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The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music and National Identity.

Article Excerpt
The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. By Nadine Hubbs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. [xi, 282 p. ISBN 0520241851 (pbk.). $19.95. ISBN 0520241843 (cloth). $50.] Index, bibliography, discography, photos, music examples.

Nadine Hubbs' recent contribution to the ongoing conversation about the relationship between sexuality and music draws on musicology, feminist and queer theory, and American cultural history in its consideration of "the interrelations of national, social and sexual, cultural and musical identity in twentieth-century America" and "their meanings within U.S. musical modernism" (pp. 3-4). Hubbs, a professor of music and women's studies at the University of Michigan and an acknowledged leader in the area of gender and sexuality studies in classical and popular music, focuses in The Queer Composition of America's Sound on a circle of Manhattan-based gay composers who created a distinct American sound in concert music during the first half of the twentieth century--Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem. She pays particular attention to Thomson and Copland and the period 1934-1954. Hubbs's introduction contains a number of statements of purpose that highlight different aspects of her exploration. "A central project of this book is to illumine the specifically queer lineaments of a musical idiom that serves as one of the most potent and recognizable cultural emblems of Americanness--a sonic representation of American vastness and rugged, simple beauty primarily associated with Aaron Copland" (p. 10). In addition, "the book examines the conditions that underlay networking activity among queer artists and...

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