Sounds Gay, I’m In

Thirty years ago, Queering the Pitch loosed one of the most powerful institutional revisions in musicology’s long and anxious history. Published in January of 1994, the book posed a forceful injunction to the field at large: Queerness—with all its social and political ramifications—could and would no longer be ignored by the ivied academies of Western art music. Music, it argued, never took place in a vacuum, and theoretical work hell-bent on abstracting it was willfully ignoring the embodied context that gave music life. And it staked the now-famous argument (amplifying parallel criticisms in Black musical scholarship, with nods to Susan McClary) that differently socialized bodies experience music differently: that the cultural pathways impressed on the subjective listener are ineluctable from the labor of active, critical reception.

Decades of tweedy gatekeeping unraveled in an instant. In the years that followed, attitudes towards popular and colloquial musics thawed considerably; committees reappraised how languages of oppression and exclusion had been codified in discourse; issues of gender imbalance in both histories of composition and their reception came under serious scrutiny; syllabi got a much-needed dusting up; and desperately overdue rescue operations wrested canonic composers from the obscurity of their well-constructed closets (Schubert and Handel are the famous examples). Across the board, musical scholarship got a belated injection of sweaty, sinuous sociality, and all those vibrating, sexualized, and generally feeling bodies that antiseptic analysis had worked so hard to systematically devalue came flooding back onto the scene. Today, much of the stylistically omnivorous, perspectively inclusive, intellectually promiscuous, and socially attentive research taking place in universities and conferences owes its fire to that volume and its heavy, vulnerable labor. That there have since been two follow-ups—2006’s Queering the Popular Pitch and 2019’s Queering the Field—only reinforce its status as one of the most influential musicological polemics of our time. Indeed, we have hardly begun to take full measure of all that Queering the Pitch made possible.

But for queer studies and cultural criticism in general, 2024 is as different from 1994 as 1994 was to the Stonewall generation 25 years before it. In many ways, the work today is harder, more convoluted, less self-evident. Without the concrete blockades of juridical oppression and institutionalized prejudice against which to throw its weight—gay marriage is legal in much of the West; drag is a mainstream celebrity affair; and diverse casting practices in mass media are ubiquitous—queer criticism has gone into something like a free fall. As whole sectors of its supposed constituency willingly assimilate with cis-heteronormative political interests and suburban cultural aesthetics, the new crisis of Western queerness is precisely in the word: where and how can we signify, much less mobilize, subaltern political energy when the word “queerness” has been so thoroughly whitewashed, so easily corporatized—became so debilitatingly and pathetically pragmatic? The moment that late capitalism (ever an equal-opportunity employer) realized queer media, fashion, music, and language could be commoditized and resold at a profit, it destabilized the communal anti-establishment grounds on which the movement staked its early claims: Queerness without subversion is hardly recognizable as queer at all. Today, even as trans panic, right-wing resurgence, and anti-intellectualism abound, the most pressing dilemmas facing queerness remain interior to the movement: the call is very much coming from inside the house. 

So at the start of another Pride Month taking place in the caustic rift between neoliberal strategies of identitarian moralizing and a still subversive but decentralized queerness too cynical to be politically actualized, I thought we might consider what Queering the Pitch may have overlooked in its early advocacy. For better or for worse, the ramifications of that book—and all the implicit assumptions that underpinned it—are still being felt today. Without abandoning the scope of its methodological thrust or the very real hope that initially set it into motion, we are nevertheless in need of a reparative without which queer musicology stands little chance of any meaningful survival. Or, reanimating a formula that will be all too familiar to the field: 

This is how we got into queer musicology, and this is how we get out. 

First, it wasn’t actually the first. Queering the Pitch had a precedent, or at least a willful provocateur. The Queen’s Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum’s paean to the opera diva, arrived like lightning in the spring of ’93. Hot on the heels of early queer theory—Sedgwick, Butler, and Anzaldúa, all darting between Foucault and Black post-segregationist philosophy—Koestenbaum’s Barthesian unpacking of his own gay erotic fixation with the genre did what no serious book on classical music had done before: It raised the writer to the level of the subject. Unabashedly first-person and devastatingly acute, without forgoing even a modicum of a poet’s love of language, The Queen’s Throat hinted at new modes of musical thinking. It recuperated real methodological gains by centering, rather than absenting, the pleasures and experiences of the individual listener. It sounds so simple now, but at a time when watertight theorems and erudite citations were measures of intellectual virility, the idea that the quivering excretions of the body had anything worthwhile to say was nothing short of a revelation. Queering the Pitch appeared a year later, with its similar claim to the listening body heralded in a forward by Koestenbaum himself.

