Conference Agenda

This paper looks to the K. Robert Schwarz Papers at Queens College as an underexamined archive of musical AIDS testimony, focusing on a December 5, 1992 taped interview between musicologist-journalist K. Robert Schwarz and baritone William Parker of the AIDS Quilt Songbook (1993), an album of art song about AIDS. This interview, which took place just before Parker’s AIDS-related death, would inform Schwarz’s Out Magazine profile of Parker titled “The Gift of Song” (1993), as well as his articles on AIDS and classical music for the New York Times and American Record Guide.

At the top of Schwarz’s interview transcript appears this handwritten description of Parker’s AIDS-ravaged voice: “Voice halting, soft, clearing throat, needing to stop for air, imbued a wistful poignancy.” This paper analyzes Schwarz’s vocal description — as well as Parker’s recorded singing in the AIDS Quilt Songbook — through the lens of Roland Barthes’s “grain of the voice” as reinterpreted by disability and voice scholars Laurie Stras and Jessica Schwartz: How does the voice “bear witness” to trauma through its affective nature?

Hindsight renders the Schwarz-Parker interview even more poignant: Seven years after conducting the interview, Schwarz himself died of AIDS. His papers — consisting of recorded interviews, typed transcripts and drafts, and handwritten edits, all meticulously preserved — show the recursive labor of relistening and rewriting. With such implied repetitions, the Schwarz-Parker interview becomes like a piece of Minimalist music in itself, recalling tape-based works like Steve Reich’s Different Trains, about which Schwarz wrote in his book Minimalists (1996). Using tape’s memorializing medium, Schwarz, like Reich, crafts what Amy Lynn Wlodarski calls “musical testimony” from others’ voices.

Ultimately, I read the Schwarz-Parker interview as a form of “reciprocal testimony” for reporter and subject. The cassette recording captures both Parker’s voice and Schwarz’s active listening, with Schwarz’s questions shaped by his own coming to terms with mortality. Building upon Will Robin’s research on Schwarz and Minimalism, this paper positions Schwarz as an understudied figure in queer public musicology, arguing for his archive’s relevance to contemporary AIDS remembrance, currently under siege, forming a counter-archive to official state narratives.

This paper explores how trans+ drag performers use music to articulate trans+ physicality and sexuality. Using ethnographic material from Bristol’s (U.K) drag scene to highlight music as an affective strategy in grassroots drag, I contrast the mundanity of trans+ embodiment with trans+ bodies in crisis. In public spheres, trans+ bodies are typically presented through crisis narrative frameworks, where they have historically been medicalised, sexualised, and problematised. Queer musical responses to homophobia and transphobia remain central in how crisis is communicated. I situate musical responses to the current trans+ genocide in a queer lineage of musical responses to homophobia and transphobia through an overview of musical responses to the AIDS pandemic, 1981-1996, building on Matthew J. Jones’s work on recorded pop music (2024), Keith C. Ward's work on art-song in The AIDS Quilt Songbook (1999), and scholarship on avant-garde artist Diamanda Galás’s Plague Mass (Gao, AMS annual conference presentation 2025; McClary, 1991.) I demonstrate how music is complicit in societal crisis narratives which demand certain musical features (volume, clarity, repetition) whilst marginalising quieter, affective, and mundane sonic modes of trans+ embodiment and connection. I term this ‘plague logic.’

I argue that reclaiming mundanity as a rich and overlooked sonic register combats the musical restraints of plague logic and challenges dominant frameworks of (mis)understanding trans+ bodies. In drag performance, mundanity is articulated in genre promiscuity, music without symbolic gravitas, affective warmth and intimacy. Plague logic is disrupted through resisting didacticism and symbolic overdetermination. Music becomes a site of radical care. In this paper, I reposition drag as a sonic ecology with multiple modes of embodiment coexisting; through music, drag performance enables privacy in public spheres, intimacy without crossing personal boundaries, strength without heroism. Sound allows trans+ bodies to be present and centred by foregrounding temporal qualities, affective resonance, listening as relational. Where crisis music demands a singular response, mundane music fosters coexistence and community. By centring mundanity within trans+ drag performance, this paper reframes music as a productive site of care and affective value, contributing to broader discussions of how queerly embodied sonic practices resist dominant crisis narratives (Garcia-Mispireta, 2023; Pennington, 2018).

The Windy City Gay Chorus (WCGC) was founded in Chicago in 1979, providing its members with both an artistic outlet and a "third place" at a time when the AIDS crisis threatened the safety of traditional LGBTQ social venues. Four years after its founding, members of the WCGC formed the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus (CGMC) following an ideological rift concerning the WCGC's finances and performance opportunities. Though each group has been historically defined by tenor and bass voices, both ensembles initially welcomed straight-identifying individuals and women, resulting in a diverse makeup since their founding. The choruses continue to this day to perform countless programs and are distinguished most notably in their repertoire; the WCGC emphasizes classical repertoire, while the CGMC presents more performances rooted in popular music traditions.

To understand the history of the two choruses, we must look to the accounts and interviews provided by members of these ensembles and their audiences. I draw from archived interviews with Kip Snyder, a former WCGC vocal coach, and CGMC members Mitch Laks, Nick Kelly, and Anne Santiago to consider their musical participation as essential in maintaining the social infrastructure of the Chicagoan queer community. I also utilize articles from the Windy City Times and OUTlines: The Voice of the Gay and Lesbian Community by music critics such as Rick Reed and David Adrian to understand the reception of the CGMC's and WCGC's concerts to connect their reception histories to their local impact. In this paper, I argue that the WCGC and CGMC defined new sites for LGBTQ socialization in Chicago as the AIDS crisis necessitated alternative locales for queer joy. The accessibility of musicking with fellow LGBTQ Chicagoans afforded by these choruses had profound impacts on the social adaptation and resilience of the local queer community from the early 1980s onward, evidenced by accounts from ensemble participants and queer audiences alike.