The end of 2020 presents a crucial time to reflect on the challenges that lie ahead for decolonizing and disrupting musicology. While many have flocked to what I call here the “presumed innocence of musical truth” during the time of Covid-19, any move to disaggregate music from political realities—both the contexts within which it was first created, and those that have upheld the musical traditions that are now in place—carries the risk of perpetuating the destructive possibility that loving the canon can also be our alibi for (or, as I propose here, our “claim to innocence” about) why the discipline of musicology has been so slow to engage with antiracist and decolonial debates in a sustained way. Thinking critically about systemic racism at the end of a particularly challenging year, the time is ripe for interrogating how the institutional structures that uphold western art music are still tied to values about aesthetic truths that have yet to be decolonized. In this article I respond to critical race and Indigenous studies theorists Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in their renowned 2012 article “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” by outlining three “moves to innocence” that are prevalent in music academia, followed by a proposed “move to disruption” about musical value that contributes to an actively “decolonizing” musicology. Focusing on the themes of truth and value, I argue that the next decade holds an opportunity to engage with the ideas that might productively disrupt our discipline the most.
The commercialized nineteenth century lyceum circuit provided the vehicle for Camilla Urso (1840-1902) to become America's first celebrity female violinist. Vizualizing six seasons between 1873-83 where Urso toured under lyceum bureau management in digital maps of my own creation, I argue industrialized transportation networks combined with the commercialized advertising and publicity of the lyceum circuit created a popular concert model that expanded Urso's audience and raised her concert fees. Urso's time on the lyceum circuit laid the foundation for her transnational career. Urso was never solely a lyceum musician, though exploring the role of lyceums and their bureaus in her career plays a key role in determining how she rose to fame and became America's most celebrated female violinist. Futhermore, Urso's lyceum career argues for classical music as a rural and commercial phenomenon of American popular culture in the nineteenth century.
Drake's music features both lyrics and harmonies that often appear multilayered, ambiguous, and conflicted to listeners. Sometimes these multilayered harmonies are created through what I call "reverse extensions," where the bass line moves one or more thirds below the root of the chord in a fixed harmonic loop. These reverse extensions can sometimes be heard as a "harmonic-bass divorce" (de Clercq 2019) in which the bass line moves independently from the harmonic layer. However, I argue that they often can also be heard as single integrated harmonies, and that these plural hearings draw on intra- and inter-textual memory to create multilayered harmonic experiences which help evoke the conflicted and ambivalent feelings that Drake's lyrics are famous for. The plural identities of these chords can be understood by adapting elementary concepts from jazz theory, in which extended chords can be mimicked by or substituted with "slash chords" that add a bass note below the base triad; for example, G/A (G major triad with A in the bass, or AGBD) sounds like Am11 (ACEGBD). This chord sometimes seems to convey a double function of both G and Am. Relationships like this create an "extension-related family" of chords which often easily substitute for one another in chord progressions. I argue that by enumerating possibilities for chord substitutions, and plural hearings of extended chords, reverse extensions are an “enactive music theory” which frames chord identity as a structure subjectively enacted by an individual, rather than an objective property inherent “the music itself.”
This listening journal is about grief and family, the way sounds interweaves with text and realms of communication, how to ask for instructions to lay to rest the remains of the dead. An observer creates credibility for the doer, which in turn gives importance to the observer. The thread of the sound practice is trust. Who lets me hold space for them, who I let hold space for me. In recording this journey of Amma's death, I thought a lot about how my practice with the listening journals influenced my speaking, my performance practice, my listening to people speak. I noticed that when I listen to my recording, I had a lot of umm’s, as if there was a hum in the middle of my speech, but it also created a hesitancy and pause to the authority of speech. Perhaps my listening practice is to create a habitat to experience, to move, to listen, to think.
