Skip Nav Destination
Close Modal
Update search
NARROW
Format
Journal
Date
Availability
1-1 of 1
Nadine Hubbs
Close
Follow your search
Access your saved searches in your account
Would you like to receive an alert when new items match your search?
Sort by
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Daedalus (2013) 142 (4): 45–50.
Published: 01 October 2013
Abstract
View article
PDF
Challenging notions of the composer as solitary genius and of twentieth-century homophobia as a simple destructive force, I trace a new genealogy of Coplandian tonal modernism–“America's sound” as heard in works like “Rodeo,” “Appalachian Spring,” and “Fanfare for the Common Man” – and glean new sociosexual meanings in “cryptic” modernist abstraction like that of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera “Four Saints in Three Acts.” I consider gay white male tonalists collectively to highlight how shared social identities shaped production and style in musical modernism, and I recast gay composers' close-knit social/sexual/creative/professional alliances as, not sexually nepotistic cabals, but an adaptive and richly productive response to the constraints of an intensely homophobic moment. The essay underscores the pivotal role of the new hetero/homo concept in twentieth-century American culture, and of queer impetuses in American artistic modernism.