Lectures in Music Studies: Arved Ashby, The Ohio State University

Arved Ashby, professor of musicology at Ohio State, presents “My Queer Anthem." This lecture is co-sponsored by the School of Music and The Ohio State University Libraries. Ashby writes:

To mark 30 years at Ohio State, I’ve returned to my starting point and first scholarly franchise: Alban Berg's Lyric Suite for string quartet (1926). People have questioned my love of Berg over the decades, voicing their own doubt, puzzlement, or even hostility to such a notion. (At one point an editor said my musical attachments divulged mental illness.) These protests were often historicist (“time has proven that...”) and took on moralist and personal overtones. In some instances, Richard Taruskin and Taruskin students have lambasted me, by name and in print, for getting pleasure from music that other people didn't even like. In addition to being perverse, surely Ashby was posing as contrary? Or, to use specific Taruskin phrases, playing the victim or enacting “a novel strain of duplicity” — i.e., outright lying?

With his anti-Berg and anti-modernist screeds, Taruskin did help me realize that the Lyric Suite had served as my queer anthem: a piece emblematic of my own love of beauty, as well as my particular weaknesses and passions. And reflective of my own being at odds with the world — with humanity in both its progressive and conservative dimensions. But Alban Berg ain’t Cher or Gloria Gaynor. If Berg’s work became a cause for me and a musical anthem for my own alienation, the Lyric Suite amounts to a very queer (even oxymoronic) anthem in that it seems anthemic for me alone. (Though I've also come to understand that queer people sharing an anthem is itself a queer, even nonsensical or anti-queer practice.)

I realized Berg's critics were puritanists and victorians only after the COVID lockdowns and George Floyd's murder, while I was writing the Lyric Suite chapter of my book My 1980s Gayboy Playlist (due out in February 2026 from punctum). Now such moralism is again renascent, and it's out for blood. The Heritage Foundation, which is essentially running the country, is even targeting heterosexual pleasure outside marriage. But denying your basic right to privacy is just the start. If you don't actively reproduce, you're not a patriot and your right to vote starts looking suspect. While Republicans have penned "don't say gay" legislation and are gunning for contraception, they've also forced a clumsy, vile, and unprecedented ideological takeover of higher education. As I make my own exit from academia, I’m eager to trigger conservatives with details of my own esoteric musical and sexual pleasures — nothing abnormal, feigned, or superficially political about them. I've not embraced queerness in the past, but when you delete that word from the Stonewall National Monument website, it's mine. The harder you try to normalize me and my world, the louder I get.

Anthems deal in pride as it faces down opposition, of course. I do like to think I might have discomfited people in the same sorts of ways Berg’s "lurid" and "decadent" music has. (I remember the tense fidgeting when I first mentioned "queer music" to SOM undergrads almost 25 years ago.) Theodor Adorno was so right when he said his teacher’s later work “seeks to restore human dignity to a banished, heretical yearning.” Now that's a cause I'm happy to fight for.

• PLEASE NOTE: There's so much to chat about here. You're invited to continue the discussion afterward with Prof. Ashby at Woody's in the Ohio Union. But you'll have to buy your own drink, sorry.
   

Arved Ashby is an award-winning musicologist with a Yale PhD in Music History. He is retiring after 30 years of teaching in the School of Music at Ohio State University. Ashby is the author of five books, including Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction (California, 2010) and Experiencing Mahler: A Listener’s Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). He has also edited and contributed to Popular Music and the New Auteur (Oxford, 2013), an essay collection on filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, David Lynch, and Wes Anderson, who all tell stories with needle drops. With his newest book, which focuses on shame as instituted in everyday 21st-century language, he's leaving music as a subject.