Imagining Musical Pasts

Kristin M. Franseen is a FRQSC postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University, where she is also a research associate with the Simone de Beauvoir Institute. She received her PhD in musicology from McGill University in 2019. Articles stemming from her dissertation appear in Music & Letters, 19th-Century Music, and the Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche en musique. Her research focuses on the role of gossip, anecdote, and fiction in the history of musicology and composer biography. She is currently at work on two projects: (1) a critical look at music critic and amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson’s record collecting and self-publishing activities and (2) an examination of Antonio Salieri’s literary reception history.

• Introduction: The Old Queer MusicologyPart I: Vernon Lee’s Ghostly Musical EncountersChapter 1: “The more or less remote Past”: Imagining Castrati and Overhearing the Eighteenth CenturyChapter 2: “A gallery of dramatis personae with whom I often feel very intimate”: Musicological Authority and Homosociality in Music and its Lovers and “A Wicked Voice”Part II: Rosa Newmarch’s Musical Detective WorkChapter 3: “An autobiographical interest for which there is no real warranty”: Gossip, Evidence, and Speculation in Newmarch’s Tchaikovsky ScholarshipChapter 4: “Her own song to sing”: Friendship and Romantic Ambiguity in Mary Wakefield and the SonnetsPart III: Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Nostalgic Musical Time TravelChapter 5: “The ultimate voices in a homosexual message by symphonic music”: The Intersexes and Long-Haired Iopas as Musicological SexologyChapter 6: “Once, But Not Twice?”: Repertory and the Culmination of Nostalgic WanderingsConclusions: Are Musicologists Human?Appendix 1: Vernon Lee, “English Questionnaire,” Music and its Lovers (1933)Appendix 2: Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Annotations and “Literary Agent’s Press-Circular” Long-Haired Iopas, Copy #77Appendix 3: Dedicatees in Edward Prime-Stevenson, Long-Haired Iopas (1927)