As it turns out, both The Queen’s Throat and Queering the Pitch were early indicators of a far more prevalent tropism underway across the humanities now referred to as the “affective turn.” Broadly (and no doubt too simply) put, affect theory was a calculated reparative meant to reheat the corpus in what was seen as an overwhelmingly frigid and hostile academe. The argument—and it had real merit—was that scholarship had “lost the plot,” that all its divagating philosophies of structuralism and post– had overlooked the real, feeling bodies seated on the receiving ends of art. Affect theory wagered on the premise that by attending to, rather than ignoring, the subjective shudderings, shiverings, and ecstatic thrills of the spectator, one could gain real insight into the entanglements of art and culture otherwise unreachable by hard-core deconstructive analytics.

Queer musicology shares the same origin story. It’s no great secret that the dominant narrative of notated music in the twilight of 20th-century modernism was of dehiscence: Babbitt and Boulez scratching away at the chalkboard in the ivory tower while Britten and Bernstein collected laurels in the commons has long been the clichéd formula. But that formula was crucial, because it gave queer musicology an opponent. In their 2001 manifesto-definition of the subdiscipline, Elizabeth Wood and Philip Brett (two of Queering the Pitch’s three editors) framed queer musicology’s disturbance to a heterosexual academy along exactly the same lines. “Since people in music all share to some extent the taint of the effeminate or feminized, powerful institutional forces had to be mobilized to counteract that image, especially with the entry of music into the universities on a large scale after World War II,” they wrote. “The widespread adoption of a neo-serialist technique, the development of arcane forms of music analysis, the separation of a high art from any form of popular cultural expression, and the equation of musical scholarship with scientific inquiry are all signs of a dominant masculinist, highly rational, heteronormative discourse in music all too unhappily but accurately characterized by the word ‘discipline.’” Queer musicology, in other words, sought a way out of the mind and back into the bloody heart of things. 

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It’s not difficult to see, however, that beneath Brett and Wood’s blatant gender binarism is a poorly masked aesthetic prejudice. Tonality—capable of inducing the passions of the heart, expressive and nostalgic, susceptible to emotional response—has long been associated with femininity (and, in the case of gay composers, the “failed-male” status); non-tonal or noise music—harsh, intellectual, ascetic, muscular, rigorous—with the masculine. By repeatedly framing queer musicology as a return to the social feminine (as in their insistence that Henze’s “flight from serialism and from Germany,” and not any compositional idiosyncrasies begun before then, was the most legible trace of his queer sensibility), Brett and Wood also forwent the possibility that noise, sonic violence, or structural rigor could ever serve a queer aesthetic. 

The jocular title Queering the Pitch is thus also a Freudian slip: it has always been pitch—and its associated arenas of harmony, sensation, and tonality—rather than noise that queer musicology prefers. Accordingly, only two 20th-century composers appear in that book, and, in a move that would delimit the aesthetic boundaries of queer musical scholarship for the next three decades, both composers (Britten and Ned Rorem) conform solidly with historical norms of tonal harmony and “expression” inherited from Romantic sensibilities.

Thirty years on, the consequences of that deliberately constructed alterity are more prevalent than ever. Studies and sessions bearing the letterhead of queer musicology are overrun with a collection of composers whose historical cathexis and decadent nostalgia is best described by what José Esteban Muñoz, in his Cruising Utopia, calls gay pragmatism. Muñoz, rallying in that book against the suburban gay white male desire to participate in state-sanctioned class systems like marriage and military, frames the fight for mere political equity as only ever reinforcing the institutions responsible for the repression of queer expression in the first place. Likewise, the collusion between gay (largely Anglo-American white male) composers and populist compositional aesthetics—the famous cases of Bernstein, Copland, Menotti, Barber, Thomson, Blitzstein, Poulenc, Rorem, Del Tredici, Britten, Pinkham, Diamond, Corigliano and their many younger apostles—facilitated a similar pragmatism. Ensuring their own lubricated admission to classical music’s cushy hegemonies, these composers did nothing to disrupt its oppressive social infrastructure; to the contrary, many only ever worked in service to it.

