Musicology Now

By Anton Vishio

“Paregmenon is a figure which of the word going before deriveth the word following.” So Henry Peacham defined the rhetorical device, in one of the word’s earliest English attestations.<1> Paregmenon was originally a participial form of an Ancient Greek verb whose basic meaning of “to lead by or past a place” spawned a number of metaphorical extensions—including ones which involved the path a word might take to become another. In its English borrowing, the term came to be applied specifically to describe root-related words deployed in proximity. Peacham cites a classic biblical example: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise.” His contemporaries made ample use of the device, sometimes in combination with other techniques, as in Measure to Measure: “To sue I live, I find I seek to die, And seeking death, find life”.<2>

But Peacham also goes on to assess the effects of such rhetoric. Of paregmenon, he wrote: “The use hereof is twofold, to delight the eare by the derived sound, and to move the mind with a consideration of the nigh affinitie and concord of the matter.” This could serve as a description of the manifold pleasures that Jo Kondo’s music makes available to its listeners. Kondo has pursued a similar compositional art of juxtaposition—the “affinitie and concord” of sounds placed aside one another—as a means to capture in music the effect of an apparently “flat surface” that is nonetheless perceptually active. This creates what Kondo refers to, relishing the apparent contradiction, as “dynamic stasis.” Surveying the scarred landscape of Dartmoor, Kondo experienced a similar assemblage in the visual domain, a “patchwork of green rocks and reddish earth, none of them being confined to the foreground or background”.<3> There is no obvious path through such a landscape; rather we might just discern a way forwards, driven by subtle shifts in the local equilibrium suggested to us by the placement of similar materials—by attention, that is, to their common derivation.

In choosing Paregmenon as the title of his 2011 composition for combined string and percussion quartets, Kondo thus gave expression to a distinctive aesthetic preoccupation.<4> The title seems relevant in another way, in relation to the composer’s avowed interest in Hellenistic thought, and even in connection to his self-identification with a “Western music world” as opposed to a specifically Japanese one.<5> For his engagement with the former sometimes reveals itself at an angle, and paregmenon enters even at this level; several of the descriptors that Kondo applies to his own music themselves appear to be rooted in yet subtly branch off from familiar Western music theoretical concepts, including as we shall see such fundamental ideas as line and form.

Kondo observes that his musical paregmenon relies on successions of shared “root intervals”.<6> Example 1 presents a reduced score of the first fourteen measures. The succession unfolds slowly, so that each sonic object can be savored for its distinctive configuration. To take Peacham’s definition literally, it is as if we are inside each unfolding paregmenon, experiencing its derivation from within. The first sonority in this context would seem an especially fruitful starting point; it voices an all-interval tetrachord, rich in potential “roots.” But even more palpable connections between sonorities are available to our audition. The use of common tones, a preference for minor ninths and their compounds, and recurrent semitone-tritone complexes are all features that one might take up in a more extensive analysis. The instrumental disposition of the work—a joining together of two disparate ‘instruments’ to create a third that, as Kondo notes, is somehow different from both—is no less involved in the collocating of sonorities. Example 2 reproduces the same music, but with attention to the actual scoring. Initially, we have the sense that each pitch pairs an instrument from each quartet, but this is quickly destabilized. A myriad of evanescent linear connections emanates from these pitch and timbral connections, in what Kondo terms a “pseudo-polyphony.”<7>

In this terrain of constant change, what does it mean for a sonority to recur? Indeed, the first sonority reappears, with only slight adjustment, on the downbeat of measure 13. Similar repetitions are seeded into the fabric of the composition, as they are in Kondo’s music in general; the act of juxtaposition can lead us in many directions, including apparently back to where we started.<8> Such events ward off a hearing which pays no heed to memory. Kondo’s music requires us to be alert to—and wary of—the constant possibility of renewing our path through recollection of its previous states. Indeed, recollection is as much a part of the experience of paregmenon as derivation. While listening, we are navigating a middle course between the experience of literal repetition and variation, what Kondo refers to as “pseudo-repetition.”<9> This pseudo-repetition suggests a particular approach to the reconstructive capacity of memory that aligns with the occasionally more humbling aspects of the experience: Kondo’s paregemenons destabilize the object one might remember. Certainty is always in question, and the possibility of error is constantly before us, just as it is in the practice of real memory.

Despite its richly connected surface, this opening music moves through a dizzying array of close or distant sonorities with no regular pulse beyond a constant pushing and pulling of chordal interactions. There is no single organizing reference, no textural center. Borrowing a term from William Caplin, we can refer to this music as manifesting ‘loose’ organization. His term becomes even more useful when we discover, later in the composition, the music suddenly aligning into a contrasting, ‘tight-knit’ pattern that features a dialogue in the style of a frieze pattern between alternating marimba duo and string quartet, about an insistent, refrain-like figure in the vibraphone.<10> The second such passage is shown on example 3. The intervals in the refrain seem responsive to the intervallic content of the duo and quartet, suggesting that a “root interval” may be derived from a process of distillation. At core, such a context allows us yet another format in which to experience the affinities at the heart of paregmenon; the anxieties of an unfamiliar terrain have given way to a sense of wonder at its fragile beauty.
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<1> Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence appeared first in 1577; I’ve used the slightly changed definition from the 1593 edition, available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Perseus%3Acollection%3APeachum_Garden (accessed January 10, 2018). The original wording appears in the OED. (His last name is occasionally spelled “Peachum”.)
<2> Peacham sources the Biblical example from Isaiah, although in this paraphrased form it appears in 1 Corinthians. The Shakespeare example comes from Jean-Marie Maguin’s useful catalogue, “Words as the Measure of Measure for Measure”: Shakespeare’s Use of Rhetoric in the Play”, Sillages critiques 15 (2013), at http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/2618?gathStatIcon=true&lang=en (accessed January 10, 2018).
<3> Kondo, liner notes for CD ALCD-57 (2000); the disc contains his Trio (moor), from 1982. For the landscape itself, see for instance the second picture at https://historicengland.org.uk/research/research-results/recent-research-results/south-west/dartmoor-nmp/ (accessed January 10, 2018).
<4> The work was premiered by the Quatuor Bozzini and Slagwerk Den Haag in November 2011. Unfortunately, there is no commercial recording available.
Kondo has recently commented on the properties of his titles: “When I give a name to a sound structure, I consider very carefully: if the sound construction has this name, what psychological image does it evoke in the listener?” Interview with Barbara Eckle, appearing in the liner notes to Wergo CD WER 7342 2 (2016)
<5> Personal communication; see also the composer’s dialogue with Stefan van Eycken that followed the premiere of Paregmenon: https://slagwerkdenhaag.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/interview-jo-kondo-stefan-van-eycken/ at 4:27 (accessed January 11, 2018). This is not a negative assessment by any means; he acknowledges that being Japanese undoubtedly affects his musical voice, but he has chosen to leave this unanalyzed. For an example of a recent attempt to link Kondo’s musical personality to specifically Japanese concepts, see John Liberatore, “Mutual Relationships: an Aesthetic Analysis of Jo Kondo’s High Window”, DMA dissertation, Eastman (2014): 24-28.
<6> Dialogue with van Eycken, at 2:14. In music theory, “root intervals” usually refers to the intervals between the roots of successive triads, a topic studied rigorously in contemporary neo-Riemannian theory; Kondo’s use is unrelated.
<7> An excellent introduction to “pseudo-polyphony” can be found in Liberatore, op. cit., 8-11.
<8> A reading of Kondo’s music particularly sensitive to the effects of different kinds of repetition is Paul Zukofsky’s essay, “Jo Kondo’s Still Life”, available at http://www.musicalobservations.com/publications/jo_kondos_still_life/ (accessed March 3, 2018).
<9> Kondo, “The Art of Being Ambiguous: From Listening to Composing,” Contemporary Music Review 2: 2 (1988), 7-29. The definition and related discussion are on pages 25-26.
<10> This alignment is all the more striking following some extremely fast music, in Kondo’s sen no ongaku [linear music] style. I borrow the ‘loose’ vs. ‘tight-knit’ distinction from Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
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Anton Vishio is an Assistant Professor at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ, where he teaches music theory and composition. His research involves analysis of a variety of composers of late 20th century music; recent papers have explored works by George Lewis, Priaulx Rainier, Brian Cherney, and Milton Babbitt.

By Jung-Min Lee

Unsuk Chin, born in South Korea and now based in Germany, has only occasionally engaged with traditional Korean or Asian music. Among a handful of examples is the last movement of Akrostichon-Wortspiel (1991), titled “Aus der alten Zeit,” described as “an ironic commentary on the traditional Korean court music” (it is left to the listeners to determine which features are based on Korean music and why they are “ironic.”)<1> She also wrote for the traditional Chinese instrument sheng in Šu for sheng and orchestra in 2009. She emphasized, however, that her motivation to write for a traditional Asian instrument was the new sound possibilities revealed in the playing of the virtuoso sheng player Wu Wei, rather than a broader interest in mixing Asian and Western music. The first movement of Chin’s Cello Concerto, written in 2008 and revised in 2013, is a rare case in which she refers to specific element of Korean traditional music, with the subtitle “Aniri.” Yet Chin has not explained what that subtitle means, or how it relates to the movement, leaving it up to listeners and performers to make their own interpretations.

Let me first introduce the term aniri, before offering a reading of how it may explain a structural aspect of the first movement of the Cello Concerto. Aniri is an element of the Korean traditional vocal genre pansori, a narrative epic drama performed by a vocalist, soriggun, and a percussionist, gosu. The vocalist tells a story through singing (sori), speech (aniri) and theatrical gestures (nuhreum). One may understand pansori as a solo opera, and aniri as a recitative.

Aniri in pansori serves specific functions. First, it drives the narrative forward by connecting different episodes of sori. In the sori (singing) parts, the performer details specific moments within the story or sing a monologue, often indulging in, much to audience’s amusement, various delicious onomatopoeias and mimetic words, which are rich in the Korean language. During aniri, the omniscient singer provides backgrounds to those moments elaborated in sori, thereby helping audiences understand the overall storyline. For example, the singer can act as a narrator and inform a change of scenery or temporal space. Or, taking on the roles of various characters, the singer may explicate their emotional states or enact dialogues. Serving sometimes as a bridge between sori episodes, aniri helps audiences place themselves in the luxuriously elaborate storytelling. Second, aniri provides a resting point for both the singer and spectators. Such a breather is necessary because a pansori performance can last hours—sometimes up to eight hours (in modern performances vocalists choose certain parts of a story).<2> A singer can rest his or her voice during aniri, while the shifts between rhythmless aniri and rhythmic sori helps refresh the attention of the spectators.

Singer Sook-sun Ahn, drummer Hwa-young Chung; the performance starts with aniri at 00:38. From Sugung-ga [Song of the underwater castle], tale of a rabbit who flees a sea king’s palace using his wit after being lured to go underwater by a turtle, a servant of the palace looking for a rabbit’s liver to use as medicine for his ailing king; the scenes in the video clip are conversations between the rabbit and the turtle (00:38-7:07) then between the rabbit and the sea king (7:11-end)

An interesting connection can be made between the role of aniri in pansori and that of the pitch center in the first movement of the Cello Concerto. Each of the three movements of the Cello Concertois organized around a single pitch center, with another pitch of secondary importance. (Chin has previously employed a similar strategy in her vocal chamber work Akrostichon-Wortspiel). In the first movement, the pitch center is G#, and the secondary pitch is Bb. The pitch centrality is apparent from very beginning: G# is the first sound of the movement, ringing mysteriously in the harps and then reinforced by the orchestra through the rest of the movement. The G# is also often the starting and ending points of the solo cello parts as well as a marker of change in texture.

Above all, the pitch center serves as a seed from which musical energy germinates. Take, for instance, the beginning of the movement. The harp plays G# with pizzicato; the cello adds a layer by momentarily playing Bb, the secondary pitch, and then converges onto G#. Soon join the percussion and the double bass, which plays G#2 in harmonics to create shimmering, ethereal timbre that is characteristic of Chin’s music. The layers of sound centering around the pitch center form the ground from which the cello can soar and plunge into an abyss. Also, the anchoring pitch, reverberating warmly and mysteriously, creates room for the cello to revel in the magic of different musical moments—just as a pansori singer can relish the details of memorable moments of a plot during sori because aniri provides the backbone of the storyline.

As mentioned, the pitch center appears in between different musical episodes, each defined by distinct texture, rhythm, or tempi. Much as aniri connects various sori sections, the pitch center is the bridge of each transition in the Cello Concerto. Tracing the recurring pedal on G# reveals the form of the movement, which can be understood as vaguely following sonata form: an introduction of the central idea, development, (cadenza), and a restatement of that idea. Here, the central idea is the pitch center that is only minimally “developed” in the first two statements (up to measure 40). And then, through five different episodes, the music explores distant places; after each excursion the G# returns, reminding listeners that that is where we began and where we ought to return. (Ironically, the movement ends with a dissolution of that central pitch: after a lengthy drone on G#, the cello line free-falls through a long glissando, then the entire orchestra explodes, playing sfffffz, against which the cello plays a semi-aleatoric passage. The effect is like countless shimmering starlets after a big bang; the movement ends in pppppp.)

Despite similarities with traditional sonata form, there is an important distinction: the pitch center of the Cello Concerto remains unchanged and returns regularly, and a sense of development is conveyed mainly through an increasing intensity of each episode. There is no departure from or recovery of the “home pitch.” Such regular recurrence of a single pitch echoes a certain linear quality of Korean traditional music, which is driven melodically and rhythmically, rather than by the logic of harmonic progression. Also, the sequential arrangement of each section of the first movement of the Cello Concerto resembles the alternation between sori and aniri of pansori. In both cases, because of this linear structure, there is a sense of openness that almost seems to allow flexibility of the length of a performance (in fact, a pansori performance can be lengthened or shortened extemporaneously).

Finally, thinking of the Cello Concerto and its use of the pitch center in connection to pansori, we may imagine that, maybe, Chin conceived the work as a sort of a story. But even if that was the case, we won’t know what the story is, because Chin is often not keen on revealing her stories. She likes her audiences to imagine. Even in her vocal works, she intentionally creates texts that are not meant to be understood, but rather are intended to be experienced, so we should “not try to understand.” (This was her explicit request to the audience at one performance of her Akrostichon-Wortspiel.)<3> Often drawing from multiple cultures in a single work—as she did in Kalá (2000; uses literary works in German, French, Danish, Finnish and Latin), Miroirs des temps (2001; employs a Portuguese poem and Ciconia’s works),<4> or Cantatrix Sopranica (2005; draws from American and German literature, and a song from the Tang dynasty)<5>—she avoids attaching specific messages to the texts. This tendency may also arise from her Bhabha-esque belief in the untenability of the notion of “pure” culture. “Cultures evolve through the process of exchanges and interlaces,” she notes. “I think that no society has an absolutely pure, uninfluenced cultural root.”<6> Chin’s uncontextualized use of the term aniri, given without an explanation of what it is or how it is used in the Cello Concerto, evokes our imagination. Her terse hint opens the door to multiple imaginative readings, one of which is explored here.

You can listen to Unsuk Chin’s Cello Concerto here:

Performed by the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra; Alban Gerchardt, cello; Myung-whun Chung, conductor, recorded and released by Deutsche Grammophon, August 2014

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<1>Unsuk Chin, “Akrostichon-Wortspiel. Sieben Szenen aus Märchen für Sopran und Ensemble (1991–1993)” [Acrostic Wordplay, “Seven scenes from fairy-tales for soprano and ensemble (1991–1993)”], in Im Spiegel der Zeit: Die Komponistin Unsuk Chin, ed. Stefan Drees, (Mainz: Schott, 2011), 60.
<2>Robert Koehler and Ji-yeon Byeon, Traditional Music: Sounds in Harmony with Nature, eds. Jin-hyuk Lee and Colin A. Mouat (Seoul: Korea Foundation: Seoul Selection, 2011), 56.
<3>The performance took place on November 11, 2015 in the “Beyond Darmstadt” concert by Curtis 20/21 Ensemble, of which Chin was composer-in-residence for 2015–2016. A video clip of this performance is available on YouTube: “Alize Rozsnyai, Soprano “Akrostichon Wortspiel”—Unsuk Chin,” YouTube video, 21:10, posted by “Alize Rozsnyai,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S- aZw6r2-wM (accessed 12 February 2016).
<4>See Program Note on Boosey & Hawkes’s website: “Chin, Unsuk: Miroirs des temps,” Boosey & Hawkes, last accessed February 23, 2018, http://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Unsuk-Chin-Miroirs-des-temps/5584.
<5>Chin adapts literary works by novelist Harry Mathews and German dramatist Arno Holz in this work. “Chin, Unsuk: Cantatrix Sopranica,” Boosey & Hawkes, last accessed February 23, 2018, http://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Unsuk-Chin-Cantatrix-Sopranica/45367.
<6>Unsuk Chin and Patrick Hahn, “Honjae doen jŏnchesung kwa ŏnŏ yuhhŭI” [Mixed Identity and Wordplay], in Stefan Derees, and Hŭi-kyŏng Yi, Chin Ŭn-suk, miraeŭi akporŭl kŭrit: ‘Arŭsŭ noba' Chin Ŭn-suk, hyŏndaeumakŭl ‘ŭmak’ ŭro mandŭlda [Unsuk Chin, drawing the score of the future: ‘Ars Nova’ Unsuk Chin turns contemporary music into “music”] (Mainz: Schott, 2011), 58-59. See Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
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Jung-Min (Mina) Lee has recently earned her PhD from Duke University with a dissertation on Korean National Identity and Modern Music after World War II. She has taught at the Montclair State University and Baekseok Arts University in Seoul; next year, she will teach courses on Music in Modern Korea and K-pop at the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department at Duke University. Her study on Korean composer Chung Tae-bong has been published in a collection of essays by the Seoul National University Press in 2017. Current research interests include Isang Yun’s early serial music as well as the reception of Béla Bartók in South Korea in the post-WWII decade.

By Alexander K. Rothe

Premiered in 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Afterword is a two-act opera composed by George Lewis to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). I approach the opera as an opportunity to examine the role of community and empathy in Lewis’s works. Though Lewis discusses empathy in terms of a specific community—the AACM on the South Side of Chicago—I apply his thinking to the role of the listener in general. Lewis’s musical works, especially Afterword, demonstrate the sound of empathy—the sound of pushing existing boundaries while at the same time calling on the active participation of the listener as a creative improviser.

