Chapter 2 examines the significance of the association between music and masochism in texts by Walter Pater, Vernon Lee and Arthur Symons. Here music is variously figured as acting upon the body in a manner that resists the imposition of identity and refuses the coherence of the self, while turning instead to modes of self-abandonment and disembodiment. Music in Pater’s ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ dramatizes a broader oscillation in his works between the denial and embrace of wilfully self-destructive masochistic violence. In ‘Marsyas in Flanders’ (1900), Vernon Lee strategically embraces the figure of Marsyas – an emblem of musical masochism – as a means of resisting the categorization of the queer body by fin-de-siècle sexology. In Symons’s ‘Christian Trevalga’ (1902) music becomes associated with a desire to abandon the materiality of the body and affirm instead a form of subjectivity defined by ‘disembodiment’. Symons’s essays on music and musical performance present the aesthetic autonomy of absolute music in a manner that articulates a form of dispersed subjectivity that can profitably be read in the light of contemporary queer theory.