal of critical work since (not all of it written by self-identifying lesbian, gay or bisexual critics, to complicate the picture even further) that refuses previous protocols in an effort to reach imaginative and varied views as to what kinds of phenomena might coexist as ‘lesbian and gay — or queer — music’ and how these might relate to whole sets of other posi-
tions, even the hegemonic one.
by Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood
VII. DIVAS AND DISCOS
The approach so far in this discussion has been along the traditional modernist lines of emphasizing production: the composer and, perhaps less so, the performer. An arguably better way of defining ‘lesbian and gay music’, and countering arguments about sexuality and gender’s being ‘inaudible in the notes themselves’, is to invert that model and, invoking the ‘politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating’ (Haraway 1991: 196), to consider both the audience and particular venues as creating (if only by contingency and for the moment) a label for the music.
In answer to the question ‘What is Gay Music?’ posed by Out magazine (November 1996, pp 108-14) to a number of musicians and people in the music business, Peter Rauhofer said ‘It’s all about the diva effect, an attitude that gay people immediately identify with’. This statement has a certain appeal as a generalization across 20th century homosexual cultures in the West, including both lesbians and gay males. Among affluent males the diva effect tends to produce a devotion to sopranos (Joan Sutherland or Maria Callas, most notably, the latter being central to Terrence McNally’s successful play, The Lisbon Traviata) and a subject position known as the Opera Queen, widely discussed and theorized (Bronski 1984, Koestenbaum 1993, Mordden 1984, Morris in Solie ed. 1993, Robinson 1994). Lesbian devotion may be equally intense, as instanced by the story of the young woman who committed suicide after being refused admission to Mary Garden’s dressing room (Castle in Blackmer
and Smith eds 1995: 25-26). It differs in attaching itself to dramatic sopranos, mezzo-sopranos or contraltos, especially if they are suspected of ‘belonging’ (like Garden) or if they cross-dress frequently in such roles as Orfeo, Octavian or the Poet in Ariadne auf Naxos. The tradition goes back beyond Garden (George Sand was ‘mad’ about Malibran, and both she and George Eliot found literary inspiration in the singing of Pauline Viardot-Garcia) and included among its celebrated divas Olive Fremstad, the famous butch Wagnerian soprano who is the heroine of Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and of Marcia Davenport’s Of Lena Geyer (Castle in Blackmer and Smith eds 1995, Wood in Brett, Wood and Thomas eds 1994).
The diva effect applies equally in popular music. If queer culture were religion, then Judy Garland would certainly be among its chief saints, its heaven ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ (a wish-fulfilling refuge from oppression), The Wizard of Oz a holy scripture, and ‘Friend of Dorothy’ the mantra of its votaries. Garland’s daughter, Liza Minelli, who starred in Cabaret, the musical adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, almost established an apostolic succession. Other notable divas might include Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Edith Piaf, Zarah Leander (the deep-voiced diva of the German scene), Bette Midler (who began her career in a New York bathhouse), Barbra Streisand, and Madonna. Whether these idols experienced same-sex liaisons or not is beside the point: more crucial are certain characteristics portrayed in their singing, such as vulnerability (or actual suffering) mixed with defiance, to which many of their fans relate. The quality of their humour is also an important ingredient. Several of the women singers already mentioned, notably k. d. lang, exploit the diva effect, possibly without quite reaching (or wanting) the status of a Garden, Callas, Ferrier, or Garland.
The diva effect also has some hold upon exclusively straight audiences; when it does occur, it is often imbued with camp elements of excess and style associated with homosexuals. Liberace, for instance, appealed to a broad (but not gay or lesbian) audience by developing a canny mixture of sentimentalism and transvestism around his candelabra and piano. His repertory included musical as well as sartorial camp, for example, his inspired cross-dressing of Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ in the haute couture of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ (for a cultural appraisal see Kopelson 1996:139-85 and Garber 1992). His manipulation of the ‘open secret’ was more extreme than that of any number of less flamboyant but also closeted gay musicians: the openly flaunted markings of a hidden identity allowed those who adored him to use their adoration (and his and their mother-love) to bolster their own sense of difference and superiority.
Another notable sphere of queer interest and sponsorship has been the dance floor. Disco is maligned in many quarters, but dance-club life throughout Europe and the United States was transformed in the 1970s with the advent of Gloria Gaynor, Patti Labelle, the Pointer Sisters, Sister Sledge, Donna Summer, Sylvester, The Village People, the Weather Girls and dozens more, to whose fast-and-heavy beat, colourfully synthesized sounds and comforting sentiments gay men and sometimes lesbians gyrated and celebrated ‘family’ in safe queer spaces that were close to realizing for the physicalized and sometimes transcendent moment what opera and The Wizard of Oz could only begin to suggest.