(Afterword, Act 1, scene 4, from left to right: Julian Terrell Otis, Gwendolyn Brown, and Joelle Lamarre. Photo by George Lewis)

In a recent interview, George Lewis describes his conception of community and empathy in Afterword:

Community is essential to the opera’s themes. What we’re seeing is a community in formation. People are coming together to find commonalities, and they need to come together because nobody is really supporting them. […] And we’re seeing the stresses and strains of community formation—disagreements of different kinds. But at the same time there is a need to forge a community that is accepting of different points of view. This is when you get to the empathy part. Empathy is also fundamental to the creation of this community; we need empathy to establish community. People need to be receptive and open. They need to even make themselves a little vulnerable, and we see this in the opera as well. There is a sense in which people aren’t sure what’s going to happen.<1>

At the AACM’s first meeting in May 1965, musicians gathered to discuss how they could survive in an environment where black musicians were being pushed out of the South Side of Chicago. Confronted with an exploitative music industry and a city council that sought to shut down music venues on the South Side, the musicians voted to form an organization for the promotion of creative music—original music outside the restrictive genre markers of the music industry.

A key aspect of the AACM from its inception, genre mobility refers to transcending the existing musical system and its genre boundaries, drawing on a broad range of different musical languages. Through genre mobility, AACM members were able to resist restrictive genre markers while exploring new networks and infrastructural pathways.

As described by Lewis in his 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, in the early days of the AACM, empathy was especially evident in Muhal Richard Abrams’s aim of “awakening the psyche” of his fellow creative musicians. On the one hand, this was a commitment to original music and the need to be supportive of fellow creative musicians. On the other, it involved concern for the “spiritual growth” of the community—to provide free education for young musicians and present imaginative programs of creative music to the public.

The Sound of Empathy and Genre Mobility

Drawing on the scholarship of Suzanne Keen, I interpret empathy as a shared experience and feeling. Keen discusses empathy as including two aspects: it is a spontaneously shared emotion that also involves cognitive perspective taking.<2> This perspective taking is always shaped by cultural and individual factors of memory and experience. In a chapter on empathy, improvisation, and embodied cognition, Vijay Iyer likewise stresses how our perception of others is grounded in a culturally-situated understanding of embodied action.<3> According to Iyer, empathy is a kind of action understanding that activates similar motor programs in the observer’s brain when experiencing music—i.e. bodies in motion.

Ryan Dohoney’s research on Julius Eastman has been instrumental in shaping my thinking about empathy in terms of genre mobility. In a chapter on Julius Eastman’s life and music in New York City in the period between 1976 and 1990, Dohoney examines how Eastman was able to connect diverse networks at venues such as The Kitchen, Environ, and Paradise Garage.<4> During this period, Eastman composed and performed music that defies a single genre label—mixing extended vocal techniques, experimental music, improvisation, and disco.

George Lewis’s music demonstrates a similar sort of empathy through genre mobility and drawing on multiple networks. In Lewis’s music, the sound of empathy is of pushing existing boundaries, giving rise to a feeling of instability that calls for the active participation of the listener as a creative improviser. In the process of doing so, it activates the desire for change in everyday life.

(Afterword, Act 1, scene 4, 1:45:44-1:58:19; Ojai Music Festival performance, June 9, 2017, Libbey Bowl, Ojai, CA)

The sound of empathy is especially evident in scene 4 of Afterword, entitled “First Meeting.” Based on Lewis’s transcript of an audio recording of the founding AACM meeting in May 1965, this scene depicts the musicians in the process of deciding to perform only original music. As the musicians discuss various types of music, Lewis uses the opportunity to compose music that comments on music (music about music)—a tradition that stretches back to Monteverdi’s Orfeo.

A close listening of this scene reveals that there is no over-arching global form. Instead, Lewis works with modules—approximately ten to fifteen measures of music at a time—which he brings back, but changes with each repetition. The layering of ostinatos and sustained chords results in a thick, complex sound. Lewis creates a shared feeling of instability by means of jump cuts between sections and extended techniques that destabilize pitch (e.g., glissando, microtonal inflection, tremolo). In the vocal writing, he contrasts recitative-like passages, which are unmetered and occur over sustained chords, with metered arioso passages. Lewis stresses the clarity of the text through syllabic treatment.

A key technique of genre mobility is musical signifyin(g), a practice of quoting or referring to preexisting material that in turn changes it by adding a new layer of meaning—whether playful, subversive, or as a means of paying tribute to someone or something (on musical signifyin(g), see Samuel Floyd).<5> Afterword’s scene 4 includes a number of examples of musical signifyin(g). When soprano Joelle Lamarre’s avatar sings “we thought of all the things we are,” the music references the jazz standard “All the Things You Are” (1:47:07). Given that the AACM members rejected the genre marker of jazz, this reference is a playful subversion of existing genre boundaries. When the text alludes to music on the radio (“The other music is already being presented; record companies, disk jockeys, everyone is promoting it”), Lewis signifies on the groove-oriented nature of much popular black music in the mid-1960s (funk and R&B; 1:51:38). Lastly, whenever the text refers to original or creative music (1:48:19, 1:50:01, 1:54:16, 1:56:51), Lewis layers multiple loops on top of each other. He is signifyin(g) on the idea of creative music as involving the complex layering of sounds. In sum, we encounter a sense of empathy through the shared feeling of instability along with the shared experience of Lewis pushing existing genre boundaries.

The Improvising Listener

The absence of a global form, the complex layering of loops, and stark contrasts of sound—these are all techniques that call on the active participation of the listener as a creative improviser. While Afterword’s score is fully notated—i.e. there is no improvisation at the level of the performers—this does not exclude the possibility of the improvising listener. Lewis writes of the listener:

[...] We can understand the experience of listening to music as very close to the experience of the improviser. Listening itself, an improvisative act engaged in by everyone, announces a practice of active engagement with the world, where we sift, interpret, store, and forget, in parallel with action and fundamentally articulated with it.<6>

In other words, the listener participates in the performance as an improviser, which is akin to the experience of improvisation in everyday life. In Afterword’s scene 4, the improvising listener navigates multiple layers of sound and creates a pathway through disparate blocks of sound. The fact that the singers’ text always remains in the foreground in no way diminishes the role of the listener as creative improviser. By experiencing this scene in the context of a musical language of instability, we have all the more appreciation for the difficult task confronted by AACM musicians at the first meeting. While the listener to some degree self-identifies with the AACM musicians, empathetic listening in this case refers more broadly to the shared feeling of instability and pushing existing boundaries.

In recent years, empathy—as a mode of emotionally engaging with music and literature—has received much criticism. Molly Abel Travis argues for the necessity of moving beyond the self-identification of empathy, instead adopting an attitude of openness to experiences of difference that “interrupt our epistemological projects to contain the other.”<7> However, it is exactly this attitude of openness that Lewis’s opera fosters by pushing existing genre boundaries. In doing so, he creates a shared feeling of instability that simultaneously activates the listener’s own mobility as a creative improviser. As listeners to Afterword, we encounter a model for thinking about improvisation in everyday life, seeking similar experiences of pushing boundaries of social injustice.
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<1>Lewis quoted in Alexander K. Rothe, “An Interview with the Composer,” VAN Magazine June 22, 2017.
<2>Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4 & 27.
<3>Vijay Iyer, “Improvisation, Action Understanding, and Music Cognition with and without Bodies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, Volume 1, ed. George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 81.
<4>Ryan Dohoney, “A Flexible Musical Identity: Julius Eastman in New York City, 1976-90,” in Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, ed. Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2015). See especially 126f.
<5>Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., “African-American Modernism, Signifyin(g), and Black Music,” in The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 87-99.
<6>George E. Lewis, “Mobilitas Animi: Improvising Technologies, Intending Chance,” Parallax 13, no. 4 (2007): 113.
<7>Molly Abel Travis, “Beyond Empathy: Narrative Distancing and Ethics in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Journal of Narrative Theory 40, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 232.
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Alexander K. Rothe is a Core Lecturer at Columbia University, where he completed his PhD in Historical Musicology in 2015. His interests are opera staging, Regieoper, Wagner Studies, and new music. He is currently working on a book project on stagings of Wagner’s Ring cycle and afterlives of 1968 in divided Germany. His research has been published by Musical Quarterly and Tempo, and he has received research grants from the Fulbright Program and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

By Lauren Eldridge

"Care for me, care for me, you said you care for me
There for me, there for me, said you'd be there for me"

This couplet serves as the foundation for both the songs at #1 and #9 on the Apple Music charts as of Friday, April 13, 2018 by two artists listed several times on the Billboard Hot 100. Drake's "Nice for What" and Cardi B's "Be Careful" both sample "Ex-Factor" by Lauryn Hill (1998). By reading sampling as a vital creative process, these three songs become links in a chain connecting four decades of black American music.

Beyond the coterminous release of "Nice for What" and "Be Careful," there is much to think through in regards to the past and future tenses of "Ex-Factor," a single from Hill's 1998 album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.<1> "Ex-Factor" itself is the product of a sample of a sample of a cover. Hill's opening verse - "It could all be so simple" - draws on "Can It Be All So Simple" by the Wu-Tang Clan (1993), which in turn samples Gladys Knight's voice in "The Way We Were" (1974), a cover of the same song by Barbra Streisand (1973). The first few moments of "Ex-Factor" are reminiscent of "Lovin' You" by Minnie Riperton (1974), with instrumentation that resembles acoustic piano and guitar, respectively, and chirping birds. This evocation of 1970's soul music, an intentional nostalgia meant to signal a dreamscape, serves to establish a sonic framework for the unrequited affection of the singer; the listener is meant to understand that this story will not end well. The specific callback to Riperton is in sharp contrast with the rest of the album, which combines such disparate sonic forces as the record scratches on "Lost Ones" and the gentle finger snaps on "Nothing Even Matters." Yet, each of these elements have the effect of invoking a sense of place, whether that scene is a street rap battle (Lost Ones) or a café ballad (Nothing Even Matters).

Though the beginning of "Ex-Factor" pulls from the past, it is the song's hook that is sampled by Drake and Cardi B. "Be Careful" plays with the word "care," eliding the refrain "be careful with me" with "care for me," resulting in the polysemic "be careful with, care for me, always said that you'd be there for me, there for me." The subject matter aligns closely with that of "Ex-Factor"; once again, the listener should not hold their breath for a happy ending. In stark contrast, "Nice for What" is ebullient in nature, praising its subject matter. The rapper (Drake) rebukes the singer (Hill) as she confesses "I keep letting you back in; how can I explain myself?" In this song, "care for me" becomes an incessant backdrop reinforcing the unnecessary nature of concern. Broken promises, intoned over and over again, lock together in a dance floor to which the listener is called by the emcee. But who is this emcee, especially in a song that samples from a subgenre of hip hop dependent on the right voice to get the party started?

"Nice for What" is an interpretation of bounce music from the North American Gulf South region. As a genre, bounce can be distinguished by its particular use of samples - extremely short sound clips are looped together to create a tapestry of danceable music. This music is then mixed and remade in live performance. Because a great deal of importance is placed on live performance, songs may have two subjects: one that can be grasped through the lyrics, and the other following the command of the master of ceremonies. After listening to a few moments of "Nice for What," it becomes clear that the dance caller isn't actually Drake, but another's voice at a remove, reproduced in lower definition. The sampled figure arguably more present than the spectral timbre of Lauryn Hill's nostalgia is bounce musician Big Freedia.<2> Her voice is frequently instrumentalized, mechanized, and compartmentalized into ever-reducing fragments of phrases that build new thoughts, new jokes, and new insights (see, for example, the descending chromatic scale that introduces the "Queen Diva" on the track "Explode" from Just Be Free).

At about 2' 07", Big Freedia interjects Drake's isolating call and response with a call and response of her own that literally crackles with liveness. The track abruptly shifts from a blend of smoothly constructed studio voices to Big Freedia calling on a microphone with feedback and an audience screaming in response. Drake does manage to signify on the verbosity of bounce music, a verbal density that results from multiple levels of sampling. Now "watch the breakdown": the track reduces all the way down to the Hill sample to rebuild over the next thirty seconds or so into its most recognizable bounce state. In order to fulfill the requisites of the genre, Drake himself is sampled, cutting and mixing earlier sing-song fragments into the 3-3-2 rhythm that undergirds the bounce.

Gladys Knight begins her version of "The Way We Were" (and the Wu Tang Clan's) by asserting that "everybody's talking about the good old days," but continues to wonder at the inevitability of the passage of time, and that future people, perhaps even her descendants would refer to her turbulent present reality as the "good old days."Lauryn Hill has noted the significance of her song being sampled in live performance, thus elevating it to the level of a "classic." These examples demonstrate the power of music legacy, in that sampling provides the opportunity to hear simultaneously "the way we were" and also what we might become.
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<1>This year marks the 20th year anniversary of this celebrated album's release, for which Hill has planned a 26-city tour.
<2>Though beyond the scope of this piece, Big Freedia is a major national representative of this otherwise regional genre. Helpful resources in understanding her media reception can be found in the writing of Myles Johnson for Vice and Ben Dandridge-Lemco for the Fader.
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Lauren Eldridge is an administrator and lecturer at Spelman College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Music in 2016, and usually writes about classical music in Haiti.

By Sam Parler

When Beyoncé took the stage with the Dixie Chicks to perform “Daddy Lessons” at the 2016 CMA Awards, she reignited the long-simmering debate over country music’s racial identity. Reactions were swift and polarizing. Over social media, some country fans invoked race to decry Beyoncé as an opportunistic interloper; as a black pop singer, they argued, Beyoncé didn’t really fit the typical rural, white image of “real” country. (Predictably, internet trolls engaged in more overt race-baiting.) Beyoncé’s defenders responded by citing country music’s long history of African American performers, with nods to Ray Charles, who recorded an album of country standards in 1962, as well as 1970s Hall-of-Famer Charley Pride and contemporary singer/songwriter Darius Rucker. This echoed the assessment of country music scholars, who have long acknowledged the genre’s indebtedness to black musicians.<1>

But the question remains: if country music has always had its share of black performers, why do audiences still think of it as a genre primarily by and for white people? The answer is, of course, complicated. In my dissertation, “Musical Racialism and Racial Nationalism in Commercial Country Music, 1915-1953,” I focus on the role of media and respectability politics in country music’s early turn towards a white identity. In the 1920s, many of the earliest country musicians projected a working-class image, epitomized in the figure of the hillbilly. As the genre grew in visibility and commercial viability, however, some musicians sought to deflect this negative stereotype in order to expand potential listening and purchasing audiences. To do so, these musicians often explicitly invoked a white identity to reframe country as a timeless, upwardly mobile, and American genre. As I argue, this shift relied upon the cultural logic of racial segregation and white supremacy as well as new technologies that divorced sound from the performing body. Over the course of four performer case studies, I examine how different media industries of recording, radio, publishing, and film deliberately crafted this white image, and how this ultimately made country music appear more respectable by midcentury.

Efforts to define country music as white began with the recording and radio industries in the 1920s and 1930s. As Karl Hagstrom Miller has documented, record companies developed “hillbilly” and “race records” categories to advertise vernacular music by white and black musicians respectively, regardless of musical style.<2> The resulting “musical color line” obscured performers of color who contributed to the stylistic and institutional development of country music. The Native Hawaiian steel guitarist Sol Hoʻopiʻi, whose innovative approach to the steel guitar was adopted by contemporaneous white musicians, was one such performer. (For example, compare versions of “Ten Tiny Toes” as recorded by Hoʻopiʻi and by white hillbilly artist Jimmie Davis.) Despite stylistic overlap, Hoʻopiʻi’s music was advertised by record companies as an exotic novelty, a view reinforced by his work in the Hollywood film industry (such as the 1932 short Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle). Hoʻopiʻi’s cultural identity thus stood in direct contrast to country music’s presumptive Anglo-Saxon origins and rustic authenticity, even while he was playing the same tunes.

By comparison, audiences accepted African American harmonica virtuoso DeFord Bailey as a country musician precisely because radio rendered his performances racially anonymous. Bailey performed regularly on the Grand Ole Opry radio program in the 1930s. In the context of these country music broadcasts, audiences heard his performances as white or un-raced rather than black. This racial confusion was by design: broadcasters discouraged Bailey from singing or speaking on the air and obscured his race in publicity materials. Bailey’s onomatopoeic repertory, including his popular “Pan American Blues,” also eschewed any obvious racial markers. Investigation of both Bailey and Hoʻopiʻi thus exposes the ironies of country music’s putative white identity and the ways in which new media amplified or masked racial difference.

As country gained greater national exposure in the 1930s and 1940s, some performers sought to escape the genre’s working-class stereotypes. White performers Carson Robison and Gene Autry both promoted an explicitly white, American identity that sought to appeal to middle-class audiences, yet their paths to middle-class respectability were strikingly different. Robison made his career as a singer-songwriter in New York, ingratiating himself with pop music publishers that typically barred country music as undesirable. Realizing his outsider position, in professional circles Robison struck an ambivalent tone towards country’s working-class status, emphasizing instead its Anglo-American origins and miming the rhetoric and formal sophistication of Tin Pan Alley in his compositions. During World War II, his mimicry included over a dozen anti-Japanese songs employing racial epithets like “yellow scum” that mirrored Tin Pan Alley stereotypes. Perhaps intentionally, in stressing the patriotic zeal of country music, these jingoistic songs helped Robison to achieve greater professional security within mainstream pop while also making country music appear whiter.

Like Robison, western films by Gene Autry downplayed country music’s working-class status, this time by swapping out the hillbilly stereotype for that of the rugged, all-American cowboy.<3> Autry’s performances of country music figure prominently in these films, underscoring whiteness through contrast with the culture of American Indians. In particular, Autry’s politically-conscious “pro-Indian” films in the late 1940s argued that the socioeconomic challenges faced by Indian communities could be remedied via assimilation to white cultural norms, including country music. This scene from The Last Round-Up (1947), in which Autry joins Indian students to perform “She’ll Be Comin’ ’Round the Mountain” at a reservation school, dramatizes this assimilationist ideology nicely. As the Indian characters struggle to adapt, country music is reframed as a central facet of white American culture, no longer marginalized as working-class and disreputable.

