(alphabetical by author)
A Struggle of Identity: Musicking in the Japanese Incarceration Camps during World War II
Danny Paul Allen (Musicology, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
On February 19th, 1942, a little over two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive order 9066, which resulted in the evacuation and internment of nearly 120,000 West Coast Japanese; many were American citizens. Within the camps, Japanese were confronted with barbed wire fences, guard towers, various American inculturation tactics, and American nationalism. Among those tactics was music, which as Chris Waller notes, is an oft welcomed means of keeping tensions low within incarceration facilities. American popular music and dance music, such as the hits of Glenn Miller were disseminated as a means of “Americanizing” the Japanese, and first-generation Japanese encouraged their children to participate in the opportunity. In other cases, traditional Japanese musicking flourished in the internment camps, as kabuki plays, shakuhachi music, and Japanese dance were enjoyed, particularly by the first-generation Japanese internees. In the case of the Internment Camp at Tule Lake, CA, the internees pushed a movement for Japanese nationalism, which took the form of more resistant styles of musicking and daily life.
In this paper, I argue that musical practice played a vital role in the formation and maintenance of identity during the Japanese incarceration of World War II. This paper draws on personal accounts, especially those of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and Harry Kitano as well as detailed looks at the Manzanar and Tule Lake Camps. I also engage historical-musical scholarship of the incarceration, including the work of Robertson and Waseda. Over the course of this paper, I will provide a look into the experience of the incarceration of Japanese people by the American government and examine how the conflict between Japanese and American identities was both pronounced in and perpetuated by internment camp musical practice.
POEM-RITE 4 – “A Song on Strings and Knots”
Fabricio Cavero (Integrated Composition, Technology and Improvisation, University of California Irvine)
Point-Line-Circle is the first “episode” of my series “Poem-Rites”. For this opportunity, it will be performed with Quipus (a pre-Columbian notation system with colored strings and knots). The main intention of the Poem-Rite series is to integrate diverse expressive technologies, including notation systems, all this, with the premise that “creations reflect their creators”. This expands my composing through the experience of making my instruments of clay, and my notational tools, in this case, Quipus, taking special consideration in the fact that Quipus involves tactile awareness, suggesting concepts like “texture”, “contour”, and “color” to elaborate a musical interpretation of the device made with strings and knots. It also allows me to elaborate on my fascination with these pre-Columbian artifacts which challenge the established history that says that my Andean ancestors did not have a notation system. I do not seek to satisfy scientific or historical propositions, but to approach the poetics and symbolisms of the Quipus, as what they simply are, strings and knots, which I connect with my poem “Point-Line-Circle”. This performance involves segments with a pre-established structure and improvisational segments for the voice (with extended techniques) and musical technologies: aerophones made of clay, electroacoustic viola with pedals, and computer (MAX/MSP) with motion sensors to control video and sound projection. This performance portrays principles of Andean storytelling in which music is a wholesome experience in that englobes singing, poetry, dance, and costume. I would like to present this performance as the 4th episode of the Poem-Rite series: “A Song on Strings and Knots.”
