Susan McClary Quote

Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowing how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence.

"Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music", Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (1994), ISBN 0415907527