Very thought-provoking post. It fits in neatly with my own current interests, which have involved reading quite a bit of new gay musicology. (Really interesting stuff.)
To start with, I agree entirely that the English pastoral school wouldn't suit the image that the movie is trying to create. One has to cast back a long way for other influential composers in England. (Like Handel, who wasn't even English. He might have been gay but sadly that's a topic for another time.) It wasn't until the twentieth century that English classical music became predominantly (in the words of Peter Pears) "queer and left and conshie."
Interwar Berlin, though? Isn't that a little anachronistic if you're trying to create an appropriate period atmosphere? One can certainly think about non-British music that ties into queer history and would have been known to Holmes himself. Schubert, possibly. Also Tchaikovsky.
One of the difficult and interesting things about "the love that dare not speak its name" is that it always ends up being coded in analogies and metaphors. This is fascinating from a textual analysis perspective, yet frustrating because it ends up participating in different varieties of othering. In American twentieth-century music for instance, gamelan-inspired music tends to be coded as gay because it is seen as "exotic" and "other." Queer or non-normative sexuality is in general often symbolized in music generally using orientalist elements. In this soundtrack it sounds like Gypsy violins and Hungarian music are carrying the burden of symbolizing the Other. And as interesting as it is in terms of what it says about the filmmakers' view of Holmes, it's by no means an unequivocally positive thing because it so easily becomes appropriative and exoticizing.
It would be very interesting to think more about Holmes' musical milieu, though. What was the opera that he and Watson were going to see in the movie? What would he have thought about Patience, which is certainly a very coded work?
Apologies now if I've rambled too much from your original theme. Hope there's some food for thought in there somewhere.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-04-28 01:36 pm (UTC)To start with, I agree entirely that the English pastoral school wouldn't suit the image that the movie is trying to create. One has to cast back a long way for other influential composers in England. (Like Handel, who wasn't even English. He might have been gay but sadly that's a topic for another time.) It wasn't until the twentieth century that English classical music became predominantly (in the words of Peter Pears) "queer and left and conshie."
Interwar Berlin, though? Isn't that a little anachronistic if you're trying to create an appropriate period atmosphere? One can certainly think about non-British music that ties into queer history and would have been known to Holmes himself. Schubert, possibly. Also Tchaikovsky.
One of the difficult and interesting things about "the love that dare not speak its name" is that it always ends up being coded in analogies and metaphors. This is fascinating from a textual analysis perspective, yet frustrating because it ends up participating in different varieties of othering. In American twentieth-century music for instance, gamelan-inspired music tends to be coded as gay because it is seen as "exotic" and "other." Queer or non-normative sexuality is in general often symbolized in music generally using orientalist elements. In this soundtrack it sounds like Gypsy violins and Hungarian music are carrying the burden of symbolizing the Other. And as interesting as it is in terms of what it says about the filmmakers' view of Holmes, it's by no means an unequivocally positive thing because it so easily becomes appropriative and exoticizing.
It would be very interesting to think more about Holmes' musical milieu, though. What was the opera that he and Watson were going to see in the movie? What would he have thought about Patience, which is certainly a very coded work?
Apologies now if I've rambled too much from your original theme. Hope there's some food for thought in there somewhere.