This dissertation explores some of the ways in which fin-de-si�cle French composers negotiated the boundaries between masculinity, aestheticism and Orientalism in their music. Dandysme - in English, dandyism - refers to the philosophy and practices of the dandy, an individual (usually male) who places particular importance upon physical appearance and mannered elegance, who lives his life with an air of cold indifference, and above all, according to Charles Baudelaire, strives to elevate aesthetics to a living religion. I examine musical dandysme as a form of sonic self-fashioning through a close examination of three composers and patrons: Robert de Montesquiou, Reynaldo Hahn, and Maurice Ravel. These men were dandies in multiple senses of the word: they were deeply concerned with fashion, manners and physical appearance, but they also strove to treat their lives as Works of Art, inflected by their aestheticized approach to composition.

While most studies of dandyism have examined it primarily as a literary and social phenomenon, my research illuminates the many ways in which Montesquiou, Hahn and Ravel incorporated the aesthetics of dandysme into their musical performance and pedagogy. More specifically, this project uses the historical figure of the French dandy-composer to theorize "posing" as a form of musical imitation. I suggest that the dandy's aestheticism can be experienced in his music through particular forms of stylization, or poses, present in the artwork itself. Whether a type of ornament or a nostalgic recollection, these poses of musical dandysme are present throughout the works of Montesquiou, Hahn and Ravel. These composers used their music to pose both as French and as exotic subjects, thus situating themselves in relation to the temporal and geographical present of fin-de-si�cle France. For example, at Montesquiou's 1894 party "Une f�te litt�raire � Versailles," theatrical and musical performance fashioned a pose of nostalgia, restaging the ancien regime for contemporary tastes at Montesquiou's Versailles villa. In compositions like Ravel's Sh�h�razade (1903) and Hahn's L'�le du r�ve (1898), the exotic poses of musical Orientalism allowed rich alignments and nuanced combinations of notions: of sexuality, gender, ethnos, or nation, to name only the most salient. Using these three men as case studies, this project develops a model of musical dandysme in order to examine the transition between late Romanticism and early Modernism in fin-de-si�cle French music, from approximately 1890 to 1912.

The tenuous boundaries that separate humans, animals, and machines fascinate and sometimes unsettle us. In eighteenth-century France, conceptions of what differentiates humans from animals and machines became a sustained topic of interest in spaces that were public and private, recreational and intellectual. This dissertation argues that eighteenth-century harpsichords were porous sites where performers, composers, artisans, academics, and pedagogues negotiated the limits of these fragile boundaries. French harpsichords are at the center of my dissertation because they embodied an experimental collision of animal parts and other biomatter, complex machinery, and visual and musical performance. Taken together, I consider the ways that instruments had social import apart from sound production alone, expanding the definition of “instrument” beyond traditional organological studies of style in craftsmanship and musical aesthetics.

I use an “entangled organology” that traces economic, technological, scientific, and environmental convergences to reveal the thick networks through which harpsichords traveled and the behavioral codes and motivations that instrument makers, performers, listeners, composers, and philosophers embedded into them. I follow the 1687 French embassy to Siam to show how harpsichords were crucial in intercultural, diplomatic exchanges as gifts, bribes, or as sources of teachable knowledge. I examine Jacques de Vaucanson’s 1738 flute-playing android to show how musical instruments mobilized debates in human anatomy and the mechanical arts. I then focus on bird and monkey genre paintings (singerie) on harpsichords’ surfaces to show how harpsichords evoked the contested human-animal divide. Next, I use Jean-Philippe Rameau’s harpsichord manual of 1724 and songbird pi�ce to narrate musical confrontations with nature between player and machine. Finally, I bring together early modern brain and nerve theories and an analysis of a pair of keyboard rondeaux by Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer to demonstrate how harpsichord music embraced neurocultural findings on the exceptionalism of human cognition over animals and machines. Drawing from historically informed performance practices, the history of the book, the history of science and technology, art history, and material culture, “Wond’rous Machines” questions implicit assumptions about music, music making, and the fixity of musical instruments to argue that there are kinds of musical engagements, or musicking, that conventional organologies cannot explain.

The Silver Age has long been considered one of the most vibrant artistic movements in Russian history. Due to sweeping changes that were occurring across Russia, culminating in the 1917 Revolution, the apocalyptic sentiments of the general populace caused many intellectuals and artists to turn towards esotericism and occult thought. With this, there was an increased interest in transcendentalism, and art was becoming much more abstract. The tenets of the Russian Symbolist movement epitomized this trend. Poets and philosophers, such as Vladimir Solovyov, Andrei Bely, and Vyacheslav Ivanov, theorized about the spiritual aspects of words and music. It was music, however, that was singled out as possessing transcendental properties.

