Category: Uncategorized

Disparate Bodies: Research Tracks and Creative Endeavors
Kendra Preston Leonard, PhD
October 2, 2018      6:15-7:30 pm
Luann Dummer Center for Women
University of St. Thomas

My brain is like a cat, constantly trying to catch multiple red dots. My brain is like a corvid, attracted to the shiny and new. My brain wants to DO ALL THE THINGS! Is your brain like mine? Or totally different? Either way, come to a discussion about how this has made my career one full of work in different disciplines and using different approaches, one that encompasses multiple kinds of theory and praxis, and one that involves both rigorous scholarly work and creative writing, and how your own work can be wider-ranging and more inclusive of all of the things you’re interested in than you might have thought. We’ll talk about the usefulness of inter- and multi-disciplinary study, disciplinary cross-theorization, balancing the creative with the scholarly, and whatever issues, questions, or ideas you bring with you. 

Today, Musicology Now posted an essay by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone in which the author bewails the lack of material on music and sexuality. As someone whose own work is erased by this claim, I want to point out that musicology has, as a discipline, engaged with sexuality in a very robust manner over the last twenty years, if not longer. Contrary to Clifford-Napoleone’s statement that “If the subject is not a famous queer performance, or someone famous for being a queer performer, then it is not in the archives as ‘sexuality.'” I cannot think of a more erroneous proclamation. I encourage her–as well as anyone interested in music and sexuality–to begin with the following resources:

• Emily Wilbourne’s excellent Oxford Bibliography on Gender and Sexuality and Music
• The resources posted by the AMS’s LGBTQ study group
• The Society for Music Theory’s Committee on the Status of Women’s Bibliography of Sources Related to Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Feminism, and Music

I hope that careful and critical reading of submitted essays by the Musicology Now staff will prevent the publication of such poorly-informed pieces in the future. Many recent posts have been excellent and, given the blog’s mixed history of success, we need the best scholarship we can get.

I’m still available for campus or Skype visits for classes, workshops, lecture series, and other events! Feel free to email me to set something up.

October 2-3, 2018: University of St. Thomas, Minneapolis. Details pending, but this will include at least one public talk.

November 1, 2018: “Dealing With Microaggressions” Workshop, Project Spectrum/Diversifying Music Academia conference. 8 am, Connally Room at the UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures. I highly recommend that my academic colleagues attend this conference, which takes place just before this year’s AMS/SMT conference at a nearby venue.

March 7-9, 2019: IASPM-US, New Orleans. See the Call for Papers here.

March 20-24, 2019: Society for American Music, New Orleans. Co-chair, with Paul Allen Sommerfeld, Seminar on Music and Sound in Horror Media.