For many years, such composers sat outside the purview of analysis under the category of “merely popular.” But with the affective turn, queer musicology reframed that return to systems of conventional musical organization associated with mainstream pleasure (tonality) as a kind of radical queer rebellion taking place under the sign of the affect. As a result, considerable academic credence was recouped for otherwise anti-academe composers; how convenient that their music both largely permitted classical models of analysis while being decidedly more “pleasurable” to work with. But it was exactly by being pleasing, the argument went, that this music was rebelling (willingly ignoring that music’s general lack of a signifier meant it had no real way of excluding any straight majority from finding equal pleasure in that same music). “Queer art music” thus became first and foremost a “pretty” or traditionally “affective” one, a music whose only political thrust could be found in its refusal to be radical at all.

“Sounds gay, I’m in,” the pithy epigram plastered across Pride merchandise (visible on all manner of T-shirts and stickers and socks and bags and hats and notebooks and pins and pillowcases etc.), has thus become something like an unspoken moniker for contemporary queer musicology and composition. The pretense that something can always “sound gay” to me, a queer listener, assumes queerness to always be both intentional (if it felt particularly strong to my gay ears, the art itself must have meant for me to feel that way) and constitutive (my corporeal experience of queerness in response to the musical object is proof enough that it is, or should be taken as, queer). The subsequent “I’m in” is both a confirmation of scholarly investment—gayness is the only metric needed for me to work on/with/alongside it—and also a surreptitious implication of the listening “I” as always “within” my analysis. “Sounds gay”—because I said so—“I’m in”—and that’s allowed. 

For all its jovial, anti-heteronormative energy, the phrase carries real threat, equivalent to saying, “My inarguable pleasure in an object can and will be weaponized as an academic fulcrum, even at the expense of real theory or insight.” It reinstalls a hierarchy, this time of feeling, where queer feeling systematically comes out on top. The same can largely be said in composition: if I, a queer composer, write music, no matter how pragmatic or conventional or assimilable it may be, it can and must be taken seriously as a valid and definitively queer aesthetic. 

To both “sounds gay” and to “I’m in,” I am resistant. Not because I’m against the reading of tonal music as queer at all—indeed, the careers of Cassandra Miller, Meredith Monk, or Julius Eastman would make no sense without queer studies (not to mention being particularly fond of Brett’s reading of camp in Poulenc)—but because I distrust the assumption that any music, by refusing to participate in radical aesthetics at any level, can retain even a flicker of queer political force. I cited Cruising Utopia earlier but it bears recalling here. In that book, Muñoz argues that “Queerness, if it is to have any political resonance, needs to be more than an identitarian marker and to articulate a forward-dawning futurity.” The version of queerness evidenced by the objects and methodologies described above are decidedly opposed to that futurity. In its insistent attachment to modalities of comfort and class, queer musicology and its associated body of composition perform a pragmatic retrenchment that prohibits it from any serious political critique. For all the potential benefits of reclaiming queer music from the hegemonic canon, such a project still tethers itself to an anti-relational and fundamentally regressive aesthetic that cannot measure queerness except in the nebulous and inscrutable (and thus indulgent and risk-less) arena of how it feels queer to a queer listener. 

