Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (Paperback)

by Philip Brett (Author) "To queer the pitch: to interfere with or spoil the Business (of a tradesman or showman)......" (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Philip Brett, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The first collection of gay and lesbian work in musicology. Contributors cover a wide range of subjects from analysis of the work of gay composers to queer readings of Schubert's `Unfinished Symphony.'

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (January 27, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415907535
• ISBN-13: 978-0415907538
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,297,592 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 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

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.

1 of 2 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

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.