Kristin Franseen: Winner of Schulich's International Grant Competition
Congratulations toĚýKristin Franseen, a current doctoral candidate in musicology, who was awarded $10,000 in theĚýInternational Grant Writing CompetitionĚýfor her grant application “Ghosts in the Archive: The Queer Knowledge and Public Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson.” Kristin also won second place in theĚýDean’s Essay Prize for her essay “Onward to the end of the Nineteenth Century: Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Nostalgic Musical Time Travel.”Ěý
On the experience, Kristin wrote in a recent email exchange, “TheĚýtwo prizesĚýwill allow me to travel to present at conferences in the UK and US this summer, as well as save some money to focus on completing my dissertation and preparing for the defense. I also hope to edit my entry for the Dean’s Essay Prize as an article for submission to a scholarly journal.”
Kristin Franseen is a PhD candidate in musicology at Ď㽶ĘÓƵ. Her dissertation, supervised by Lloyd Whitesell, is entitled “Ghosts in the Archives: The Queer Knowledge and Public Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson.” She has published articles inĚýKeyboard PerspectivesĚýandĚýMusique et pĂ©dagogie, and has presented at numerous regional and international conferences, includingĚýmeetings of the American Musicological Society, the Forum of the International Association for Word and Music Studies, and the Society for American Music. Kristin has a BA in music (double bass) and women's studies from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and aĚýMA in music history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.ĚýHer other research interests include the rise and early marketing of the metronome andĚýthe influence of French Enlightenment philosophy on Antonio Salieri’s operas.
Abstracts:
Ghosts in the Archives: The Queer Knowledge and Public Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson
Over the past thirty years, gender and sexuality have become important critical lenses within music research; however, conventional wisdom holds that these approaches largely date to the so-called “new musicology” of the 1990s. My dissertation traces earlierĚýknowledge around music, gender, and sexuality through the critical, historical,Ěýand literary works of philosopherĚýVernon Lee  (pseud. Violet Paget, 1856-1935), biographerĚýRosa Newmarch  (1857-1940), and music critic/amateur sexologistĚýEdward Prime-Stevenson (1858-1942). By reevaluating these three individuals as musicologists, I call for a broader understanding of what “musicology” means and what kinds of work can be considered relevant to the history of the field. Given recent developments about the definition of research and the ethics of academic life,ĚýI also make a case for examining how these scholars’ lives influenced their choice of subject matter and vice versa.Ěý
“Onward to the End of the Nineteenth Century”: Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Nostalgic Musical Time Travel
In the fourth chapter of my dissertation, I theorize the role of nostalgia and memory in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s music criticism and amateur sexology. While Prime-Stevenson had a successful career as a music critic in New York City during the 1880s and 1890s, he left the United States around the turn of the century to pursue sexological research in Italy and Switzerland. During his time in Europe, he wrote and self-published an early gay novel,ĚýImre: A MemorandumĚý(1906), and one of the first histories of homosexuality in English,ĚýThe IntersexesĚý(1908/1909), under the pseudonym “Xavier Mayne.” Music appears as a theme in both of these works, andĚýThe Inter sexes in particular presents Prime-Stevenson’s approach to finding queer musical meaning in symphonic music and Wagnerian opera. Decades later, Prime-Stevenson revised his earlier newspaper writings in an effort to preserve his journalism in a more permanent format inĚýLong-Haired Iopas andĚýA Repertory of One-Hundred Symphonic ProgrammesĚý(1932/1933). Ěý
All of these books were distributed by Prime-Stevenson in extremely limited editions, and both the texts and his surviving notes suggest a deep musical and personal longing for the 1890s. They feature dedications to Prime-Stevenson’s friend and ex-lover Harry Harkness Flagler, and focus largely on repertoire that he and Flagler experienced as concertgoers in the early 1890s in New York City. The composers and works Prime-Stevenson identifies as central to the “Uranian” [homosexual] musical experience also appear in his mainstream music criticism. InĚýLong-Haired Iopas, sexuality and the erotic appear as a primary force that can never quite be unpacked in a satisfactory manner. Prime-Stevenson alleges that recent psychological interest in sexology accounts for the widespread success of Wagner’sĚýParsifal, describes the diversity in the ways he claims men and women respond to and perform music, and toys with issues of forbidden love and male friendship in his biographical musings on bachelors in music history. Ultimately, however, these seemingly disparate approaches to musical-sexual knowledge all link back to his personal views on music appreciation. Prime-Stevenson’s layers of secrecy and frequent obfuscation can make it difficult to piece together his research process, although some of his claims are corroborated in writings by others, including Ethel Smyth, Edward Carpenter, Rosa Newmarch, and Magnus Hirschfeld.ĚýĚýMore than anything, however, Prime-Stevenson attempted to construct queer music histories where none had previously existed, citing unverifiable gossip and turning to personal experience when the surviving historical record did not live up to his lofty aims. His last book, a collection of “playlists” of phonograph recordings, continues this canon-building project, and can thus be read as a kind of nostalgic communion with other listeners across time and space.
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Photo by Claire McLeish