Which is where, to me at least, the lie becomes most difficult to ignore, because lingering behind the prioritization of affect is an archaic, conservative assumption that music’s sole function must always be to make one feel something specific. It rests on the ancillary presumption that music’s emotional excretions are always “definitionally, necessarily, and essentially intentional in aim, direction and effect,” and that the adequate intellectual account of a musical work is the one that most successfully documents the responses of the subjective, listening body whose reactions must be the music’s lonely aim. “Perhaps the greatest danger of this approach,” writes Eugenie Brinkema in The Forms of the Affects, her contestation against the ubiquity of affect theory, “is that it emphasizes the successful consumption of affect and thus makes theoretical accounts of each private feeling experience complicit with the explicit market of feeling from the commercial side of [music] production. One suspects… that the theoretical qualification for such work is to be a better consumer of feelings: if affect does not need to be interpreted, just recorded, then the most affected theorist wins.” No matter how eloquent, thrilling, or insightful theories of the “listening diary” can be—and, for all that I love it, I know The Queen’s Throat was always one of these—“each remains beholden to a model of emotional intensity that assumes its energetic vector leads to an energetic spectatorial sensorial reaction.” Again and again, affective accounts of musical queerness fall trap to the dreaded syllogism of “I love it and I am queer, therefore it is queer”: a neoliberal narcissism that flatly rejects the potential for queerness to serve anything other than safe, inclusive, positivist, capitalist comfort. 

“The danger in ceding the specificity of affects or the generalizability of theory or the pervasiveness of textual interpretation,” Brinkema writes, “is potentially to risk both the loss of disciplinary rigor… and the critical insights of that theory.” Queer musicology has very nearly done so, as it slinks into its fourth decade still wringing out the same few composers for new and ever finite categories of feeling. There is an exhausted aura that pervades academic conferences nowadays; a sense that, for all the eloquently worded, well-meaning and connoisseuring bodies floating about the room, no one can really argue with another’s sense of feeling, leaving discourse forever stuck at “well I hear it differently.” We are all the flock of seagulls in Finding Nemo, shouting our dutiful chorus of mine mine mines without any serious ability to critique those claims of ownership. 

Brinkema, gratefully, comes armed with an alternate proposal. It is her theory—and I’m inclined to agree—that (1) any individual affect always manifests in, as, and with textual form, and (2) that it is only because one must read for it that affect has any force at all. In short, it is in form, and specifically the forms that affects (of which that nebulous queer feeling may be said to be one) take, where real discourse can be generated, because form itself is what is endlessly, brutally generative. All we have to do to productively engage those affects is to close-read, but crucially—and this is Brinkema’s other major qualification—without any promise of return. The minute we set out assuming we know what it is we want to find, we have already foreclosed on the deal. Form can never be used to prove anything; it is only always what must be read for anew each time.

This has, of course, all been said before. In a remarkable 1985 dialogue between Foucault and Boulez—a gay philosopher and an ambivalently ascetic composer—the pair land on precisely this solution. Foucault is probing Boulez about the evergreen debate of accessibility in new music: “Contemporary music, by trying to make each of its elements a unique event, makes any grasp or recognition by the listener difficult,” he accuses. Boulez’s response reads like a thinly-veiled critique of what J. Jack Halberstram has elsewhere characterized as “straight time”:

Is there really only lack of attention, indifference on the part of the listener toward contemporary music? Might not the complaints so often articulated be due to laziness, to inertia, to the pleasant sensation of remaining in known territory?

Boulez implicitly contrasts the intellectual lethargy of a majoritarian society and its comfort in the known with a queer preference for unknown’s potential that emerges only in concert with discomfort, attention, and “difference.” It is not that his (queer) music is inaccessible; it is that listeners under immediacy-oriented capitalism have been made inaccessible to the music. The solution Boulez offers to Foucault’s conflict of accessibility is to recuse art music entirely from the promise of affective primacy and intentionality to which culture (and, by extension, criticism) has grown so accustomed in its consumption of media:

There are fewer and fewer chances for the first encounter to ignite perception and comprehension. There can be a spontaneous connection with it, through the force of the message, the quality of the writing, the beauty of the sound, the readability of the cues, but deep understanding can only come from repeated hearings, from remaking the course of the work. [Emphasis mine.]

Boulez is found here campaigning for a Brinkema-like tarrying of critical attention that refuses to take objects as immediately given. His repartee to Foucault’s “difficulty of understanding” is an injunction to read too closely, to dwell too long, to (the telling phrase) remake the course of the work anew each time. To the question of how we might meaningfully engage with a music that does not offer itself up at the first affective experience, Boulez is clear: Read, without promise, for form.

