Imagining Musical Pasts[Note: This blog post began life quite a few years ago as a proposed and accepted abstract for a talk at the International Summit on Gender, Sexuality, and Equity in Grove Music Online, which was to be held at the University of Guelph in spring of 2020 and which was sadly canceled due to the […]
While we might think of ghosts as primarily visual entities, sound and music have played and continue to play an important role in the history of ghost stories and supposedly true stories of hauntings. One of my favorite sitcoms has a lot of fun with imagining the musical opinions of ghosts across time, including scenes […]
Most of my writing so far on this website (and elsewhere) has dealt with questions of how musicology has been written in different times and places and with different audiences in mind. A large part of my argument for thinking about musical scholarship as a form of literature revolves around considering how we read different […]
For, one of the supreme qualities of a gramophonic concert, as contrasted with hearing the same music from an orchestra in a concert-hall, is the superior intimacy, closeness of attention, fixedness of interest, absortion [sic] of all that the music means and conveys to ear and psychos; as there is not any of the sub-conscious […]
Long-Haired Iopas: Old Chapters from Twenty-Five Years of Music-Criticism demonstrates many of Prime-Stevenson’s idiosyncrasies, particularly in his later self-published works. It is a book full of contradictions. The title implies deeply personal reflections, with many chapters dedicated to close personal friends and family, yet the introduction makes it clear that this is not a memoir […]
Unfortunately, after the concert he [Maurice] met Risley.“Symphony Pathique,” said Risley gaily.“Symphony Pathetic,” corrected the Philistine [Maurice].“Symphonie Incestuese et Pathique.” And he informed his young friend that Tchaikovsky had fallen in love with his own nephew, and dedicated his masterpiece to him. “I come to see all respectable London flock. Isn’t it supreme!” E.M. Forster, […]
Lately I have been seeking some kind of occupation that would take me completely away from music for a time, and would seriously interest me. Alas, I have not discovered it! There is no guide to the history of music in Russian, and it would be a good thing if I could occupy myself with […]
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in writing about the history of queer musicology is definitions. Not necessarily what counts as “queer” or “musicological” when it comes to literature (both topics that themselves could and do take up multiple dense theoretical works). But what to do with the question of how historical authors consciously […]