Conference Agenda

The musical “middlebrow,” which saw its height in the mid-twentieth century, presents analytic and categorical challenges. It undermines and homogenizes artistic distinctions while patrolling taste, perpetuating notions that such labeled music is of suspect value, form, and function—best sequestered away from serious spaces. Yet, more nuanced inquiries reveal that the middlebrow offers multifarious meanings, especially if considering the racial dynamics and ambivalent gender politics it projects. Don Shirley (1927-2013), whose story the 2018 film Green Book popularized, provides an illustrative case of the gendered racialization of middlebrow politics. Denied classical concert management due to his race, Shirley found himself performing in nightclubs. He navigated the legacies of racialized entertainment, especially the lingering afterlives of blackface minstrelsy and associated sexualized stereotypes that haunted African American male musicians. His latent queer identity introduced further complexities as he steered his performances through disidentificatory, coded gestures in sound (cf. Muñoz 1999), which he conceptually merged with the covert communicative underpinnings he learned from Negro spirituals. Ultimately, Shirley engaged otherwise discriminatory, dismissive audiences with his own brand of American music, all the while revealing a manifestation of a Black, masculine musical middlebrow and its mechanics.

This study explores the dynamics and negotiations in Don Shirley’s music by juxtaposing him to two publicly popular pianists often placed on either end of the spectrum of the musical middlebrow: Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), a musician Shirley greatly admired, and Liberace (1919-1987), Shirley’s musical nemesis. To traverse the challenges of imposed racialized gender expectations, Shirley found “middle ground,” so to speak, distancing his music from both the overtly virile, heavy-handed, and complicated virtuosity associated with Rachmaninoff, as well as the theatrical, flamboyant, and uncultured spectacle of Liberace. I argue that masculine and fraught respectability pressures led to Shirley’s performance approach, marked by tempered emotional expression and avoidance of maximalized pianistic techniques and magnified gestures. Shirley’s journey exemplifies the intricacies of Blackness and pianism in relation to staged and sounded masculinity. I challenge narrow perceptions of the middlebrow and open lines of historically informed constraints of race, gender, and sexuality in the context of the long 1960s’ musical landscape.

The United States Marine Corps’ motto “Semper Fi” serves as an important plot device in the musical Dogfight by Dear Evan Hansen and La La Land composer-lyricist duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Set in San Francisco during the midst of the Vietnam War on the night before John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a group of marines spend their last night stateside causing havoc in the name of sadistic hypermasculine entertainment. Short for “Semper Fidelis”, this Latin phrase at the heart of the musical translates to “always faithful” and occurs not only when the marines are pledging nationalistic loyalty to the USA, but also when they are pledging loyalty to one other as fellow marines. This seemingly unbreakable promise of fraternal loyalty comes into question however when acts of violent misogyny from individual marines causes ingroup fighting that challenge their personal conceptions of what it means to “be a man” despite their homosocial adherence to traditional norms of American masculinity. The overall narrative of the musical thus translates Vietnam War era masculinity to modern audiences and utilizes the stage as a space for exploration of male gendered performance in musical theater.

Using R.W. Connell’s framework of hegemonic masculinities and Judith Butler’s theory of gendered performance, I examine how the musical Dogfight approaches the performance of masculinities accounting for not only how men interact with women, but also how they interact with one another. Using a broad range of methodologies to examine lyrics, musical score, narrative, staging, costuming, critical reviews, and interviews, I construct the varied ways in which masculinity is performed in this musical. I argue that the presentation of the marines as a hegemonic whole is challenged by individual marines’ performances of subordinate, marginalized, and protest masculinities within their homosocial grouping. Furthermore, I demonstrate how those who occupy the status of a non-hegemonic masculinity experience gender panic resulting in violent action by means of misogyny and homophobia. This violence occurs as non-hegemonic marines attempt to reconstruct perceptions of their masculinity toward a hegemonic performance to fit societal expectations of American military service members in both Vietnam and contemporary eras.

Knobs are a ubiquitous part of daily life, used to turn on lights, preheat ovens, adjust volume, and tune radios. Yet, their design has long been shaped by masculinist ideologies. Historically, knob interfaces were designed for an imagined male user, while women were marketed push-button alternatives. Though these gendered associations date back to the postwar era, I argue that they persist in contemporary discourses on music technology.

This talk examines the enduring gender politics of knob interfaces in music technology. Beginning in the 1950s, High Fidelity framed knobs as tools of masculine control over both technology and sound, rendering timbre—an otherwise ineffable quality—quantifiable and subject to analysis. Contemporary guitar periodicals reinforce this logic, treating knob settings as a kind of tablature notation for tone. By comparing mid-century discourses from High Fidelity with recent discussions in guitar magazines, I reveal how the longstanding association between knobs and masculinity continues to shape ideas of musical expertise and sonic control.