Christopher Moore in his article about camp in Poulenc’s early ballets writes “Publicized as a “Materials Ball,” guests were invited to don evening apparel concocted from everyday items such as wax paper, wickerwork, leather, upholstery, and the like. Author Paul Morand came dressed in book covers, Valentine Hugo in table napkins, and the Baroness de Almeida donned sheaves of wheat (320).”1
Wow I’ll be honest. This sounded very fun and I know that while there’s no way I could’ve been invited, I’m a little hurt that I wasn’t there! I love crafts and this would’ve been the perfect occasion to pull out all the stops. It is also a little bizarre to read about parties while currently trapped in a house due to a devastating panic but this isn’t about me.
In their respective articles, Christopher Moore and Samuel Dorf write about the ways in which the sexual orientation of Poulenc and Satie influenced their artistic decisions. In Dorf’s article, this focus is placed on Satie’s composition Socrate which was commissioned by the Princesse de Polignac, who presented a public facing appearance of heterosexuality while creating a salon space where she could be privately homosexual. Moore’s article focuses on Poulenc’s use of camp, or as he defines it “sexual deviancies….masked by an ensemble of dramatic, gestural, and musical conventions that strongly reinforce the conventional theme of heterosexual romantic desire(307).”2
Both Moore and Dorf’s articles rest on the assumption that “gay” music was inherently expressed in a way that deviated from cultural norms, because of the imminent threat of having that identity exposed to the public. Dorf explains that in Socrate, any sexual component of the diologue was absent writing “The first movement of Socrate takes its text from Plato’s Symposium, one of Plato’s most sexually explicit dialogues. All references here to the sexual relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates are removed (95).”3 This implies a dramatic effort to eliminate any outward sexuality.
While I agree that introducing sexuality into our understanding of compositional and artistic choices is a step in the right direction, I find Moore and Dorf lacking in their explanations of heterosexuality as a similar artistic marker. I fear that in outlining homosexual expression, it only continues to other and eroticize queer expression while failing to interrogate what makes “straight” music “straight.”