Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 26
Abstracts
Panel 7: Music Theory
17:25 – 17:40
“Das ist höhere
Katzenmusik”
Feline Metaphors and Sexual Anxiety in Music
Criticism
Ross Hagen / Utah Valley University
Cats have long been used by music critics to convey
musical unpleasantness. Nicolas Slonimsky’s 1963
book The Lexicon of Musical Invective, a collection of
scathing concert reviews from the 1810s–1950s, is
a case in point. Within, the music of notable
composers including Johannes Brahms, Franz
Liszt, Richard Strauss, and Richard Wagner are all
described as sounding like frightened cats,
amorous cats, and sick cats. Early 20th-century
atonal and serialist compositions earned multiple
comparisons to a cat on a piano keyboard, an
impression that continues to this day among
bemused listeners. Such music could also induce a
Katzenjammer, a term for headaches and
hangovers. However, some reviews describe
particular musical works as Katzenmusik, literal
“cat music.”
Katzenmusik enforces the boundaries of musical
style and taste in multiple ways. On its own, “cat
music” evokes animalistic noise and untutored
chaos, ridiculing the music and suggesting that it
should not be taken seriously as art.
Yet
Katzenmusik is not a literal term; it has long
associations with charivari, masked processions in
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which household implements and kitchenware
served as noise-making instruments. When
critics deploy Katzenmusik as a term of
musical derision, they also refer obliquely to
this unskilled human cacophony. Charivari’s
main purpose, however, was usually an
expression of community displeasure or
protest, often directed towards accused
adulterers, unwed mothers, childless couples,
submissive husbands, and other violators of
traditional gender roles. The cat references in
critical reviews often carry similar undertones
of gendered sexual anxiety through frequent
references
to
musical
impotence,
emasculation, and perversion. Although the
town mob punishes sexual transgression and
the music critic decries musical decadence,
both aim to enforce established norms and sow
suspicions of moral corruption. In the end,
both Katzenmusik rely on the web of gendered
connotations around cats to insult and
humiliate social and artistic nonconformists.
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