Queering the Pitch : The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology [Hardcover]

Philip Brett (Editor), Elizabeth Wood (Editor), Gary C. Thomas (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 27, 1994 | ISBN-10: 0415907527 | ISBN-13: 978-0415907521

Is music the patriarchy's most powerful weapon in constructing and controlling sexual roles? If you scratch an opera queen, will you find a lesbian? "Queering the Pitch" aims to provoke readers into questioning what it is that makes music pleasurable, and how it is shaped by notions of sexuality and sexual identity. A collection of gay and lesbian work in music and musicology, this book contains a wealth of diverse approaches which signal a controversial advance in the field. Musicologists, scholars, academics, critics, performers and composers examine the areas of musical education, voice and listening, history and biography, as seen through an interdisciplinary and political eye. The essays cover a broad range of topics: lesbian experience and the process of making music; the part gay choruses play in the personal, political and theoretical understanding of what it means to be gay; and a discussion of the way specific musical elements configure female or lesbian adolescent sexuality. Readings of musical works are given - such as Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" and little-known 17th-century songs - as well as discussions of modern gay composers.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 357 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (January 27, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415907527
• ISBN-13: 978-0415907521
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 8 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good start for an exciting new field, May 22, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (Hardcover)

Queering the Pitch is the first anthology to be published in the new field of queer musicology (although it does draw from works like Solie's "Musicology and Difference" collection.)

The quality of the fourteen essays here varies greatly. Some, like Philip Brett's "Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet" are absolutely earthshaking-provacative, well-written, and inspiring. Other essays seem a bit out of place, and show how much work their needs to be done in this field. It occasionally feels as if the editors had to scrape around to find enough material for the collection.

The three editors, all well-known musicologists, are to be commended for this effort. The book is already something of a classic, and has certainly helped to legitimitize this field of inquiry.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended, April 14, 2005

By 

Reader/Viewer (Ireland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (Hardcover)

I love this book. The style is approachable and dynamic, and the ideas are still exciting ten years after the book was published. The authors cover a wide range of topics both historical and contemporary and come from different theoretical stand points. The articles not only focus on composition and performance but also on listenership and the gendered power relationships involved in that. As a first year postgraduate student involved in gay and lesbian studies of music I found this book inspirational and invigorating because of the high quality of scholarship involved. Queering the Pitch is a much more interesting read than several more recent collections of queer musicology because of the strength of the ideas involved but especially energetic and transparent writing styles which avoid the stogyness that musicology can often suffer from.