The document discusses debates around discussing composers' sexuality and whether it matters in interpreting their music. It notes that historically biographers would hide or disprove homosexuality in male composers. While some argue sexuality does not matter, others like Eve Sedgwick argue homosexuality has always been prominent in culture and shaped modernism debates. Though Schubert's sexuality may never be certain, his music presented different constructions of masculinity than contemporary norms and explored possibilities beyond typical heroic narratives of the time. There is no essential link between sexuality and artistic expression, but Schubert's music may still be linked to his sexuality in some way.
Original Description:
Important quotes from an article written by Susan McClary
The document discusses debates around discussing composers' sexuality and whether it matters in interpreting their music. It notes that historically biographers would hide or disprove homosexuality in male composers. While some argue sexuality does not matter, others like Eve Sedgwick argue homosexuality has always been prominent in culture and shaped modernism debates. Though Schubert's sexuality may never be certain, his music presented different constructions of masculinity than contemporary norms and explored possibilities beyond typical heroic narratives of the time. There is no essential link between sexuality and artistic expression, but Schubert's music may still be linked to his sexuality in some way.
The document discusses debates around discussing composers' sexuality and whether it matters in interpreting their music. It notes that historically biographers would hide or disprove homosexuality in male composers. While some argue sexuality does not matter, others like Eve Sedgwick argue homosexuality has always been prominent in culture and shaped modernism debates. Though Schubert's sexuality may never be certain, his music presented different constructions of masculinity than contemporary norms and explored possibilities beyond typical heroic narratives of the time. There is no essential link between sexuality and artistic expression, but Schubert's music may still be linked to his sexuality in some way.
p.83 "Before that time, most biographers either drew a veil of secrecy around the homoerotic aspects of a (male) composer's life or else sought to prove that he was heterosexual - a feat that often required extensive rummaging for possible girlfriends." p.85 "Do we really need to know about a composer's sex life? Does this knowledge matter?" p.85, Eve Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet "Has there ever been a gay Socrates ... a gay Shakespeare? ... Their names are Socrates, Shakespeare" "She is most serious as she reminds us of the prominence of homosexuals in a cultural history: not only have they always been there, but they often occupy central positions within the pantheon." "She argues compellingly that twentieth-century culture cannot be studied properly without taking sexual orientation into account, for many of the debates that spawned Modernism were reactions to what was perceived as the increasing homosexual presence in the arts." p.86 "Richard Leppert has revealed how eighteenth-century English males were discouraged from participating in music because it was associated with effeminacy" p.86 "Thus even if we were to find unequivocal evidence that all Schubert's sexual encounters involved men, that discovery in itself would not tell us how to interpret his music. ... And even if we found explicit verification that Schubert wanted to make his sexuality relevant to his music, we would not know in advance how that relevance might be manifested. There is, in other words, no essentialist link between sexual preference (or gender, class, or ethnic identity, for that matter) and modes of cultural expression." Finish with that phrase. p.86 "a long line of critics have discerned in Schubert's music an unusual sensibility that many of them are labelled as "feminine" or "womanly," usually in explicit contrast with a Beethovenian model." p.87 "We would o better to regard them as presenting a version of masculinity that challenges that universality of the rather more aggressive versions being adopted around that time as normative. ... Schubert's music differs not because he was
incapable of producing heroic narratives along the lines Beethoven
had charted, but rather because he evidently wanted to explore other possibilities - even though this required that he rework virtually every parameter of his inherited musical language." p.87 "Yet if homosexuality cannot by itself account for those aspects of Schubert's music, there still remains the possibility that the two are linked." pp.87-8 "We may never know with certainty about Schubert's sexuality. Yet we do know that Schubert - for whatever reason - was producing constructions of masculine subjectivity that differed markedly from many of those that surrounded him."
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