Rufus Wainwright - Katherine Williams
Opera, Gender and Sexuality
Rufus Wainwright - Katherine Williams
Katherine Williams [+]
University of Bristol
Dr Katherine Williams is Lecturer in Music at Plymouth University. Prior to her appointment in 2014, she lectured at Leeds College of Music and Cardiff University, and taught on various modules at the University of Bristol. Throughout her musicological study (BMus King's College London, MA and PhD University of Nottingham), Katherine maintained an active profile as a saxophonist, performing and teaching in the idioms of classical, jazz and new music. Katherine's research has been published by Jazz Perspectives, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and Jazz Research Journal (forthcoming 2014). Her first monograph is in production with Equinox Press, and she is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (forthcoming 2016), and the Singer-Songwriter Handbook (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
Description
Opera is a persistent and pervasive theme throughout Wainwright’s pop songs and western art music projects. Wainwright explicitly connects his discovery of opera with his emerging homosexuality in his teens. In Chapter 3, I draw on multiple methodologies to nuance this connection, considering perspectives from new musicology, literature and philosophy. Songs considered include ‘Damned Ladies’, ‘Barcelona’, ‘Going To A Town’, ‘Greek Song’ and ‘Vibrate’. More details about Rufus Wainwright can be found at Williams’ recent blogpost on Thinking About Music, available here .