Through provisional, idiosyncratic, and non-normative listening practices,
Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory counters music theory's continuing tendencies towards rationality, unity, unilinearity, teleology, and logical certainty. In this volume, editor Gavin S.K. Lee brings together a diverse group of music theorists who issue queer challenges to both music theory and musicology and show that queerness is integral to music-theoretical practice. These investigations of the "queer ear" and queer soundings, while drawing upon a broad range of approaches, are united by the repurposing of "hard" music-theoretical apparatuses, as well as "soft" apparatuses like narratology and cultural theory, for queer ends. Such repurposings contribute to the search for general principles--or a theory--of queering that counters mainstream music theory's proclivities, instead encouraging everyone to experiment with queer ways of listening.
Through the lenses of queer temporality, queer narratology, and queer music analysis, the essays examine a wide variety of artists and composers, including Sun Ra, Cowell, Czernowin, Henze, Schubert, and Schumann; theories ranging from Schenker to queer shame, disability studies, and posthumanism; and authors such as Edward Cone and Edward Prime-Stevenson. Together, they rethink the field's major tenets, examine hidden histories, and view listening practices from the perspective of non-normative subjectivities. Ultimately, Queer Ear works to queer the field of music theory while paying heed to the ways in which music theory intersects with diverse, embodied LGBTQ lives.
Industry Reviews
"The first monograph on queer music theory, and a much-needed contribution to the field. The essays in Queer Ear challenge us to recognize the importance of gender, sexuality, and race in analysis, while breaking down the traditional divide between music theory and musicology." -- Patricia Hall, Professor of Music, University of Michigan
"The collection Lee has edited is unquestionably the most comprehensive and valuable resource to date on the relationship between queer theory and music theory. Each chapter provides a different model of how an author might approach a music-theoretical task from a queer perspective. Taken together, these chapters form a wonderfully rich collection of thought-provoking, question-asking scholarship that requires as much, if not more, from the reader than it
provides." -- J. Daniel Jenkins, Theory and Practice