As with many other genres, country music was and is on one hand a fundamentally multiracial music, and at the same time inescapably racialized. Contrary to popular historical narratives of its origins, country music’s white identity was not inherent in the music itself but intentionally constructed by performers, entrepreneurs, and audiences. Far from denigrating country music as uniquely retrograde in its racial politics, however, this dissertation suggests that a middle-class investment in whiteness is largely responsible for country’s racial identity. As in other corners of classical and popular music, messages of racial nationalism by the likes of Autry and Robison arose as a strategic response to class-based concerns over the music’s social prestige.<4> This dissertation also continues the important work of documenting the careers and artistic influence of country musicians of color. Uncovering the contributions of figures like Bailey and Ho‘opi‘i reveals the limitations and contradictions of current genre labels and should point us towards a more nuanced, less segregated history of U.S. popular music.
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<1>Some examples include Pamela Foster, My Country: The African Diaspora’s Country Music Heritage (Nashville, TN: My Country, 1998); and My Country, Too: The Other Black Music (Nashville, TN: My Country, 2000); David Morton and Charles K. Wolfe, DeFord Bailey: A Black Star in Early Country Music (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); Diane Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); and the CD compilation From Where I Stand: The Black Experience in Country Music (Warner Bros. 46428, 3 CDs, 1998).
<2>Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
<3>For a more thorough comparison of the hillbilly and cowboy figures, see Bill C. Malone, Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).
<4>This was hardly a new phenomenon. In the early 1900s, first- to third-generation immigrants like George M. Cohan and Al Jolson combined nationalist sentiments and racial humor, including blackface, to help shore up their whiteness for middle-class Broadway audiences. Beth Levy has observed a similar strategy of racial nationalism among twentieth-century American composers like Aaron Copland and Roy Harris, who used cowboy and frontier themes to define themselves both within and against the European-dominated world of classical music. See Elizabeth Titrington Craft, “Becoming American Onstage: Broadway Narratives of Immigrant Experiences in the United States” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014); Beth E. Levy, Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); and Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants and the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
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Samuel Parler is Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at Denison University. His research focuses on respectability politics in the U.S. music industry, considering how issues of class, race, and media intersect to create new commercial genres and aesthetic hierarchies. This includes current projects on early country music, 1960s novelty songs, and the rise of budget classical recordings. He is a recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship and the Mark Tucker Award from the Society for American Music. He completed his Ph.D. in historical musicology at Harvard University in 2017.

By Matthew J. Jones

Singer-songwriter, producer, and actor Troye Sivan first made a name for himself in the Land Down Under with a hugely successful YouTube channel. Sivan’s cherub-next-door charm, choirboy voice, self-deprecating humor, and sincerity were a winning combination. His videos racked up millions of hits, and soon Hollywood took notice. Sivan landed a role in the X-men franchise while writing the songs for his debut EP. TRXYE (2014) rose to #5 on the Billboard 200, and his acclaimed full-length studio debut, Blue Neighbourhood (2015), confirmed that Sivan was a rising star to watch. In 2018, he released three singles ahead of his sophomore studio album: MY, MY, MY; THE GOOD SIDE; and the title track, BLOOM.<1>

“Bloom” is what I call a “bottom power ballad.” The punny significance of this term is threefold. First, “bottom” is gay slang for the receptive partner in male-male sexual encounters (“top” describes the penetrative partner). Men on the “bottom” are often stereotyped as passive, effeminate, and powerless, maybe even bent on self-shattering. Second, I’m making a rather obvious pun on the 1980s power ballad, a genre that offers musicians (most often men who otherwise rock) an opportunity to explore their sensitive, and some might say feminine, sides. Musically, however, “Bloom” is not a power ballad but a mid-tempo electronic dance tune. In making a connection between the power ballad and “Bloom,” I draw less from the musical semiotics of the genre than from a discourse that surrounds the power ballad, a discourse that Spin music journalist Charles Aaron characterizes in terms of male vulnerability, humiliation, and shame. Finally, I suspect that Bloom/ “Bloom” can complicate or queer the notion of “bottom power,” a Nigerian turn of phrase used to describe women’s reliance on sex/sexuality to access male power and privilege. I first learned the phrase from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TedTalk, WESHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS, and I borrow then playfully misuse it here.

Situating Troye
Journalists trumpeted Sivan’s arrival as the harbinger of a new pop era. As The New York Times recently announced, he’s “here, he’s queer, get used to it,” effectively turning a Queer Nation activist slogan from the 1990s into a retro byline for Sivan’s popstar brand. Comparisons to Freddie Mercury, George Michael, Elton John, and Boy George abound; however, such analogies often obscure crucial differences surrounding each man’s status as a gay entertainer. For these older gay men, midcentury homophobia, Reaganism/Thatcherism, and AIDS created a dissonant buzz deep in the mix of their careers. Mercury’s rise to fame overlapped with the Gay Liberation era in the US and the UK, but for a celebrity of his stature, being out was career suicide. Mercury only had to look at Jobriath, the first out star signed to a major label, to see how quickly the stain of queerness in a homophobic culture could destroy a career. He struggled to balance his larger-than-life persona as the front man of one of rock’s most prominent acts with a semblance of normalcy in his life away from Queen. While Mercury played coy with the press about his sexuality, he released a statement just hours before his death in 1991 in which he acknowledged that he was living with AIDS. Notoriously private off-stage, Michael was outed after his 1998 arrest for lewd behavior in a Los Angeles men’s room, though rumors about his sexuality dogged the singer for most of the preceding decade. He occasionally created music about his experiences as a gay man. JESUSTO A CHILD (1996) mourns the death of Michael’s partner, Brazilian designer Anselmo Feleppa (who died of an AIDS-related brain hemorrhage), while OUTSIDE (1998) responds directly to the scandal of his arrest.

A product of the Internet age, Sivan’s coming out was mass-mediated from the start. At eighteen, he seized control of his digital narrative in a coming out video that spoke to millions of LGBTQ kids around the globe. His family has been openly supportive, and his fan base accepted him as a gay man more or less from day one, evidenced by the fact that his covers of songs by Adele and others, which use male love-object pronouns, have been viewed millions of times. In many ways, he has more in common with Rufus Wainwright, whose sexuality has been inscribed on his music, music videos, album art, and both on- and off-stage persona since his 1998 debut, than with Michael, Mercury, or Elton John. Family and fan support does not mean that Sivan is immune to homophobia; nor do I mean to equate some mythical, authentic queerness with adversity in a simplistic way. Nevertheless, it is important to point out some key differences in Sivan’s status as an openly-gay public figure and those who made such openness possible. Whereas journalists gloss over or ignore this history, Sivan himself has done his homework and acknowledges the importance of previous generations of LGBTQ activism in his music video HEAVEN.

That Sivan’s work speaks directly to gay audiences, especially adolescents, is critically important given that LGBTQ youth often turn to media and popular culture, film, and books for guidance—a process that anthropologist Kath Weston calls “tracking the gay imaginary” (255-62). Queer visibility is key to reducing elevated rates of depression, anxiety, self-harming behaviors, and suicidal ideation among LGBTQ youth, who also represent the largest number of homeless people under the age of twenty-one. Sivan is helping move the needle. For instance, the BLUE NEIGHBORHOOD trilogy follows a fictional romance between two young men, portrayed by Sivan and model Matthew Eriksson. As of this writing, it has more than 6.8 million views on Sivan’s YouTube channel alone—a remarkable achievement for a young gay artist.

Growing Up Troye
Sivan’s growth from adorable child star to LGBT icon is documented in his social media accounts. In 2007, at age twelve, he began posting videos, mostly covers of songs by others which Sivan sang in his living room. In 2012, he added a vlog and began to connect with other YouTube stars. Sivan’s youthful YouTube persona was beloved for his wide-eyed innocence, prodigious musical ability, and fearlessness in speaking about a variety of personal and political topics. As he matured into late adolescence, his image evolved into that of an erudite, self-deprecating, but widely knowledgeable young man who still had an undeniable cherubic charm. Blue Neighbourhood positions Sivan as a kind of uber-millennial: stylish, somewhat world-weary, yet still possessing his schoolboy innocence. An Australian Rolling Stone review remarked that Sivan “delivers these quiet gems of young wisdom with enough humility to sound endearing.”<2> However, Sivan is not destined to remain a starry-eyed teen idol forever.

Sivan, 2007

Sivan, 2015

Blue Neighbourhood, 2015

For decades, artsy pop stars have tapped into the potential of an unstable or evolving star text. David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Cher, Madonna, Annie Lennox, and Lady Gaga are all stars for whom reinvention is, or was, a way of life. Notably, many in this list either self-identify as LGBTQ themselves or have devoted queer followings. Likewise, Sivan is revamping his image. From Blue Neighbourhood to Bloom, there’s been a noticeable shift in the iconography of his music videos, photography, live performances, and social media. He made headlines for his appearance at the 2018 Met Gala in New York where he paired androgynous makeup with a sanguine tuxedo and a mesh shirt, and the June 2018 issue of Attitude christens him a “boy wonder” with a “grimy, sexy new sound.”

Sivan, 2018

Sivan’s sexy new androgyne image seems to have been inspired by the work of Melbourne-based 3D artist Jason Ebeyer, who created the Bloom lyric video. Taking inspiration from online subcultures, erotica, and technology, Ebeyer’s digital art explores the worlds of light and color as well as darkness and shadow in trippy, shimmering tableaux that blur the boundary between reality and the hallucinogenic world of dreams.

“Earthly Erotica” (2017)

“Fortune Queen” (2018)

“Bloom” (2018)

Liquid surfaces, traditionally beautiful physiques, and overt sexual content signal Sivan’s emergence as a “mature” pop star. Similar techniques have been used by many celebrities, but it is especially common for women in entertainment industries to break with their “innocent” pasts and emerge fully sexual(ized) in order to remain in the game. Britney Spears famously transformed from seductive schoolgirl to outright vixen, and Christina Aguilera shocked with her shift from teen pop princess to “Dirty” superstar. Such changes can be empowering or inspiring for celebrities who wish to move on from their status as child stars to adult entertainers, but feminist critics also argue that this can be a trap. According to media scholar Sut Jhally, women in pop culture face two choices: hypersexualization or obsolescence. Male pop stars have also transitioned from teen idols to music men in this way—though often without the nasty consequences that adhere to women. George Michael, for instance, used macho biker iconography (coded as uber-masculine in straight culture and hypersexual in gay culture) to break with his Day-Glo Wham! past and became a legend.

Wham, c.1984

Michael, c. 1987

Attention to his physical appearance dominates discourse about Sivan. In photos, Sivan’s body is frequently positioned in reclined, open positions that feminist media scholars like Jean Kilbourne identify as the stuff of misogyny: bodies shot from above, posed on beds or on the floor, legs spread, inviting the gaze of men, in child-like poses, often infantilized, subjected to dehumanizing violence, and at the same time hypersexualized and always available for sex. Similar images and body positions dominate gay male erotica and pornography, especially in depictions of youthful and inexperienced men (so-called twinks). Journalists frequently remark on Sivan’s “prettiness” and fawn over his flawless, alabaster complexion, which, according to Dazed, “is enough to make you swoon.” Wonderlandmagazine makes cherubic connections in this video from a 2018 photoshoot. When directed at women, such comments raise the ire of feminist fans and critics who believe that women should be judged by their work and character, not their appearance. Not so for LGBTQ celebrities. While queer activists also promote self-love and discourage body shaming, it’s also routine for journalists and public figures themselves to discuss the importance of beauty, fierceness, and flawlessness as part of twenty-first century queer visibility. This reveals a tension between feminist and queer discourse—and one that this essay will certainly not resolve. That Troye is a cis-male and gay means that he can, in a sense, have his cake and eat it, too. He’s taken seriously in the pop world as a musical force and his “prettiness” serves as an asset.

American Apparel ads that mimic amateur pornography, naughty Polaroids, and possibly even the aesthetic of child pornography

Sivan in Wonderland and Dazed, (bottom, 2018). Sivan’s boyish looks and poses are used to similar effect in these images.

A teaser promo clip for BLOOM plays with this pornographic imaginary. In a dimly lit motel room, Sivan sits, poised on the edge of a rumpled bed in which a snoozing man tosses and turns. Illuminated by the warm orange glow of a bedside lamp, Sivan’s brow glistens with a post-coital sheen that obliquely references Ebeyer’s aesthetic (a similar glistening effect can be seen in his SNL performance of “My, My, My”) In a playful deadpan, he says to the camera, “It’s about flowers,” then a snippet of the chorus plays as the song’s title flashes on screen. This is a radically different queer representation when compared to the house-party innocence of YOUTH, Sivan’s first hit single that featured him partying with friends, kissing a handsome young man, and dreamily, but platonically, lounging with a group of people on a canopy bed.

BLOOM promo

YOUTH screenshot

By contrast, the teaser’s grainy footage and sweat-kissed bodies suggest sleazy pornography and obliquely references the use of similar effects in the intro sequence of George Michael’s OUTSIDE, in which a sexy, “high-heeled saxophone” (5) plays as a man and woman exchange glances and suggestive gestures with one another against a backdrop of blue-green and pink lights. The clip turns out to be a joke; the buxom blonde changes, deus-ex-toilette, into a sternly unsexy policewoman making an arrest. The visual and musical rhymes between the two clips allow me to read Bloom simultaneously as a kind of queer double-voiced utterance, a song of gay innocence and gay experience.

OUTSIDE intro screenshots

Online speculation about the song’s meaning began immediately, especially around the question of anal sex. Pitchfork described “Boom” as “quite possibly an anthem dedicated to first-time bottoms” and praised the song as “one of the few mainstream pop songs to imagine queer sex as not just a good time, but as something natural, pure, and innocent.” Junkee’s Jules Lefevre concurred. “Let’s be real,” she writes, “this is a straight up ode to being on the receiving end of anal sex for the first time.” Sivan himself was coy when asked to decipher the song. “It’s 100 percent about flowers. That’s all it is,” he told Dazed, adding a playful wink. Contrary to his cheeky denials, Sivan briefly tweeted, then deleted, the hashtag #bopsboutbottoming. Of course, the eagle-eyes of the Cyberland saved the receipts.

Tweeted, then deleted

As Foucault, Butler, and generations of feminist and queer scholars have demonstrated in well-rehearsed arguments the intimate linkage of sex and power. In white-supremacist, phallocentric, and binary-gender culture, white heterocis men possess the most symbolic, economic, political, institutional, and interpersonal power. They are trained by culture to be top dog, to fight their way to the top, to come out on top, and to stay there. Women can access this kind of power, but as bell hooks points out, its operation remains fundamentally patriarchal. In other words, women with this kind of male power may mistake for liberation what is really just the cross-dressed status quo. Adichie argues that bottom power is illusory because women, lacking their own agency, have only “a good route to tap [a man’s] power.” What happens, she wonders, when he “is in a bad mood, sick, or temporarily impotent?” The implication is that the absence of a sexually-available male from whom she can syphon off some power reduces a woman to powerlessness. While I have critiques of Adichie’s formulation, they are tangential to the mainline of this discussion. Instead, I will ask what happens in male-male sexual culture, where the dynamics of gender-power play out somewhat differently; is there gay-male bottom power; and what happens when the love that dare not speak its name comes out as on bottom on top of mainstream pop?

Bottom Power/ Power Bottom

All gay men risk accusations of being a bottom/effete/powerless, or worse, of enjoying it. That is, they risk being perceived as feminine. The threat of this accusation creates quite a bit of anxiety and no small amount of gender trouble among gay men. Need evidence? Cruise on over to any app that gay men use to find sex/romance and count the number of times you see words like masc only, the hashtag #gaybro, or any number of more subtle ways gay men police their fragile masculinity. In our culture’s wildest homophobic nightmares, gay cisgender men relinquish their macho power when, as Leo Bersani memorably described it, they hoist their “legs high in the air, unable to resist the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.” (18) Effeminate queer icon and author of The Naked Civil Servant Quentin Crisp once quipped that in Western culture, “there is no sin like being a woman.” From the erastes (adult male) of Classical Antiquity to the total tops of the digital age, “real” men, straight or otherwise, get (it) on (from the) top. Here’s an old joke that Bersani recounts:

The butch number swagger[s] into a bar […] opens his mouth and sounds like a pansy, takes you home, where the first thing you notice is the complete works of Jane Austen, gets you into bed, and—well you know the rest. (14)

An updated version goes something like this: His profile says “total top,” then he shares his private pics. There’s even a campy send up by a trio of drag queens called THAT BOY IS A BOTTOM that makes fun out of this queer cultural conundrum.

Some gay male bottoms have reclaimed their stigmatized identity, breaking the stranglehold of sexism, misogyny, and (internalized) homophobia that equates being penetrated with powerlessness by speaking back in a voice that echoes that chants, shouts, and cries of other marginalized groups who have found strength and intelligibility at the margins. I am tempted to call this phenomenon “bottom power,” but the boundless creative energies of queer sexual culture beat me to the punch. Enter, the power bottom. Another term from the queer lexicon, a power bottom is assertive, unashamed, unapologetic, and (stereo)typically sexually aggressive. Power bottoms range from the fey and ephebian to the ruggedly masculine. A more radical form of an always-already denigrated gay-male stereotype, power bottoms resist the shaming of men who enjoy penetration by daring any potential top to try and keep up. This is a very different use of “bottom power” than that described by Adichie. In her formulation, women savor some fleeting male power which they gain by using sex and sexuality. By contrast, the power bottom possesses male power and privilege which he uses to counter accusations of effeminacy. His sexual voraciousness, stamina, and assertiveness become much-admired assets, not liabilities or limitations.

Flowers in an Intertextual Garden

Which brings us to Sivan’s power bottom ballad. Much of the online chatter about “Bloom” misses the rather obvious fact that Sivan’s song utilizes the most humdrum and obvious imagery. Throughout, the green world serves as a metaphor for sensuality, sexuality, and love. In the chorus, Sivan sings, “I bloom for you,” likening the singing subject’s sexual awakening to a flower opening its petals for the first time (there is no indication that this song is, or is not autobiographical). While Sivan’s choice of imagery may be banal, it’s planted in fertile soil. This fairly standard muso-poetic language has a longstanding association with the feminine (Mother Earth), female genitalia (the art of Georgia O’Keefe), and sexuality more generally (Shakespeare even got in on the game in Sonnet 18). These works create a complex intertextual web for “Bloom,” one that extends to vernacular and concert music as well. A few examples, chosen more or less at random, illustrate the use of flower imagery in different song contexts:

Schumann’s setting of Heine’s “Du bist wie eine Blume” uses the image of a flower to describe the beauty of a beloved, and the composer’s romantic music imbues the idyllic imagery with an intense yearning that borders on the sexual.

Delibes’ “Flower Duet” (“Duo des fleurs/ Sous le dôme épais”) from Lakmé is a duet for two women in which the voices move in sensual parallel motion as they sing of a “thick dome of jasmine” beneath which “the rose […] blends with the rose” and drifting downriver together.

In popular music, Liz Phair’s “Flower” (which was covered by homocore band Pansy Division) reverses the gender association of flora with the feminine. To a male lover, Phair/ Pansy Division sing “Your face reminds of a flower/kind of like you’re underwater/ hair’s too long and in your eyes/ your lips are perfect ‘suck me’ size.”

Jason Ebeyer incorporates flower imagery in BLOOM, which takes place in a greenhouse filled with exotic plants and illuminated by phallic neon lights whose colors change from cool greens and blue to hot pink. On one hand, this could exemplify what Andrew Goodwin would call an amplification of the song’s lyric content—the music video for song about “blooming” features plant imagery. However, against the intertextual backdrop of flowers/nature as metaphors for sexuality and Sivan’s new queer/ sexually mature star text, the song and its video blossom with significance.

