![]() ![]() A queer theoretical approach to gender and sexuality, coupled with interdisciplinary theories concerning music as an identificatory practice, provides the theoretical landscape for this study. This research examines musically facilitated expressions of queerness and queer identity, asking how and why music is used by queer musicians and musical performers to express non-normative gender and sexual identities. Music has been theorised as both a putative agent of moral corruption and an expressive mechanism of gender and sexual signification, capable of arousing and channelling sexual urges and desires. The essay advocates a resolute historicization of sixteenth-century discourses of creative endowment, a critical reassessment of the role of authentication scholarship in Josquin studies, and a renewed sensitivity to the imbrication of mythologies of musical genius in music historiographies of both the past and the present.Īcross ages and cultures, music has been associated with sexual allure, gender inversion and suspect sexuality. By privileging a discourse of musical genius in the service of which, among other concerns, the canon of works attributed to the composer is being decimated beyond historical recognition, the richness and complexity of the musical culture of which he was a vital part risks being overshadowed and obfuscated by the disproportionate amount of attention invested in his singular accomplishments. Contextualizing the composer’s reception history with respect to the debates between Joseph Kerman and Edward Lowinsky in 1965 and especially the 1971 Josquin Festival-Conference, the author suggests that the ideological refashioning of Josquin in the image of Beethoven has simultaneously shaped and derailed the intellectual trajectory of early music scholarship in the past thirty years. Abstract Within the theoretical framework of Roland Barthes’s writings on myth and ideology, this essay seeks to expose the historical legitimation project through which the mythmaking, universalizing rhetoric of musical genius that has long surrounded the figure of Ludwig van Beethoven came to infiltrate scholarship on Josquin des Prez, culminating in his late twentieth-century apotheosis. ![]()
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