"Early Twentieth-Century Queer Literary Musicology: Strange Sources and Eccentric Evidence" an Esquisses Talk by Kristin Franseen (FQRSC Postdoctoral Fellow, Concordia University)

Esquisses is a lunch-time series of works-in-progress by researchers at McGill.

Evidence can occupy an uncomfortable place in queer histories. Archival sources are often missing, censored, or incomplete, or reflective of the archival priorities and frameworks of oppressive social systems. Within musicology, social history, and other historical fields, queer scholarship is still all too frequently accused of “misreading” primary sources anachronistically, with the assumption that queer readings are merely a recent political and/or cultural phenomenon that has little bearing on earlier people and contexts.

This presentation considers the presence, absence, and use of musical and historical evidence in the early twentieth-century writings of Rosa Newmarch (1857-1940) and Edward Prime-Stevenson (1858-1942). Newmarch, a British Tchaikovsky scholar, and Prime-Stevenson, a US expatriate music critic turned sexologist, were both deeply concerned with the ways popular gossip about 18^th- and 19^th-century composers interacted with more documented sources of musical knowledge. Their works, while sometimes in conflict, reflect a nuanced engagement with evidence, missing sources, and issues of queer musical biography. In this talk, I will explore a few key examples of ambiguous evidence and creative interpretation in Newmarch’s and Prime-Stevenson’s scholarly approaches, consider how their writings were and are read as musicology and queer history, and suggest some further avenues for exploring “strange” or “eccentric” sources in unconventional ways.