Sivan’s greenhouse

Sivan’s lyrics abound with references to flowers, gardens, plants, and water—elements of the natural world typically associated with femininity and female sexuality. At the same time, flower imagery has a very specific place in corners of the kink communities—although I suspect that few homonormatives want to own up to knowing about such things. In hardcore parlance, a “rosebud” refers to an intentional rectal prolapse achieved through stretching, the use of larger-than-average sex toys, or fisting (the insertion of a hand into a bodily orifice—a practice, it must be noted, that many straight people also enjoy). Some power bottoms occupy a special place in the kink milieu for they are prized for the ability to achieve a “rosebud.” The polymorphic perversity of queer sexuality rewrites the coordinates of “normal” bodily pleasure onto parts of the human corpus generally considered pleasure-neutral or abject. Oral and anal sex are perhaps the two most benign forms, now more widely accepted in our culture. Others include a variety of practices grouped under the BDSM banner but also, as Douglas Crimp argues, the multitude of pleasures assembled under “safe sex”: the routine use of condoms and dental dams; mutual masturbation and frottage; non-penetrative role play and fetishes; pornography; and a seemingly infinite variety of ways to manipulate the body to produce new intensities and pleasures. Since the 1980s, BDSM has inspired heated debates about the dynamics of sexual power, most notably in the works of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, their radical foil Pat Califa, and Tim Dean. Contrary to stereotype, hardcore kink communities emphasize consent and safety through practices like Safe Sane Consensual (SSC) and Risk-Aware Consensual Kink (RACK). These terms refer to kink subcommunities who prioritize consent as part of a hardcore ethic while also encouraging participants to make informed, safer-sex choices and mitigate risks according to each individual’s level of comfort. While innocent ears may hear Sivan’s pleading to “take it slow” and “hold my hand before it goes down” as the platitudes of a virgin on the cusp of sexual experience, experienced queer ears hear those same lyrics as descriptions of a very specific, subversive sexual practice.

Imagined Intimacy

Although he acknowledges that “Bloom” is about anal sex, Sivan dismisses any naughtier implications or interpretations of the song as nothing more than a dirty “little inside joke” about which he and his producers had good laugh. Singing as the blushing virgin who saved himself for his one-and-only, Sivan envisions a homo-happily-ever-after in which those who do not fit society’s prevailing standards of beauty, body image, wealth, whiteness, cisgender-ness, monogamy, and matrimony simply do not appear. Typically, I hesitate to equate an artist’s private life with their public works. More often than not, such a project devolves into little more than a quest for biographical trivia and ignores the complex dynamics involved in the construction of a star text through performance, multiple media forms, and songwriting. However, the discourse surrounding Sivan is dominated by notions of authenticity and sincerity. As a YouTuber, he found fame by speaking directly to fans, often in a darkened bedroom illuminated by the white light of his computer screen. This is a staging choice to be sure but one that over-emphasizes the personal or confessional face-to-face intimacy between best friends or lovers. Sivan literally grew up before our eyes and gave us weekly videos through which he documented his transition from precocious child to international star, and much of his fan base grew up alongside him. His music videos and promotional materials re-emphasize his face in close-up, an effect we might call imagined intimacy because it reinforces the convenient fallacy that Sivan looks, speaks, and sings directly to individual listeners in the imagined community of his fans. BLOOM visualizes this trope by putting Sivan’s body and face on display in ways that mimic a moment of hyper-intimacy: the loss of virginity or the first sexual encounter between lovers.

Goodwin asserts that “one way into the topic [of dance in music video] is through its attempt to visualize [the] music” (68), and he notes several ways in which dance, music, and lyrics function to create the idiomatic media language of music video. For instance, many music videos over-emphasize the gestures of a lead guitarist shredding a solo or maybe just playing air guitar instead of using their actual instrument. In other contexts, dance can render the lyric content or the story of a video. In a number of iconic videos from the 80s, the awesome power of a shimmy, directed at a video villain from a chevron of dancers is enough to reduce him to powerlessness (see Pat Benetar’s LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD for the classic example, though Michael and Janet Jackson have used similar choreography in several of their videos). In MY, MY, MY Sivan uses his own signature amateur dance moves to conjure the image of millions of young gay boys lip synching and dancing to the music of their favorite divas behind securely locked bedroom doors around the globe. Choreographed movement and camera work in BLOOM reinforces the lyric narrative of sexual experience in a number of ways while also fostering a sense of extreme intimacy. Ebeyer creates a digital avatar of Sivan, complete with trademark blond hipster cut and skinny jeans, but this avatar glows with the iridescence and luminescence reserved for saints and angels and certain sexual sinners. The avatar’s position and body language convey passivity and resemble the movements of gay sex: flat on his back, legs rising into the air (an echo of Bersani’s rendering of the cultural nightmare); head thrown back ecstatically, shot from above as if from the perspective of a lover. The camera lingers on the avatar’s feet, hands, hips, and face—all parts of the body associated with either sensuality or vulnerability. Sivan accentuates this vulnerability by placing the word “bloom” on a high pitch, which he could comfortably belt, but instead he sings it with a breathy softness evocative of the way lovers might speak during their first sexual experience together.

Passive body position

Tumescence

Sivan’s doe-like eyes are frequently mentioned as part of his cherubic appeal, and Bloom is also preoccupied with eyes, gazing, and looking. The avatar features exaggerated versions of his trademark oculus, and each time Sivan sings “I bloom just for you,” its eyes open, perhaps a stand in for the opening of bodily orifices during sex. This association is made explicit in two pivotal moments. The video begins with a wash cool green and blue hues, but at 1:52, the color changes to red and pink as the avatar flings open his arms and legs, opens his eyes. Then, his neck extends and his head grows visibly larger—cranial tumescence here a rather cheeky way of representing an erection. Spring—a well-worn metaphor for sex and sensuality—has arrived, and Sivan’s avatar glows with all the warmth that metaphor implies. An extreme close-up of the avatar’s left eye at 2:47 allows viewers to see the full “bloom” of his pupil, a visual analog for the dilated vagina (in sex or childbirth) and the dilated anus (in gay sex). The cumulative effect of imagery, color, and choreography is a kind of plasticine vulnerability of the male body.

Blooming Pupil

Full Body

Checking Troye’s Privilege

“Bloom” celebrates male-male sex from a perspective seldom seen or heard in popular culture. As such, it is transgressive because it enacts a form of bottom power through which a power(ful) bottom claims his identity, sexuality, and bodily agency without shame, hesitation, or apology. For this, both Sivan and “Bloom” must be applauded. However, I stop short of calling Sivan a queer poster boy, and this is where my analysis introduces a dissonant note into the chorus of near universal praise.

Neither the song nor the video advances a political or aesthetic agenda that could, with a straight face (pardon the pun), be called queer. Queer, according activist and author Kate Bornstein, is a more radical form of gay/lesbian. Queer is militant, angry, resistant, irreverent, kinky, slutty—the very opposite of the politics of respectability that surround the Sivan image, no matter how much makeup or gender-bendy clothing he puts on. Sivan’s work explores themes of love, heartache, friendship, family, and sex from a position that is cisgender, monosexual, white, able-bodied, middle-class, and male. Across his larger oeuvre, he repeatedly imagines a world in which two such men can fall in love, marry, and have children without fear of abuse or molestation. Recently, Sivan and Jacob Bixenman settled into just this sort of non-threatening same-sex domesticity, and Sivan openly praises his parents for their acceptance and respect for his gayness. Although this is one laudable vision for the gay future, it is also part of a broader trend toward what Lisa Duggan has called homonormativity—the very antithesis of queerness. LGBTs who most closely resemble the heteronorm can purchase (often, literally) their safety and acceptance by distancing themselves from the very “deviants” whose radical lifestyles and sexual practices, ironically, fueled the engines of Gay Liberation that made such assimilation possible in the first place. Assimilationist gays frequently ignore or denounce radical sexual cultures, non-monogamy, unsafe sex, genderfuckery, and a variety of other subcultural practices that seem shameful when viewed through normative-colored glasses. While Sivan paints a lovely portrait of normative gay male sexuality in bloom, there are more exotic flowers in the garden that deserve their moment in the sun.

***

<1>A note on song, album, and video titles. Throughout, I borrow conventions established in Andrew Goodwin’s Dancing in the Distraction Factory, using the familiar quotation marks for songs, italics for album titles, and small caps for music videos. This helps orient readers toward specific media and clarifies ambiguity when discussing different media forms (song, album, video) that may have the same name. I use the same convention to distinguish between the text, book, and TedTalk video by Adichie.

<2>Jules LeFevre, “Troye Sivan—Blue Neighbourhood,” Rolling Stone Australia 4 December 2015. At present, the magazine’s website is offline as publication, including digital archives, has ceased.

***

Matthew J. Jones (PhD: Critical & Comparative Studies of Music, UVA 2014) is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Miami University of Ohio. His work explores intersections of American music, sexuality, illness, and social justice. He is a recipient of the 2017 ASCAP Deems Taylor/ Virgil Thomson Article Award for Concert Music Criticism for his essay “Enough of Being Basely Tearful: ‘Glitter and Be Gay’ and the Camp Politics of Queer Resistance” in The Journal of the Society for American Music. His work also appears in Women and Music and The Journal of Popular Music Studies as well as the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness and Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings. He is currently at work on a book project about music, affect, and AIDS activism.

Emily Dolan, a member of the JAMS Editorial Board, and George Lewis, co-chair of the AMS Committee on Race and Ethnicity, sat down recently for a discussion of how the recent JAMS Call for Papers for a special issue on music, race, and ethnicity can help not only in broadening the scholarly conversation around these topics, but also in asserting a central role for musicology in exploring the crucial issues of our time in a period of rapid change.

Please note: The deadline for article submissions for this special issue is 1 July 2018.

ED: The idea for this Special Issue of JAMS on Music, Race, and Ethnicity came out of the work that the Committee on Race and Ethnicity has been doing.

GL: Yes. This special issue idea has been a couple of years in the making. Like a number of the interesting ideas the committee has considered, this one came from Judy Tsou, who serves with me as co-chair.

ED: How did the Committee come to be?

GL: One spur to action was that controversial Musicology Now blog post about teaching Don Giovanni in prison. I don't think the author really meant to discuss race, but the responses to that post brought out a lot of impatience with models of discursive colorblindness that a lot of humanities and social science fields have abandoned, and which seemed naïve to a lot of people who felt that their experience was being cavalierly dismissed.

Ellen Harris, who was AMS president, published an open letter to the AMS membership, and asked a number of us to formulate a committee to create some effective responses to these and other ongoing issues. Her idea was that one of the models could be the original Committee on the Status of Women, which became the Committee on Women and Gender. The working title became the rather unwieldy “Planning Committee on the Status of Race and Ethnicity in the Profession,” and Judy and I were named co-chairs.

The Planning Committee’s main remit was to establish the current, permanent AMS Committee, for which a five-part remit was developed. Perhaps the most crucial parts of the committee’s vision are around scholarship and pedagogy, the lifeblood aspects of what we do. The others--professional development, governance, and atmosphere--proceed from the first two. Without scholarship and pedagogy you don't get professional development, and the resulting atmosphere in the profession becomes impoverished. This is because smart people have choices, and if you drive the best people away, what you're left with is the second team. A lot of fields have found this out.

The Planning Committee’s initial effort was to organize the special session on “Race, Ethnicity and the Profession” at the 2016 Vancouver AMS meeting. What came out of the session supported and augmented many of the positions that were coming out of the responses to the blog post, the #AMSSOWHITE hashtag, and so on, in that was that there was a lot of professional despair out there about whether people of color had any real purchase on the profession. We already had Matthew D. Morrison's article in the 2012 JAMS colloquy, basically warning people that that that the profession seemed to be driving away some of its brightest scholars of color. Concerns were expressed that young scholars, particularly scholars of color, would be or had already been penalized for working on race, or for speaking out about these issues in their writing, or that issues of race and ethnicity were considered a peripheral area of musicological scholarship, which could in turn influence hiring, awards, and grant and subvention decisions.

This meeting reminded me of the session on “The Musical Aesthetics of Race and Ethnicity” at the 2009 meeting in Philadelphia, which Ellie Hisama organized with the Committee on Cultural Diversity. The key questions were about how race and ethnicity mediate musical creation, reception, and understanding, but a lot of issues of atmosphere and professional development also came up, especially after Ellie presented some audio of Eileen Southern expressing her frustration with the profession and with her colleagues--basically, “They don’t care about what I do.” Hearing that in Southern’s own voice made a lasting impression on me, and speaking with some of the scholars of color who’ve been in the trenches much longer than I have—Josephine Wright, Johann Buis, Gayle Murchison, others--has been very enlightening indeed in terms of the long and complicated history of the profession’s engagement with race.

ED: The idea that questions of race are somehow not central to music and its history seems utterly untenable right now—both in the context of our discipline and in of our current political climate. This also reminds me of questions about the profession and professionalization that I think Bonnie Gordon expressed so well at the 2016 meeting, in terms of what we can do to help the pipeline. She stressed that it is not just the job market—it goes back even to college, and what we can do to help students prepare to apply for graduate school.

GL: Exactly. Judy and I brought the findings from the session and the communications we received to the AMS Board, which, under Martha Feldman’s leadership as president, has been very supportive in undertaking a number of substantial actions. In 2017 at Rochester the Committee was supported in producing a well-attended session on “Critical Race Theory and Music.” The panel included the legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris, who was one of the originators of the field of critical race theory and who is very well versed in music and culture (she is a member of the board of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). In 2018 in San Antonio another session on this topic will be held with the historian George Lipsitz as speaker. The idea of these sessions, which was originally suggested by Suzanne Cusick, is to present an interdisciplinary context in which people see not only that we in musicology can draw on how race is studied in many other fields, but how scholars in those fields are able to draw upon insights from musicology.

ED: So, what are your hopes for this issue? What are you hoping this issue will do, and what would you hope to see in it?

GL: There’s this great quote from Southern, writing in a special issue on music in the popular magazine Black World in 1973: “If we black folk are serious about our commitment to the rediscovery and the redefining of our heritage in the fine arts, our scholars must take upon themselves the responsibility for developing an appropriate and exemplary literature.” I think that a special issue like this can take a leading role in establishing that literature. That's what I want to see. The Board has also supported the establishment of an AMS award in Critical Race Studies, another great idea by Judy Tsou, which again puts scholarship up front and encourages the creation of a community of researchers and critical engagement.

ED: The special issue has a very capacious call, as people will notice.

GL: The call was a collective project that incorporated suggestions from the Committee on Race and Ethnicity and the JAMS editorial board. So there were a lot of bright minds putting this together, and of course, the submissions will be reviewed by the JAMS editorial board, subject to the peer review process and procedural guidelines for the journal. So we can expect these articles to reflect the customary rigor of those processes, while also opening the window as wide as possible to a great diversity of topics. There is no reason why we can't imagine work on race, say, in the context of 18th-century comic opera and the project of chattel slavery. Jann Pasler and Ralph Locke have been connecting these kinds of dots among race, colonialism, and the Western tradition, as well as Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh’s book, Western Music and its Others. For musicologists to explore these connections enhances the scope of our influence in the massively interdisciplinary and intercultural landscape of modern scholarship.

ED: We’re seeing a wealth of scholarship on race right now. Two influential early volumes were Guthrie Ramsey’s Race Music and Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman’s Music and the Racial Imagination. More recently, there was Olivia Bloechl’s recent conference on race, empire, and early music, as well as her co-edited volume on difference in music scholarship. Naomi Andre’s new book on black opera has just hit the shelves, there is a new volume by Ana Alonso-Minutti, Eduardo Herrera, and Alejandro Madrid on global Latinx experimental music scenes, and Nina Sun Eidsheim’s work has been very important to many in the field. Of course this is not even a summary, but a sample.

GL: We’ve had student initiatives already in this regard. When he was editor-in-chief of Current Musicology, Morrison anticipated this special issue of JAMS in 2012 by editing a special issue of the journal on sound, race, and performance. The journal just published another one on Black Sound Studies.

We’ve had JAMS colloquies that have addressed race and ethnicity as part of the overall mix, but this special issue puts the study of race and music in prime time, so to speak, and signals the willingness of the profession to tackle thorny issues that crucially intersect with how we see ourselves as societies. I feel that no one else can do this in quite the same way as musicologists, because of the centrality of music to human experience. If you're going to talk about race as a part of that experience, musicologists should really be able to draw from these wellsprings of experience to do amazing scholarship.

ED: It would be wonderful if this issue could become a kind of landmark, not just in musicology, but also for other fields engaged in critical race studies. Speaking for the editorial board, we hope that this special issue paves the way for future scholarship on race in JAMS. Our work is far from over after this issue.

GL: Of course there is much more to be done, but at these meetings a lot of hope was expressed that something could be done to transform the field, and I think that this JAMS special issue can help greatly in exercising that effect.
***

Emily I. Dolan is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of Music at Harvard University. Dolan has served on the AMS Council, the Pisk Prize committee, and is currently on the Editorial Board of JAMS and the 2018 Program Committee for the Annual Meeting in San Antonio. She is the author of The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Recently she guest edited an issue of Opera Quarterly (“Vocal Organologies and Philologies”) and she is the co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Timbre.

George Lewis is Professor of American Music at Columbia University. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and a United States Artists Walker Fellowship. An Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society, Lewis has served on the AMS Council and has co-chaired the Committee on Cultural Diversity in addition to his current role as co-chair of the Committee on Race and Ethnicity. His 2008 book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press) received the AMS Music in American Culture Award, and he is the co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). Lewis holds honorary degrees from the University of Edinburgh, New College of Florida, and Harvard University.
See https://music.columbia.edu/bios/george-e-lewis

By John Gabriel

June is LGBTQ Pride Month, an ideal occasion to think about the intersections of musicology and the long, ongoing struggle for queer and trans liberation. We are used to thinking of musicology as having come late to queer studies, but if we expand our definition beyond the academy, we see that musicology — that is, researching and teaching music history — played a small but important role in the origins of the modern American gay rights movement. Musicology, it turns out, helped inspire the Mattachine Society, founded in 1950, the first gay rights (or in the parlance of the time, homophile) organization in the United States after WWII.<1> This musicology took place in the adult education programs of the American Communist Party, and specifically in a course at the Los Angeles People’s Educational Center taught by Harry Hay. In order to design the course, which was to take a materialist approach to music history, Hay had to conduct substantial research. This led him to the historical Feast of Fools and sociétés mattachines of Renaissance France. Hay saw the Fool in these societies as a model for a new role gay men could fulfill in the modern world. Enriched by his background in music performance and continuing work on folk music, this revelation inspired key elements of the Mattachine Society’s organization and became the foundation for Hay’s evolving vision for the future of society and gay men’s role in it.

