James Sexton

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To What Extent can the Details of a Composers Life be

Useful When we are Writing Music History?

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Biographies, the details of composers and musicians lives, have always been an integral part of musicology,
forming a literary genre based around the ordering of facts, but they often extend beyond the
biographical information to embrace the assumed relationships between life and work.1 Such presumptions

are problematic. Scholars such as Edward Hanslick seek to establish the autonomous status of music, a
language which we speak and understand but cannot translate , raising questions regarding the writing of
music history.2 Are influence and stimulus important in comprehending musical meaning, if that even exists?

And do events in composers lives affect their compositional process and influence their music, which may
lead, in some cases, to large changes in the course of music history?

The nature of music history is rather hard to ascertain. Music, as such a massive subject encompassing
music theory, performance practice, composition, pedagogical study, analysis, enthomusicology,
psychomusicology, therapy, philosophy, etc. does not have easily discernible boundaries. In addition, Leo
Treitler describes it as among other things, a discourse of myth3. Even the most comprehensive histories of

music do not include all of these things. Richard Taruskin admits that his history of Western music does not
take coverage as its primary task, excluding a lot of famous music and even some famous composers,
Vaughn-Williams being a prominent example.4 Donald J. Grout believes that the history of music is

primarily the history of musical style, though, today, this seems a narrow view especially with the advent of
musicology.5 Here, sexuality and gender seem to be omitted altogether, as there is no mention of the

sexualities of, for example, Britten, Chopin, Copland, Schubert, and Tchaikovsky.
1"

David Beard and Kenneth Gloag, Musicology: The Key Concepts (New York: Routlage, 2005), 26-29.

Andrew Bowie, Music Aesthetic and Critacal Theory in: J. P. E. Harper-Scott and Jim Samson (eds), An
Introduction to Music Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 87.
2"

Leo Treitler, Gender and other Dualities of Music History in: Ruth A. Solie (ed.), Musicology and Difference: Gender
and Sexuality in Music and Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 23.
3"

Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music Volume 1: Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), XIII-XIV.
4"

5"

Donald J. Grout, A History of Western Music (New York: W. W, Norton & Company, Inc., 1972), 1.

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James Sexton

The issue I am raising here is whether or not a subject already so broad should consider the biographical
details of composers within it. As the individuals who shaped music, experimenting and always striving to
expand their art, surely the lives and influences of composers should be examined, even if those influences
are not directly conveyed in the music itself. The conception of a piece can be just as important as its
consequences. Biographical details may help to explain why so-called great pieces are great, throwing light
on deviations from the preceding norms and why these occurred. Taruskin comments on books that call
themselves histories of music, saying that they (italics mine) are in fact surveys, which cover and
celebrate the relevant repertoire, but make little effort truly to explain how and why things happened as
they did. Biography is important to Taruskin: selecting at random a few examples, Guillaume de Machaut,
Beethoven, Schubert, and Britten all receive biographical introductions and their music is discussed within
the context of their experiences.6

Ignoring biographical details of a composer when writing about their work may create difficulty in
understanding a piece or set of pieces. Many works that impacted most greatly on musical progress require
some background to be understood analytically. The highly unusual ending of Haydns Symphony No. 45,
Farewell, cannot be simply explained in terms of the music, but only by the circumstances of he and his
fellow musicians.7 Similarly, taking examples from the classical period to the present day, the following all

have significant aspects that are difficult to explain without knowledge of the composers lives: Beethovens
Symphony No. 3, Eroica; Tchaikovskys Symphony No. 6, Pathetique; Elgars Enigma Variations; and
Thomas Ads's Asyla (a symphony-like work for large orchestra). In the case of Tchaikovsky and Ads, the
biographical detail needed is their homosexuality. The former placed the slow movement last to represent his
internal sorrow and pain, the latter replaced the what would normally be a scherzo-movement (mvt. 3) with
an arrangement of a dub-step piece, Ecstasio, influenced by the homosexual culture of Soho, London.8

The sexuality and gender (two of the most fundamental facts in ones biography) of musicians has played a
large part in new musicology, none more so than Schubert. The debate about about Schuberts sexuality
became most fierce after Maynard Solomon presented a paper at the 1988 Annual Meeting of the American
Musicological Society, in which he cited a large amount of circumstantial evidence showing the prevalence of
homosexuality in Schuberts circle and suggesting that the composer was gay. Using letters, memoirs and
even poems of Schuberts friends and acquaintances, Solomon pieces together a rather convincing argument

Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music: Volume 1, 289-291; Volume 2, 648-651; Volume 3,
79-82; Volume 5, 225-230.
6"

7"

J. Cuthbert Hadden, Master Musicians: Haydn (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1934), 64-65.

8"

Thomas Ads and Tom Service, Full of Noises: Conversations with Tom Service (London: Faber and Faber, 2012)

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James Sexton
although much of the information is, considered singularly, quite cryptic.9 For example, a poem by Eduard

von Bauernfeld reads:

Schubert was in love with a pupil,

One of the young countesses,
But in order to forget her he gave himself
To another someone entirely different.

The nature of someone entirely different is completely based upon the interpretation of those reading the
poem.