We Like it Here: “Post-Fusion” Jazz and Snarky Puppy
Jacob Collins (Musicology, University of North Texas)
When Snarky Puppy won their first “Best R&B Song” Grammy for “Something” featuring Lalah Hathaway in 2013, it made the group visible and popular in both jazz and popular music. Since then, they have been awarded four additional Grammys in “Instrumental Pop,” as well as several “best jazz group” and “favorite jazz fusion group” accolades in publications like Downbeat and JazzTimes. Still, the group remains reluctant to explicitly claim any association with jazz or jazz fusion. In this paper, I argue that Snarky Puppy represents a contemporary type of jazz that I term “post-fusion.” Post-fusion bands share many of 1970s jazz fusion’s musical characteristics—including virtuosity, expanded instrumentation and timbres, episodic forms, and rhythmic complexity. However, their wider incorporation of diverse musical styles such as various kinds of pop, soul, gospel, hip-hop, and others previously excluded from fusion discourse; their ability to emphasize musical characteristics beyond virtuosity; and their ambivalence towards being categorized stylistically ultimately sets them apart from their predecessors. Furthermore, jazz critics’ relationship with post-fusion bands is remarkably better than it was with early fusion, which often results in critics and trade journals claiming post-fusion groups as jazz or jazz fusion via awards and coverage despite groups’ previously mentioned ambivalence towards such categorization. Building on the work of Kevin Fellezs, Steven Pond, and John Covach, I first contextualize Snarky Puppy’s relationship to 1970s jazz fusion, highlighting the stylistic similarities that the group shares with early fusion groups. Then, using their 2014 album We Like it Here and other contemporary projects coinciding with their rise to more mainstream popularity as case studies, I demonstrate how the group has adopted a more modern approach that significantly diverges from this lineage. Ultimately, I suggest that “post-fusion” is a useful framework for understanding how many jazz musicians experience and conceive of jazz in the Twenty-First Century that contains a synthesis of an eclectic range of stylistic lineages not covered in current fusion scholarship.
Reconstructing Breakthrough’s Conceptual History: From Materiale Formenlehre to the New Formenlehre
Rafael (Ardi) Echevarria (Musicology and Music Theory, Durham University)
This paper reevaluates how the concept of “Breakthrough” migrates from German to English scholarship. Breakthrough (Durchbruch) is a formal rupture which critically alters a work’s formal and expressive narratives. By undermining comprehensive theoretical understanding, it resists a standardized account. The concept has a well-established history: the term was first introduced by Paul Bekker and popularized in Theodor Adorno’s Mahler book as part of his material theory of form (“materiale Formenlehre”). Mediated by Bernd Sponheuer, the concept was imported into English scholarship by James Buhler and James Hepokoski as part of contemporary formal theory (the “New Formenlehre”). This neat narrative, however, suggests linear continuity: it implies that Bekker’s conception is taken up by Adorno and straightforwardly translated into English. This monolithic account obscures substantial developments throughout the concept’s history, thereby preventing a more nuanced theoretical category.
By developing a more multi-faceted conceptual framework, this paper explores the confluence of musicological, music-theoretical and socio-political strands throughout Breakthrough’s history. Firstly, I distinguish between Bekker and Adorno’s conceptions of Breakthrough by demonstrating their fundamental differences. Whereas Bekker’s perspective is essentially musicological, Adorno’s dialectical approach is more concerned with hermeneutics and socio-political critique. This distinction demonstrates the novelty and complexity of Adorno’s approach, one which establishes Breakthrough as a unique category. Secondly, I examine how Sponheuer’s music-analytical account of Breakthrough connects German and English scholarship. Despite his grounding in Adorno’s philosophical system, Sponheuer enables a more technical, ‘formalistic’ approach that subverts Adorno’s socio-political concerns. Finally, I contrast Buhler and Hepokoski’s divergent responses to Breakthrough’s German origins. Rather than a singular model of Breakthrough, these competing perspectives ultimately divide the concept’s English reception. This paper’s multi-faceted account of Breakthrough therefore recontextualizes the concept’s migration from “materiale Formenlehre” to “New Formenlehre,” elucidating an intricate web of musicological, philosophical, and socio-political concerns. By examining how Adorno’s richer conception of Breakthrough becomes formalized as an analytical category, this conceptual history encourages a more nuanced understanding of Breakthrough’s position within the New Formenlehre. In doing so, it stimulates further reflection regarding the status of socio-political critique within contemporary music theory.
