Conference Agenda

The feather-caped musical medium Jesse Shepard (1848-1927) swept onto the world stage in the 1870s, becoming famous across Europe and the United States for channeling musical ghosts in séances. As he sat in a trance at the piano, the shades of Chopin, Mozart, and Beethoven returned to speak through Shepard’s fingers, producing compositions unheard by living ears. After these ghosts departed, Shepard sang “spirit arias,” channeling voices from the deceased bel canto age. Henriette Sontag (1806-1854) and Luigi Lablache (1794-1858) returned from the dead to sing together from a single body, a Donizetti duet now only for one, in which Shepard's voice oscillated between a rich baritone and what commentators described as no “mere falsetto voice…but a clear bell-like soprano.” Shepard’s “wonderfully feminine” soprano garnered international fame, with newspapers reporting Shepard’s séances “require[d] no stretch of the imagination to believe in the presence incarnate of those world-renowned artists.”

`This paper outlines a theory of queer vocal performance to understand Shepard’s duets for one, particularly his propensity for re-embodying dead divas. I introduce the term “intermundane vocal drag” to analyze Shepard’s vocal performances, wherein the already-porous boundaries between life and death in the séance room allowed Shepard to explore his own queer identity as he spectacularly dis/embodied an aesthetic of “vocal multiplicity and heterogeneity,” a distinctly queer feature of the diva’s voice as outlined by Wayne Koestenbaum. I place Shepard’s work within various discourses surrounding late nineteenth-century vocal performance and sexuality, reading the musical medium in the context of the dead age of bel canto and of the waning castrato voice, followed by the rise of recording technology. Drawing on an array of musicological work, opera history, voice studies, and queer performance theory, I argue that Shepard’s performances constitute queer compositions that revive opera’s past and prefigure its future in the era of recording technology, returning the voices of divas who died before the advent of recording by becoming a sort of queer recording device himself, a performance of difference which simultaneously subtly refigures the uncanny legacy of the castrato.

When Vicky Beeching came out as gay in 2014, her career as a songwriter, worship leader, and performing artist in the Christian music industry came to an abrupt halt. Record labels dropped her contract, megachurches vowed never to sing her songs again, and fans sent hate mail (Beeching 2018). Her story is remarkably similar to that of Jennifer Knapp, who came out in 2010, and also experienced rejection from the industry which previously adored her. By contrast, Jackie Hill Perry is a Christian rapper and public speaker who has found significant success in Christian circles despite identifying as a gay woman – something made possible by her testimony that even gay people can find success in heterosexual marriages.

Unencumbered by global movements toward LGBTQ+ inclusion in faith communities, the Christian music industry – situated in the "Bible Belt'' of the United States – has clung to strict moral clauses and conservative biblical beliefs on human sexuality. While studies have examined the history and contemporary practices of the Christian music industry (Bowler 2018; Mall 2020) and the negative impact of conservative Christian teachings on sexuality (Rivera 2021), none have considered how artists engage their queer identities in this conservative Christian industry. What strategies have artists like Beeching, Knapp, and Perry used to negotiate their sexualities in the conservative public eye? Throughout their music careers, how have they represented their sexualities in ways that appeal to – or reject – heteronormative church teachings on sexuality? Drawing upon research on Evangelical beliefs (Bowler and Reagan 2014; Barr 2021), intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989; Kim and Shaw 2018), and queer music industry spaces (Hubbs 2014; Williams 2016) this presentation will examine how female Christian music artists have negotiated minoritized sexual orientations in ways that subvert expected norms, and will explore how these various strategies have resulted in artists' radically different relationships to the Christian music industry.

In the preface to Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880, rev. 1907), lesbian author Vernon Lee frames her deep personal relationship with Settecento music culture by recounting a formative experience from her youth. As a child, Lee was fascinated by tales about how the famous castrato Farinelli had soothed the madness of the King of Spain with song. She longed to hear one of Farinelli’s arias, “Pallido il sole,” for herself, fantasizing that it contained “residues” of the castrato’s miraculous voice. Yet when her mother obtained the aria in manuscript and went to play it at the piano, Lee fled the room, overcome by a “sickening fear, mingled with shame, lest the piece should turn out hideous.” The stakes were unbearably high, for “on that piece hung the fate of a world—the only one which mattered—the world of my fancies and longings.”

This talk explores how eighteenth-century Italian opera and its emblem, the castrato singer, formed the foundations of Lee’s late Victorian aesthetic thought. Her vast (and understudied) corpus of writings on music blurs distinctions between fiction, memoir, and scientific-empirical analysis, making it seem more the province of literary scholars than music historians. But this talk finds in Lee’s idiosyncratic approaches to historiography and aesthetics a generative model for engaging with the musical past, as what I call “queer musical temporality.” By positioning her own so-called "affective memory" of castrato voices as a conduit to the “exquisite unreality” of eighteenth-century Italy, Lee insisted on the worldmaking power of musical experiences, whether real, imagined, or somewhere in between.

Building on studies of queer desire for operatic voices (Koestenbaum 1993; Jarman-Ivens 2011; Wilbourne 2018), and on theories of queer temporalities as nonlinear, spectral, and backward-looking (Muñoz 1999; Halberstam 2005; Dinshaw et al 2007; Freeman 2010), this talk explores how Lee's imaginative empathy for the castrato functioned as a mode of music historiography. In thus situating queer musical temporality as, indivisibly, a historiographical method and a practice of self-formation, this paper attends to how music conjures the transhistorical “fancies and longings” of its lovers—and of its historians.