Susan McClary, 'Music and Sexuality: On the Steblin / Solomon

Debate' 19th-Century Music, Vol.17 No.1 (Summer 1993), 83-88

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."