Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration

by Lisa Barg

Overview

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

Honorable Mention for the 2025 Woody Guthrie Award 

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819500656
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	02/20/2025
Series:	Music / Culture
Sold by:	OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	395
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

LISA BARG (Montreal, QC) is Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. She is currently serving as Co-editor-In-Chief of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture.

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Queer Arrangements/Queer Collaboration • Part One - Working Behind the Scenes: Gender, Sexuality and Collaboration in Strayhorn's Vocal Arrangements • Chapter One – Arriving by Flamingo • Chapter Two – Difficult Beauty Part Two – Strayhorn's Queer Music • Chapter Three – Strayhorn's Lorcian Encounter • Chapter Four – Black Queer Moves in the Strayhorn-Ellington Nutcracker Suite • Part Three – Strayhorn Performing/Arranging Strayhorn • Chapter 5 – Paris, Halfway to Dawn, or Listening to The Peaceful Side • Epilogue - Ever Up and Onward, or Searching for Stayhorn in the 21st Century

Editorial Reviews

"Lisa Barg's Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration (Wesleyan University Press, 2023) represents LGBTQ+ scholarship at it's finest. Barg takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey through the life and music of Billy Strayhorn, using a creative and playful approach to the archive. This book offers a beautifully written musical biography of an out, black, queer musician and a titan of jazz. It is a gift to multiple disciplines and must-read for pop music scholars."—Honorable Mention for the 2025 Woody Guthrie Award (IASPM)

"Queer Arrangements brings fascinating archival and biographical details about Strayhorn's life into dialogue with queer studies by making visible connections that... enlarges our understating of the immeasurably complex worlds in which jazz musicians move."—Jennifer Messelink

"What makes this study great is Barg's masterful use of critical analysis to spotlight Strayhorn's work outside of Ellington's domineering shadow... If your collection is looking to add new works to round out sections on composer biographies, then Barg and Farina's books are highly recommended."—Blaine Brubaker, ARSC Journal

"This is a groundbreaking contribution to jazz studies. Lisa Barg brilliantly unpacks how queerness plays out in the music of Billy Strayhorn, one of jazz's most talented composer-arrangers."—Walter van de Leur, author of Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn

"This book challenges the manner in which historical frameworks have been constructed and have promoted a personal and creative hierarchy in jazz's historiography. Most importantly it continues the much-needed work of detangling Billy Strayhorn's musical legacy from that of the Ellington organization by making the invisible aspects of his life visible, and the silent facets of his music heard."—Tammy L. Kernodle, author of Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams

"This remarkable, wide-ranging, musical, and intellectually stimulating book offers fascinating new insights on a composer-arranger whom his more famous collaborator Duke Ellington described as 'seldom seen, but always heard.' Lisa Barg's evocative, deeply researched study, invites us to see Billy Strayhorn—and the musical worlds in which he collaborated—more clearly than ever."—Jeffrey Magee, author of The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz

"Lisa Barg deftly and elegantly applies critical analysis of sexuality and queerness to reveal Billy Strayhorn as not only a brilliant pianist and composer, but also a vocal arranger committed to collaborative creativity, a vital, yet woefully understudied aspect of jazz music and culture."—Nichole Rustin-Paschal, author of The Kind of Man I Am: Jazzmasculinity and the World of Charles Mingus, Jr.

From the Publisher