“Oppressed by Sensual Delight”: On a Lesbian Relationship with Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata (1919) through the experience of a lesbian relationship—a relationship that extends from the Sonata as experienced by a violist and scholar, to Clarke herself as a performer and composer. Inspired by the work of Suzanne Cusick, I examine the musical elements of the Viola Sonata that invite and enable a lesbian relationship in the music. Such elements include existence outside the phallic economy, porous ego boundaries, and a fluid positioning within the power/pleasure/intimacy triad. A central theme of Clarke’s compositional style is embodiment, which furthers the potential for a lesbian experience of the Viola Sonata through “body-aware” and performer-centric techniques. The poetic inscription for the Sonata, lines from Alfred de Musset’s “La nuit de mai,” serves to further construct a musical narrative of embodiment through the relationship of Poet and Muse. Without claiming that Clarke was a lesbian, this paper sheds light on the Viola Sonata by considering the relationships between performer, composer, and listener in a lesbian musical analysis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".