Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson [Hardcover]

Imagining Musical Pastsconsiders the ways early twentieth-century musicologists Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson approached gender and sexuality in their scholarly and creative work. This book explores the place of musicology as literature, as well as the role of gossip and speculation in constructing queer music histories.Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. It will be made available open access after three years.

Imagining Musical Pastsexplores the complicated archive of sources, interpretations, and people present in queer writings on opera and symphonic music from ca. 1880-1935. It focuses primarily on the work of three turn-of-the-twentieth-century music scholars--philosopher and horror writer Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget), biographer and program note annotator Rosa Newmarch, and critic and amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson. Each of the three major sections of the book is organized according to the authorial personae each author adopted in their creative and scholarly work. These categories reflect the particular intellectual commitments of each figure: Lee's fascination with the failure of written documentation to fully capture the ghosts of past musical experience, Newmarch's reliance on documentary evidence to reveal some of her subject's secrets and her stated discomfort with the role of the biographer, and Prime-Stevenson's nostalgic use of repetition, revision, and dedication to return to the 1890s decades after the fact. By reframing these ways of knowing as central to each scholar's individual approach to constructing and interpreting musical and sexual knowledge, the book draws attention to aspects of their work previously neglected or considered only in isolation.
Identifying the coded references, careful nuances, and intentional and accidental gaps that make ambiguity an inherent feature of these sources requires an awareness of multiple lÃ"