The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity

Rating:
Summary: Queer as folk, queer as classical
Review: "The Queer Composition of America's Sound", a new contribution by Nadine Hubbs, tackles a subject which is as fascinating in concept as it is mystifying in content. How is it that the premiere American composers of the twentieth century happened to be identified as gay and to what end has that influenced their compositions?

Centering around Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, whom Hubbs refers to as essentially the "father and mother" of American composers, the author (adding several more composers to "the circle") seeks to build a case around the conception that their individual and perhaps collective sexuality contributed to what we might say is the defining American sound. Rounding out the junior colleagues of Copland and Thomson, (Marc Blitzstein, David Diamond, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles and Ned Rorem) Hubbs refers to them as "gay modernists", whose works are more tonal than not, and more simple in their overall construction....therefore, more effeminate and ultimately homosexual. As a balance, the author cites the twelve-tone Schönberg-esque composers as more atonal and more masculine.

Covering roughly the period between 1925 and 1955, an early point made in the book is that before Copland came along there was no such thing as an "American sound" and save for a revival of Copland's music after the American bicentennial, the American classical sound has all but disappeared. How ironic, she points out, that the quintessential voice of American music came from a marginalized segment of the population, albeit a more accepted segment of the music profession.

What's lacking in "The Queer Voice of America's Sound" is the connection of the composers' lives to their actual compositions. Would one consider "Rodeo" to be "gay"? If so, why? What in the musical structure of the piece would make it sound so? Hubbs offers a little of that in her chapter about Thomson's "Four Saints in Three Acts" but never quite connects the dots elsewhere. One can better imagine taking a class with her and having her play musical examples to back up her theses.

The book has a dissertation-delivered feel to it rather than a narrative flow. It tends to hop around from one idea to another without a joining coalescence. Yet Hubbs has managed to give us a well-documented look into the lives of several mid-twentieth century American composers and proffer some perceptions as to how homosexuality contributed to the identity of American music and the men who figured in it.




Rating:
Summary: Hubbs gets it.
Review: Nadine Hubbs' The Queer Composition of America's Sound marks a milestone in queer studies, musicology and American historiography. She details the relationship between self-consciously queer composers and the mid-twentieth century "American sound" with insight, compassion and finesse.

Hubbs describes the traditional if muted association of music with gender; then notes that 20th century America saw a sharp rise in overt attention to gender in music and in society. Composer Charles Ives had acidly proclaimed that a masculine musical ethos was needed in the United States, which he associated with strong harmonic dissonance. Traditional tonal neo-classical music was too soft and feminine. But it turned out to be gay Jewish composer Aaron Copland who produced an identifiably American sound that caught on--a musically conservative tonal neo-classical sound.

Copland, Virgil Thompson and their followers fashioned a musical identity that in the event coincided with their sexual identity, both of which were perceived to be French, female-influenced and generally sissified. Gay and straight composers were well aware of this. The listening public presumably was not, and did not adjudge Copland's signature music to be gay. In addition to his own compositions, Copland created a gay network, nurturing generations of rising gay composers. But after World War II, communist- and queer-baiting became rampant, diminishing the ascendancy of Copland's network. Copland's music also became suspect, due to his leftist political affiliations; the untrammeled homophobia sent gay composers further into the closet or out of the country.

Straight composers in the meantime demanded near incomprehensibility in their experimentalism, but their very success has largely led Americans to lose interest in serious music. Copland's reputation, however, has been rehabilitated with the resurgence of a parochial American patriotism, but without adknowledging his gay identity.

The sexual orientation of Thompson, Copland, Bernstein, Rorem has never been entirely secret, but now Hubbs elaborates upon that significant detail with a discussion of the nature of their music. Only someone so well-versed both in music and in queer studies could have produced this book. Hubbs embraces postmodern scholarly sensibilities as well as the need to conduct exhaustive research. She knowingly begins her account by discussing Gertrude Stein's collaboration with Thompson in the 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts and how Miss Stein's writing and her social prowess influenced these composers. She evinces a keen understanding of the paradoxes of homosexual camp and its role in both obfuscating and highlighting reality, and she writes homophobia into the story with exactly the pervasive influence it wielded and wields. Her understanding of music is expansive, and she accounts for anomalies such as the gay experimental modernist composer John Cage and the straight-identified conservative tonalist Ben Weber. Her ability to convey the meaning that music has for musicians is on the mark. As is the abiding reality and marked significance of all this material for pre- and post-Stonewall musicians, scholars, queer readers and indeed all Americans, whose identity has been in part framed by queer composers.