More localized and specialized forms, such as the even faster and louder House music of the 1980s, and later Acid and Techno, developed as Disco moved into the straight mainstream. In the 1990s gay dance music was strongly affected by the artistry of RuPaul, possibly the recording industry’s most successful drag queen. Like rock and roll before them, Disco and House were heavily derived from black performing styles and sounds, the African-American diva from Grace Jones to RuPaul being as important here as in the opera house. They momentarily displaced racial tensions to create an idealized arena for queer identity to be performed (Currid 1995). Even to consider Disco a category of music is inadequate: it is ‘also kinds of dancing, club, fashion, film, etc., in a word, a certain sensibility, manifest in music, clubs, etc., historically and culturally specific, ideologically and aesthetically determined — and worth thinking about’ (Dyer 1992: 149). This is as close as can be to gay music, one might think, yet its placing of queer performativity on the platform of black ‘diva-inity’ leads to a complicated play of identification, as Currid (1995) has shown.
Focus on a particular audience and its ‘situated knowledge’ may also undermine traditional critical arguments seeking to eradicate all identity in music save nationality. The New York Times review (by Paul Griffiths, 7 July 1998) of Kimper’s opera and the CRI recording of the music of lesbian coposers mentioned above, reaches the conclusion ‘that sexual preference, as well as sex, is inaudible’ and calls that conclusion ‘inevitable’. The response immediately suggests itself, ‘inaudible to whom’?
Modernist criticism, anxious to check the proliferation of meaning and keep forms of authority and canons of taste in place, puts the onus of proof on ‘the music itself’. But the notes cannot so easily be separated from their context (of performance, venue, genre and audience, as well as musical allusion): if stripped of all associations — an impossibility — they can yield no meaning.
In some few cases, such as the bizarre juxtapositions in Poulenc’s instrumental music, a homosexual sensibility is clearly audible, but then only to someone who has some grasp of the aesthetics of that much-discussed but uneasily defined phenomenon known as ‘camp’. Further, the orientalism or exoticism of a great range of 19th and 20th century music can be heard not simply as decorative acculturation but as an audible manifestation of some dissatisfaction with prevailing Western mores. More complicated musical strategies, such as the set of motivic and tonal interactions that signal the tragedy of internalized oppression in Peter Grimes, may be revealed as criticism involves itself more deeply and widely with such questions. Such markers, however, are possibly more prevalent in (closeted) homosexual culture in which classical music is so heavily implicated than in openly lesbian or gay music, such as Disco or the kinds of alternative women’s music mentioned above. Here, context exerts so powerful an influence as to overthrow conventional associations: even the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that quintessential model of heroic masculinity, met its gay destiny when, tricked out with a heavy beat and other accoutrements, it hit the Disco scene in the 1970s as ‘A Fifth of Beethoven’.
‘The identity of music is the sacred issue’, Philip Bohlman explains (referring to McClary 1991):
‘That women, working-class labourers, gays and lesbians, blacks, religious or ethnic communities, or anyone else should identify music in some other way or imagine music to embody completely different and differentiated cultural spaces, that becomes blasphemy against “what MUSIC is”.
Imagined in this way it may not be MUSIC anymore’ (Bohlman 1993: 417).
Accordingly, an important strategy among lesbian and gay critics is to insist on the possibility and the importance of different receptions of all kinds of music, an insistence which can undermine any authority or objectivity criticism might claim for itself, and of destroying the essentializing or minoritizing drive to confine lesbian and gay music criticism to style analysis. Suzanne Cusick, in an extremely radical statement quite early in the movement’s history (delivered at the first Feminist Theory and Music conference, 1991), insisted on, and explored, a special lesbian relationship to music itself (Brett, Wood and Thomas eds 1994). This gesture, going (in the gentlest manner) all the way, so to speak, prepared the ground for a good deal of critical work since (not all of it written by self-identifying lesbian, gay or bisexual critics, to complicate the picture even further) that refuses previous protocols in an effort to reach imaginative and varied views as to what kinds of phenomena might coexist as ‘lesbian and gay — or queer — music’ and how these might relate to whole sets of other posi-
tions, even the hegemonic one.
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου