Conference Agenda

“She probably flirted to get that gig.” “There just haven’t been as many female composers.” “You probably only got the job because you’re Black and a woman.” In the TikTok video titled “Things we’ve heard that make us [eyeroll emoji],” posted by the all-female chamber group Her Ensemble, these sentences flash across images of young, female or nonbinary string players dressed in brightly colored suits. The video attracted thousands of viewers and elicited enthusiastic comments such as, “as a lady who loves classical music, you guys are ICONIC!”

Her Ensemble’s post reflects the phenomenon of what I call “classical music influencers:” Gen-Z or millennial musicians who turn to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram to challenge what they see as Western classical music’s sexist, racist, ableist, and classist traditions, including the “concert black” dress code, the racially homogenous makeup of many major orchestras, and the erasure of female and BIPOC composers from mainstream concert programs. The violinist Esther Abrami, who boasts almost half a million TikTok followers and was the first classical musician to win the Social Media Superstar award from the Global Awards in 2019, uses her social media platforms to raise awareness about gender discrimination in the field; in a September 2023 post, for instance, she called out music journalists who criticized her for posting photos of herself in a bikini. Similarly, the violist Christine Anderson posted a reel of herself sporting pink hair, a crop top, and a brown suit with the caption, “Just because you’re a classical musician doesn’t mean you have to hide your queerness.”

Drawing on the methods of performance studies, textual analysis, and feminist and queer musicology and building on recent work on gender, sexuality, race, and disability in Western classical music (Cheng 2016, 2019; Maus & Whiteley 2018, eds; Ewell 2023), this paper will explore the feminist and antiracist work of classical music influencers. I argue that these influencers are working to build new kinds of classical music communities that are more inclusive, relational, and social justice-oriented. These performers not only critique classical music’s centuries-old conservative traditions, but do so publicly and accessibly, for hundreds of thousands of followers around the world who might not be able to regularly attend live concerts. Perhaps some of the most exciting activism in the field is happening on the stage of social media.

In the twenty-first century, the 1980s have been inescapable. Nostalgia for this era has permeated Western popular culture, including popular music, from at least the mid-2010s to the early 2020s. Although scholars have explored 1980s nostalgia in vaporwave, synthwave, and other popular genres (Born and Haworth 2017; Glitsos 2018; Cole 2020; Ballam-Cross 2021; Merlini 2023), many other expressions of 1980s nostalgia have not yet received musicological attention. This limits insights into the aesthetic and, crucially, the political meanings of this nostalgia.

To contribute to this discourse, this paper reads twenty-first century nostalgia for the 1980s as camp. Camp, as queer parody, is political: producing a range of feelings from delight to unease (Salvato 2019), it can challenge conventional notions of sex and gender (Meyer 1994). I analyze the aesthetic, political, and affective contents of camp in two collections of YouTube videos: “80s remixes” that reimagine twenty-first-century songs as 1980s hits, and edits of 1980s songs made to sound as if playing “from another room.” Since camp, as parody, emerges from interactions between text and reception, I consider both collections’ musical characteristics alongside their YouTube comment sections.

I argue that both case studies camp on the closeted queerness of 1980s Western popular music, but differ in their emotional tone. The 80s remixes parody the queer connotations of synthesizers (Peraino 2015) and the malleability of popular music as a recorded artform. Thereby, the remixes and their comments fabulate current-day pop stars, whether openly queer or not, as 1980s queer icons, queering both the past and the present. While these remixes delight in their delusion, the “from another room” edits provoke more emotionally complicated, even morbid fantasies. They sonically invoke closeted spaces, bestowing an uncanny quality onto 1980s music. The music no longer signifies the decade’s frivolity, but instead its flipside of the AIDS epidemic, the neoliberal policies of Thatcher and Reagan, and climate doom, which continue to impact our present day. These two case studies thus politically mobilize 1980s nostalgia to affirm joyful queer existence on the one hand, while warning about its fragility on the other.

“AIDS is God’s Punishment” comes about 90% of the way through Michael R. Jackson’s self-referential musical, A Strange Loop. In this number, the show’s protagonist, Usher, who is a fat Black gay composer, recontextualizes Black Gospel performance in the hopes of demonstrating to his mother the harm he has experienced from her religious tradition. Yet despite his hopes, Usher’s mother reads his performance within the context of her religious tradition and avoids her son’s pain. In our talk, we consider Jackson’s use of Black Gospel musical styles, Christian theology, and complex intersectional identities to produce unexpected and unsettling moral reflections within the audience.

We first situate this number dramatically before turning to the musical score. Using the work of Horace Maxile Jr. and Braxton Shelley, we highlight the referential musical topics that place the number within the Black Gospel tradition. We especially note instances where the musical number contrasts the Black Gospel genre with restatements of earlier numbers to sonically dramatize the differing perceptions of this “Gospel play.” The strangeness of this musical number lies in Usher’s use of Black Gospel in a sardonic way; while the audience understands Usher as critiquing his mother’s religious tradition as he articulates the pain Black Christianity has caused him, his mother remains oblivious to his message and instead interprets his performance as an act of repentance for his blatant homosexuality.

We conclude by questioning what sort of moral reflection Jackson might hope his audience experiences. Reflecting on Ahmed (2004), the audience encounters queer grief in a robust way. This encounter has the potential to inspire the audience to consider the power of cultural forces such as religion and race as contributing factors to that grief. But more than that, it suggests that moral agency is contingent upon, in part, one’s experiences. Usher and his mother’s various interpretations of “AIDS is God’s Punishment” are a result of their own unique experiences and moral formations. If we are to respond to Usher’s grief in meaningful ways, we must discover ways of reforming ourselves as open to such a response.