Dorf’s and Moore’s papers examine vastly different pictures of queerness in music. Moore’s argument is very convincing. It makes perfect sense that Poulenc and his contemporaries could hide their sexualities behind a smokescreen of flamboyance. Moore points out that straight people at the time didn’t notice the ambiguity and dog whistles embedded in Poulenc’s music. They were just entertained.1 Poulenc certainly took advantage of the lack of plot in Les Biches. If anyone happened to notice the double meaning, Poulenc could just claim that the ballet simply had no meaning at all. Moore explained the phenomenon very well.
As a matter of fact, I think Moore could have gone further with his arguments. Earlier this semester, a reading by Taruskin cited Poulenc as the archetype for the frivolity and detachment of 1920s music. Taruskin claimed that music was viewed as entertainment, and it was frivolous for the sake of being frivolous.2 Moore could have argued against Taruskin specifically. Taruskin was wrong about Poulenc. Moore could state that Poulenc’s music is actually full of emotion – it just uses the idea of frivolity to mask his identity. The flamboyance in Poulenc’s music was real, and it conveyed his true sexuality.
Dorf’s argument is not quite as convincing to me, but it does a good job of illustrating how Winnaretta Singer-Polignac and Erik Satie tried to hide their sexualities from the public. Dorf creates a very clear narrative of how WSP and Satie built figurative walls around themselves. They operated in a way completely different from Poulenc. They did not engage in flamboyance. They avoided sexual topics by eliminating all mentions of sex from the text in Socrate. WSP distanced herself from openly lesbian women, and Satie publicly denounced homosexuality. They didn’t leave anything open to interpretation, as Poulenc did with Les Biches.3 Dorf demonstrates how these two presented themselves as definitively heterosexual.
Dorf does an excellent job of arguing how Socrate demonstrates WSP’s queerness. He states that the mere act of women reading Greek was radical and deviated from gender norms.4 Dorf makes that point very clear. On the other hand, I’m not convinced by Dorf’s use of sapphonics5 in his argument. He could only connect it to the ideas of queerness surrounding Socrate. He did that correctly, but he didn’t really need sapphonics to describe how Socrate reveals the collaborators’ queerness. Dorf couldn’t connect it to the quality of the performers’ voices, which is an important pillar of the whole idea of sapphonics. Dorf’s inclusion of Wood’s ideas feels forced, as if he’s trying to ride on her coattails.
Dorf and Moore do some exemplary work in revealing queerness in the Paris music scene. They explore two completely different examples, which would make for an interesting juxtaposition. Which method was better for hiding one’s sexuality during that period: Singer-Polignac’s, or Poulenc’s? Either way, Dorf and Moore make it clear that gayness is present in the music from that era, and that reveals another dimension of heartbreak and suffering.
1 Christopher Moore, “Camp in Francis Poulenc’s Early Ballets,” Musical Quarterly 95 (Summer-Fall 2012), 299-342.
2 Richard Taruskin, “Lifestyle Modernism,” in Chapter 10, “The Cult of the Commonplace,” in Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
3 Samuel Dorf, “‘Étrange, n’est-ce pas?’ The Princesse Edmond de Polignac, Erik Satie’s Socrate, and a Lesbian Aesthetic of Music?” FLS: Queer Sexualities in French and Francophone Literature and Film 34 (2007), 87-99.
4 Ibid.
5 Elizabeth Wood, “Sapphonics,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Lesbian and Gay Musicology (New York: Routledge, 2006), 27-37.