This article serves to further the conceptual and musical analysis of guarapachangueo, a key influence in the contemporary style of the percussion in Havana-style rumba. I follow Turino’s (2009) lead in distinguishing between improvisation and formulaic performance in analyzing the rhythmic vocabulary of guarapachangueo as a set of related formulas and variations. In doing so, I expand upon and refine some of the characteristics of guarapachangeuo described by Bodenheimer (2015), particularly the common and yet nebulous idea that the style entails increased improvisation in the lower register of the percussion. As an active performer of the style who specializes in the lower register percussion, I will draw upon my experiences and those of fellow rumberos, as well as commercial recordings and online videos of rumba in highlighting the structural formulas used in rumba’s contemporary rhythmic vocabulary. I argue that rather than increased improvisation, guarapachangueo comprises an aesthetic approach to playing rumba in which unique formulas are employed, representing a break with the standardized formulas of traditional rumba from the second half of the 20th century. These formulas produce a heightened sense of tension and release in which increased space and the interactive exchange of percussive phrases are central. Internalized by drummers, these formulas and variations become part of the performer’s musical habitus and are drawn upon—often unconsciously—by the musicians in the form of musical decisions that “say something” in the flow of a rumba performance.
In sonata form, the transition module has specific primary functions and labels any other uncommon ones as deformations or, rather, idiosyncrasies. Considering the difference in compositional styles and techniques used between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the latter undergoes a trend explored by some nineteenth-century composers: a development in its transition module, which ostensibly confining it to an idiosyncratic feature or a lower-level default of the transition (Hepokoski and Darcy, 2011). I argue that composers utilized this technique in transitions to foreshadow themes in subsequent modules, yielding an additional function of the transition. This paper examines nineteenth-century sonatas, providing an analytic overview of my findings and introducing a concept I call the “Anticipatory Transition,” offering an additional function to the transition–—distinct from other concepts by previous scholarship. Building off the work of Schenker's concept of “linkage technique” and its contribution to the development of new themes in subsequent thematic modules (Smith, 2007), as well as Schmalfeldt's adoption of Dahlhaus’s’ “processual” ideas (Schmalfeldt, 2011; Carro, 2020), the anticipatory transition is employed through two avenues: first, a literal “copy-and-paste,” and second, a “spun-out” transition. I analyze four case studies that utilize anticipatory transitions in nineteenth-century sonatas. It is important to examine the function of transitions more deeply and explore other possible outcomes because the material within can inform other thematic modules and contribute to the cohesiveness of the work. My analyses demonstrate that anticipatory transitions—profound than mere deformations and limitations—offer a deeper sense of unity and a broader perspective within sonata form.
La Gioia Sovrana, Nietzsche e la Musica come Filosofia is a book written by the Italian conductor and philosopher Bruno Dal Bon. It demonstrates that music is one of the fundamental driving forces that moved Nietzsche in his philosophical activity.
In some contexts, classical music is described as capable of evoking powerful emotional experiences in listeners, while in others it is associated with a restrained response on the part of the audience. Against the backdrop of this observation, the article aims to apply a discourse-analytic approach to investigating how symphonic music is constructed and legitimated as an emotional resource, and how listeners’ reactions are articulated in relation to ideas about the emotional qualities of music. The material comprises texts and a small number of images taken from concert programs of two leading symphony orchestras: the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (GSO). The results demonstrate variation in both the feelings that are highlighted in the concert programs and the conceptions or ideas about musical meaning that are referred to in the descriptions. While some descriptions draw on a formalist artistic ideal, emphasizing the music’s independent esthetic value, others exhibit a romantic understanding of music, emphasizing its metaphysical qualities. Music is furthermore legitimated as an emotional resource by being characterized as a bearer of specific feelings, in other words, in line with a conception of musical meaning as representational. When it comes to audiences’ listening positions, it is shown that two contrasting listening ideals are articulated in the concert descriptions, one introspective and one that involves the manifestation of powerful emotional experiences. The variation in listening ideals and conceptual assumptions is found to agree with the individualized understanding of musical meaning that is typical of neo-liberal consumer culture. At the same time, however, because emotional extremes are given space alongside traditional esthetic ideals, historically formed ideals are perpetuated.
