Conference Agenda

Critically panned and largely overshadowed by his earlier theater works, composer Marc Blitzstein’s only “urban” opera, Reuben Reuben (1955), explores themes of suicide and redemption in a seedy and raucous 1950s Manhattan. In the limited scholarship on the unpublished opera, the titular character’s condition of aphonia has been attributed to Blitzstein’s own persecution by McCarthyism. However, I argue that connecting the opera’s theme of selective mutism to the threads of silence found throughout queer scholarship complicates this conclusion. Using archival research from the Blitzstein Papers as well as the composer’s FBI files, I offer an interpretation of Reuben Reuben as a mimetic expression of Philip Brett’s “crisis of secrecy.” In this regard, Blitzstein and his fictional Reuben have something in common: both lived constantly in the presence of danger where being mute was the only option for self-preservation. For historical context, I define the effects of this danger using two interwoven concepts: the “enemy from within” and the “enemy from without,” taken from language of the second Red Scare. For the former, Reuben’s dual personality, represented most literally by the redundancy of the opera’s title, emerges as an allusion to the double lives led by gay men, a diremption necessitated by the sexual mores of the Atomic Age. For the latter, I look to Foucauldian biopolitics. Here, Foucault’s conduire des conduit explicates a jingoistic rhetoric that still resonates today, one that points to the true enemy from without. Blinded by patriotic zeal and xenophobia, the scourge of anti-communism waged a war that used fear to hold a generation hostage. In doing so, they created a new enemy — one that, in Blitzstein’s words, was willing to kill the images of its own ideal.

The purpose of Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour of America was to publicize the Gilbert & Sullivan opera Patience, as well as to advance his own persona as a self-invented modern celebrity. As part of the fervid response to his visit, many songs for voice/piano and solo piano were published. Some of this music was dedicated to Wilde or used his name and image for commercial relevance. Much of it–particularly the vocal music–had text and music that playfully parodied characterizations of Wilde and the aesthetics for which he was known. The sheet music cover art is iconic, and the music is often mentioned by scholars of Wilde and American fin-de-siècle aesthetics. However, they seldom consider the way the sheet music sounds as performed.

What exactly was “wild” in this Wildeiana music? Which of the approbative pieces captured in music his flippity-flop catch phrases such as “utterly utter,” attempted to musically match his heightened or “foppish” physical manner (as described by contemporary press articles), or had a generally mocking tone? Conversely, which pieces, lacking anything intrinsically unique in their music, were merely connected to him as a marketing gimmick? This paper sheds light on the way Wildeiana music sounds, and explores the sheet music as a possible commentary on, or interaction with, reception history of Wilde in America, questioning how the music engages with Wilde’s aesthetics.

As case studies, I analyze three Wildeiana songs housed in UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Archive: “Quite Too Utterly Utter!! an Aesthetical Roundelay” (Coote); “Oscar, Dear!” (Rosenfeld); and “Flippy Flop Young Man” (Adams, Johngmans). Musically, the songs and dance suites about Oscar Wilde feature extensive use of motivic accented non-chord tones to achieve desired characterizations and highlight lyrical elements. These musical characterizations work in conjunction with sheet music cover art that plays up his “feminized” poses. This multifaceted exploration provides greater appreciation for how Wilde’s 1882 tour and its initiation of celebrity culture affected contemporary American music with regards to both marketing and internal musical elements. Exploring selected contemporaneous music and images helps us better understand how Wilde’s American tour impacted international popular music and culture.

Racial homogeneity and heteronormative biases have often been left uninterrogated in Japanese music scholarship, as queer and/or mixed-race performers in Japan have been deemed irrelevant, anomalous, or simply inconvenient in the pursuit of cultural authenticity. Subverting these standards, the Japanese “fashion punk band” Queen Bee [Ziyoou-Vachi] challenges hegemonic discourse surrounding legibility and purity, as their expansive and evocative repertoire tackles diverse social issues in contemporary Japan, including racial prejudice, domestic violence, heteropatriarchal scripts, and sex work. In alignment with this principle, the lead singer Avu-chan has resisted identifying themself according to categorical distinctions, leading to mass media portrayals of them as a bizarre and mysterious figure who refuses to disclose their gender, sexual orientation, age, or ethnicity. Yet, while their public identity is inscrutable, Avu-chan boldly exercises their “right to opacity” (Glissant 1997) through extravagant aesthetics and operatic vocals. Queen Bee’s 2022 single “Inu-Hime” offers a prime example of Avu-chan’s idiosyncratic vocality, wherein their performance of queerness in premodern Japanese settings enacts a disidentification with their racialized and gendered body (Muñoz 1999).

This paper explores how “Inu-Hime” reappropriates traditional noh and kabuki conventions to dismantle ethnonationalist and heterosexist ideologies that pervade contemporary Japan. Engaging a queer of color critical approach, I extend Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of “mestiza consciousness” (1987) and José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of “queer hybridity” (1995) to develop a theory of queer polyculturalism, which addresses the intersectional particularities of being queer and mixed-race in Japan. I begin by employing Koizumi Fumio’s tetrachordal theory (1965) to examine how "Inu-Hime" recontextualizes sounds signifying Japanese musical authenticity to interrogate their ethnonationalist undertones. Then, focusing on Avu-chan’s layered subjectivities manifested in their vocal timbres (Eidsheim 2019), I discuss how their timbral shifts destabilize discursive binaries of masculinity and femininity imbued within Japanese gender norms. Lastly, I expand upon scholarship on gender and sexuality in Japanese performance traditions (Mizuta 1998; Robertson 1998; Isaka 2016) to discuss how the music video historicizes queer performativity as constructed and perceived in premodern Japan. The reimagination of "historic Japan" renders visible non-conforming voices, bodies, and subjectivities that existed then, while also problematizing their marginalization in Japan today.