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A Musical Coming Out
A Musical Coming Out
As I wrote in these pages a few years ago, I didn’t come out until I was 57 years old. Recently I realized that this had a quite profound effect on my life as a composer as well. In the second half of the 20th century, composers of what some call “classical” or “art” music were expected to be aligned with the avant-garde. Mostly this meant composing twelve-tone or chance-like music and creating works which one could be sure an audience would not enjoy. I solved this problem by establishing my reputation in the field called electro-acoustic music where I felt a lack of expectations and where I was quite sure that my audience would consist of a small but appreciative people interested in “alternative” music.
Having been raised by an old-school Russian musician who was my step-father, my first love was always the Russian “romantic” composers such as Borodin, Tchaikowsky, and Rachmaninov. But when I came of age as a composer, I had to hide this love in order to be accepted in the community of “modern” and “avant-garde” composers of my day. I expressed my romanticism in secret just as I hid my homosexuality. Few people knew of my romantic pieces and in truth, there were not many of them.
It was about the same time that I was willing to admit being gay that I started to compose the most beautiful music of my life. This was almost exclusively piano music composed for Russian performers and played only in Moscow. Until recently I have not shown this music to American and European colleagues and fans. I was quite sure they would not understand why I had composed this music, in the same way that they would not understand someone who was married, raised children and then quite late in life thrown over the façade of respectability.
I do not believe that it is considered respectable to be gay in most any part of the world. Those who think otherwise should travel outside Vermont, outside the United States and Europe to see how little comprehension and how much fear still surrounds homosexuality. But in coming to know the lives of gay composers and performers, most closeted but some not, such as Tchaikowsky, Ravel, Vladimir Horowitz, et. al, I have come to believe there is nothing in their compositions and performances that would indicate their sexual preferences. “Queer studies” may be popular and relevant in literature and perhaps the figurative visual arts, but if one’s music does not use words, there is nothing I can find in the musical sounds that can convey sexuality, politics or anything specific except feelings. Musically, the love of a woman for another woman is indistinguishable from the love of a woman for a man or a man for a man.
The best part about coming out as a gay man was the unexpected benefit of making me unconcerned about what others thought about my life. It made me free to be the kind of composer I always was and wanted to be. A great gift, even late in life.
Jon Appleton is a composer living in White River Junction, VT