Fake Radiolab is the name of an ongoing duo performance project in which we interrogate mediated “facts” through explorations in the podcast media form. We adopt the mannerisms and mania of radiophonic personalities and a variety of media genres (e.g., podcasts, YouTube rants, ASMR sessions, self-help narrations, dream sequences, radio plays, nature documentaries) to playfully/seriously jar the clarity and authority imparted to “content” by contemporary audio production. Acting as (unreliable) hosts of a live podcast, we present a kind of musicalized speech performance that juxtaposes multiple modes of audio narration against live synths, processed violin, and sampled audio fragments. During live performance, the opening narration, which is pre-recorded, presents an acousmatic pun to the audience who sees us on stage in front of our microphones; instead, our improvised performance inserts other manipulated material in counterpoint to the pre-recorded “backing-track.” Our project self-consciously addresses radiophonic matter as both our subject and form. The result is a technologically and culturally hybridized discourse in which power-symbols presented as performative utterances are subsumed within an assault of genres. In particular, we use audio production to highlight and amplify the transformation of text into performance, and performance into text, powerful manipulations which we see as ubiquitous and scarily efficient throughout contemporary media culture(s). Through all the surface misdirection and dislocation, there remains a through-line in the narration of the title track which offers an analysis of the history and present presence of the radiophonic voice.
This article presents the partial results of a dissertation entitled The role of music in the internationalization of capoeira: Flows and crossroads Rio-France-Germany (2022). Documents prepared by practitioners of the N'Zinga Capoeira School in Hanover, Germany, published on a platform called Yumpu, provide information on how musical-cultural knowledge of capoeira is understood and passed down in this context. Through the translation of songs and the study of informational texts written by German instructors about capoeira, I observe that musicality (and, by extension, corporeality) are fundamenatal to the consolidation of capoeira culture in Germany. This analysis is influenced by Leda Martins' Performances da Oralitura (2003), which highlights the enduring African root in Afro-diasporic cultural activities, transmitting africanidades ("Africanities") beyond the performance itself. Paul Gilroy's The Black Alantic (1993) also informed my understanding of the relevance of Black culture in critiques of European democracy. German capoeira practitioners gain a deeper understanding of the structural differences imposed on racialized people when they coexist with their mestres and learn of oppression and social difference through the art of capoeira.
Formal experimentation allows writers to critique long-standing notions of tradition and propriety. Within Caribbean literary discourse formal interventions are used to assert Caribbean life, art, and history as its own distinct expression. Particularly in relation to history and origin, or the history of our origins, Caribbean writers have experimented with literary form to articulate the region’s own peculiar understanding of its place within a time/space continuum as outside of conventional structures of knowledge. In this essay, I explore the adaptation of form across creative, artistic genres. Specifically, I look at how writing leverages sound in ways that disturb the belief that writing is a singularly privileged form in which knowledge circulates. Looking at the musical form of Jamaican Dub Music, I consider how the structural features of the sound such as fragmentation, reverb, and echo play out on the pages and in the story of Marcia Douglas’ Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim. I argue that Douglas’ novel enacts what I term “dub writing” that draws on the structure of dub music and that the novel suggests how we can imagine new ways to interpret and re/present histories. These new ways—creative interventions—effectively yield versions of history in much the same way that dub music results from the versioning of an orginary text or record. Further, versions are aspirations towards destabilizing the rigid nature of linearity that sustain our conception of time and how it structures history.
In 1948, Elliott Carter penned an analysis of his Piano Sonata for Edgard Varèse. His analysis of the first movement, in particular, makes one ask why Carter did not subsume its recurrent two-tempo structure under “first group” of its sonata form. Given Carter’s sophistication, was he experiencing a moment of music historical “agnosia,” since two-tempo expositions inform familiar Beethoven works such as Piano Sonata, op.31, no.2 and String Quartet in Bb, op.130. This paper explores Carter’s “agnosia” by way of internal and external evidence. Internally, it revisits the thematic chart he attached to the 1948 analysis and goes on to posit the idea that the work’s quintal neo-tonality so saturates its thematic network themes as to distort the composer’s analysis of the form, historical precedents irrespective. Externally, the paper compares three works by Beethoven to Carter’s Sonata as regards its two-tempo structure, using concepts borrowed from Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory (1999). Finally, the author revisits writings of Carter and his circle that may explain why his analysis downplayed historical precedents to the Piano Sonata.
