Musicology Commons^™

Unmasking Wagner's Grail: Homoeroticism, Androgyny, And Anxiety In Parsifal, Tyler Cole Mitchell

Masters Theses

Most readings of Wagner’s final music drama Parsifal seek to illumine a clandestine presentation of Wagner’s racist doctrine or make sense of a less-shrouded but still ambiguous panegyric to Christianity. However, little scholarly material addresses Wagner’s provocative account of sensuality and homoeroticism in this Bühnenweihfestspiel [Stage Consecration Festival Play]. This thesis explores desire and homosexuality within the drama and considers how and why Wagner masks these themes through the opaque mythos of religion, race, and community. Parsifal was partly informed by Wagner’s own complex neuroses: his sexual anxieties and scandals, amalgam of German philosophies, and confusion concerning Germanness. As filtered …

A New Approach: The Feminist Musicology Studies Of Susan Mcclary And Marcia J. Citron, Kimberly Reitsma

Musical Offerings

One of the currently prevalent analytic approaches in academia is feminist theory and criticism. Its combination with musicology has influenced the field for the past four decades. The goal of the new approach, loosely termed “feminist musicology,” has been to discover, analyze, discuss, and promote the representation of women and the “feminine” essence in various disciplines of music. Today, feminist musicology is highly researched, published in books and journals, and presented as scholarly papers at various musicological conferences around the world. This new approach introduces the ideologies of feminism to the study of music.

Susan McClary and Marcia J. Citron …