Harry Hay
From San Francisco Public Libraryhttps://sfpl.org/?pg=2000517301

Harry Hay (1912-2002) left a complicated legacy. He is widely praised for his role in the founding of the Mattachine Society and later the Radical Faeries.<2> A life-long activist, he was also involved in campaigns for numerous progressive causes including Native Americans’ rights, environmental protection, and nuclear non-proliferation. Yet, even among his fellow activists, Hay was controversial. As a young man, Hay had been a member of the Communist Party, an affiliation that distressed many members of the Mattachine Society in the 1950s. In the 1980s, Hay continued shocking many queer activists by, for example, speaking out against what he perceived as the “machismo” (or what we today might call “toxic masculinity”) in ACT-UP’s confrontational activism or by marching in the 1986 Los Angeles Gay Pride parade carrying a sign in support of the National Association for Man-Boy Love (NAMBLA) after that organization had been banned from the parade. Even his personality could be divisive; personal as much as political disputes led to him being ousted from leadership roles in both the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries shortly after their founding.

The Mattachine Society has a comparably mixed legacy in queer historiography.<3> Its historical precedence is uncontested, but as a predominantly white, middle-class organization exclusively focused on gay men, it has come under repeated criticism for class and racial bias, and for what are now perceived to have been assimilationist and respectability politics.<4> The latter of these postdate Hay’s involvement. While Hay’s original plan for the organization was focused explicitly on gay men and largely blind to the concerns of gay men of color, it was distinctly not assimilationist. Instead, Hay envisioned a radically transformed society in which gay men served a unique and essential social function. His removal from his leadership role was the result of an internal struggle over the direction of the organization that led to it taking on the assimilationist agenda for which it is most remembered today.

While the founding of the Mattachine Society is frequently described as a transition in Hay’s activism from Communism to gay rights, in fact his early life was similarly characterized by the triangular interactions of his gay identity, his Communist politics, and his career as a musician and actor. This dynamic began already in his teenage years, when Hay accepted his homosexual orientation, choosing to live most of his young adult life as a discreet, but sexually and romantically active gay man. It was also in his teens that Hay was exposed to Leftist politics. He spent several summers working on a cousin’s farm in Nevada where many of the workers were members of the International Workers of the World (Wobblies). Hay joined the Communist Party in his early 20s, after fellow actor and then-lover Bill Geer convinced him to attend the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. Hay was inspired by the energy of the strike and the violence with which the strike was suppressed further triggered his activist impulse.<5>

In addition to his teenage interest in music and theater, another contemporaneous connection helped launch his career as a singer and actor. Hay attended the same high school as John Cage, who was a few years older and tutored him informally; they later reconnected when Cage was living with Don Sample in Los Angeles in the early 1930s.<6> The three men spent much time together, often in costume. In Cage’s family house, they would dress in women’s clothes, and when Hay performed Cage’s early songs in Los Angeles, he wore Bauhaus-inspired, abstract geometric outfits. Hay eventually parted ways with Cage and Sample, but the experience cemented his ambition to pursue work as a singer and actor. This work in turn introduced him to various circles of Leftist and queer artists, especially through the Hollywood Film and Foto League, and a homoerotic spiritualist group, the Los Angeles Lodge of the Order of the Eastern Temple. It also occasioned his first experiences in music historical research: he worked as an uncredited ghostwriter on a number of films, including Largo, a full length film on the life of Handel which never made it to production, and an Academy Award-winning short on Handel, Haydn, and Mozart titled Heavenly Music.<7>

By the mid-1940s, Hay’s work in the Communist party and his interest in music brought him into contact with Earl Robinson and other Leftists interested in the political application of folk music.<8> Hay had a long-abiding love of music from around the world; he therefore joined the Los Angeles branch of the organization People’s Songs and even composed a handful of political songs under various pen names.<9> This activity in turn led to his being asked to teach a course on music history at the People’s Educational Center,where he developed a course along Marxist historical materialist lines that traced the development of primarily, but not exclusively Western music with a focus on its social function, and a particular focus on folk music.<10> In the 10-week course, Hay illustrated lectures with titles such as “Feudal Formalism and the Guerilla Warfare of the Carol,” with musical examples drawn from his extensive record collection. He often encouraged students to sing along to the recordings or from sheet music.<11> It was in his research preparing this class that Hay discovered the French Renaissance sociétés mattachines.

“Feast of Fools,” 1559, engraving by Pieter Van der Heyden after Brueghel
Wikicommons Media

The Renaissance French sociétés mattachines were involved in the celebration of the Feast of Fools. Members wore masks, performed an intricate sword dance, and processed through towns, mocking authority figures and social mores.<12> Hay interpreted the Feast of Fools and the cross-dressed, gender-bending “Fools” of the sociétés mattachines as holdovers from Europe’s pre-Christian past, which he idealized as a matriarchy in which gay men were accepted and took on additional responsibilities for the maintenance of society. These ranged from handicrafts, to assisting with child rearing, to officiating rituals. Hay saw the retention of ritual actions like the Feast of Fools as evidence of their importance to maintaining a healthy society, and imagined a role for gay men in contemporary society along analogous lines.<13> Assuming that gay men would be free from the responsibilities and expense of raising children, Hay believed they could therefore “take stock of the communities in which they live and find the services they can undertake that the community needs and that familial households have not the time to do.”<14>

Hay had long been thinking about ways to create gay male communities for fellowship and activism in a way that the Communist Party had done for Leftists during his first experiences with the Party. The Party, however, was not open to out homosexuals (with very few exceptions); moreover, Hay found little support from other gay Communists.<15> In adherence with the Party line, Hay had married a woman in 1938, but his discovery of the historical sociétés mattachines as part of his music history research in 1947 coincided with other events that would lead him to re-embrace his gay identity and enter into gay rights activism. In 1948, a friend from the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign invited Hay to a party consisting mostly of gay music and theology students. There, discussion of the campaign turned into discussion of organizing gay men for the campaign. Hay received enthusiastic feedback from the intoxicated partygoers, but the morning after, he found no one was willing to join a public homosexual campaign organization. Undaunted, Hay continued to privately develop his ideas for a gay rights organization. It took two years before Hay convened the first meeting in 1950. Again, his music course proved central to solving one of the new organization’s greatest obstacles: finding members. Hay recruited students he thought would be receptive, and they in turn recruited friends out of their own social circles.<16>

Harry Hay and members of the Mattachine Society, Christmas 1951.
From Chicago Reader: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/mattachine-podcast-lgbtq-history-devlyn-camp/Content?oid=40998822

While the structure Hay proposed for the organization is often said to have been modeled on the American Communist Party, he himself described it as modeled on a Masonic lodge — an organization he had studied while researching Mozart’s life for the film Heavenly Music.<17> As with both the Communist Party and a Masonic Lodge, Hay imagined a secretive organization with hierarchical levels, and his love of opera (his friends remembered him as an “opera queen”) inspired the unofficial name of the highest level: Parsifal. Hay was especially fond of Wagner and idealized the brotherhood of the Grail Knights. (He also appreciated that Wagner’s long operas were conducive to cruising in the standing area in the upper balcony at the Met.)<18>

After its founding in 1950, the Mattachine Society expanded rapidly across the United States, though not all of its new members shared Hay’s views about Communism, the organization’s need for a secret leadership order, or the special role gay men could play in society. In response to internal pressure, Hay resigned his leadership role in 1953, and the membership voted on new leadership and a new direction, taking an assimilationist approach to gay rights and emphasizing middle class respectability. Disenchanted, Hay eventually moved to New Mexico in 1971, where he became involved in political campaigns for Native Americans’ rights and environmental protection. He pursued his long-standing interest in Native American culture (as part of his work on folk culture) with greater intensity, focusing his investigations on what is today known as Two Spirit identity (Hay used the term berdache, then commonplace in anthropology).<19> The shamanistic role fulfilled by Two Spirit individuals in many Native American cultures became the driving inspiration for his ideas about the special role gay men could play in modern society, much as the sociétés mattachines had been during his Communist period. Hay was also drawn to the New Age movement, and out of this confluence of ideas, the Radical Faeries were born in 1978.<20>

In conclusion, we might return to my observation at the beginning of this post: The musicology discussed here that shaped the postwar gay rights movement was musicology outside the academy. Universities in the 1950s were not welcoming places for out homosexuals or Communists, nor was Hay’s Marxist methodology generally accepted in American academic musicology at that time. Anne Shreffler has argued that East German Marxist musicology prefigured many of the concerns of the so-called New Musicology, a claim that also fits remarkably well with Hay’s music history.<21> For Hay’s music history not only parallels Marxists’ interest in folk music, non-Western music, and social context, but it also adds a concern for gender and sexuality that these other Marxist histories lacked. The story of Hay’s music history class in the late 1940s and early 1950s is thus not just one of musicology helping to shape the early gay rights movement, or of the sometimes unexpected ways that musicological research finds relevance in the world. It also exemplifies a queer and trans critique of academic institutions and the barriers around them. And that is just what Pride is a time for: Celebration and Critique.
***
<1>The first known gay rights organization in the United States was the Society for Human Rights, founded in Chicago in 1924. It dissolved after a few months. The Mattachine was the second. While there is currently no active national Mattachine Society, it arguably continues to exist to this day in various splinter, spin-off, and regional organizations.
<2>The most substantial biography of Hay remains Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1990). See also Will Roscoe, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996); and John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
<3>For an introduction to the Mattachine Society, the early gay rights (homophile) movement, and additional bibliography, see Martin Meeker, “Homophile Movement” and “Mattachine Society,” Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered History in America, edited by Marc Stein, vol. 2, 52-56 and 234-37 (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004).
<4>On the historiography of the Mattachine Society and a revisionist take on its work and legacy, see Martin Meeker, “Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, no. 1 (January 2001): 78-116. On race in the early gay rights (homophile) movement, see Kent W. Peacock, “Race, the Homosexual, and the Mattachine Society of Washington, 1961–1970,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 25, no. 2 (May 2016): 267-96. As the Mattachine Society grew, it began to attract female members, but it remained primarily an organization of gay men and other organizations were founded explicitly for women, like the Daughters of Bilitis, or mixed-gender, like ONE. See Meeker, “Homophile Movement.”
<5>Timmons, 33, 54, 69-70; and Roscoe, 326.
<6>On Cage and Hay, see Rob Haskins, John Cage (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 24-5; Roscoe, 319-23; and Timmons, 56-59.
<7>Timmons, 75-76, 80-81; and Roscoe, 70, 72.
<8>Roscoe 357-58. On Earl Robinson’s role in debates among American Leftists over folk music, see Maria Christina Fava, “The Composers’ Collective of New York, 1932-1936: Bourgeois Modernism for the Proletariat,” American Music 34, no. 3 (Fall 2016), 331-36.
<9>Timmons, 128. On People’s Songs, Earl Robinson, and Leftist use of folk music, see Robbie Lieberman, “My Song is my Weapon”: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); and R. Serge Denisoff, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).
<10>Notes for one of Hay’s lectures on music history are reprinted in Roscoe, 120-29. Pace Roscoe, Hay’s emphasis on “the relationship of folk music to daily life tasks” (120) was much in line with many Marxist music histories. See, for example, Hanns Eisler, “The Builders of a New Musical Culture” (1931), in A Rebel in Music, edited by Manfred Grabs, 36-58 (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1978). Except for its focus on folk music as opposed to institutional music, Hay’s music history resembles Hanns Eisler’s music history essays from the 1930s and 40s and his music history course at the New School in 1938. While it seems Hay and Eisler never met, Hay may have had access to Eisler’s work; beyond institutional Communist channels, both men were friends with Earl Robinson, and Robinson also taught at the People’s Education Center in Los Angeles.
<11>Timmons, 127-31.
<12>The definitive modern history of the Feast of Fools is Max Harris, Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
<13>Timmons, 194: “Harry had taken on an enormous investigative project. His earliest document was a six-page typewritten outline titled ‘The Homophile in History: A Provocation to Research,’ sketched out from 1953 to 1955. Divided into fourteen periodic sections, it traces homosexual prototypes from the Stone Age through the European Middle Ages up to the ‘Berdache and the American Scene,’ where Hay cited Johnny Appleseed as one example of an ‘American Fool Hero.’ Much of the study for this was expanded from the syllabus of his music classes at the Labor School.” My emphasis.
<14>Hay, “The Homosexual and History … An Invitation to Further Study,” reprinted in Roscoe, 94-115, here 114.
<15>Timmons, 54, 69-70, 108-9.
<16>Timmons, 134-35, 143.
<17>Timmons, 151-52. The Los Angeles Lodge of the Order of the Eastern Temple (discussed above), for which Hay had been an organist, was also organized on a Masonic model. While Hay’s biographers emphasize the role of music in the founding of the Mattachine Society, it is almost always excluded from histories focused on the Society or on the early gay rights (homophile) movement. See, for example, Meeker, “Behind the Mask.”
<18>Roscoe, 9; Timmons, 111, 146.
<19>Timmons, 228-47.
<20>Timmons, 248-79. On the Radical Faeries, see David S. Churchill, “Radical Faeries,” Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered History in America, ed. Marc Stein, vol. 3, 7-8 (Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004).
<21>Anne C. Shreffler, “Berlin Walls: Dahlhaus Knepler, and Ideologies of Music History,” Journal of Musicology 20, no. 4 (2003): 504-5.
***

John Gabriel is a postdoctoral fellow in music in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong.

By Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell

The well-meaning comments I received this year from students and colleagues about Cinco de Mayo (which ranged from remarks celebrating Mexican “independence day” to inquiries about authentic Mexican food in Connecticut) reminded me of the last time I taught a world music course in 2014. It was at the end of class, right after the midterm, when I realized something was wrong. I had just finished a presentation on son de tierra caliente in Mexico, followed by a Q&A to reinforce some concepts about instrumentation, geographical origin of the music, and issues related to cultural context featured in the textbook. Once class was over, a student left the room exclaiming loudly, “ándale, ándale, arriba, señorita, margarita!” This was not an isolated case; the class featuring music and culture from East Asia the following week ended with pentatonic calls from students heading to Panda Express for dinner. By the end of the semester, it seemed clear that this introductory course—which addressed general education components in human diversity and global engagement—was a failed attempt in cultural awareness, supported by an industry of higher learning that approaches the idea of “world cultures” through commodified stereotypes of racialized differentiation. That was the last time I agreed to teach such a course.

Around the U.S., different universities, music schools and departments offer world music courses today, in part, to abide by the standards that the National Associations of School of Music sets as essential competencies for undergraduate programs that combine studies in music, business, and music industry (as indicated in pages 178-187 of the NASM 2017-2018 Handbook). As part of these competencies, NASM expects students to demonstrate “[a]n acquaintance with a wide selection of musical literature, the principal eras, genres, and cultural sources, including but not limited to, jazz, popular, classical, and world music forms.” This competency—number 3 in the list—is followed by “[t]he ability to develop and defend musical judgements.” The taxonomical structuring approach established here (i.e., the concept of “literature” as a western index that legitimizes the study of music practices insofar as they are written) could explain the perennial interest to textualize: to codify the notion of “music culture” using a system of representation that relies on clearly defined categories, and leave little room for historical contingency. Considering that world music classes nowadays are viewed as spaces through which students can fulfill general education competencies in human diversity and global engagement, foreclosing the notion of “culture” in such a way seems problematic.

Overall, global engagement competencies in U.S. colleges and universities urge students to take courses that require them to inquire about other societies and cultures, and to reflect about these encounters. These experiences, some institutions say (I have taught at five different universities over the past ten years, and these ideas resonated in all of them) are meant to make students explore themes such as peace, conflict, and security; international economics and development; natural resources and the environment; and comparative cultures, arts and identities, among other things. Thus, global engagement ought to reflect human diversity awareness as a self-reflexive experience that challenges students to explore issues related to race, ethnicity, gender, and social difference. Such awareness, it has been claimed, should relate to the current need to immerse students in the logics of a rapidly changing global environment, which has made it necessary to be “culturally competent,” more than ever (refer to Donna Shalala’s article "A Clarion Call for Cross-Cultural Competence").

By and large, concerns for cultural difference (and cultural competence) in the United States have been largely addressed by the anodyne rhetoric of cultural diversity and inclusion. This rhetoric addresses “culture” as a totalized object that is directly connected to nationalist narratives of identity. Anchored to this view, diversity and inclusion efforts have focused on bringing national “others” into the dominant realm of political discourse. Interests in world musics, ethnic musics, or “other” national musics in American academia resonate with this context, as they remain tied to otherizing ideologies that stem from dominant western cultural narratives, in which the nation-state is the basis of cultural understanding (consider, for example, recent texts on Latin American music reviewed by this author in the Journal of the Society for American Music volume 10, no. 2 (2016). Also, the panel “Strategies and Opportunities for Greater Inclusion of Ibero-American Music in the Curriculum” (American Musicological Society annual conference, 2015) recently addressed the need to diversify the European canon through inclusion. The proceedings of the panel were eventually published by the Journal of Music History Pedagogy.) These publications point to a historical practice of racialization in relation to a western narrative of socio-cultural progress, which informs perceptions of difference on asymmetrical terms. While the need to expose students to the cultural and political imbalances that permeate the experience of globalization has set ethnomusicological curricula in relief, our current approaches need to be revisited, lest we reproduce the very mentalities and problems we are attempting to deconstruct.

Upon my arrival to the University of Connecticut, I was told of the need to implement a course that would expose students to musics from non-western cultures. I was further told that such classes should satisfy the general education, global engagement competency. My immediate reaction was to ask what constituted a non-western culture nowadays, given that the “non-western” (third) world has been historically the fulcrum of the colonial dynamics that shaped the West and its cultural and political project. What if people in different places identify themselves (and their cultural and political way of seeing themselves in the world) with musical, production, and listening practices that are considered “western”? There are important and fascinating things to learn from the context surrounding mbira music, for sure. But if the experience of globalization (and the identity politics that it produces) is of central importance, why not study hip-hop in Senegal? Death metal in Brazil? Or Colombian vallenato in Mexico? If we are to follow this rationale, what are the problems posed by different case studies, which dismantle cultural stereotypes and leave musical, cultural, and political questions unanswered? What if the study of music, culture, and difference in globalization, far from foreclosed, points to uncomfortable dilemmas without clear solution? Such has been my approach thus far, which has managed to hold the attention of students interested in cultural competence.

