The Importance of Commentary: Primary-Source Opinions as Stronger Evidence than Mere Musical Analysis

Scholars Samuel N. Dorf and Christopher Moore both present valid arguments that the music commissioned or composed by 1920s French artists, Polignac and Poulenc, served as an expression of their queer identities and a means of communicating with their respective queer communities. The most convincing pieces of evidence for such arguments are primary sources that reveal the artist and their audience’s personal accounts, as these writings reveal the intentions behind or the social effects of the artist’s musical decisions. Between the two authors, Moore makes better use of such written, primary-source opinions from Poulenc in order to demonstrate Poulenc’s clear intention to infuse his work with his gay identity. While Dorf has a nearly equally convincing argument concerning Princesse de Polignac’s same intention, he fails to use enough relevant primary sources revealing the Princesse’s own motives. This creates a gap in his argument, leaving little connection between her influence on her commissioned composer and said composer’s actual musical choices.

One of Moore’s best use of primary sources reveals an intriguing sexual interpretation of the female partner-dance choreography in Poulenc’s Rag-Mazurka. Sokolova, one of the female dancers, asserted that Nijinska’s close-bodied choreography strongly misrepresented the “type of women we were meant to be, and certainly few people ever have been less Lesbian than Tchernicheva and myself.”¹ With this blunt commentary, I find Moore’s argument to convincingly demonstrate that the Rag-Mazurka dance could be readily interpreted as intentional erotic expressions of a homosexual couple. We might further assume from this evidence that queer members of Parisian audiences, if not all audience members, could easily come to the same conclusion.

Moore uses additional written primary sources to reveal likely evidence that Poulenc deliberately used unusual musical elements to convey sexual ambiguity. Poulenc stated himself that he purposefully “avoided” certain waltz styles when composing for the Woman in Blue, and that the piece “needed” “unexpected modulations.”² Another irregular characteristic of Woman in Blue is Poulenc’s choice of duple meter for a waltz, a dance form which is identified by its standard triple meter.³ Moore’s pairing of musical evidence with Poulenc’s direct commentary on his composition methods provides a much stronger argument for the meaning behind Poulenc’s musical choices. Without the composer’s words, musical interpretation can easily become a stretch.

Dorf  uses fewer primary sources to prove that Polignac communicated her queer identity through the music she commissioned, which weakens his argument. One of his stronger arguments, however, combines a secondary source, a primary source, and historical cultural context for evidence. Dorf analyzes Polignac’s demand for all-female readers of Socrate‘s Greek text through the lens of Elizabeth Wood’s idea of “Sapphonics”.⁴ He argues that Polignac’s choice to commission four women to read Greek, during a time when males reserved Greek education for themselves, was likely an attempt to communicate lesbian Sapphonics to her audiences. This analysis of Polignac’s written requests⁵ and cultural gender norms through the lens of Wood’s scholarly idea of Sapphonics creates a strong argument that Polignac incorporated her sexual identity into her music.

Dorf’s weaker arguments use musical analysis alone to decipher the meaning in the sounds of Satie’s music commissioned by Polignac. Although Dorf demonstrates that Satie’s musical elements in Socrate contrast with elements in his previous Greek works, this difference in sound has feebler implications that Polignac’s influence on Satie’s composition is a reflection of her own sexuality. Dorf analyzes the “smooth quasi-plainchant vocal lines” of Socrate as a new sound in Satie’s music,⁶ and even includes some of Satie’s written descriptions of this musical style;⁷ but Dorf never connects Satie’s stylistic shift directly to Polignac’s Sapphonic infusion of her lesbian sexuality into the piece. Despite Dorf’s stronger argument that Socrate reveals Polignac’s identity, he fails to demonstrate the relation between Satie’s musical contributions and those of Polignac. In this way, the analysis of Satie’s musical elements without relevant, writen primary sources (i.e. Polignac’s own words describing why she wanted this new sound from Satie), Dorf’s argument becomes weaker and less coherent to his overarching thesis.