ABSTRACT
Says a lesbian friend, who wants to write unconventionally about Clara Schumann: May music escape, for good, the fate of presumed straightness. May music
at last be subject to the critic’s seduction. By soda machines in the library’s basement the faces of fellow musicology
students (my sometime cohort) look cloudy with ambition and compromiseeven the queer ones, suspicious of what they consider my tortuous conduct, my betrayal of the musical closet’s heart-and head-and limb-constricting pact of silence. ough it’s agrant to expect to earn a degree in my desires, I wish to enforce no separation between my musical and my sexual passions.
