If sexual intercourse itself began—thus Philip Larkin—“in ninety sixty-three … between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban and the Beatles’ first LP,” it arguably took another thirty years to reach the field of musicology, when Susan McClary published her Feminine Endings in 1991 and Philip Brett went a-Queering the Pitch three years later. Yet, McClary and Brett were hardly the first to observe the confluence of sex, desire, and music. It would have required a particularly obtuse mindset to ignore the correlation between musical and sexual climax that is implicit in Isolde's Liebestod and made fully explicit by Richard Strauss in the orchestral prelude to Der Rosenkavalier fifty years after. And as McClary, Brett, and their peers among the “New Musicologists” of the early ‘90s readily admitted, they owed many debts to others—most obviously to Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytical literature of the earlier 20th century, and more recently to Michel Foucault and his Histoire de la sexualité of 1976, which remains to this day a seminal work in the field. Issues of gender in music and musicology had also already been thematized by Eva Rieger in Germany in the early 1980s.

Nor was sex utterly in its infancy in the music faculty of Cambridge when I studied there from 1981 to 1984, though when a serious lecturer announced that the closing lines of a dull madrigal “symbolized orgasm,” eyebrows were raised and little else (“Really?” said our college's director of music afterwards about the piece, “it sounds rather more detumescent to me”).