And if we glance back only three years before that, we find Foucault, in a short essay on Boulez, making analogous points in uncannily familiar language. Foucault begins with what could very well be read as an oracular rebuke to the primacy of the affect: “During a time in which we were being taught the privileges of meaning, of the lived-through, the sensuous [du charnel, he says in French, the carnal, fleshy viscera], of foundational experience, subjective contents or social significations, to encounter Boulez and music was to see the 20th century from an unfamiliar angle—that of the long battle around the ‘formal.’” Foucault goes on to describe Boulez’s method of engagement with other arts as a move against any universalizing aesthetic and towards a reading of history for form that arrives, finally, at a postulation that swings Boulez and his music forcefully into the realm of queer futurity:

I think his object, in this attention to history, was to make it so that nothing remains fixed, neither the present nor the past. He wanted them both to be in perpetual motion relative to each other. When he focused closely on a given work, rediscovering its dynamic principle, on the basis of a decomposition that was as subtle as possible, he was not trying to make a monument of it; he attempted to traverse it, to “pass through” it, to undo it with an action such that the present itself might move as a result.

Causing the present to move; what else but this could be the mark of a queer music? What else but this refusal to settle for the toxic culture of late-capitalism’s contemporary moment could ever really be called queer? Across Cruising Utopia, Muñoz insists that it is through exactly this kind of critical engagement with the past—what he calls (following Bloch) “anticipatory illuminations”—that horizons of queerness open up before us. By attending to its form and not its affect, Foucault spots in Boulez’s music the very thing that makes it so powerfully, ineluctably, devastatingly queer: the rejection of a present it cannot survive, coupled with the momentary glimmer of another, potential world just beyond it, all of which happens in form.

Queering the Pitch, for all the ground it broke, implemented a scholarly gate of its own by willingly prioritizing an affective, pragmatic queerness over a radically formal one. The resultant extradition of noise/experimental artists from queer musical studies—an incomplete listing of which might include Salvatore Sciarrino, Kari Watson, Cornelius Cardew, Claude Vivier, Annea Lockwood, Sylvano Bussotti, Timothy McCormack, Pierre Boulez, Kelley Sheehan, Pauline Oliveros, Aribert Reimann, Cassandra Miller, Harry Partch, Meredith Monk, Charles Wuorinen, Jean Barraqué, Julius Eastman, Laure M. Hiendl, Ellen Fullman, Michael Finnissy, etc.—simultaneously dispensed with all those artists for whom form is the primary concern of their music and, with them, the political dimension of utopian futurity that makes a music queer at all. These 30 long years of the warm-blooded affect have, like milk, sweetly spoiled into an identity politics masquerading a much more sinister conservative moralizing beneath. And criticism has become the sicker for drinking it. 

So this is how we get out. We take queerness out from under the stultifying weight of the affect. I should clarify that I’m specifically not advocating for a reversion to some forgotten, great age of ascesis, that we remove ourselves again from the equation. The great advancement of the affect, and there’s still tremendous value in it, was to recognize that flesh throws real punches: I, for one, would hate to see a return to cut-and-dry theory, all numbers and no sex. No, what I’m suggesting (via Brinkema) is that visceral affect can only be as productive as the rigor of the formalism willing to read it to filth and take nothing for granted. Nothing less than a complete reinvestment in formalism is needed if the practices that founded queer musicology are to ever hope for another 30 years as generative as the ones that lay behind us.

Which begs the final question: What labor is left over for the “queer”? What, in a rigorous formalism, could still be protectively walled off as queer at all? 

Nothing, maybe. But in a way that’s my point. Calling it queer musicology from the start meant we always assumed at least one thing before we read. And maybe that one thing got in our way. Muñoz certainly thinks so. In the very first line of Cruising Utopia, he launches what is still his private revolution, an insistent ontological humility the potential of which, should we choose to accept it, would be the return of our lost queer political futurity: 

“Queerness is not yet here,” he writes. “Put another way: we are not yet queer but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon.”

Brinkema would simply say, “We do not yet know all it is that form can do.”

Happy Pride. ¶