In recent decades, there has been a surge in scholarly work devoted to the transcendent strain in Russian Symbolism. The end of the Cold War has brought renewed interest in trying to understand such an enigmatic period in Russian culture. While much scholarship has been devoted to Symbolist poetry, there has been surprisingly very little work devoted to understanding how the soundscape of music works within the sphere of Symbolism. The question that arises is: what about music can be understood as transcendental? In the Symbolist journal Novyi Put’, Andrei Bely noted the piano compositions of Nikolai Medtner as being the perfect example of theurgy. Bely’s description of this, however, is extremely vague and our understanding of where theurgy lies in the compositional process is hard to grasp. The same ambiguity exists in making sense of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, whose music is reviewed prominently in Symbolist journals. A composer who tried deliberately to embody the spirit of Symbolism and theurgy in his music was Alexander Scriabin, who planned to compose a seven day long piece that was meant to actually summon the apocalypse. Due to his untimely death, this was a work that never came to fruition. Confusion over the musical construction of Scriabin’s late works, by musicians and scholars alike, is generally coupled with a sympathetic yet dismissive view of his own messianic and maniacal ideologies.

The opaque sense of meaning surrounding musical transcendentalism in this repertoire has presented a considerable challenge not only for performers, but for scholars as well. Musicologists have spent a considerable amount of time on the formal aspects of this music, but have still been hesitant in deciphering its meaning. Literary scholars have been able to interpret some semblance of meaning in music described by Symbolist poets, but have not shown where this lies within the music. What is necessary in trying to understand the Symbolist concept of musical transcendentalism and theurgy is a study that attempts to take into account all facets of research. In this dissertation, I present a means by which to understand this music without compromising formal structure, cultural context, or performance.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov subtitled Sadko “an Opera-Bylina,” a gesture which both reveals his compositional approach, and gives the piece a sui generis designation as an operatic and folk-epic hybrid. The composer drew from an extraordinary range of textual and musical material to fashion Sadko, a work that is thoroughly imbued with references to Russian folk culture. His primary source texts were the Russian byliny: folk-epic poetry that had circulated orally for some seven centuries before being collected and transcribed in the nineteenth century. While Rimsky-Korsakov’s preoccupation with folklore represents a thematic continuation of his prior operas, his approach to his source material takes a decidedly antiquarian and philological turn in Sadko.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s transmutation of the byliny into operatic form involved his development of a set of narrative strategies that approximate the storytelling conventions of the source texts. Rimsky-Korsakov includes multiple narrators in the opera who present Sadko’s tale through different narrative frames, chronotopes, and musical idioms. The arias of each narrator constitute moments of heightened narrativity, in which the events of the plot are condensed, refracted, retold, and foretold through the prism of diegetic song. The diegetic passages, though generally critiqued as moments of stasis in the dramatic action of the opera, are in fact the active fulcra of the narrative, foretelling, even generating, its subsequent events as well as offering retrospective viewpoints on prior events from alternate narrative perspectives. The diegetic songs communicate implicit details about the narrators’ respective positions in the social strata, and their underlying alliances with other characters. Sadko not only tells the story of the eponymous hero, but foregrounds the mechanisms, modalities, and multidimensionality of telling itself.