“Everybody Wanna Move Like Us!”: Performing Afro-Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest, 2019-2021
Paul David Flood (Musicology, Eastman School of Music)
From 2019 through 2021, the Swedish public and an international group of jurors elected three consecutive Afro-Swedish artists with soul-pop songs to represent Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest: “Too Late for Love” by John Lundvik; “Move” by The Mamas; and “Voices” by Tusse. I argue that their performances in Eurovision allowed them to negotiate a sense of Afro-diasporic belonging with global audiences, declaring their cultural citizenship as both Black and Swedish. These representations of Afro-Sweden, aided by Black American musical aesthetics, bear political significance amid recent changes to Swedish legislature that eliminate mentions of race despite upticks in racially-motivated violence and anti-migrant rhetoric. Drawing on musical analysis, reception history, and primary accounts from the artists, I demonstrate how these three performances recontextualize Black American musical idioms in ways that embody the communal values of Black internationalism.
Scholars have increasingly addressed the circulation and recontextualization of Black American musics throughout Europe and their resonances with Black international solidarity (Moore, 2022; Rollefson, 2017; Helbig, 2014), insofar as Afro-diasporic communities have turned to aspects of Black American expressive culture as models for resistance and survival (Ellis, 2015; El-Tayeb, 2011). Moreover, nations use the Contest as a platform for enacting soft power, but scholars have seldom connected performances of racial identity and negotiations of Afro-diasporic identity through Black American genres in the Contest to broader discourses surrounding Afro-diaspora. I historicize these performances within the Afro-Swedish Renaissance (Skinner, 2022), wherein Afro-Swedes are challenging Sweden’s colorblinding agenda through artistic practice, engaging a mode of talking back (hooks, 1989) that resists European assimilationist narratives. Ultimately, recognizing these performances as critiques of Sweden’s white protectionism destabilizes prevailing narratives about who gets to be Swedish and reveals Eurovision’s role as a musical worldmaking tool for members of Europe’s marginalized migrant and diasporic communities.
As the Parish was Perishing: A Theological Perspective on Black Musical Activism During the AIDS Crisis in the United States
Samantha Hark (Musicology, Indiana University Bloomington)
SILENCE = DEATH was one of the most memorable slogans used for AIDS activism. Coined in 1986, it represented an outpouring of grief and rage from the queer community, who witnessed official channels keep quiet as their friends mysteriously fell ill and died. While the entire queer community was suffering, queer Black individuals were not only more likely to be infected with the disease, but they also faced more medical injustices, religious strain, and societal backlash due to their intersecting identities.
Simultaneously, the musical genre house began to emerge from underground gay clubs for people of color. Musicologists who have written on house have not been shy about noting the genre’s religious overtones. Indeed, the fervid early fans of house claimed that it was holy; it was preached; the clubs it was played in were their sanctuaries. While many narratives surrounding the genre mention AIDS, there is little scholarship pertaining to the ways in which the illness—and its societal complications—helped to shape both house and the queer club communities.
By utilizing interdisciplinary scholarly sources alongside oral histories, magazine articles, and blog posts, this paper provides a new perspective that can only be seen when one incorporates the context of the AIDS crisis. It will argue that, considering the ghoulish circumstances of the time, it was no mere coincidence that the genre of house came to be associated with reverent descriptors. With ecclesiastical enthusiasm, Black queer DJs and their listeners became some of the most important AIDS activists who painstakingly carved out spaces for themselves to experience spiritual joy.
The AIDS crisis is strangely liminal; a monumental tragedy that we still feel the impact of, but do not speak of. However, this cannot be overstated: to properly acknowledge the musical Black queer community that refused to stay silent then, musicologists should refuse to stay silent now.
Liberté, Égalité, Sonorité(s): Theorizing the Sonic Landscape of Racialized urban governance, Youth mobility politics, and Place-making in Mantes-la-Jolie, France
Raymond Jennings (Geography, Rutgers University)
This preliminary dissertation project and paper examines the sonic landscape as a tool to address the ongoing crises and contradictions of French republican citizenship in “priority neighborhoods” (QPV; Kirszbaum 2015). More specifically, it aims to emphasize how urban citizenship struggles of France’s Afro-descendant communities can be both “heard” and “listened to”. The urban sonic landscape, consisting of how a place sounds and how places are governed and experienced through sound, is a critical epistemology expressive of urban governance regimes of racialized surveillance, confinement, and differential mobilities across neoliberal city-space. By examining the music-making and soundmaking practices (sonorités/sonorities) of Afro-descendant youth and the wider urban sonic environment in Mantes-la-Jolie through phonographic methods of field-recording and collaborative soundwalks that attune to the everyday lived experience in the local neighborhood, city, and across the wider Île-de-France region, I assess how the sonic structuring of space governs Black and other racialized youth mobilities in everyday life, and how those youth resist and contest such governance through their own sound and place-making practices.
