The present article considers the ways in which sex and sexuality, as fundamental categories of human experience, filter into the composition of music and its understanding. ‘Sex’ sustains several meanings that can bear upon music, as well as referring to the physiological and biological characteristics that distinguish categories of beings and genital union or other erogenous activity. In casual parlance, ‘sex’ is often used to denote the larger category within which fit culturally perceived differences between men and women; in modern scholarly discourse the discussion of these issues is normally subsumed within consideration of gender (see Gender; see also Feminism and Gay and lesbian music).
Taking cognizance of the various meanings of the term, ‘sexuality’ (best understood as a phenomenon of relatively recent origin rather than as a fixed, transhistorical essence) refers to a cultural production that configures the relationship between sexual practice and identity; it thus not only contributes to a personal, interior sense of self, it also serves as a nexus for relations of power. From ancient times to the present, texts that treat sexual difference and sexual union have been set to music; more recently, instrumental and balletic works have also sought to represent aspects of sexual behaviour. Inquiries into notions of sex and sexuality have profitably informed a wide range of musical scholarship, including biographical studies of composers, performers and other actors in the musical realm, investigations into the institutions that have fostered the production of music and explorations of the signification and structure of musical works themselves.
Human beings, of course, have always taken part in sexual activity, but the nature of sexual activity has not always remained the same. Steeped in the ubiquitous sexual content of popular music, and conditioned by apparently transparent representations of sexual desire in the canonic classical repertory (the love duet from Tristan und Isolde, the opening bars of Der Rosenkavalier), modern listeners can readily misconstrue convergences of sex and music from earlier eras. While the definition of ‘sex’ as the sum of physiological and biological characteristics that distinguish categories of being might appear to imply a relentless dimorphism, at different times and in different cultures it has been more flexibly configured. Both ‘one-sex’ and ‘third-sex’ formations have affected musical composition and comprehension. The ‘one-sex model’ of sexual difference that reigned within the prevalent Galenic medical tradition lies behind the poetic conceit of orgasmic ‘death’ commonly encountered in the Renaissance madrigal (Arcadelt's Il bianco e dolce cigno and Marenzio's Tirsi morir volea both famously deploy it). This tradition viewed women as imperfect versions of men and construed their genital organs accordingly. Women's genital functions also mimicked men's: if men released ‘spirit’ during sex in order to conceive, so too did women; if orgasm was necessary for men, then so too was it for women. (Death also brought about a release of ‘spirit’, which accounts for its popularity as a metaphorical substitute for terms for orgasm.) That metaphors of ‘dying’ drew upon a widely shared cultural understanding of the necessity for mutual release in sex suggests then that attempts to interpret the nature of the musical settings of these metaphors should focus on relationships of contiguity rather than of difference. Various ‘third-sex’ categories have contributed to musical understanding, with castratos perhaps the most famous and visible of them. But other ‘third-sex’ classifications have also entered more indirectly into the reception of music: 19th-century writers who described Chopin's person, playing and music by evoking such otherworldly beings as fairies, sylphs and angels deployed metaphors that implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) framed Chopin within the ‘third-sex’ categories of androgyne, hermaphrodite or sodomite.
‘Sexuality’ also has a history; the claim that the concept emerged relatively recently hinges on a distinction between behaviour and identity. There is a difference between committing a sexual act of some type and being a homosexual, a heterosexual or a transsexual. According to this view, while Gombert and Britten may, four centuries apart, have shared an erotic interest in boys, the meanings of their sexual activities will have differed sharply, both for their senses of self and for the music they composed. To invoke sexuality is to call upon a nexus of institutions, desires and acts that together endow an identity. Before this governing concept took shape, these institutions, desires and acts either existed independently of one another or were linked in different sorts of ways. Two chronologically separate instances of musical production being measured against sexual reproduction illustrate the importance of this distinction. When C.F. Zelter (in a letter to Goethe of 14 September 1812) described Beethoven's works as resembling ‘children whose father is a woman or whose mother is a man’, and contraposed Beethoven's devotees to ‘partisans of Greek love’, he did not mean his comparison to reflect in any way on Beethoven's personal sense of self; his concatenation of same-sex desire and transsexual parentage instead attempts to account for the flaws he perceived in Beethoven's compositional offspring by calling on longstanding medical theories of monstrous birth (theories that explained, among other things, the existence of physical and psychical hermaphrodites, as ‘partisans of Greek love’ were often described at the time). But when Richard Strauss, in the Symphonia domestica (1902), followed the section of the work that depicts the husband (a representation of Strauss himself) in the act of composing music with one that represents the husband and wife having sexual intercourse, the juxtaposition is meant to reflect on a basic aspect of the protagonist's being. The explanation for this gesture goes beyond mere exhibitionism: Strauss, alert to the centrality of sexuality in the modern constitution of identity, in effect asserts an essential and self-defining continuity between acts of creation and acts of procreation.
The development of the concept of sexuality marked a momentous and complicated shift in the ways of construing individuals, one intimately connected with the emergence of modernity, its attendant notions of the individual and its new versions of subjectivity. When this shift took place is a matter of contention; scholarly opinion focusses primarily on dates between the early 18th century and the mid-19th. But by the second half of the 19th century the modern phenomenon of sexuality was widely established, its presence most readily perceptible in the nascent discipline of sexology, the quasi-Darwinian science that comprehensively mapped sexual persons and forms of desires. While the vocabulary of sexology, including such coinages as ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’, continues to inform thinking about sexuality today, the field of knowledge that has contributed most to modern conceptions of sexuality is psychoanalysis. The theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and their followers decisively shifted interpretations of sexuality away from biological, reproductive imperatives onto notions of unconscious drives formed in infancy. These theories have proved immensely influential not only among psychoanalysts but also among cultural critics interested in the relationships between eroticism and human pursuits, including ideology, politics, philosophy, religion, art, literature and music. As central as they are, however, psychoanalytic models of sexuality have been challenged on several fronts, most significantly in the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault set his central task (for his planned history of sexuality) as the exploration of the historical relations of power and discourse on sex. He viewed sexuality not as a drive but rather as a complicated point of transfer for structures of power between human beings (power here understood as a productive relation, not as a force exerted in an authoritarian manner); his emphasis on sexual discourse as productive of meaning encouraged much of the ensuing research in sexuality, particularly in such areas as queer theory and gender studies.
It is no mere chance that the era of ‘sexuality’, with its attendant emphasis on the tracing of concealed inner drives, coincides so closely with the rise of modern musical analysis, with its concern for explicating background structures and processes of aesthetic gratification in compositions. The evident affinities between the two domains have stimulated scholars to use the tools of modern musical analysis (e.g. the parsing of form and the close reading of harmonic processes) both to derive sexual meanings from compositions and to illustrate how music can foster the construction of sexualities within society. An analysis of, say, Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune would not only hope to reveal how such constructive elements as its chromatic harmony, formal patterning and timbral control produce the haze of diffuse eroticism that surround the work; it would also try to suggest how Debussy's music, experienced intimately by individual listeners, contributes to the very notion of eroticism in modern society. Thus in the best scholarly work of this type, music and its attendant realms emerge not only as mirrors of the sexual currents and ideologies of an age, but also as producers of these very modes of discourse.
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JEFFREY KALLBERG