Queer Music Theory

Abstract

AbstractQueer musical phenomenology refers to the practice of disorientation away from established music theories, including one’s own. In Lewin’s “Phenomenology” article, queering can be understood as his intentional, self-critical, conceptual disorientations—first departing from Schenkerian theory, and then moving toward and finally away from the perception-model. Through a close reading of Lewin in combination with Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, which offers a theory of embodied lives marginalized by pathways of normativity, I examine the generalizable application of theories such as queer phenomenology to another domain beyond gender and sexual embodiment: music theory at large. Lewin’s practice models a form of music theory that I regard as phenomenologically queer.