Emotions On Demand: How AI Music Scoring Interfaces Combine Game Engines, Music Data, and Machine Listening
Ravi Krishnaswami (Musicology and Ethnomusicology, Brown University)
Music has historically been used in audiovisual media to add cultural context, emotional valence, and narrative arc. Since the generative AI boom began in 2022, a small army of computer scientists have descended on the sleepy world of stock music and composition for media and advertising, promising new automated solutions. Many of these tools offer the variety stock music along with the flexibility of working with a composer. Users can choose from a wide variety of genres while being able to specify exact timings and, in some cases, transitions to new sections. Generative systems combine older techniques of symbolic algorithmic composition with newer processes that deploy machine listening and spectral analysis and diffusion. Some systems also consolidate techniques developed for video games, allowing users to “play” the score to their video.
This paper demonstrates how these generative and automated systems are a map of the priorities, assumptions, and epistemologies that marketing people bring to audiovisual communication and storytelling. Through a comparison of user interface design and an analysis of the results of testing systems side-by-side, this paper will identify common strengths, weaknesses, and biases. Because music metadata often includes tags for emotion, an analysis of these systems can also reveal assumptions mistaken for “ground truths” in their training data. At an intersection between critical data studies, media studies, and musicology, this paper will also argue for an interdisciplinary methodology in studying generative AI.
Imperial Mimesis: Staging Conquest and Colonial Encounter in Handel’s Poro, re dell’Indie (1731)
Anushka Kulkarni (Musicology, University of California Davis)
“… the opera form itself… belongs equally to the history of culture and the historical experience of overseas domination.”
– Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
The eighteenth century marked a pivotal period in the history of British-Indian encounter. During this time, the English East India Company solidified its economic monopoly and began to establish its colonial foothold on the South Asian subcontinent.1 Alongside England’s burgeoning imperial projects, the spread of Enlightenment thinking brought issues of governance, expansion, and racial difference to the forefront of contemporary public consciousness. Indeed, scholars such as Martha Feldman, Suzanne Aspden, Michael Burden, and Thomas McGeary have explored opera seria’s socio-politically intertwined nature. With a focus on London stages and publications, Ellen Harris and Davis Hunter respectively link Handel to the enterprises of the East India and Royal African Companies. My work builds on this scholarship and further interrogates how Handel opera seria narrativizes and represents the politics of eighteenth-century imperial conquest.
In this paper, I focus on Handel’s Poro, re dell’Indie (1731), which dramatizes the clash between Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great and King Porus, who ruled portions of Punjab, during the former’s fourth-century BCE Indian Campaign. Comparing the musical-dramatic representation of the two monarchs, I examine how Handel adapts classical accounts of encounter to allegorize ideologies entrenched in projects of British imperialism and colonization in India. My analysis engages eighteenth-century political writings and Greco-Roman historical sources in order to contextualize Handel’s opera within contemporary discourse on governance, expansion, and racial otherness. Drawing these historical sources and contexts together with theoretical frameworks from subaltern studies,5 I ultimately demonstrate a contrapuntal reading of Poro, re dell’Indie that foregrounds the opera’s entanglement in both English metropolitan and colonial pasts.
A Jingle for a Jury: A Review of Melodic Exhibits in Recent Music Plagiarism Claims
Bethany Lambert (Music Composition, University of Georgia)
This paper examines the practice of forensic musicology in United States music copyright litigation. Focusing on melody, I review visual aids created by forensic musicologists and presented to juries of non-musicians in recent cases. I question the reliability, continuity, and efficacy of these visuals. Finally, I introduce an additional method to consider when discussing what methodology will produce consistent and fair evidentiary exhibits.
