There is a long list of good news to report from Kristin Franseen, a post-doc in our dept who is working with Dr. Elena Razlogova:
Her book, Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson University Press), just came out in advance of the 2023 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. Imagining Musical Pasts explores the complicated archive of sources, interpretations, and people present in queer writings on opera and symphonic music from ca. 1880–1935. It focuses primarily on the work of three turn-of-the-twentieth-century music scholars—philosopher and horror writer Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget), biographer and program note annotator Rosa Newmarch, and critic and amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson. The ebook is available from Liverpool UP here, with the hardcover distributed by Oxford UP. More information is available on the book’s companion website here.
She has also published a chapter on Edward Prime-Stevenson in Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory (Oxford University Press, 2023), edited by Gavin S.K. Lee. “’Legendary In-Reading’: Musical Meaning, Analysis, and Biography in Edward Prime-Stevenson's Music Criticism and Sexology,” focuses on Prime-Stevenson’s desire to find queer subtext in Beethoven’s music and biography and the phenomenon of amateur gay music analysis in the early 20th century (including essays on Beethoven’s instrumental music by Edward Carpenter and E.M. Forster).
Sha has also contributed to a revised and updated entry on Constanze Mozart (W.A. Mozart’s wife) to the online music reference work Grove Music Online (currently featured on the landing page as a part of their initiative to update coverage of topics related to women, gender, and sexuality). This entry builds on prior work on her depiction across the history of Mozart biography to consider her place in the emerging market for biographical anecdotes and rumors about famous composers during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Keep an eye out for the book launch of Imaging Musical Pasts.
Congratulations, Kristin!