The study of music and culture in globalization does not necessarily promote a cheerful postnationalism to simply debase cultural stereotypes and the power imbalances they represent. The approach exposes students to the material effects that transnational practices have on people’s lives, showing the contextual specificity of such practices, and the regulatory effects that institutions, and domestic and foreign policies continue to have. In their globalized character, however, these practices challenge the geo-political limits of the nation-state and contest the political forces that mark people as peripheral. It is in this sense that music studies owe attention to the examples of imagination and behavior that go beyond current narratives of cultural representation. Concerns for cultural difference today ought to account for the transnational exchanges that decenter the nation and its cultural ideology, and for the desires that influence such exchanges among individuals. This approach, I believe, illuminates the intricate dialogues that shape globalized music practices, through which people constantly negotiate the political forces that marginalize them, and that upset objectifying ideas about indigeneity, aesthetics, territoriality, language, and ethnicity.
***

Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell is Assistant Professor in Residence of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, and faculty affiliate of El Instituto: Institute of Latino/a, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies at the University of Connecticut.

By Kimberly Francis, Michael Accinno and Meagan Troop

Many music educators today grapple with this daunting question: How do we create and foster accessible teaching and learning experiences? By “accessible” we are referring to approaches that address learner variability by providing multiple opportunities and options for those with sensory, mobility, cognitive, and learning differences. A good place to start is with the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework that aims to maximize learning for all students. Indeed, UDL“provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone—not a single one-size-fits all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs” (CAST, 2012).

UDL provides three central principles for tackling the question of designing for learner variability. First: Instructors should provide multiple means of representation, or, in other words, present content and information in various formats. Second, the pedagogy should provide multiple means of action and demonstration of learning, or allow learners to express what they know in different ways. And finally, instructors should provide multiple means of engagement, which essentially means that students should be offered options that will stimulate and motivate them (CAST, 2012). Ultimately, the accessible and inclusive classroom can be characterized as differentiated, flexible, and empowering.

Within the last decade, Ontario legislation has provided guidelines for reducing barriers and maximizing learning for all, such as in the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) and the Ontario Human Rights Code (OHRC). A few higher education institutions, such as the University of Guelph, The University of Waterloo, and The University of Calgary, have also created useful resources for practitioners on the topics of Universal Instructional Design (UID) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). At other institutions, the question of universal design is often left to the instructor’s discretion or handled on more of an ad hoc basis, still leaving the instructor with the question: Where does one begin? In this post, we offer some straightforward tips on how to make the music history classroom more inclusive for all learners.

Start small. Don’t expect to anticipate every issue, and don’t think you need to find a solution to every difficulty all on your own. The key to starting is asking yourself: Have I inadvertently privileged, excluded, or disengaged someone through my approach? Have I thoughtfully addressed questions of complexity, flexibility, and accessibility? Inclusive design means thinking about flexible, customizable mechanisms that support multiple experiences, model inclusive pedagogy, promote excellence, and empower the student.

It may be easier than you think to begin to adapt your curriculum. Try an outcomes-based approach, starting with what you want your students to be able to do when the course is done. Then, design for those goals with choice and flexibility in mind. Throughout the process, seek out and be open to feedback. Like all good curriculum, designing with difference in mind takes time. Here are six simple considerations to make when designing your course:

Step 1: Start with the syllabus

Effective inclusive design reduces physical, psychological, and emotional barriers to learning. However, despite our best efforts as educators to minimize all barriers through inclusive design approaches, there may still be individual accommodations that need to be made in our courses depending on the context and circumstances. Traditionally and all too often, accommodation statements are buried towards the end of the syllabus for a given course, leading students to feel they are an afterthought or a cursory concern for the instructor. Instead, promote the possibility for success across your classroom population by placing a statement of inclusion and accommodation requests at the top of your syllabus. Also, in the interest of promoting multiple means of representation, present a video announcement on your Learning Management System (LMS) as part of your introductory materials. (More on accessibility and video content, see below.) If you create “learning agreements” with your students on the first day of class, consider making accessibility an important part of these conversations. Begin by stating an openness to learning differences and by providing a diverse range of instructional goals, activities, and assignments, as this approach can often be the best way to set the tone of inclusion for your course.

Step 2: Make TEXT more accessible

Be it textbooks, online notes, transcripts, or powerpoint presentations, text is a prevalent part of the teaching and learning experience. Most screen readers, software used by blind and visually impaired computer users, enable access both to online and print text. Remember, though, that contrast is important when preparing slides. You should ensure that all visual materials contain enough contrast to be visible to everyone, including those with colour-blindness or other visual differences. Text formats should be flexible, allowing students to adjust for size and layout when possible. Scanned PDFs of articles and books often lack the flexibility that screen readers require. Another way to enhance the accessibility of your classroom is to allow students to download and manipulate notes as they see fit. Also, be sure to check with your institution’s LMS (Learning Management System, for example Blackboard, Desire2Learn, or Moodle) support team to ensure your texts are useable on multiple devices and in various formats (tablet, phone, and personal computer). Finally, consider developing descriptive elements and alternative text (alt text) for images and figures. Detailed prose explanations will allow all students to develop deeper understandings of the images you include. When you write an alt text, consider what a student would need if they couldn’t see the visual components at all. Include a clear description of the content and a sense for the function or the importance of that content. Check out this website for further guidelines.

Example 1 Example of alt text for Moritz von Schwind’s drawing of a Schubertiade (1868)

ALT text: Schubert plays piano in a drawing room for 30 attentive guests.

Step 3: Make AUDIO more accessible

We are instructors of music. Sound is inherently an important part of what we do. So, what are some key tips for incorporating sound into the classroom that takes into consideration learner differences? First, ensure you’re using high-quality recordings that can allow for volume adjustment, playback options, and pausing. Second, be careful not to overwhelm students. Students on the autism spectrum might need to move around. Make it clear to students at the outset that it’s okay to move around the classroom as needed. Have stopping points, where appropriate, or provide structural cues of some kind, i.e. provide goal posts that break down larger formal structures. Third, provide tactile or visual alternatives. Link to sheet music or musical notation when appropriate. Inquire about the possibility of offering braille scores. Have supporting written materials available for download through your LMS or in a purchased textbook. And finally, make sure all audio files are downloadable, clearly labelled, and compatible across platforms (MP3 or MP4 files are the best).

Step 4: Think beyond music examples: Additional Uses for Audio

One of the greatest strengths of music classrooms is their ability to attract students interested in sound, and students are increasingly interested in creative expression when it comes to submitted materials. Don’t stop at musical examples. Consider podcasts, speeches, videos, and performances as a part of classroom materials. Record a lecture and pair it with visual slides on your LMS for students to consult later. Record an explanation or a play-by-play of a certain work that can be paired with a score. If your LMS allows it, provide recorded feedback on assignments. Create a class playlist on YouTube. (For more on how to find videos that honor copyright law use the Creative Commons Search Tool.)

Audio is also a compelling tool to incorporate into assignments. With the use of smartphones and laptops, students can create their own podcasts, perhaps even incorporating interviews with members of the community. Students can orally record arguments on a topic or create journal reflections. Audio can also serve as a means to craft, track, and reflect upon goals during the course. Most written assignments can be offered as oral assignments with a little tweaking of prompts and evaluation criteria.

Step 5: Make VIDEO more accessible

Videos are increasingly important to the music history classroom. Whether experienced through concert recordings, opera on film, or other multimedia formats, the visual element of performance can inform the aural element in unique ways. Whenever presenting audio material (and here’s another place to remind you of the Creative Commons search tool), there is a simple checklist to consider when taking into account learner differences. First, include captions and a transcript—also referred to in some instances as “described video”—for video materials. (For some handy DIY resources for closed captioning and transcription see here.) Be careful to test these for pacing—for example, captioning that runs too quickly can be difficult to digest. Try to ensure material is delivered at a moderate pace and that pauses are included. Keep in mind - closed captioning is excellent for many learners. For example, those who are learning a new language, listening in noisy spaces, or those who prefer to read along while listening will appreciate closed captioning. Just as with audio examples, video examples should allow students access to playback controls and be careful not to make your videos overly long. Recent research shows that students engage more with shorter videos and an optimal length of 6 minutes or less (Guo, 2013). If you’re interested in including opera videos with built-in subtitles, an excellent resource to consider is OperaVision, a consortium of European opera companies that provides video streams of its productions free of charge.

Example 2: Subtitled Version of Verdi’s La Traviata from OperaVision

Similar to audio, videos need not be limited to music examples. Instructors can use videos to conduct interviews with experts, create a course blog, or share multimedia presentations. Encourage students to record responses to course material using VINE, create mini-documentaries, remix existing videos, or record a teach-back session where they present concepts in their own words. And, in creating their own videos, ask students to incorporate their own closed captioning and accessibility elements. Turn the creation process into a space to engage the question of learning difference with your students.

Step 6: Consider ways to support Executive Functioning

Executive functioning is a skill present in everyday life. It includes those parts of the brain that manage logistics, execute tasks, and oversee day-to-day routines. These skills can be easily supported and developed in the classroom, benefiting a wide range of learners, including students with ADHD, second language learners, and (more broadly) first-year undergraduates and transfer students adapting to the demands of the university environment. The easiest way to support executive functioning is to establish clear expectations, classroom norms, and assessment criteria. This approach might include co-creating norms with your students to generate a shared language around expectations and values to collectively foster an inclusive teaching and learning environment. In terms of assessment and evaluation, a rubric (holistic or analytic) or checklist for assignments, a clear breakdown of materials, or a suggested timeline can help to support student focus and reflection. Give students the opportunity to be interactive when not in the classroom. Allow them to create or annotate notes together by setting up a classroom google doc or a discussion board. Insert check-in moments throughout the course through self-check quizzes. Be clear about expectations and give immediate feedback.

Overall, designing with difference in mind opens up opportunities for student engagement, and creates a flexible, empowering, inclusive classroom. Many of these approaches have been tried by ourselves or our colleagues, and students are excited by the opportunity to explore creative assignments and multiple means of demonstrating and expressing what they know. Indeed, inclusive design for learning can mean that students feel actively engaged in their education. It makes the lessons of music history more immediate and implicates students in their own learning process. The types of Instructional strategies and assessments included in this post also encourage students to think creatively and critically in their own mobilisation and transfer of knowledge. Creating this type of classroom environment makes music history more inclusive, engaging, and relevant for educators and learners alike.

HELPFUL SITES

Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education: http://udloncampus.cast.org/home#.W0-UEdhKiCQ
Accessible Online Learning Experiences:http://cel.uwaterloo.ca/honeycomb/accessible.html
Popular Podcasts for Higher Education (iTunes Preview)
http://aem.cast.org/National Centre on Accessible Educational Materials
Web Accessibility in Mind https://webaim.org/articles/design/textonly
Web Content Accessibility Initiative:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/
Closed Captioning Best Practices: http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/pages/mag/services/captioning/faq/sugg-styles-conv-faq.html
Magpie Caption Toolhttp://ncam.wgbh.org/invent_build/web_multimedia/tools-guidelines/magpie2helpcontents
DIY Resources for Closed-Captioning and Transcription (including creating CC for YouTube videos) http://udloncampus.cast.org/wicket/resource/org.cast.cwm.xml.FileXmlDocumentSource/opt/tomcat-oncourse/content/downloads/DIY_Brief_Captioning.pdf
AMS/SMT Bibliography to help navigate disability issues in the classroom:
https://musicdisabilitystudies.wordpress.com/pedagogy/
Duke Accessible Syllabus website: https://sites.duke.edu/dukeaccessiblesyllabus/
Michelle D. Jones, et al., “Roundtable: Accessible Music Pedagogy and Scholarship: Accommodations for Bodily Difference and Disability”: https://iu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/SEM2016-Session+4A/1_kh8whl7m

***

Michael Accinno is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Music at the University of California, Riverside. His research examines the development of music education at schools for the blind in the nineteenth century. Accinno’s work has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, and he has presented papers at the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the Society for Disability Studies. He currently serves as the Webmaster of the AMS Music and Disability Study Group.

Kimberly Francis is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Guelph, Canada. She is a feminist musicologist and the author of Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence (Rochester, 2018) and Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and Consecration of a Modernist Icon (Oxford, 2015). She serves as Editor-in-Chief for the University of Guelph’s award-winning journal, Critical Voices: The University of Guelph Book Review Project.

Meagan Troop holds a PhD in Education from Queen's University and is currently an educational development consultant and professor at Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada. In this role, Meagan is involved in supporting faculty in the design and development of inclusive, active, and collaborative pedagogical approaches. She is an active researcher in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) field and recently joined the Editorial Board of The Canadian Journal of SoTL.

By James Parsons

As anyone who has engaged in archival research can attest, what one discovers can be rewarding, but also, as the saying goes, not so much. Yet every once in a while what one uncovers can be downright delightful, as I was reminded during a July 2017 trip to New York City.

What took me there was the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library of the Grand Lodge of New York (http://nymasoniclibrary.org/). My goal was to gain a contextually richer understanding of Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 poem “An die Freude” (To Joy), a poem made famous by Beethoven’s partial and reordered use of it in the finale of his 1824 Ninth Symphony. As it happens, Schiller’s poem was immensely popular both before and after Beethoven, and nowhere more so than among German Freemasons. Schiller’s verse, whether by itself, or, less often, when included in the guise of a song setting, runs through Masonic publications during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and even after the Ninth like a red thread.

Lieder zum Gebrauch der vier vereinigten Logen in Hamburg (Songs for the Use of the Four United Lodges in Hamburg), published 1801. No. 17, beginning of Schiller’s “An die Freude.”

Personifying Freude in his poem’s first strophe, Schiller proclaims, “Joy, beauteous spark of the gods, / . . . . Your magic joins again, / what custom callously has divided.” As many readers will recall Schiller—and Beethoven in his setting of Schiller’s verse—ends the first stanza with the couplet “All men become brothers, / where your gentle wing lingers.” Yet this is the couplet’s contents only in the 1803 second version of the poem overseen by Schiller; in the first version, written in 1785 and published in 1786, the stanza ends “beggars become brothers of princes, / where you gentle wing lingers.” [1] If one reads the poem with a knowledge of Schiller’s other writings, what emerges is a program whereby the individual and community work together to attain Enlightenment, self-synthesis, or Bildung, what Schiller himself in his 1795 Ueber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man) addresses in the directive “Erkenne dich, weise zu sein,” to be wise know yourself. [2] That process was intrinsically communal, starting with the single self and requiring reciprocity with one’s community. Schiller addresses just this subject in the second strophe of “An die Freude,” when, after mentioning friendship and marriage, he moves next to the single self able to name (nennen) her or himself: “Ja — wer auch nur eine Seele / sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!” (Yes — even he who calls only one soul / his on this round earth!). To name one’s self in the sense Schiller means here is to know one’s self, to have embarked on the path towards Bildung, the same concept he addresses in the passage from his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man cited above. As more than two centuries of critical commentary attest, the two lines that follow almost always are misunderstood: “And whoever has never known this [the joy named in the poem’s title] weeping, must steal away, from this alliance!” Arguably the most famous critic to erroneously take Schiller to task was Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825). As Jean Paul declared in the 1813 second edition of his Vorschule der Aesthetik (School for Aesthetics), “I should depart silently, accompanying the unloved butt of the song, when the company chanted and cheered the heart-revolting sentiments, ‘Who ne’er could do it, weeping let him steal out of our band.’” [3] The misunderstanding is that Schiller casts out the single self; I disagree. What Schiller finds problematic is the person unwilling to embark on the challenge of Bildung.

Making a complete case for the argument that Schiller does not banish the single individual would require a great deal more space than what I wish to take up here. Briefly, however, in my project-in-progress which will address the social history of Schiller’s “An die Freude” and the fallout of that context in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, I am interested in trying to understand the popularity of Schiller’s poem among Freemasons yet also its appeal for society at large during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. As I hope to make clear in my current project, coming to terms with the popularity of poem and symphony sheds light on Beethoven’s attraction to the poem and the related fact that Schiller’s “An die Freude” occasioned a great number of musical settings in the years before Beethoven’s. Moreover, Schiller’s was not the only poem to address Joy as a philosophical concept or to have been given the name “An die Freude” or some similar title, many of which date to the early 1740s. Clearly, Beethoven didn’t set to music just any poem on any subject. Schiller’s “An die Freude” possessed deep cultural resonance.

Johann Friedrich Reichardt, “An die Freude,” from Zwey und sechzig Freymaurer-Lieder: mit Melodien zum Gebrauch der Loge zu den drey Degen in Halle (Sixty-two Masonic songs With Melodies for Use at the Lodge of the Three Swords in Halle). [4]

Searching through pertinent German publications at the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library between 1785 and 1830 that include Schiller’s “An die Freude” poem or poems bearing a similar title greatly advanced my research. All told, I consulted some forty volumes in which I found Schiller’s poem, a musical setting of his “An die Freude,” or a poem by another German poet addressing the same topic.

On my second day I made a poignant discovery, when, looking through the volume Lieder für Freymaurer (Songs for Freemasons), published in Hannover in 1809. Opening the book to page 142 I found nestled between that page and the next the remnants of a flower and the marks it had made on both sides of those pages. The flower makes good sense given that the poem into which it is inserted is called “Freundschaft,” “Friendship,” by August Gottlieb Meissner (1753-1807). The first two lines in translation are: “In the streams of life, there often enough flow the bitterest of tears.” In the lines that follow Meissner states that life’s tears can be assuaged by friendship, that is from within the social environment of self-cultivation Schiller treats in his “An die Freude.”

Lieder für Freymaurer (Hannover, 1809), pages 142 and 143.

Lieder für Freymaurer (Hannover, 1809), title page.

Most of the time turning the pages of eighteenth- and especially nineteenth-century printed sources is a finger staining not to mention eye and nose straining endeavor. Sometimes, however, the researcher comes across something that makes for a stand-still if not heart-stopping moment. For me the discovery of the flower was one of those moments, a tangible sign that someone before me had enjoyed this book and memorialized that experience. Was the flower a sign of friendship between the individual who had pressed the flower between the book’s pages and another? Did Meissner’s poem possess special significance for the person who left the flower? Before I allowed too many more questions to formulate I returned the volume to the librarian and made my way to the library’s exit on West Twenty-Third Street. In its own way, history had taken shape and reached out in the form of that preserved flower. Suddenly the more than 200 years that separated me from the 1809 Lieder für Freymaurer were no more. In that moment the past seemed very much alive.
***
[1] Writing the poem in 1785, Schiller published two versions of “An die Freude,” the first in 1786 in the second volume of his literary journal, Thalia, the second in the 1803 collected edition of his poems. The wording here, in English translation, is from the latter version, set by Beethoven. On the differences between the two versions see Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed, Julius Petersen et al. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1943), 1: 169–72 and 2, part 1: 185–87, and my “‘Deine Zauber binden wieder’: Beethoven, Schiller, and the Joyous Reconciliation of Opposites,” Beethoven Forum (2002) 9/1, 1-53; here 4-5.
[2] Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe, 20: 331.
[3] Jean Paul Richter, Vorschule der Aesthetit nebst einigen Vorlesungen in Leipzig über die Parteien der Zeit, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1813), 887-88.
[4] No composer attribution is provided in this publication; Reichardt’s authorship is established from Reichardt, Lieder geselliger Freude (Leipzig: G. Fleischer, 1796), No. 34, p. 76—music provided on foldout following the poem’s second strophe; see http://idb.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/diglit/Mk90_R01_1/0163?sid=2433e061df1d4dd633eca390ab96bd98.
***

With his primary research interests the German Lied and Beethoven, James Parsons is Professor of Music History at Missouri State University and serves as the editor of the AMSNewsletter. The research discussed above was made possible by a Missouri State University 2017 Summer Faculty Fellowship. All of the photographs above were taken by the author with permission.

