Underrepresented Composers: LGBTQ+ Composers

In this vivid portrayal of a giant in American twentieth-century music and criticism, Anthony Tommasini recounts Thomson’s experiences as a composer, critic, and gay man. Tommasini chronicles Thomson’s upbringing in turn-of-the-century Kansas City, along with his struggle to accept his sexuality as he searched for a place in the wider world through army service in World War I as well as at Harvard and in 1920s Paris.

With her debut album Switched-On Bach, composer and electronic musician Wendy Carlos brought the sound of the Moog synthesizer to a generation of listeners, helping to effect arguably one of the most substantial changes in popular music's sound since musicians began using amplifiers. Carlos's identity as a transgender woman has shaped many aspects of her life, her career, how she relates to the public, and how the public has received her and her music. Although Carlos did not agree to participate in this biography, every effort has been made to use her words to construct the narrative of her life. This biography relies heavily on published interviews Carlos has given since the late 1960's.

McBrien's biography chronicles the ins and outs of Cole Porter's immense success as a Broadway composer, his homosexuality, and his twenty-plus-year marriage.

When The Paris Diary exploded on the scene in 1966, there had never been a book in English quite like it: its intimate combination of personal, literary, and social insights was unprecedented. Rorem's self-portrait of the artist as a young man, written between 1951 and 1955, was also a mirror of the times, depicting the now vanished milieu of creatives whose paths crossed with Rorem's in such settings as Paris, Morocco, and Italy. The New York Diary, published the following year, pictured the period between 1956 and 1960, when Rorem had returned to America. The diaries marked the beginnings of the Gay Liberation movement, not because Rorem made a special issue of his sexuality, but because he did not; rather, he wrote of his affairs frankly and unashamedly.

In the first full-scale life of the most important composer-lyricist of our time, Meryle Secrest draws on her extended conversations with Stephen Sondheim as well as interviews with his friends, family, collaborators, and lovers to bring us not only the artist--as a master of modernist compositional style--but also the private man. She traces major events in his life and career, from his ascent to the peaks of the Broadway musical, to his first success as co-lyricist with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story, to the composition of his first full Broadway score, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

In this pioneering book, Nadine Hubbs shows how a gifted group of Manhattan-based gay composers were pivotal in creating a distinctive "American sound" and in the process served as architects of modern American identity. Focusing on a talented circle that included Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, The Queer Composition of America's Sound homes in on the role of these artists' self-identification--especially with tonal music, French culture, and homosexuality--in the creation of a musical idiom that even today signifies "America" in commercials, movies, radio and television, and the concert hall.