City Research Online

Abstract

As original contributions, this dissertation outlines ‘queer listening’ and ‘queer(ing) performance practice’ in the context of western classical music performance (that is, roughly, the ways musicians work out how a given composition might ‘go’ in a given performance, out of countless possible ‘ways’ that it conceivably might).

Pairing queer and gender theory – particularly that concerning gender and the body as sites of ‘performance’ – with a reframing of the performance of musical ‘works’ as a comparable site of identity work, the study explores the ways performance practice in western classical music culture (here called ‘conservatoire-musicianship’, ‘conservatoire-discourse’ and similar) derive from, and implicitly re-inscribe, longstanding cis-heteronormative ideals. It takes a queer-‘scavenger’ approach to its source literature, drawing on performance studies, musicology, sociology of music, and queer and gender studies.

As a practice-as-research project (the author being a sometime conservatoire-pianist as well as full-time queer-nonbinary person) the study draws on queerly evocative auto-ethnographic strategies, putting the author’s complicit attachment to the conditions of their musical ‘upbringing’ toward historically elusive questions around the ways aesthetic values and social values in conservatoire-musicianship intersect. Deploying conscious queer(ing) approaches at the level of style as well as conceptual apparatus, the study begins by identifying patterns of ‘erasure’ in conservatoire-discourse surrounding performance, re-framing a longstanding resistance to ‘the political’ in conservatoire-performance discourse as a highly effective counter to aesthetic/social ‘deviance’.

In three case studies, ‘queer listening exercises’ are carried out on three recordings of a Bach keyboard work, demonstrating the framework’s ‘open’ (rather than prescriptive) potential. As an example of a ‘queer(ing) performance practice’, the study concludes with the author’s exploration of their own recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Text - Accepted Version
This document is not freely accessible until 31 August 2026 due to copyright restrictions.

Audio (Mx. Pink) - Accepted Version
This document is not freely accessible until 31 August 2026 due to copyright restrictions.

Audio (Mx. Green) - Accepted Version
This document is not freely accessible until 31 August 2026 due to copyright restrictions.

Audio (Mx. Brown) - Accepted Version
This document is not freely accessible until 31 August 2026 due to copyright restrictions.

Audio (Goldbergs) - Accepted Version
This document is not freely accessible until 31 August 2026 due to copyright restrictions.

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