I reviewed Williams v. Gaye and examined the different analysis of “signature phrases” of Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams’s “Blurred Lines” and Marvin Gaye’s “Got To Give it Up” by the separate Parties. I note the distinct differences between the Plaintiff’s analysis by Judith Finell (Example 1) and the Defendant’s analysis performed by Sandy Wilbur (Example 2). I also reviewed exhibits from the claim against Ed Shereen by beneficiaries of Marvin Gaye’s estate which alleges that Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” plagiarized Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On”. (Example 4) I then applied these different methods of melodic analysis to compare the melodies subject to a March 2022 claim against Dua Lipa’s which asserted that “Levitating” plagiarized Artikal Sound System’s “Live Your Life”. (Example 6-9) I then suggest an alternative “one staff” comparison analysis. (Examples 3, 5, 10).
Music copyright cases of recent years have been wrought with unexpected and concerning outcomes. Forensic Musicologists are shaping the music industry, yet there is no standard requirements for analysis except that the forensic musicologist has “special knowledge” that may help the jury. The very different visual examples provided here highlight major issues with continuity in forensic musicology. I argue that musicians and evidence experts need to form committees and initiate studies to produce standardization to music theory analysis in forensic musicology to ensure continuity and efficacy of evidence placed in front of the lay juries in music copyright cases.
“Reception, Reinvention, Revolution: Luigi Nono’s Engagement with Renaissance Music”
Andreas (Zichen) Liu (English, Harvard University)
2024 marks the centennial birthday of the Italian composer Luigi Nono (1924-1990). Though steeped in the idiom of European high modernism, Nono differs from his contemporaries in his commitment to the Italian musical tradition, especially the soundscape of Venice. My paper investigates Nono’s creative reception of Renaissance Italian music through his writings and the multimedia project Prometeo, tragedia dell’ascolto (1981-84). An examination of Nono’s essays and interviews (Scritti e colloqui, Ricordi 2001) reveals two threads of aesthetic influence. On the one hand, his musical mentors, in particular Bruno Maderna, inspired him to explore the potential of the acoustic experiments of the Venetian School; on the other hand, Antonio Gramsci’s Marxist interpretation of the Renaissance helped to mold his idea of Renaissance music as the exemplar of an ideologically radical aesthetics, where music-making is a synthetical and active process that unifies time and space, the intellectual and the material.
My paper then looks into Nono’s Prometeo, a collaborative work of musical theater that, in the spirit of the Renaissance polymaths, brings together the arts of sound, literature, and architecture. I focus on Nono’s dialogue with the Venetian Renaissance in two of its movements, “Stasimo primo” and “Terza, quarta, quinta isola.” The former, with the help of live electronics, explores the sonic horizons of the late 16th-century practice sonar e cantar (the addition of instruments to the choir) in order to suggest the birth of a new collective consciousness. The latter employs the acoustic effect of echo, prevalent in Monteverdi and the Gabrielis, in an allegorical manner that signifies an existential distance both spatial and temporal. By recontextualizing history in a mythical narrative that tracks human society’s gradual loss of liberty, Prometeo stages a transhistorical vision where the reconstructed past and the imagined utopian future comment on and strengthen each other.
