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The Macropolitics of Microsound: Gender and sexual identities in Barry Truax’s Song of Songs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2017

Danielle Sofer
Danielle Sofer*
Affiliation:
Department of Music, Room 115 Logic House, Maynooth University, Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland
*
Email: daniellessofer@gmail.com
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Abstract

This analysis explores how Barry Truax’s Song of Songs (1992) for oboe d’amore, English horn and two digital soundtracks reorients prevailing norms of sexuality by playing with musical associations and aural conventions of how gender sounds. The work sets the erotic dialogue between King Solomon and Shulamite from the biblical Song of Solomon text. On the soundtracks we hear a Christian monk’s song, environmental sounds (birds, cicadas and bells), and two speakers who recite the biblical text in its entirety preserving the gendered pronouns of the original. By attending to established gender norms, Truax confirms the identity of each speaker, such that the speakers seemingly address one another as a duet, but the woman also addresses a female lover and the man a male. These gender categories are then progressively blurred with granular time-stretching and harmonisation (which transform the timbre of the voices), techniques that, together, resituate the presumed heteronormative text within a diverse constellation of possible sexual orientations.

Type
Articles
Information
Organised Sound , Volume 23 , Special Issue 1: Context-based Composition , April 2018 , pp. 80 - 90
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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