Other evidence includes double entendres embedded in secret codes of letters sent between members of
Schuberts circle, the composers own diary entires and descriptions written about the composers. Especially
important to Solomon and Christopher H. Gibbs is an extract from a letter from Schubert to Ferdinand
Schubert, his brother, whose frankness possibly demonstrates the composer writing about his sexuality:
imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to who the happiness of love and friendship
have nothing but pain for all things beautiful threaten to disappear.10

Although his sexuality had been eluded to previously, in his music as well as in his personal life Grove
saying compared with Beethoven, Schubert is was a woman as to a man and Susan McClary referring to
a flexible sense of self Solomons arguments were promptly rebutted, not only in academic circles but in
the mainstream press. Believing Solomons arguments had been excepted without question, Rita Steblin
sought to reopen the topic of Schuberts sexuality by investigating Solomons interpretation of the
documents and sources he cites.11 She does this by quoting larger sections of work and taking an even wider

biographical view of Schubert and of the time in which he lived even citing new marriage laws to counter
arguments. At the time, it would have been insensible for Schubert to leave unquestionable allusion to his
homosexuality so, in the words of Nicholas Cook, the argument and counter arguments were inconclusive,
as indeed they were bound to be.12

Though research into Schuberts life is interesting and important, I believe that it should always be connected
to his art and music. McClary says:
Maynard Solomon, Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini in: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 12, No. 3
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 193-206.
9"

10
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Christopher H. Gibbs, The Life of Schubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 116.

Rita Steblin, Schubert: Music, Sexuality, Culture in: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 5-33.
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11

12
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Nicholas Cook, Music: A very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 111.

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Do we really need to know about a composers sex life? Does this kind of
knowledge matter? [Although] scholars such as Solomon accept the possibility
that composers they admire had psychological and sexual lives and that these
aspects of their personalities might be relevant to the work they produced.13

However, Solomon and Steblin make little or no reference to Schuberts music. Steblin only mentions that
Schubert set many love poems for Therese Gob around 1814-15, including an enchantingly lovely Ave in
C [now lost].14

More concrete suggestions have been made about Schuberts music in connection with his possible
homosexuality (other than its general effeminacy). Schuberts novel harmonic language cycles of third and
semitones, Neapolitan relations, major- and minor-mode equality, and less reliance on the dominant in his
sonata forms can be connected with his possible homosexuality. McClary is cited in particular by Taruskin
as interpreting the freewheeling mediant relations and sleight-of-hand modulations as analogous (or more
precisely homologous) to promiscuous personal relationships. Perhaps surprisingly, Taruskin writes:
mediants are to fifths, she [McClary] argues, as gay is to straight.15 Here, although the connection is only

conjecture at best, the biographical research on Schubert has led to a small insight in to his music. The
arguments of Solomon and Steblin may seem overly detailed and removed from the art itself, but, sometimes,
only once the background has been thoroughly explored can enlightening comments be made on the music.

Sexuality and gender are not the only details of a composers life that can influence music and create pieces
that change the course of music history (though, when writing music history, should unremarkable pieces be
given less attention than the greats?). Symphonie Fantastique may not have been composed without Berliozs
love for Harriet Smithson; Arvo Prt may not have invented Tintinnabuli without the religious influence of the
Russian Orthodox Church;16 West Coast Minimalism may not have be as it is now if John Adams had not

moved to California;17 or American music simply may not be what it is today if Copland, Gershwin or Ives

were not born (a most fundamental biographical detail) in America.18

Susan McClary, Music and Sexualty: On the Steblin/Solomon Debate in: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 17, No. 1
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 86.
13
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14
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Steblin, 12.

15
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Taruskin, Volume 3, 117.

16
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Paul Hiller, Arvo Prt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3.

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17

John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing and American Life (New York: Faber and Faber, 2008), 64-67.

18
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Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise (London: Harper Perennial, 2009), 130-170.

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On this final point, the culture a composer lives and works within has a bearing on the type of music they
write. A hugely important example would be Shostakovich, who, living under a watchful Soviet eye, was
forced to write in styles that, maybe, he did not want to. This can be seen in his symphonies and string
quartets, where secret and double meanings abound for example, are Symphonies No. 5 and 7,
Leningrad celebrating Soviet culture or denouncing those in power in favour of a revolution?

Political oppression and terror has played a large role in music of the previous hundred years more generally.
Had composers such as Korngold, Rachmaninov, Schoenberg and Shostakovich not moved to America
before or during the second world war, Hollywood (and more broadly, film) music would certainly not be the
way it is today.

Carl Dahlhaus suggests that an account of the origins and later history of musical works will serve a dual
function, illuminating the preconditions for a given work on the one hand and on there other shedding light
on the implications of the present-day listeners relation to that work.19 This implies that the biographical

details leading to the conception of a piece are not immediately necessary for musical comprehension
though I dont believe that this can ever be complete without deep analysis and research and to
understand the consequences of a piece moving forward in music history, but he does not rule out the need
for biographical background knowledge when looking back.

The details of a composers life are, of course, important when writing about music, but scale and broadness
should be considered at all times. When writing a short history of music these should come secondary to the
history of the evolution of musical style, but, if one were to write the complete history of music an
impossible task every small detail of every musicians (whether composer, performer, theorist, musicologist,
psychologist, therapist, philosopher) life that could have been influential should be analysed and scrutinised
until a full musical understanding is reached.

19
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Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1997), 3.

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