Broken Glass Everywhere: “The Message” as Hip-Hop’s Shattered Ghost
Ashley Martin (Music and Ethnic Studies, Northern Arizona University)
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 anthem “The Message” signaled a shift in the burgeoning genre’s performance practices, transitioning from party-friendly and DJ-centered to socially conscious and emcee-focused. “The Message” wove a localized narrative of the psychic effects of living in impoverished conditions, ultimately serving as a template for the conscious rap of the 80s/90s. Though the influence of “The Message” is long-reaching and immediately heard in figures such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, and N.W.A, the song’s current cultural status as ancestral sampling material positions “The Message” as haunting specter in each song employing its instrumental. Drawing upon Derrida’s hauntology (1993) and Hartman’s iterability as redress (1997), this paper will explore how sampling “The Message” is both hauntological and remedial for the continued assault on Black life. Through analyses of works by Ice Cube, Puff Daddy and Mase, and Coi Leray, this paper will explore how the spectral nature of “The Message” presents itself in hip-hop’s timeline. A comparative analysis of each song, coupled with a discussion of sampling as citationary practice will serve as the first half of the paper. An exploration will follow of “The Message” as a genre-specific act of redress for a group still subjected to an environment built upon sanctioned psychic and bodily assault on Black people. Though the redress can often take the form of adopting ruling-class values as a way out of poverty, the sampling of “The Message” points to a haunting un-exorcisable by a fixation on material acquisition as retribution.
Future Girls Are Industry’s Favorite Food: Queerness and Fugitivity in Modern Punk Spatiality
Evan Martin-Casler (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Leadership, Tufts University)
Punk has eluded definition and standardization since its emergence as an international phenomenon in the late 20th century. Born of British white working class and Rastafarian subcultures, and popularized by queer and contrarian personalities, the mélange of styles has survived generational and ideological transitions via its inherent slipperiness and inbuilt tensions. Punk spaces have long been Islands of Misfit Toys, havens for self-identified freaks and weirdos who, out of protest of mainstream mores, seek out communities that exist in antagonism with the status quo, that is, in antagonism with White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchies. As indicated by punk’s etymology, the artform has always existed in a dimension of queerness, an element that has only grown more salient given antisocial readings of queerness. Punk/queer sequestration—antithetical and resistant to normative values, lifestyles, and subjects—produces punk/queer spaces. These socio-political spaces exist at the convergence of pleasure and filth, invoking Jennifer Nash’s Black Feminist explorations of anality, and as celebrations of the violent catharsis and self-shattering of jouissance. Following Edelman’s argument in Bad Education where queerness is not tethered to identity, I argue that punk cultural formation essentializes and reclaims queerness through its fugitivity from and refusal of mainstream, normative worlds. This essentialization allows for a reterritorialization of a “null set” of queer(ed) subjects, such as the woman, the Black, the crip, and the subaltern. By exploring the queercore of G.L.O.S.S. and the hip-hop/hardcore fusion of Soul Glo through the lenses of Jack Halberstam’s punk negativity and José Esteban Muñoz’s Queer commons, and in the spirit of bell hooks’ and Judith Butler’s analyses of Ball Culture, I argue that punk spatiality can provide a materialist exemplification of this interpretation of queerness, with punk spaces existing as alternate worlds wherein the normie is othered and the other(ed) is normed without being recuperated.
The (Dis)Embodiment of Voice in Chaucer’s House of Fame: An Acousmatic Challenge to a Medieval Metaphysics of Sight
Margaret McCurry (English and American Literature, New York University)
Dreams are marked by a shared departure from reality, including the realities of physical embodiment. The disentanglement of the conscious mind from the constraints of the body frees the dreamer to navigate the symbolic realms of the dreamscape in the pursuit of meaning. Despite the extraordinary degree of freedom that they facilitate, dreams are delimited by their finitude. As dawn breaks, the dreamer awakens to the realization that his phenomenal encounters, however immediate, were illusory. Yet while the arrival of dawn signifies the end of the dream, it also initiates a new endeavor in waking: the interpretation of the dreams themselves. In this regard, the dreamer’s transition from unconsciousness to consciousness marks not an end, but a continuation of the interpretive journey.
As a formal genre, medieval dream visions primarily engage the sense of sight and are characterized by their use of vivid imagery and visual metaphors. This privileging of sight reflects the prevailing association of knowledge with vision. Despite their inclination towards a metaphysics of sight, medieval dream visions are characterized by their intricate use of obscuration, obfuscation, and occultation, placing the genre into the discursive mode of allegory, where the central “truth” of a text perpetually recedes from the stratum of the written word. As such, dream visions demonstrate a folding and unfolding relationship between signifier and signified, which represents a semiotic delay or deferral where true meaning is veiled and reveals itself gradually through a perpetual process of concealment and illumination. It is only when we recall that allegory is derived from the Greek word allegorein (Greek: to “speak otherwise”) that we fully realize the thematic resonances between this rhetorical device and the acousmatic veil described by Pierre Schaeffer, Michael Chion, and Brian Kane.
