Does sex sell? Darn-tootin' it does. I'm not a big buyer of classical music, but I do pick up CDs every so often. Yet as an occasional devotee, I don't memorize artists' names or march off to the music store with a long list of must-haves. I wander through the shop, stopping when my eye's been caught. In 1996, I bought
Lara St. John's "Bach Works for Violin Solo": she was naked on the CD cover, her instrument carefully positioned over her breasts.
That's not why I bought it: the reviews for this album were amazingly positive. But the much-discussed cover image made me remember it, and that mix of critical acclaim and memorability led to the purchase.
The Telegraph has a fun little piece on ribald bassoonists: "In all the earnest debate about how to 'sex up' classical music, one thing is never mentioned - sex itself. And yet what more potent force could there be for getting new people into classical concert halls?
"The market, not sharing the squeamishness of the debaters, has seized on this obvious fact with relish. Suddenly, we're surrounded by glamorous young violinists, cellists, singers and - believe it or not - bassoonists.
"If you don't believe it, look at
www.beautyinmusic.com, where you'll find pictured a generous acreage of musically-gifted pulchritude, listed by instrument. Among the violinists there's Linda Brava, rather better known for her centrefold appearance in Playboy than for playing in the orchestra of the National Opera of Finland.
"The site lists only women, but in the musical world the men are getting the same treatment.... About time, some will say, depressed at the sight of so much resolute unsexiness in classical music. Just think of those orchestral musicians, perspiring in their tight funereal black. Think of the grimly serious maestri....
"As feminist musicologists keep reminding us, classical music since the 19th century has been configured by male 'maestri,' male critics, male performers, who've propagated a very male view of the art - severe, formal, intricate, with 'feminine' things such as chromatic harmony and dance rhythms kept within decent bounds. Which is really a travesty of the truth, because classical music is mostly full of sex, or to put it better, eroticism - it's just that it's hidden, buried in music's grammar.
"Every time you hear a dissonance (a tense-sounding interval or chord) melt into a consonant one, you're hearing the basic erotic pattern of arousal and relief. That's true even in the chaste polyphony of Renaissance church music (which is why some of it doesn't sound half as chaste as it ought to).... Italian madrigals of the early 17th century are full of these sequences, often leading to a particularly scrunchy dissonance at the phrase, 'I die upon your breast' - a favourite euphemism for orgasm."
(More in the
original story.)
And what of our drearily serious Canadian literature scene? Emily Schultz revisits her stint as a CanLit hotsie totsie
here, in Broken Pencil mag.
"I don’t like talking about my time spent as a sex slave for Canadian literature," she writes. "But it does still come up at parties. Believe me, it does. Where did it all go wrong? ... How did I go from being the director of my university Womyn's Centre to the hetero-nightmare that I am today?
"Sam Hiyate... had an idea, a plan to topple the literary establishment and shock the press. It was just a little joke, really. As we gathered , it all seemed so innocent: 14 women writers - smiling, chatting, and reapplying makeup for the cover shoot.... It was the summer of 1999 - almost six years ago. A lifetime.... He would adorn the cover of his fiction magazine
b+a (short for blood + aphorisms) with as many women writers as possible, gorgeous babes, he said. Literary magazines needed more women on their covers. Lit mags needed to be sexier. And everyone would be so offended by this smallest of gestures. I agreed. It was brilliant....
"Regarding the actual writing within the issue, Christopher Michael of the National Post reported, 'Sharp insights are undermined by some of the frankly erotic writing, which ends up seeming graphic for its own sake, more exemplary of a preoccupation with sex than a definitive literary statement on behalf of babes everywhere.' I'm not certain what Mr. Michael meant, but in a year when the rough zine aesthetic had undoubtedly tramped its way into the mainstream and Maxim and Lilith Fair were competing for control of the female form, to shy away from discussions of either graphic writing or gendered writing seems… suspect....
"Yet, we remained to most peoples' eyes, the whores of literature. Why? you ask. We weren't writing about the traditional themes that still dominate book lists for the middle-class, middle-aged, and middle-cultured. Canada's superstores Chapters and Indigo were still separate outlets then, and they were hungry for us. 'Bring in the whores!' their purchasers hollered. 'We'll take anything. Two copies of every small press book in Canada.' [...]
Many of the stories ended abruptly, dissatisfying endings for dissatisfied characters, disqualifying us from fitting into the ever-swelling erotica aisles....
"Plain and simple, we on that cover were (and are) commodity. To believe we are not would be foolish. If we had not appeared within the constraints of the Literary Babes issue, we would have been forced to appear within some other cliched constraint. The Babes issue was merely upfront about such constraints, and dammit if we didn’t have fun doing it. In a deluge of chick lit and mom lit, there is little place for the wanton writerly woman - for the woman who writes 'like a man.'"
Tsk. Lesbian blogs have too much sex in them,
don't you think? But at least some of it's het sex: very groundbreaking.