Revealing Through Concealing

At this point of my college career, I’ve noticed that scholarship is full of bold claims and ideas. From intentions to relationships to fetishization, scholars love the “hot goss.” Was Chopin’s music obviously feminine? Was Paul Simon politically insensitive in the creation of his album Graceland? Arguments have been addressed, and the claims have been controversial. That being said, I asked myself whether or not I bought Samuel Dorf & Christopher Moore’s claims that these works reveal through concealing, claiming that these pieces both can reveal the sexualities of both the patrons and composers through the careful concealing of subtleties and nuances. Through careful analysis of the things that at first glance seemed concealed and hidden, you can learn something about their sexualities… What may have been concealed in the past, can be revealed in this scholarship. Though bold, controversial claims that have only been recently explored, these details bring depth and clarity to the claims that are given in these articles that are hard to see in the music at first glance.

Dorf’s argument reveals in his scholarship that Polignac played a very safe game when it came to external appearance. She kept her love affairs at a hush, using and being protected by the “codes and mores of the nobility’s rigidly circumscribed world”. ¹ She kept her private life private. Restraint and decorum were paramount to Polignac’s survival in Paris.¹ Although, just because Polignac’s sexuality cannot necessarily be directly seen in the score, her specific intentions and demands of the piece seemed to reveal her sexual tendencies. From her specific directions for who recites the Greek readings to where she wanted the piece to be performed, her private salon, it shows just how much this piece can allude to her sexuality- poignant yet private.¹ Her private life fueled the intentions behind her commissions.

“Again, it is not always what is said,

but sometimes more importantly, what is not said.”¹

Moore makes the claim that it is also through the subtle behind-the-scenes details of the creation process of the music that reveal Poulenc’s sexuality. Poulenc also felt the need to remain discrete, confiding in friends to not reveal his “serious secret” of falling in love with Richard Chanlaire.² Though legal on paper, homosexual behaviors were discouraged, or else they’d be shamed or, essentially, “canceled” from the broader society.² Through this, it was seen that Poulenc participated in queer cultural practices of camp, which, though a “deviant” form of expression, was expressed through heteronormative artistic discourses. Revealing through concealing. Camp culture relied on “straight audiences missing the point or refusing to hear or see beyond what common sense dictated.”² The external did not match the internal, all too similar to Polignac’s approach to her commissions. 

It is all too evident that the claims made by both authors both hold the similar theme of exposing sexuality through the unseen, indirect aspects of the music itself. While Dorf and Moore acknowledge that these are bold claims, ones not been explored until the past few decades, it is obvious that they have primary source evidence to back up their arguments.