When analyzing medieval dream visions, it is worth considering how the voice, both literal and metaphorical, finds its place in these narratives. How does voice manifest in a realm dominated by sight? What unique perspectives can medieval dream visions provide in our understanding of the (dis)embodied voice? This paper examines Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, a dream vision celebrated for its distinctive employment and elucidation of sound, and considers the ways that the text represents experiential knowledge as evolving from a visual concept to an auditory engagement. This inquiry into the voice’s role and significance in dream visions opens a new analytical dimension to the genre— one that challenges the primacy of the visual while attending to the nuances of (dis)embodied vocality.
Trading Fours with Derrida: The Limits of Play in Jazz
Ben Papsun (English, Tufts University)
This presentation will combine a theoretical discussion of the semiotic boundaries of improvisation with examples of jazz piano performance to illustrate what it looks/sounds like to approach these boundaries in practice. Drawing on insights from Jacques Derrida’s bizarre 1997 interview with free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, as well as his seminal essay “Structure, Sign, and Play” (1966), I take Derrida and Coleman at their agreed word that “the very concept of improvisation verges upon reading[…] the creation of something new, yet something which doesn’t exclude the pre-written framework that makes it possible.” I argue that jazz improvisation—against historically racialized romantic notions of pure spontaneity and unmediated creative “genius”—is a necessarily limited mode of creation, one which is best understood as a practice of simultaneously reading and unwriting a primary musical text to activate its interpretive potential.
I will intersperse my Derridean reading of jazz improvisation with musical (substitutively, textual) examples of my own improvisation to show how this theoretical model maps onto actual creative practice. Because the paradigm of the jazz standard most effectively illustrates the ways in which improvisation has both a dependent and disobedient relationship to a (literal or figurative) ur-text, these digressions will be based on the famous Miles Davis jazz standard “Donna Lee” (1947). By first introducing an earlier version of the tune, Ballard MacDonald’s “(Back Home Again In) Indiana” (1917), then moving to “Donna Lee,” I will show how these contrafacts challenge any monolithic notion of textual authenticity or authority, and how, in Derrida’s words, “even when one improvises… one ventriloquizes or leaves another to speak in one’s place.” I will then offer a few short solos over “Donna Lee” of differing levels of abstraction to gesture towards Coleman’s musical innovations in the 60s, which took the idea of improvisational “freedom” to its semiotic limits.
Who are you, Miss Simone?: Voice, Androgyneity and the Acousmatic Question | Amanda Paruta (Historical Musicology and Music Theory, SUNY Buffalo)
Though recognized as a pivotal contributor to the civil rights movement and praised for her enormous musical prowess, Nina Simone is notably absent from discourse on the voice. With its unique contralto timbre, her voice evades traditional cultural markers, such as gender and race, manifesting as a form of androgyneity that permits Nina Simone’s fluid occupation of several identities in her public and private lives: artist, activist, Black American, woman, mother, and survivor. Scholarship on Nina Simone addresses her intersectionality, however, her singing voice is not recognized as its own politically and socially engaged semiotic zone. This paper seeks to center discourse around the biomechanism through which Nina Simone’s identities and desires were mediated, asserting that its timbral qualities—dark, raspy, growling, and nasal, among others—granted her voice inimitable rhetorical power and subversive capabilities. Drawing crowds from across racial, economic, and gender spectrums, her voice seeps through barriers that would otherwise obfuscate messages of Black and women empowerment, thereby uniquely contributing to imperative revolutionary action of the late twentieth century.
