This image is the cover for the book Queer Arrangements

Queer Arrangements

Winner of the 2024 Philip Brett Award, sponsored by the LGBTQ Study Group of the American Musicological Society (AMS)

The legacy of Black queer composer, arranger, and pianist Billy Strayhorn (1915–1967) hovers at the edge of canonical jazz narratives. Queer Arrangements explores the ways in which Strayhorn's identity as an openly gay Black jazz musician shaped his career, including the creative roles he could assume and the dynamics between himself and his collaborators, most famously Duke Ellington, but also iconic singers such as Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. This new portrait of Strayhorn combines critical, historically-situated close readings of selected recordings, scores, and performances with biography and cultural theory to pursue alternative interpretive jazz possibilities, Black queer historical routes, and sounds. By looking at jazz history through the instrument(s) of Strayhorn's queer arrangements, this book sheds new light on his music and on jazz collaboration at midcentury.

Lisa Barg

Lisa Barg is associate professor of Music History and Musicology at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University and associate dean of Graduate Studies. She has published articles on race and modernist opera, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Melba Liston, and Paul Robeson. She is currently principle investigator for a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) titled Collaborative Creativity: Sound Recording and Music Making. She is co-editor-in-chief of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. As a member of the Melba Liston Research Collective, she served as a guest co-editor for a special issue of the Black Music Research Journal devoted to the career and legacy of Melba Liston.

Wesleyan University Press