Review: Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the impact that these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.

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: Ear Training for Twentieth-Century Music . Michael Friedmann.

Music Theory Spectrum ◽

10.1525/mts.1992.14.1.02a00040 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 14 (1) ◽

pp. 66-74

Author(s):

Elizabeth West Marvin

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Ear Training ◽

Twentieth Century Music

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Queering Musical Biography in the Writings of Edward Prime-Stevenson and Rosa Newmarch

19th-Century Music ◽

10.1525/ncm.2020.44.2.100 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 44 (2) ◽

pp. 100-118

Author(s):

Kristin M. Franseen

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Instrumental Music ◽

Primary Source ◽

Gender And Sexuality ◽

Benjamin Britten ◽

Twentieth Century Music ◽

History Of ◽

Music Research ◽

Symphonic Music ◽

Biographical Knowledge

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.

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