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

Nadine Hubbs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 18, 2004

In this vibrant and pioneering book, Nadine Hubbs shows how a gifted group of Manhattan-based gay composers were pivotal in creating a distinctive "American sound" and in the process served as architects of modern American identity. Focusing on a talented circle that included Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, The Queer Composition of America's Sound homes in on the role of these artists' self-identification--especially with tonal music, French culture, and homosexuality--in the creation of a musical idiom that even today signifies "America" in commercials, movies, radio and television, and the concert hall.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"What does music have to do with homosexuality, or homosexuality with music? That is the question Hubbs explores through a breathtakingly original history of the mid-twentieth-century gay American composers who produced 'America's sound.' Hubbs shows how sexual desire, aesthetic practice, and social identity shape one another and define specific forms of human consciousness. Her recovery of the homosexual roots of American musical modernism is ultimately a study in the sexuality of culture itself." - David M. Halperin, author of Saint Foucault; "Compellingly argued and beautifully written, The Queer Composition of America's Sound will no doubt raise controversy, but it will be required reading for musicologists, Americanists, and queer theorists." - Susan McClary, author of Conventional Wisdom"

From the Inside Flap

"In this remarkable book, Nadine Hubbs demonstrates that our understanding of modernist American culture will remain impoverished so long as we ignore the gay social networks and patronage and distinctly queer sensibilities and idioms that influenced (to varying degrees) the work of the great modernist composers Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Samuel Barber, Ned Rorem, and Leonard Bernstein, among others. Deeply learned, theoretically sophisticated, and powerfully argued, this is a landmark study, which is sure to inspire a new generation of work drawing together and advancing the insights of musicology, feminist and queer theory, and American cultural history."--George Chauncey, University of Chicago, author of Gay New York

"What does music have to do with homosexuality, or homosexuality with music? That is the question Hubbs explores through a breathtakingly original history of the mid-twentieth-century gay American composers who produced "America's sound." Hubbs shows how sexual desire, aesthetic practice, and social identity shape one another and define specific forms of human consciousness. Her recovery of the homosexual roots of American musical modernism is ultimately a study in the sexuality of culture itself."--David M. Halperin, author of One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Saint Foucault

"Nadine Hubbs's courageous and important book seeks both to recover the historical significance of the prewar American modernists and to confront some of the reasons behind the relegation of their work to the closet. Compellingly argued and beautifully written, Queer Composition will no doubt raise controversy, but it will be required reading for musicologists, Americanists, and queer theorists."--Susan McClary, author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form

"Hubbs's graceful, shrewd, and nuanced book is the best account yet of the queer sources of much modern American music--and American culture--and a compelling contribution to music history, gay and lesbian studies, and American studies."--Michael Sherry, History, Northwestern University, author of In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930's

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Product Details

• Paperback: 293 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (October 18, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520241851
• ISBN-13: 978-0520241855
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,108,781 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Okay, but there's still Unanswered Questions, October 26, 2005

By 

Jeff Abell (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Paperback)

When I first heard the title of Nadine Hubbs new book, I remarked to a friend, well, there's one less book I'll have to write. Which is another way of saying, issues about gay American composers, and music and gender in general, interest me (professionally and personally). On some levels, Hubbs is on the right track: noting how the definition of an "American sound" in music (basically, French-influenced neo-classicism) was largely constructed by a group of gay men who formed a closely-knit group of individuals. She also correctly focuses on Copland and Thomson at the hub of this circle of mutual influence. There are some nice tidbits of info here, involving people like Marc Blitzstein and Paul Bowles, and it's clear that Hubbs has done her homework, in referencing gay historians like George Chauncey and musicologists like Philip Brett.

Yet when I was finished reading it, I found the book curiously unsatisfying overall. I don't know how much new information I learned that couldn't have been gleaned from Rorem's diaries, Thomasini's bio of Thomson or Pollack's bio of Copland, with Chauncey's Gay New York thrown in for good measure. Moreover, Hubb's style is quite academic: first I summarize what I'm going to tell you, then I tell you it, and then I summarize what I said. As a result the book felt padded to me, like a couple of good essays that got stretched into a book.

Moreover, it seems to me if one is going to consider the gender orientation and sexuality of a composer as anything other than juicy gossip, it has to be because there's a relationship between the composer's sexual orientation and the work he produced. Susan McClary's work is consistently interesting on this very point: the whole gender issue is relevant because it helps us understand and better account for how the composer's work is put together. (Read McClary's excellent and controversial essay on Schubert in that regard.) It's less an issue of who slept with who, than why should we care? If it's relevant to better knowing the work. Copland's turn to tonal Americana in the 1930s also corresponds to a period of relatively happy stability in his sex life at the same time, and that's more to the point than who he was sleeping with. It is this failure to address the very real issue of music's impact on our own subjectivity, and its relation to the composer's subjectivity, that remains the Unanswered Question in this field of study. Perhaps Ms. Hubbs next book will explore those issues, and I look forward to reading it.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hubbs gets it., December 18, 2004

By 

William Mccarthy "Associate Professor; Histor... (Wilmington, NC, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Paperback)

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.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Queer as folk, queer as classical, November 7, 2004

By 

Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Paperback)

"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.