{"id":1323,"date":"2022-04-19T00:23:05","date_gmt":"2022-04-19T05:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/?p=1323"},"modified":"2022-04-19T00:23:05","modified_gmt":"2022-04-19T05:23:05","slug":"hiding-in-plain-sight-music-as-a-smokescreen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/2022\/04\/19\/hiding-in-plain-sight-music-as-a-smokescreen\/","title":{"rendered":"Hiding in Plain Sight: Music as a Smokescreen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dorf’s and Moore’s papers examine vastly different pictures of queerness in music. Moore\u2019s 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\u2019t notice the ambiguity and dog whistles embedded in Poulenc\u2019s music. They were just entertained.1<\/sup><\/a> Poulenc certainly took advantage of the lack of plot in <\/span>Les Biches<\/span><\/i>. 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/sup><\/a> Moore could have argued against Taruskin specifically. Taruskin was wrong about Poulenc. Moore could state that Poulenc\u2019s music is actually <\/span>full<\/span><\/i> of emotion – it just uses the idea of frivolity to mask his identity. The flamboyance in Poulenc\u2019s music was real, and it conveyed his true sexuality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dorf\u2019s 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 <\/span>Socrate<\/span><\/i>. WSP distanced herself from openly lesbian women, and Satie publicly denounced homosexuality. They didn\u2019t leave anything open to interpretation, as Poulenc did with <\/span>Les Biches<\/span><\/i>.3<\/sup><\/a> Dorf demonstrates how these two presented themselves as definitively heterosexual.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dorf does an excellent job of arguing how <\/span>Socrate <\/span><\/i>demonstrates WSP\u2019s queerness. He states that the mere act of women reading Greek was radical and deviated from gender norms.4<\/sup><\/a> Dorf makes that point very clear. On the other hand, I\u2019m not convinced by Dorf\u2019s use of sapphonics5<\/sup><\/a> in his argument. He could only connect it to the ideas of queerness surrounding <\/span>Socrate<\/span><\/i>. He did that correctly, but he didn\u2019t really <\/span>need<\/span><\/i> sapphonics to describe how <\/span>Socrate <\/span><\/i>reveals the collaborators\u2019 queerness. Dorf couldn\u2019t connect it to the quality of the performers\u2019 voices, which is an important pillar of the whole idea of sapphonics. Dorf\u2019s inclusion of Wood\u2019s ideas feels forced, as if he\u2019s trying to ride on her coattails.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s sexuality during that period: Singer-Polignac\u2019s, or Poulenc\u2019s? 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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1<\/a> Christopher Moore, \u201cCamp in Francis Poulenc\u2019s Early Ballets,\u201d <\/span>Musical Quarterly<\/span><\/i> 95 (Summer-Fall 2012), 299-342.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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2<\/a> Richard Taruskin, \u201cLifestyle Modernism,\u201d<\/span> in Chapter 10, \u201cThe Cult of the Commonplace,\u201d in <\/span>Oxford History of Western Music<\/span><\/i> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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3<\/a> Samuel Dorf, \u201c\u2018<\/span>\u00c9trange, n\u2019est-ce pas?<\/span><\/i>\u2019 The Princesse Edmond de Polignac, Erik Satie\u2019s <\/span>Socrate<\/span><\/i>, and a Lesbian Aesthetic of Music?\u201d <\/span>FLS: Queer Sexualities in French and Francophone Literature and Film<\/span><\/i> 34 (2007), 87-99.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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4<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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5<\/a> Elizabeth Wood, \u201cSapphonics,\u201d in <\/span>Queering the Pitch: The New Lesbian and Gay Musicology<\/span><\/i> (New York: Routledge, 2006), 27-37.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dorf’s and Moore’s papers examine vastly different pictures of queerness in music. Moore\u2019s 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\u2019t notice the ambiguity and dog whistles embedded in Poulenc\u2019s music. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4408,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4408"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1323"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1328,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1323\/revisions\/1328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/performinghistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}