This review essay considers the relationships among opera, sound recording, and critical race theory, and explores them at a moment when these fields are beginning to converge. One of my concerns will be the recent and ground-breaking studies and collections on opera and race by Naomi Adele André (2017, 2019), Kira Thurman (2012, 2019), Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson (2011), and Mary I. Ingraham, Joseph K. So and Roy Moodley (2016). Another will be the neglected history of opera and sound recording; notable scholars here include Karen Henson (2020), Robert Cannon (2014), and Richard Leppert (2015). Finally, I will focus on the thought-provoking analyses of race and sound by Alexander Weheliye (2005), Brian Ward (2003), Jennifer Lynn Stoever (2016) and Nina Sun Eidsheim (2019). There are obvious connections among these three bodies of scholarship, yet these connections have not yet been clearly identified and explored. Although many scholars have come to embrace opera as a material and embodied phenomenon, the artform’s dissemination, analysis, and enjoyment through sound recording is still overlooked as a site of enquiry, especially its potential as a fertile site of inquiry about identity. To overlook the issue of identity in relation to recording is to perpetuate the belief that recordings are primarily documents of performance practice. It ignores the army of technicians who invisibly craft the acoustic object, many of whom are historically white and male. This review essay seeks to address this neglect and to suggest some ways in which the processes of making and consuming opera recordings is intimately related to whiteness and anti-Blackness—but also to Black possibility. In what follows, I cast a broad net, ranging widely and at times unexpectedly. I begin with some recent events in American musicology and in the New York operatic scene; then, turn to a consideration of some of the scholarship just mentioned; and finally conclude with a brief discussion of a specific recording, the Metropolitan Opera’s “live” sound recording of the 2019 production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.
Arts advocacy in the U.S. tends to cultivate state and philanthropic art support by emphasizing art’s potential to increase productivity and generate revenue in various ways. Even musicologists often take this rhetorical route, arguing for the continued relevance of our work, for example by noting that studying music cultivates the kind of creative thinking skills that make workers attractive to corporations like Google. This way of promoting music and musicology thus reinforces the logic of state and capital by demonstrating music’s usefulness within that logic. I argue that we should instead embrace and pedagogically center music’s uselessness as its most potentially radical quality. Doing so could help us construct a new political imaginary that might more robustly resist the antisocial logics of capital. My argument circles around the question of musical autonomy. While a certain version of autonomy undergirds our discipline’s tools and assumptions, today this value is dismissed by almost everyone, including leftists and liberals, activists and academics. In salvaging the autonomous ideal, I attempt to resituate it firmly within collective practice, an orientation it has traditionally been seen as transcending. My exploration of collective autonomy weaves together work from musicology, political theory, anthropology, feminist theory, and Black studies, as well as from radical activist traditions that develop outside of any institutional framework. I think with and through these diverse perspectives, arguing that celebrating music’s uselessness might aid our collective ability imagine a radically different world.
This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our violin concerto, “a loose affiliation of alleluias”, which we created and premiered in 2019. Making this concerto was an exercise in excavating the material histories that guide our creative practice. Our purpose in doing so was to work towards a clear and necessarily complex appraisal of how our current practices are motivated by, and reproduce, historically-determined knowledge, authority, and cultural attitudes. We think through our own reproductions of historical knowledge via Ben Spatz’s exegesis of “technique”, and via Edward Said’s notion of “affiliations” as the networks which build up cultural associations and cultural authority. With this theoretical frame, we contextualize some of the musical techniques and tropes engaged in our concerto—for instance polyphony, ornamentation, and the concerto soloist as heroic subject. We contextualize our reflections next to critical positions staked circumscribed by what Ben Piekut calls “elite avantgardism”—an analytical category which we see ourselves as operating within. We discuss, for instance, the critical gestures of musical modernism which (per Adorno’s analysis) conspicuously arrest and negate historical musical grammars and logics – and yet continue to reproduce its structuring values. In our concluding statements we gesture towards some of the pedagogical implications of this work, considering how creative practice can be leveraged to re-appraise the histories shaping our practices of composition, improvisation, and performance.
This colloquy, by graduate-student-led collective Project Spectrum, attempts to map out existing discussions around inclusion and equity in music academia, with a specific focus on identifying and analyzing the structures in academia that work against minoritized and historically excluded scholars.
