At the beginning of the semester, coming to this class felt like the informational equivalent of standing in front of a firehose. The readings were a largely indistinguishable soup of names and -isms. But after spending over three months untwisting the serpent (Daniel Albright pun intended) of Parisian musical life in the 1920s, I’m pleasantly […]
Tag: Erik Satie
Both Dorf and Moore’s writing raise issues of gender and sexuality that had been excluded from meaningful examination in musicology through much of the 20th century. Queer scholar Elizabeth Wood is a rare example among musicologists of that time, introducing the idea of Sapphonics in her first edition of Queering the Pitch in 1994. Wood […]
Like these two bros, Poulenc’s and Satie’s music aligned, at least outwardly, with heteronormative expectations. By giving the music of Erik Satie and Francis Poulenc queer readings, Samuel Dorf and Christopher Moore use a largely unexplored lense to unearth greater insights to the works and perhaps the composer behind them. However, only Moore seals the […]
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Music in the closet
Paris in the 1920s (much like New York) is often seen as an era of gaudiness, irony, and a general sense of the avant-garde in regards to arts, culture, and society. Important aspects of modernism were developed such as Dadaism in art, camp in fashion, and a myriad of changes in music, including the incorporation […]
My initial thoughts on these questions are as eclectic as the plurality of opinions and musics I’ve attempted to digest over the first two weeks of class. Firstly, the horse. I can’t stop thinking about the way the horse moves. However, in all seriousness, I think the horse is a very fitting representation of […]