The late nineteenth century saw the publication of the first medical texts in western Europe that defined a condition known as inversion—a concept that set the precedent for modern categories such as homosexual and transgender. However, prior to their official medicalization, ideas about race, sex, and sexuality that informed twentieth-century identity constructions were already circulating in mass culture and musical entertainment. This dissertation investigates musical, sonic, and performative means through which gendered and sexual difference were articulated in nineteenth-century U.S.-American culture. I argue that musical and theatrical performance are not merely sites where identities are represented; rather, performance plays a key role in the formation and maintenance of those identities. Chapter 1 deals with staged impersonation—encompassing racial and ethnic impersonation, as well as female and male impersonation in which both actors and characters are white. By contextualizing impersonation within a) a broader cultural zeitgeist of illusion, hoaxing, and curiosity, b) contemporary racial ideologies, and c) contemporary journalism about cross-dressing people off the stage, I argue that this genre instructed audiences to understand cross-dressing, passing, or otherwise gender nonconforming people to be impersonating something they were not. Chapter 2 examines a repertoire of popular songs that depict Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement. Through practice-based musical performance and analysis of physical gestures, I argue that these songs articulated ideas about Wilde’s sexual otherness that could not be expressed in print. Chapter 3 looks at the writings and musicking of an individual, Ralph Werther-Jennie June, who identified h/imself as an androgyne, or fairie. I explore musical and performative means through which Werther-June articulates h/is experience of sexual difference, and also navigates through states of extreme abjection. I conclude with a discussion of Todd Haynes’ 1998 film, Velvet Goldmine, which demonstrates the persisting centrality of performative tropes and techniques such as innuendo, camp, and impersonation to queer expression, representation, and reception in U.S.-American culture—and displays the tendency of prevailing queer narratives to be about both white people and imposture, despite those narratives being built upon racialized rubrics, and cultural work done by people of color.

In this dissertation I argue for the importance of the film soundtrack as affective archive through a consideration of the horror soundtrack. Long dismissed by scholars in both cinema media studies and musicology as one of horror’s many manipulative special effects employed in the aesthetically and ideologically uncomplicated goal of arousing fear, the horror soundtrack is in fact an invaluable resource for scholars seeking to historicize changes in cultural sensibilities and public feelings about sexuality. I explore the critical potential of the horror soundtrack as affective archive through formal and theoretical analysis of the role of music in the representation of sexuality in the horror film. I focus on films consumed in the Unites States during the 1970s, a decade marked by rapid shifts in both cultural understanding and cinematic representation of sexuality.

My analyses proceed from an interdisciplinary theoretical framework animated by methods drawn from affect studies, American studies, feminist film theory, film music studies, queer of color critique, and queer theory. What is the relationship between public discourses of fear around gender, race, class, and sexuality, and the musical framing of sexuality as fearful in the horror film? I explore this central question through the examination of significant figures in the genre (the vampire, the mad scientist/creation dyad, and the slasher or serial killer) and the musical-affective economies in which they circulate. I argue that attention to the ways in which music interacts with moving images and narrative in the horror genre provides a new way of interrogating the political history of sexuality in the United States, one uniquely equipped to theorize and analyze areas of culture that are often left unanalyzed because of their close engagement with emotions and the body.

This dissertation pairs together two contrasting concert musicians, African American pianist-composer Don Shirley (1927-2013), revived by the 2018 film Green Book, and Russian pianist-composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943). Both faced aspects of erasure, reducing the likelihood of being heard or understood on their own terms. Rachmaninoff’s erasure stemmed from a Slavic alterity assigned to him outside of Russia and class differences within Russia during the turbulent inter-revolutionary period. Shirley’s arose from anti-Black barriers barring him from performing European classical music on concert stages. Both pianists, facing reductive assumptions, created musical dualities, enabling them to hold onto core, authentic realities as they shaped their careers, even if the public might read their presentations alternatively, perhaps through initial biases.

I study Rachmaninoff’s 1930 recorded performance of Fr�d�ric Chopin’s Second Sonata in B♭ Minor, Op. 35, focusing on the first three movements, using Rachmaninoff’s composed sequel Second Sonata in B♭ Minor, Op. 36 as a guiding Rosetta Stone. I identify Rachmaninoff’s performance as an artifact of the Russian Revolution’s “losing side”—the aristocracy. I fill a gap surveying wordless instrumental music and identify, through the trope of illness, the Eastern Orthodox hope of recovery—deification—of resurrecting Mother Russia, which embodied Rachmaninoff’s attempt to preserve “true Russianness” during his perpetual exile. Considering selections from his 1955 album, Tonal Expressions, among others, I examine how Shirley, through developing what I term the “Green Book Style,” inched as close as he could to the category of classical music while pushing against the limits of the sonic color line. I consider how Shirley called upon aspects of the Werktreue ideal, putting himself in line with “serious” music-making to stimulate more engaged, idealized listening, even when performing in nightclubs. This dissertation seeks to contribute to dismantling the problematic musical “middlebrow,” a category that consigns racial and ethnic misfits into the category of “all others” relative to the hegemony. My work contributes to the emerging subdiscipline of music performance studies; my assessments move from micro-readings of “data” as concrete performance analysis to corporeal, intertextual, and subject position queries about culture, race, and personhood. [Components: Written Dissertation + Performance Video]