Building on the scholarship of Victoria Malawey (2020), Nina Sun Eidsheim (2019), and Kate Heidemann (2016), this paper attempts to understand the synthesis of identities through vocal timbre by analyzing iconic recordings of “I Loves You Porgy” (1959) and “Mississippi Goddam” (1964), songs laden with immanent racial and gender tension. Reaching beyond lyrics and expanding the civil rights era lexicon, this exploration of Nina Simone’s vocal androgyneity reveals that her voice’s enigmatic quality bolstered her musical success and political messaging.
Invocations of Kieu: Listening and Sounding Relationships with the American-Vietnam War Dead
Savannah Rose Ridley (Ethnomusicology, Indiana University Bloomington)
In 2021 a group of monastics in the Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism gathered in the meditation hall of Deer Park Monastery in California to take part in oracle readings drawn from Vietnam’s national epic, The Tale of Kieu. Plum Village, rooted in Vietnamese Buddhism and founded by peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, emerged directly from the context of the American-Vietnam War. Indeed, the character of Kieu, compared to Vietnam itself, has become tied to the history of the Vietnamese fight for self-determination. In these oracle readings, the presence of the dead as ancestors is woven throughout as practitioners listen for new meanings to emerge from the text meant to guide their future action and practice—dialogically sounding and listening to the presences of the war, its invisible dead, and the wounds of the living beloveds.
In this paper I analyze live-streamed videos and primary literature on Kieu Oracle readings in Plum Village; Grand Requiem prayer ceremonies carried out by Plum Village monastics in Vietnam in 2007 for the war dead; and speech content from Bill Clinton’s historic presidential visit to Vietnam in 2000 (including his own uneasy invocation of Kieu) which signaled a reopening of diplomatic relations. Clinton’s speeches provide context for an international model of cooperation, based on the goals of transitional justice (recovering bodies of the war-dead), the success of which relies on the rhetorical elision of continuing war wounds in both nations. I argue that counter to state narratives of grief, justice, and historical time, the Kieu Oracle readings—emerging from a Buddhist ethic and adapted by Nhat Hanh for spiritual practice—take on a dialogic life and function as the continuation of intimate relationships of care with the war-dead and the transformation of Vietnamese cultural practices in diaspora, tending to nodes of suffering in and across time. As such the practice of Kieu Oracle readings in Plum Village ask us to listen closely to a Mahayana Buddhist ethics and more-than-human presences, which in turn unsettles conventional ethnomusicological presumptions regarding sound and temporality.
From Folk to Art Music and Back Again: Ideological Shift and Identity (Re)Construction in Yoruba Art Music
Sunday Oluwaseun Ukaewen (Music, Harvard University)
This paper examines the shift in compositional ideology from folk music to art music, in addition to the process of identity construction in Yoruba art music. It argues that this shift goes beyond mere stylistic changes, signifying a profound transformation in the expression of cultural identity and artistic agency. In Yoruba folk music, for example, the text functions as a signifier, conveying two primary elements: the intonations and the cultural context of the music. Through this, composers evoke a familiar aura in the audience.1 Following exposure to European church music, the focus shifts from the text’s musicality to the technicality of the musical elements. This adoption of new musical systems had a significant impact on composers, who had to create music that did not align with their cultural and musical traditions. Similarly, the audience, for example, the church congregation, had to adapt and learn how to appreciate the unfamiliar music. Since the late 1950s, however, composers have been attempting to create a familiar ambiance in their art music due to demand from their African audience. Owing to this quest, Akin Euba suggests that to create authentic African art music, composers must return to African composing ideology, which uses texts as signifiers for affect, structure, and meaning-making. This paper applies Euba’s proposition to further interrogate how Yoruba composers like Ayo Bankole, Bode Omojola, Ayo Oluranti, and Yomi Daramola, among others, construct identity in their compositions. Through interviews and analysis of their compositions, the paper demonstrates how the composers engage Yoruba text and contexts to create a familiar ambiance in their compositions, and this engagement has continually changed the concept of identity in Yoruba art music compositions and performances.