Re #43: Quickly, cos I need an early night, and this is off-topic now (I was careful to relate my previous post back to Ives at the end): Yes, I know exactly what you're getting at. But I can't help feeling that sometimes denying people the right to take up 'rigid, inflexible categorisations' is paradoxically a refusal of pluralism carried out in the name of pluralism.

It's important to me to self-identify as a gay man. I don't know why, I can't really explain it, and I certainly don't mean to imply that other men, either in my culture and society or in different ones, should have to choose between 'straight' and 'gay' as if those were the only two, or the main two, options. You're absolutely right that in some (I'd even say most) other cultures men who sleep with men are on the whole married or otherwise female-partnered men engaging in casual liaisons, without needing to self-define in terms of such activities. But I and many other men in present-day Western society do feel the need to self-define in such terms, and one of my big problems with 'queer theory' (insofar as it sets itself up in distinction to 'gay identity politics') is its bad conscience about such self-identification.

We should take this discussion elsewhere, though, if it's going to continue.



Re #44 ('women ... were seen as emblematic of the consumers of mass culture'): Indeed. Madame Bovary being the most obvious example of this trope applied within a literary diegesis.

So many things in the human domain are on a scale from yes to no rather than being either yes or no, I suspect human sexuality is the same.

Perhaps Ives was really 90% gay and was reacting against it? 

Very quickly (anything further, as you say, we should take elsewhere) - I'm certainly not denying that (that would be the classic liberal paradox of preaching pluralism, but a pluralism that excludes anyone who, well, doesn't share those same pluralist values), just saying why I don't see others in those terms (and am not prepared to talk about music in essentialist terms, say). I've written a little about this in the context of talking about Finnissy's Seventeen Immortal Homosexual Poets, arguing the fallacy of a similar identification of Baudelaire, say, as a 'dominant poet', even though such themes permeate his work regularly.

Indeed, and very much on-topic, so no need to apologise!

Will try to give this some serious thought over the weekend - should also re-read the chapter on Ives in Lawrence Kramer's Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, which I have a feeling is problematic but interesting. Years since I looked at it though.

Just to offer a possible counterbalance, one might say that 'man' is being contrasted equally with 'child' as with 'woman' here. And I wouldn't imagine anyone here would thus take the utterly facile conclusion offered by Nadine Hubbs, in her book The Queer Composition of America's Sound, where she basically goes almost as far as to thus define dissonance as straight and consonance as gay. There is a aesthetic position which sees an aptitude and openness to dissonance as being part and parcel of an appreciation of music that doesn't present a prettified picture of the world or human emotion, which I believe one can conceive without having to resort to gendered metaphors.

I have always taken Ives's comments, about standing up (was this an attack on wheelchair-bound listeners) and using your ears like a man, as you have, ah. I think it all to easy, and actually a bit intellectually lazy, to take Ives's use of American English out of its historical and social crib. To me, such an approach is on a low par with Mary Daly's diatribes against men.

Let's get back to George's question. Which I can't answer at the moment. I was brought up[ on the Stokowski version which I still like a lot, although not everybody is totally happy with it. I was less impressed with Tinsel Toenails version than many, but I can't remember why. Jose Serebrier is to be avoided from what little I can remember. Sorry to be unhelpful - Bryn, we need you here !

Your effective pillorying of this book and what it seeks to accomplish is indeed as salutary and welcome as its contents that you describe are the very opposite. There are just so many holes in it all, even in the basic details. OK, so, according to the article on it whose URL you kindly provide here, she does admit of the exietence of exceptions such as Harris, Schuman and Piston (there are more among the mid-soth century American symphonists, too), but  her arguments about those who went to study with Boulanger appear carefully to ignore the fact that Carter was one of those who did this, to say nothing of the fact that Carter's writings at and soon after that time display a healthy enthusiasm for the music fo Copland.

One of the things that irks me so particularly about her fatuous conclusions is their overly simplistic, black-and-white, male-and-female nonsense. Did Leonard Bernstein's well known (or Paul Bowles's rather less well known) bisexuality evidence a sitting-on-the-fence manifestation in their music? - or might she (I've not read the book) have concluded that the former's espousal of populist Americana while at the same time presenting Beethoven and Mahler and commissioning and premièring Carter's Concerto for Orchestra is sufficient evidence that he had a "foot in both camps"?

Anyway, I must put up and shut up about this and remember with all due humility that I know my place as a dissonant atonal Mittel-european cerebral internationalist complexicist - a place of which I would indeed have been wholly unaware had it not been for your account of the work of this most Hubble-telescopic of "musicologists".

I think that, by describing her as having presented any kind of "æsthetic argument" at all, it may be thought that you vest in her work an importance and vaildity that you yourself roundly, articulately and necessarily deny.

I am tempted to believe that, by comparison with this stuff (although if anything demonstrates just how odious comparisons can be, this is it), even the more excessive and extreme rantings of McClary seem almost like beacons of sanity (well, maybe I'm exaggerating abit, but...)

Best,

Alistair