"Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet" by Philip Brett, from Queering the Pitch (2nd edition), II

Come back to the bottom of page 16-top of page 17- lots of complicated information that needs to be summarized for clarity.

"Music is a perfect field for the display of emotion. It is particularly accommodating to those who have difficulty in expressing feelings in day-to-day life, because the emotion is unspecified and unattatched. The paino, let us say for example, will this become an important means for the attempt at expression, disclosure, or communication on the part of those children who have difficulties of various kinds with on or both parents. To gay children, who often experiencea shutdown of all feeling a the result of sensing their parents' ad society's disapproval of a basic part of their sentient life, music appears as a veritable lifeline. But full participation in the constructed role of musician in our society can only be accomplished by recognizing its deviance and acknowledging the norms of society itself" (17).

"What was the point of all those coded messages about homosexual oppression and pedastry if they prompted only further denial of their meaning, further entrenchment of the universalism and transcendentalism that make Western classical music a weak substitute for religion in capitalist society and divorce it from meaning?" (21)

"...I have become increasingly convinced that the special dedicated roel signified by the word "musicality" is comperable to, and linked with, the role of homosexuality in our societies...Neither label is up to much good. They are tools of social control dressed up in one case as "talent," in the other as "condition." And they are outmoded" (22).