By Rebekah Moore

Note: This essay is the second installment in Musicology Now's "Teaching Music & Difference" series, which features additional essays by Jesus Ramos-Kittrell, Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, and Angela Glaros.

If one were to search the phrase “what is world music” and scroll past the list of upcoming local concerts and festivals conjured by search engine optimization, one would quickly come across a 2012 article by Ian Birrell for The Guardian, titled “The Term ‘World Music’ is Outdated and Offensive.” The author condemns this marketing silo for non-Anglo artists on the basis of its valuation of cultural rootedness-as-purity and as a disavowal of the digitized and highly mobile world in which most people now live. His loathing for this designation, however, does not prevent him from exploiting the marketing potential of defining difference according to a geographic otherness: He is co-founder of a London-based concert promotion and production company called Africa Express. To a degree, I empathize: enticing concert-goers thirsty for something other than the mainstream pop fodder of the major labels and live event companies with the promise of a soundscape of exotic elsewheres is a profitable and personally fulfilling strategy for many concert curators and producers—myself included. As director for international yoga, dance, and music festival BaliSpirit, I catered a stage line-up to Californian and Australian yogis and digital nomads island-hopping between Bali and Phuket by booking musicians and dancers from First Nations and the Global South, who would match in performative spectacle the festival’s exotic tropical backdrop. I rebranded the world music concert series as “One World, One Stage,” as a strategy to downplay the tokenistic presentation of difference and convey the cosmopolitan’s vision of one human tribe. But in retrospect, I did little to challenge the festival’s appropriative tendencies or discourage cultural stereotyping.

In subsequent professional roles in the public and private sectors, I generally managed to avoid the ethical problem of world music as genre or creative and professional “ghetto,’ to borrow from Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour’s assessment of the music industry’s handling of “nonwestern” musicians in a 2000 interview.<1> In 2017, I opened a new professional chapter as an academic ethnomusicologist. Now, I must contend with a teaching mandate to design courses that “engage with difference and diversity,”<2> and ethnomusicology’s culpability for the persistence of world music as a core requirement in conservatories and music departments. This new role compels me to question: What are universities really trying to accomplish by insisting on diversity in curricula? “Diversity” to what end? Are academics challenging or reinforcing the white male domination of the classical music canon with such requirements? Can a world music “survey course,” a mainstay in many American college and university curricula and charge of many early-career ethnomusicologists, offer anything more than superficial coverage of music traditions that have been canonized by world music textbooks and bear a resemblance to European colonial expeditions? Or should such courses be exorcised from music curricula, as neocolonial specters?

In my current post as a music industry professor for a program oriented toward professional development rather than theoretical inquiry, I do not necessarily have to answer most of these questions. But I do have to contend with the preparation of students entering a profession carrying global economic and social impact, which will shape both how they interact with professionals who do not share their socioeconomic privilege and also what they envision as sustainable, ethical business practice. So I have been compelled to offer a “Global Music Industries” course as supplement to a curriculum focused largely on U.S. music business opportunities and developments. Thus, like colleagues at other institutions leading world music survey courses, I am doing my best to cover the “rest” of the world’s music, largely ignored by music curricula, and yet still avoid tokenism and the allure of cultural competence.

The course’s practical objective is to help prepare students for international music careers involving activities such as international touring and contract negotiations or the navigation of diverse legislation on licensing and IP protection across national borders. Students encounter modes of music production and consumption through diverse knowledge sources, such as ethnographic studies and industry trade reports, with a focus on grounded practice outside the U.S. music industry and its global conglomerates. Course content is organized topically by professional practices and challenges, such as recording and record labels, live performance, market research, instrument manufacturing, government interventions, and emerging business models. A strong focus on peripheral markets—vis-à-vis mainstream entertainment conglomerates—provides an exercise in “mainstreaming,” to borrow from Anne Rasmussen, diverse modes of music professionalism.<3> The ethnographic studies, in particular, introduce professional activities that are both familiar in practice and culturally distinctive. Students encounter, for example, album sales strategies along the North American powwow trail,<4> payment structures in a New Delhi recording studio,<5> pirates as crucial distributors within Myanmar’s popular music industry,<6> and digital activism as a core professional activity among Indonesian recording artists.<7>

Indonesian rock band Navicula during their tour of Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) to raise awareness about deforestation and its impacts on indigenous communities, wildlife, and the global climate. Photographed by the author.

Rather than focusing on how students might navigate these diverse markets, the course encourages them to explore the myriad ways in which professionals consolidate music production, distribution, and consumption. The course’s implicit objective is to encourage these students, most of whom will work within the dominant music industries of the United States, Europe, or China to a) dispute the narrow definition of music’s value as consumer good propagated by the highly regulated, centrally controlled, capitalistic recording industries with which they are most familiar and b) recognize their own complicity with unequal access to resources for producing and consuming music.

Unfortunately, in the course’s first iteration, student self-assessments and teacher evaluations suggest that the implicit objective was not achieved. This is due, in large part, to my decision to keep this priority objective close to the vest, based on my concern that students might reject a blatant challenge to modern music business practices. Instead, I might have explicitly insisted on critical engagement with core business values and ethics. An additional problem is that the stated objective’s focus on preparing students for fruitful careers imparts a goal of economic dominance that is at odds with the implicit objective. Thus, the course could be critiqued as providing training grounds for ongoing musical imperialism.

With fine-tuning, however, courses like “Global Music Industries” might offer an interesting alternative to world music survey courses. By focusing on music in practice and profession, rather than as aesthetic tradition, such courses could denaturalize current business models that coalesce power in a corporate oligopoly and accelerate creative homogenization. They could prioritize entrepreneurial thinking about sustainable music practice and stimulate critical engagement on the common ground of professional practice shared by recording and touring artists worldwide.

Key to these outcomes would be an explicit rejection of cultural competence as a course outcome and instead the adoption of the lens of critical awareness. This notion, developed through research on healthcare and social services for diverse populations, provides useful pedagogical frameworks, whereby instructors would support students in working toward the principles of “‘curiosity’ and of ‘informed not knowing,’” to use the words of social work scholars Mark Furlong and James Wight.<8> In such approaches, the aim is not to accumulate a body of knowledge about cultural and professional others; rather, critical awareness “establishes a context for practice that regards ‘the other’ as a mirror upon which the practitioner can see the outline of their own personal, professional, ideological, and cultural profile.”<9> By explicating critical awareness as a course objective, instructors would challenge students to recognize the plurality of music professionalism and their own positionality within it and to undertake global creative exchanges through a lens of informed not-knowing—a lens that prevents them from seeing the world’s musical traditions as territory to acquire.

If one were to take, at face value, university diversity requirements as strategies to foster inclusivity, mutual respect, and collaboration, then one would be compelled to advocate for the continual inclusion of courses introducing diverse musics and musical values, as a means to critically engage with intersectionality, define music as a rightful human experience, and build students’ commitment to equal access to music production and consumption. Such courses would overtly confront the inequities created by regional or cultural differentiation, the canonization of certain traditions over others, and the accumulation of cross-cultural knowledge as the means to succeed in a digitized, mobilized world. Perhaps, then, we could effectively equip students with the global curiosity and cosmopolitan responsibility required to make a world of difference in how we all experience music.
***
<1>N’Dour, quoted in Taylor, Music and Capitalism, p. 89.
<2>“Engaging Differences and Diversity.”
<3>Rasmussen, “Mainstreaming American Musical Multiculturalism.”
<4>Scales, Recording Culture.
<5>Booth and Shope, More than Bollywood.
<6>MacLachlan, Burma’s Pop Music Industry.
<7>Moore, “My Music, My Freedom(?)”
<8>Furlong and Wight, “Promoting ‘Critical Awareness’ and Critiquing ‘Cultural Competence,’” p. 39
<9>Ibid.
***

Works Cited

Booth, Gregory D., and Bradley Shope. More than Bollywood: Studies in Indian Popular
Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“Engaging Differences and Diversity.” NUpath: The Core Curriculum at Northeastern
University. Accessed May 11, 2018.
https://www.northeastern.edu/core/requirements/engaging-differences-and-diversity/.
Furlong, Mark, and James Wight. “Promoting ‘Critical Awareness’ and Critiquing ‘Cultural
Competence’: Towards Disrupting Received Professional Knowledges.” Australian Social
Work 64, no. 1 (2011): 38–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/0312407X.2010.537352.
MacLachlan, Heather. Burma’s Pop Music Industry: Creators, Distributors, Censors.
Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011. http://ezproxy.neu.edu/login?
url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt1x7285.
Moore, Rebekah E. “‘My Music, My Freedom(?): The Troubled Pursuit of Musical and
Intellectual Independence on the Internet in Indonesia.’” Asian Journal of Communication
23, no. 4 (2013): 368–385. https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2013.804105.
Rasmussen, Anne K. “Mainstreaming American Musical Multiculturalism.” American Music
22, no. 2 (2004): 296–309. https://doi.org/10.2307/3593008.
Scales, Christopher A. Recording Culture: Powwow Music and the Aboriginal Recording
Industry on the Northern Plains. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Taylor, Timothy. Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015.

***

Ethnomusicologist Rebekah E. Moore has returned to the United States and American academe after a decade-long career in Indonesia, where she worked in public programs management, concert and festival production, and band and tour management. Last Fall, she joined the music faculty at Northeastern University, in order to teach undergraduate and graduate music industry courses and coordinate the graduate certificate programs in arts administration and cultural entrepreneurship. Prior to accepting this position, Rebekah was Senior Manager for @america, the world’s largest center for U.S. public diplomacy, located in Jakarta. Rebekah has published articles in the Asian Journal of Communication, Asian Music, Collaborative Anthropologies, and Inside Indonesia. She is co-founder of Bersama Project, an Indonesian nonprofit foundation that supports musicians and artists to stage creative interventions on violence against women and LGBTQ+ young people, an organization to which she continues to contribute as Project Advisor.

By Angela Glaros

Note: This essay is the third installment in Musicology Now's "Teaching Music & Difference" series, which features additional essays by Jesus Ramos-Kittrell, Rebekah Moore, and Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone.

I don’t teach ethnomusicology full-time, or even a single course devoted to music. I’m an anthropologist who does ethnomusicological research. I teach in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology at Eastern Illinois University. Our Introduction to Anthropology course (taught by myself and my other full-time anthropology colleague) counts toward our anthropology minor as well as our sociology major. It also helps fulfill the university’s general education requirements, specifically Citizenship in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, which includes courses that emphasize civics, ethics, or diversity. As EIU’s catalog states, “Diversity courses focus on students’ capacity for viewing issues or problems from multiple perspectives…[t]he examination of history, language, and/or traditions of other countries or cultures (anthropological, artistic, literary, philosophical, political, or sociological) aids in using cultural sensitivity when making informed and ethical decisions.”<1> As a survey course, “Intro to Anthro” covers a wide spectrum of topics: culture, ethnography, economic systems, kinship, religion, gender, and many others. Moreover, my colleague and I enjoy the freedom in our individual sections to choose our own books and arrange our topics to take advantage of our particular areas of expertise.

Such freedom, however, is tempered by larger institutional factors. For example, our school of music already offers a “Non-Western Music” course whose description promises that “[t]he music of a variety of world cultures, such as Asian, African, and South American, will be examined in their appropriate contexts.”<2> Given the often territorial nature of academic departments, particularly during challenging economic times, the only opportunity for me to bring my own research into the classroom without appearing to duplicate courses taught elsewhere was to incorporate ethnomusicology, albeit briefly, into my Intro classes.

At first, I simply lectured about music, explaining the relationship of anthropology to ethnomusicology, discussing the ethnomusicological shift from studying music in culture to music as culture, reviewing classes of instruments, and talking about what kinds of things the study of music can show us (relationships to nature, gender relations, etc.). I also discussed dance, focusing on how bodily motion and the use of space engaged local cosmologies. After a few semesters, however, that lecture morphed into a combination of in-class exercise and mini-lecture that I called “Thick Listening,” after Geertz’s (1973) discussion of the importance of “thick description” in ethnographic interpretation. <3> While Damon Krukowski uses “thick listening” in his 2017 Paris Review article to refer to the process of listening to noise in analog music, I have been using the term since at least 2014 in the ways described above. In any case, our respective meanings are not unrelated, since Krukowski describes the process of listening through surface noise back to the original conditions of the recording—that is, to original cultural production—in ways that make ethnographic sense.<4>

This “Thick Listening” exercise is intended to expose students to some of ethnomusicology’s methods and questions, and also to counter the visual bias prevalent in college classrooms by forcing them to rely on their ears. I begin by questioning the status of music as a “universal language,” an old chestnut that most students have heard and accepted. Then I play four samples, allowing ample time for listening and writing down their descriptions as thickly as they can. Next, we briefly discuss each one to identify common observations. Finally, I perform a “reveal” where I identify each sample and discuss some of the features of this form of music. Currently, my samples include a Bosavi recording from Steven Feld’s research in Papua New Guinea, a Byzantine rendering of Psalm 136 by Greek Orthodox monks, Tuvan throat singing, and a Northern Plains pow-wow song.<5> Three out of four of these tracks involve no instrumentation, which simplifies the listening process and showcases a variety of vocal techniques, allowing me to provide more context, drawn from my own research on vocal aesthetics. Additionally, the pow-wow song bridges music and dance, incorporating older research of mine on pow-wow dancing in Montana, while the Byzantine chant engages my ongoing research on liturgical chanting.

What do students hear?
While almost no one recognizes any of the music samples before the “reveal,” I am continually surprised by how much students identify. They are particularly attentive to the relationship of sound and space. For example, students point out water sounds in the background of the Bosavi recording (which takes place near a waterfall), and they observe that the Byzantine piece sounds like it’s being played in a large stone building, pointing out the reverberation. They notice song structure, particularly call-and-response, which also shows up in both of these pieces. They also notice rhythm, which is hard to miss in the pow-wow song, given the presence of percussion. And they make reasonable guesses as to the gender of singers, based on pitch and vocal quality.

How do we further “thicken” the listening?
During the “reveal,” I discuss the related concepts of aesthetics and cosmology, pointing out how music can show us how people construct their worlds through sound. In the Bosavi example, the cascading voices serve as metaphor not only for the waterfall, but also for the Bosavi style of communicating that they call “making talk together,” as Feld discusses in “Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or ‘Lift-up-over Sounding.’”<6>

For the Byzantine chant, I explain the importance of the drone not only to sound but as a sonic icon of the Church, providing a place for errant souls to return, just as the drone helps wandering lead chanters come back to the tonic. With the Tuvan example, I discuss the importance of animism, and how the sounds of throat singing may be interpreted as literally otherworldly. Finally, with pow-wow, I discuss the importance of the circle—the shape of the drum, the circle of dancers, and the cosmological relation of all beings, while they also see the relationship of dance to the song with a video clip of a pow-wow grand entry. In each case, what makes music sound “right” is married to some extent to how people understand themselves in relation to each other and their world(s).

What don’t students hear when asked to listen thickly?
My classroom sound technology doesn’t lend itself to the “thickest” listening, as individual headphones might. Some students hear more nuance than others, depending on the particular classroom. However, the largest challenge I face is simply my students’ lack of exposure to people who live and believe differently from them, which affects the entire semester, not just this lesson plan. Their responses to unfamiliar sounds are somehow more immediate, visceral, and potentially problematic, since “gut reactions” tend to be difficult to unpack and interpret in limited time frames. For example, while many students recognize the Byzantine chant as something Christian, because they hear the word “Alleluia” or because it resembles church music they’ve heard, some laugh at the throat singing, commenting that it “sounds like a burp.” Others describe the high male falsetto of pow-wow singing as “violent,” like “screaming.” Here is where I interject my story of similar prejudice in white towns that bordered reservations, where people described pow-wow singing as “war whoops.” For context, I play students the end of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” as another example of a high, strident male falsetto with a definite place in the mainstream American soundscape.<7>

If I could devote more time to music in my Intro class, I would address some of the gaps in students’ music literacy, particularly Western art music and its history, without which additional comparisons to more familiar forms of music prove challenging (though here, the music majors come to class overprepared, if anything). Without the ability to listen thickly and reflexively to a wider range of Western genres, I worry that this exercise doesn’t do enough to prevent the exoticization of “other” musics, negating the possibility that they, too, incorporate Western identities, values, and contexts, as Jesús Ramos-Kittrell has suggested in his recent post. To take my students beyond Western and non-Western as categories that constrain their musical understanding, this exercise must emphasize that it isn’t only “Others” who link sound and cosmology in some sort of mystic fashion; rather, all of us make and remake our worlds through sound all the time.

***

<1>Eastern Illinois University. 2018. Course Catalog, General Education. http://catalog.eiu.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=32&poid=4751Accessed May 10, 2018.
<2>MUS 3562G, http://catalog.eiu.edu/content.php?catoid=32&navoid=1305. Accessed May 10, 2018.
<3>Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
<4>Krukowski, Damon. 2017. "Surface Noise." Paris Review. April 21, 2017. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/04/21/surface-noise/#more-110135 Accessed May 8, 2018.
<5>“Ulahi and Eyo:bo Sing at a Waterfall.” Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea. SFW CD 40487. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 2001; Monks of Simonopetro. “Exomologiste To [Give Thanks Unto the Lord]." Agni Parthene: The Monks of Simonopetro are Chanting. B0002J6EEU. Fataka Records, 1990; Tuva Ensemble. “Kargiraa-Style Song.” Tuva: Voices from the Land of the Eagle. PAN2005CD. Pan Records, 1993; Northern Cree Singers. “Singer’s Song.” Nikamo—“Sing!”—Pow-Wow Songs Recorded Live at Samson. CR-6378. Canyon Records, 2005.
<6>Feld, Steven. "Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or 'Lift-up-over Sounding': Getting into the Kaluli Groove." Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 20 (1988), pp. 74-113.
<7>Led Zeppelin. "Stairway to Heaven." Led Zeppelin IV. ATL 50-008. Atlantic Records, 1971.

