Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology

I love this book. The style is approachable and dynamic, and the ideas are still exciting ten years after the book was published. The authors cover a wide range of topics both historical and contemporary and come from different theoretical stand points. The articles not only focus on composition and performance but also on listenership and the gendered power relationships involved in that. As a first year postgraduate student involved in gay and lesbian studies of music I found this book inspirational and invigorating because of the high quality of scholarship involved. Queering the Pitch is a much more interesting read than several more recent collections of queer musicology because of the strength of the ideas involved but especially energetic and transparent writing styles which avoid the stogyness that musicology can often suffer from.

Queering the Pitch is the first anthology to be published in the new field of queer musicology (although it does draw from works like Solie's "Musicology and Difference" collection.)The quality of the fourteen essays here varies greatly. Some, like Philip Brett's "Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet" are absolutely earthshaking-provacative, well-written, and inspiring. Other essays seem a bit out of place, and show how much work their needs to be done in this field. It occasionally feels as if the editors had to scrape around to find enough material for the collection.The three editors, all well-known musicologists, are to be commended for this effort. The book is already something of a classic, and has certainly helped to legitimitize this field of inquiry.