Music Research Forum: Frederic Kiernan - Musical Value in a Loneliness Epidemic: Queer Perspectives

Join us for the first music research talk for Semester 2 2024, presented in partnership with the Musicological Society of Australia! The Museum will be open from 5:30pm, with the talk starting at 6pm. No bookings required.

Musical Value in a Loneliness Epidemic: Queer Perspectives

Loneliness is a growing social and public health issue, and inadequate social connection can be as damaging to health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010). Social identity is understood to play a key role in mediating social connection (Haslam et al., 2020), and socially vulnerable groups are particularly at risk, including migrants, the elderly, and LGBTQ+ people (Eres, 2020). It is well established that music engagement offers potential for enhancing social connection, and in recent decades the concept of the "scene" has emerged in popular music studies as a way of explaining music's role in mediating local, trans-local, and virtual social connections (Bennett & Peterson, 2004). This paper uses interview data and personal, auto-ethnographic reflections to report on the progress of an ongoing research project which examines how music can mediate social connection for LGBTQ+ people in the Melbourne queer scene, giving particular focus to the gay/queer venues in and around the suburb of Collingwood. It considers the emerging findings in relation to various dimensions of social connection and contrasting notions of queerness, some of which emphasise the importance of identity as an aspect of queerness, while others view normative identity categories as the problem. It signals some of the varieties of social value that music holds for different members of the queer “community”, and some of the ways that intra-community connections can be musically delineated.

Frederic Kiernan is a Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellow based at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, the University of Melbourne. He has a background in historical musicology and the history of emotion, and between 2019 and 2022 he was a Research Fellow and Academic Convenor of the Creativity and Wellbeing Hallmark Research Initiative (CAWRI). His PhD thesis of 2019, on the Dresden-based Czech composer Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745), was awarded the University of Melbourne’s Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in 2020. His current research focuses on music’s role in shaping social connection among LGBTQ+ people in Melbourne. He has published numerous journal articles and edited journal special issues, an edited volume of Zelenka’s Ave Regina coelorum settings (ZWV 128) and he is co-editing a book for publication in 2024 titled Varieties of Imagination, Creativity and Wellbeing in Australia (Melbourne: Unlikely).