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

Abstract

The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. By Nadine Hubbs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. [xi, 282 p. ISBN 0520241851 (pbk.). $19.95. ISBN 0520241843 (cloth). $50.] Index, bibliography, discography, photos, music examples. Nadine Hubbs' recent contribution to ongoing conversation about relationship between sexuality and music draws on musicology, feminist and queer theory, and American cultural history in its consideration of the interrelations of national, social and sexual, cultural and musical identity in twentieth-century America and meanings within U.S. musical (pp. 3-4). Hubbs, professor of music and women's studies at University of Michigan and an acknowledged leader in area of gender and sexuality studies in classical and popular music, focuses in The Queer Composition of America's Sound on circle of Manhattan-based gay composers who created distinct American sound in concert music during first half of twentieth century-Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem. She pays particular attention to Thomson and and period 1934-1954. Hubbs's introduction contains number of statements of purpose that highlight different aspects of her exploration. A central project of this book is to illumine specifically queer lineaments of musical idiom that serves as one of most potent and recognizable cultural emblems of Americanness-a sonic representation of American vastness and rugged, simple beauty primarily associated with Aaron Copland (p. 10). In addition, the book examines conditions that underlay networking activity among queer artists and its abundant productivity in this period of U.S. cultural and seeks to enrich and complicate our understanding of role of queer artists in conceiving and producing American cultural identity . . .(p. 15). More broadly, this book explores sites of U.S. gay modernist composers' individual and collective achievements to account for ways in which queer lives and have shaped American musical, and larger, life and culture (p. 17). Chapter 1, Modernist Abstraction and Abstract Art: Four Saints and Queer Composition of America's Sound, opens on 7 February 1934 with premiere of Gertrude Stein and Thomson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts, received by many as a glorious and redemptive birth-of nothing less than national culture (p. 19). Hubbs's examination of this landmark collaborative creation of U.S. modernist artists engaged in early-twentieth-century efforts to establish distinctly and genuinely American voice (p. 22) raises issues addressed throughout book-abstraction and identification; national, artistic, and sexual identity; and key role played by gay composers in creation of recognizable American musical voice. Hubbs also tackles meaning of modernism in this chapter, highlighting characteristics such as abstraction, emphasizing form over content, opposition to Romanticism, and valuing inner experience of spectator, listener, or reader over narrative representation. In chapter 2, Being Musical: Gender, Sexuality, and Musical Identity in Twentieth-Century America, she addresses concept of musical modernism directly, noting that since World War II modernism in music has typically denoted hypermasculine, antifeminine impulses (p. 82) associated with atonal, dissonant, and/or experimental music, e.g., Italian futurism, Schoenberg's atonality, Ives' experiments with dissonance, and serialism of Boulez, Babbitt, and others. The composers on whom Hubbs focuses wrote tonal, consonant, and/or neoclassical music, but considered their work modernist, as does Hubbs. She notes that anti-Romanticism was characteristic of kinder, gentler musical modernists, who particularly rejected German Romanticism in favor of French ideals. …