***

Angela Glaros is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Eastern Illinois University.

By Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone

Note: This essay is the final installment in Musicology Now's "Teaching Music & Difference" series, which features additional essays by Jesus Ramos-Kittrell, Rebekah Moore, and Angela Glaros.

Music scholars do not do well with sex.

Musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, anthropology of music. . . . whatever field or discipline we claim, the truth is that as a field of study we need to do better with sex. And I mean that word in every way: sexuality in terms of sexual behavior, sexual identity, sexual orientation and gender expression, and changing definitions of sex as a biocultural marker. As scholars, we notice and critique colleagues who ignore race, indigeneity, and/or ethnicity. We might not always get those critiques correct or present them nearly often enough, but we see those faultlines. We attempt to speak to the inclusion of women, again not well enough or often enough, or with nearly enough force inside our own organizations and institutions, but we are at least aware. About sexuality, however, there is still a broad field of lack. Lack of knowledge, to be sure, but also a lack of engagement, interest, and effort. The ignorance looks ignorant.

Have you ever tried to research “sexuality and music?” What you will find is two things: scholarship about music and gender, and mainstream material about music and sexual behavior. I recently did some research at the Kinsey Institute, focusing on music and its inclusion in the famous archive. I ended up with files filled with news clippings of LGBTQ+ musicians and performers, two folders of Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and one article titled “Sex Differences in Sexual Imagery Aroused by Musical Stimulation.” The 1958 article by Beardslee and Fogelsong suggested that women were more likely to have a sexual response to music because the rhythm was pseudosexual, arguing that women “listen more closely to learn” sexual technique from music. I’ve found a similar dearth of resources at archives and repositories all over the world, from the British Library to the Lesbian Herstory Archives. If the subject is not a famous queer performance, or someone famous for being a queer performer, then it is not in the archives as “sexuality.” Unless the article is about how music makes the brain want to listen to Barry White, it is not archived as “sex.”

I teach an ethnomusicology course that focuses on globalization and popular music. I examine the ways in which music has traveled, been appropriated, been covered and sampled and impersonated, as a way of understanding global flow. As a lesbian female professor, I am assumed by some of my students to embody their ideas about gender and sexuality- even if they are not sure what the difference really is. For my students who identify as non-normative in terms of gender and/or sexual identity, I’m somewhere between a signal of queerness that they identify with, and they are hoping to see some bit of themselves in what I teach. That is a constant challenge in a discipline where sexuality is still largely silenced.

This is not to say that there is no literature about the music of the world and sexuality. The problem is that such works are used as add-ins, optional texts, the readings that get assigned for the one day you’re “doing gender.” Garcia’s work on sexuality and club culture, MacLachlan’s essay on GALA choruses, and Taylor’s recent monograph on LGBTQ+ folx in popular music, are all important contributions. There is also a long history of work in this field that we all know: Brett and Wood’s all-important work building a history of gay and lesbian musicology, Munoz’ work on worldmaking, important work in jazz studies by Tucker, my own work on heavy metal, and West’s amazing work on hip-hop. These are all works, both germinal and current, that seek to describe and explain the complications of gender and sexuality. The problem is that we, as teachers and scholars, are complicit in marginalizing these works by treating them as sidebars to a grander narrative. We miss an opportunity to teach the cultural constructions of gender and sexuality with/in/through music. I propose that not only is the study of music the place to talk about sexuality, it may be the most productive place to do precisely that. To welcome that opportunity, however, scholars must avoid three things: exoticizing, eroticizing, and failing to admit biases.

As scholars of music, we should all be at least familiar with the dangers of exoticism. In ethnomusicology and anthropology, especially, avoiding the exoticization of our interlocutors is paramount. When it comes to sexuality, however, exoticizing difference happens in classrooms every day. If sexuality and sexual identity are included in our curriculum, how are they represented? As opera divas? Disco queens? How often has sexual identity been reduced to whether Tchaikovsky was gay, or how Billy Strayhorn passed? Even a cursory examination of common texts will shed further light on this issue. Sheila Whiteley’s classic Sexing The Groove, an essential collection on gender and popular music, has two essays specifically about sexual identity: “Mannish Girl” about singer k.d. lang, and “Missing Links” about lesbian culture in the 1990s riotgrrl movement. It is simply not enough to include in our pedagogy lesbian folksingers, 1970s disco divas, Aaron Copeland, and the nan dan of Peking opera. The result is two-fold: making sexual diversity exotic and sensational, and positioning sexual diversity in music is an exception, an exotic rarity that exists only in coffee shops and drag culture.

Another issue is eroticizing sexuality in world music. You cannot divorce the sex from sexuality, and at its core sexuality is about our attractions. Sometimes, however, an attempt to discuss sexuality quickly becomes an exercise in eroticizing musicians and performers, both historically and today. When this happens, their identity as a performer of music, or as a composer, is eclipsed by their sex lives. As a queer person I am often guilty of this myself, merging my identity as a fan with my work as a scholar. While we should not ignore the sexuality of our subjects and their work, that same sexuality should not become the story we tell about music. Non-normative sexuality is only one facet of people who identify as LGBTQ+, and their work should not be reduced to that point. At the same time, there are thousands of stories we could tell about sexuality and music that we avoid, or do not know. One excellent example is Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: a founding member of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, they are without question among the most important music performers of the 20th and 21st centuries. P-Orridge gave birth to industrial, acid house, and experimental music, pushed the Moog synth to new heights, and brought music to new boundaries of visual and performance art. P-Orridge identifies as pandrogynous, a term that “is the conscious embracing of gender roles, sexual orientations, or cultural traditions so as to render the person’s original identity completely indecipherable.” While P-Orridge’s sexuality is undoubtedly part of their work, it is also not the sum total of their work or their lives. It is one opportunity, among thousands if not millions, for a pedagogical move to talking about sexuality as a factor in the music.

Finally, as teachers and scholars we must acknowledge our ignorance and identify our biases when it comes to gender and sexuality. We do not get trained in our doctoral programs to teach about either, and unless you identify as something other than heterosexual and cisgendered, knowledge about gender and sexuality may range from confusing to frightening. We live in a world where knowledge, conceptions, and presentations of different sexualities are changing rapidly for some, while it feels like a long fought battle for recognition to others. Those of you who teach may indeed be in a time and space where your students seem to know more than you do. Those of you in classrooms may feel that your teachers do not have a complete understanding of gender in your time, your culture, and your life. All of these reactions are fair, and honest. As professionals, however, it is our job to learn. That is why we all joined the ranks of academia hopefully, due to a thirst for knowledge and the search for it. We must refuse to be so confused, or frightened, or disappointed, that we avoid the opportunity to learn. If you do not feel that you understand gender and sexuality in the 21st century, read, ask, seek help. Learn not just your students’ names, but their pronouns. Get trained through your campus safe zone program, and make sure your students and colleagues understand that you support those living through changes in their identity. Find those scholars who have done the heavy lifting to create a study of genders and sexualities in music, and include them in your curriculum regularly. Assign reading by LGBTQ+ writers. Diverse sexuality exists in every species on earth. It is also culturally constructed and mediated, and received through the eyes, ears, desires, and experiences of one’s life. In this way, it is not unlike music. Using sexuality to study music is an opportunity not only to make our students better thinkers, but also to demonstrate that sexual diversity has always been there, that the study of music is not separate from that diversity but woven within it, and that we as music scholars will refuse to embrace the phobias and oppressions that exist around us. It is not just good pedagogy, it is good humanity.

In a recent article, blogger Ace Ratcliff asked why there are no accessible spaces in science fiction. “In a universe this big,” wrote Ratcliff, “sci-fi could show us a reality where we have evolved beyond neglecting or outright ignoring a significant portion of our population.” We can bring that reality closer only if we are willing to do the work of truly, intentionally, refusing to use music scholarship as a vessel for marginalization, sensationalism, and ignorance.
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Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone (PhD American Studies, U Kansas) is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the McClure Archives and Museum at University of Central Missouri. She is also the author of Queerness In Heavy Metal (Routledge, 2015) and Queering Kansas City Jazz (forthcoming, U Nebraska). She can be reached at Clifford@ucmo.edu.

By Alexander Stalarow

Dissertation Digest: Listening to a Liberated Paris: Pierre Schaeffer Experiments with Radio
I first became interested in Pierre Schaeffer when I encountered his pair of electroacoustic operas based on the Orpheus myth. Comprising Orphée 51 and Orphée 53, Schaeffer’s Orpheus project offers a very early example of mixing live performance with prerecorded music and sounds; it also mixed new compositional processes with old stories. Alluding to past Orpheus settings by Monteverdi and Gluck, among others, Schaeffer placed his operas in conversation with the rich interpretive history of the myth. He also used its drama to advocate for a new type of composer, one used the burgeoning techniques of musique concrète involving the capture, manipulation, and retransmission of recorded sounds. At its 1953 Donaueschingen premiere, German critics assailed Orphée, some on the grounds that making musique concrète was not an act of original creation worthy of a composer per se. Schaeffer’s own retrospective account suggests that electronic music historians have tended to agree with his German critics: “It was thus we lost the battle of Donaueschingen and that we were plunged for years into international reprobation, while there rose in the sky of Cologne, a dawn favorable to the hereditary and electronic enemy!”<1>

Donaueschingen Festival, program cover, 1953, GRM Archives

Schaeffer himself may have relegated Orphée 53 to a pile of failed experiments. I, however, was drawn to rethinking the project on its own terms by considering its potential to broaden the conceptual role of the composer in light of new methods for music making in midcentury France. Such questions sparked my first entry into Schaeffer’s world, which was enlivened by his own copious writings, his recordings of radiophonic art and musique concrète, and later by archival materials as well—administrative documents, radio program transcripts, correspondence, personal notes—housed outside of Caen at the Institut Mémoires de l’Éditions Contemporaines (IMEC).

Schaeffer’s material and audiovisual archival traces highlight his multifaceted career. He was at once an author, sound engineer, radio artist, administrator, musician, and mentor to interns and junior employees in the studios he directed for French state radio (Radiodiffusion Nationale and its postwar successor Radiodiffusion Française). It was at these radio studios under French state patronage that Schaeffer pursued his multifaceted career, and radio mattered to his creative work in two interrelated ways. First, as an institution, radio facilitated Schaeffer and his team’s access to particular resources, both technological and human. Making the radio programs that Schaeffer wrote, directed, and produced for the Studio d’Essai between 1942 and 1945, for example, required the institution’s machines and network of people comprising bureaucrats, technicians, and artists. When he would in 1948 orient his experiments toward more strictly musical concerns by founding the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC), much of the human and technical infrastructure was already in place. Second, radio mattered as a medium, both as a type of transmission and of creation itself, shaping not only who listened, but also where, why, and how they might do so.

My dissertation, Listening to a Liberated Paris: Pierre Schaeffer Experiments with Radio, starts a conversation about the ways in which radio mattered to the creative labor, collaborative process, creation, and diffusion of Schaeffer’s music. Drawing appropriate attention to radio in Schaeffer’s career provides needed context for both the musique concrète project and for Schaeffer’s theoretical writings on the phenomenology of sound. The recent translation of his Treatise on Musical Objects makes the latter particularly apt. I argue that Schaeffer’s musique concrète compositions and his theories of sound perception are best understood as parts of a broader project with radio at its center. To do this, I analyze the largely overlooked radio programs that Schaeffer’s produced from 1942–1947, revealing the origins of many sources and techniques Schaeffer would use in his musique concrète works, from his Cinq Études de bruits (1948) to Orphée 53, the work that sparked my interest in Schaeffer in the first place. Further, listening to his radiophonic art helps relocate Schaeffer—a figure who is often relegated to the pioneering fringes of postwar music histories—in an intellectual network at the heart of institutionalized French culture.

The first half of my dissertation considers Schaeffer’s work building a model for making radiophonic art. Chapter 1 recounts Schaeffer’s upbringing, schooling, and his formative professional activities from 1936–1942. After exploring his interests in music, literature, and philosophy while pursuing a rigorous engineering degree at the École Polytechnique, Schaeffer’s first job for French state radio involved redeveloping the Paris Opéra’s live radio broadcasting system for its 1936–1937 season. Here Schaeffer used both his musical ear and his training as an engineer to choose which microphones to purchase, where to place them around the stage, and he trained recordists and musicians alike in the art of sound recording. The work, however, frustrated him. Capturing with precision opera singers as moving targets seemed futile next to his work recording in a studio, where he found that moving the microphone by even one centimeter had a profound impact on the sonic result. Schaeffer quickly turned his attention to the development of a proper radiophonic art, one that would study and leverage the inherent abilities of the medium, rather than attempt to retransmit other arts conceived for acoustic consumption.

Chapter 2 focuses on Schaeffer’s founding role in 1942 at the Studio d’Essai, an experimental studio staffed by thespians, musicians, technicians, and poets dedicated to radiophonic production. The studio’s first major production, La Coquille à planets, an eight-episode radio opera, served as an experiment with the technical and artistic aspects of studio production, fostering new collegial relationships between artists and technicians from diverse backgrounds. Schaeffer collaborated closely with Claude Arrieu, who composed a full score for the work, and helped producer Maurice Cazeneuve developed a model for his role of metteur-en-ondes, responsible mainly for the montage of recorded scenes. The Studio d’Essai also served national needs as well, producing the first official French broadcasts after the Liberation of Paris by Allied forces in August 1944. In his Chronique sonore de Paris libéré (1945), Schaeffer sampled footage from these broadcasts, which include speeches by General de Gaulle, cheering crowds, tolling bells, and a recording of La Marseillaise.

Interior front courtyard, Studio d’Essai at 37, rue de l’Université,
photo credit: Alexander Stalarow.

Une Heure du monde (1946), the central focus of my third chapter, took Schaeffer's radio experiments to the world stage. With the war over, Radiodiffusion Française now used its technical and artistic acumen to reach international audiences and to flood the Parisian airways with the sounds of cultural internationalism. Throughout the series, Schaeffer’s audience encountered a global community through a wide sampling of recordings featuring speech, noise, and music from around the world. In the last episode, “Radio Babel,” Schaeffer considers a theoretical model for international radio communication where sounds, noises, musics, and speech interact in confusion. This episode indexes Schaeffer’s theories of acousmatic sound by training audiences to listen without context.

Chapters 4 and 5 explore Schaeffer’s musique concrète project in light of his past experiences in radio production and point to continuities in techniques as well as a shared listener-centered creative approach. In Chapter 4 I analyse each musique concrète piece Schaeffer produced from 1948 through 1951, examining the sound materials used, their significance, and the contributions of Parisian musicians including Pierre Boulez, Gaston Litaize, and Pierre Henry. The chapter ends with a discussion of Schaeffer and Henry’s Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950), which I use to address two crucial aspects of the musique concrète project: the acousmatic concept (the perceptual implications of hearing sounds without seeing their source) and the studio’s concert culture in Paris and abroad. Both converge in my analysis of a 1952 Boston performance of Symphonie pour un homme seul as a ballet danced by Merce Cunningham, who uncannily reconnected manipulated sound fragments of recorded human gestures with live choreography. Chapter 5 draws on the institutional and aesthetic connections between radio and cinema in Schaeffer’s thought to examine Orphée 51 and Orphée 53. I put Schaeffer’s opera in conservation with Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée (1950) as I argue that the two works present analogous postwar interpretations of the mythic protagonist.

Listening to a Liberated Paris broadens our understanding of Schaeffer, and expands the view of his impact beyond the electronic compositions and theories of sound perception for which he has risen in fame. Working from this expanded perspective, I situate these very aspects of his legacy to show how radio and experimentalism played formational roles in his interdisciplinary artistic and creative aspirations. This re-envisioning connects the previously disconnected spheres of experimental musical practices, and radio as institution and medium, in mid-century France.
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<1>Pierre Schaeffer, La Musique concrète (Press Universitaire de Paris, 1973), 23 via Simon Emmerson, Living Electronic Music (Ashgate, 2007), 77.
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Alexander Stalarow is a Collegiate Professor of Music History at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His research on Pierre Schaeffer has been supported by a Chateaubriand Fellowship and an Alvin H. Johnson-AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship. He completed his Ph.D. in musicology at the University of California, Davis in 2017.

By Gavin Lee

How should music research approach different social formations and musical expressions of gender and sexuality—and the very concept of difference? What are the affordances and pitfalls of difference? What else should we consider when working with marginalized communities? The chapters of Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality and Popular Music <1> offer case studies in response to these questions. Below is a taste of some of the authors’ work.

In the music video for “The Eyes of the Poor” by goth band The Cure, the lyrics circulate around a beloved whose cold-heartedness is a metaphor for the impossibility of being truly united in love. This unbridgeable distance gives rise to a permanent condition of emotional pain that shows how central S/M is to goth aesthetics. In goth aesthetics, pain becomes a central dynamic which replaces gender binarism as evidenced in the replacement of the female beloved of the lyrics with cold statues of males in the music video. But along with gender ambiguity in goth aesthetics and goths’ personal styling comes the fierce denial by many practicing goths of any non-normativity in terms of sexuality, a point made by Carol Siegel in her chapter. Goth presents both difference from and adherence to mainstream gender and sexuality norms, which should make those of us who are prone to narratives of minority heroism pause for a second. If, like me, you’ve seen conference audiences nod in fervent admiration for the protagonist in a given presentation, a hero who against all odds, seemingly breaking free of catastrophic social constraints, expresses their social agency through music—if you’ve felt at all concerned that at these presentations privileged professors get to feel better about themselves by hearing about minorities who seem to live up to nothing but the highest standards of heroism, you might understand my reservations. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t any minority heroes, many of whom do exhibit a level of resilience that I know I can never match. I’m suggesting that we need to be critical of an institution that is in danger of becoming what the character Michael from Arrested Development sardonically calls a “feel-goodery” (referring to a new age high school that facilitates student emotional expression while abolishing grades in Season 3, Episode 9). A “feel-goodery” represents the diametric opposite of Sarah Ahmed’s “feminist killjoy” project.<2> For Ahmed, remaining true to feminism requires us to disrupt heteronormativity, thereby spoiling the enjoyment of others who may resent us for it: Whoever said academia should feel good anyway?

My gut feeling is that Ahmed is right. As a scholar of affect theory, Ahmed is well placed to recognize the affective fields that condition contemporary reality: the “feel-good” mantra resonates throughout the mediatized economy of the twenty-first century. Feel bad? Chicken Soup for the Soul! Soothing sounds from the Spotify “Deep Sleep” playlist! Happy endings in Hollywood movies! Because ambiguity gives rise to the unpleasant feeling of anxiety over uncertainty (I argue), we would much prefer to idealize heroes than to figure out the complexity of their human frailty. My edited volume, Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music, is a corrective to idealizations of heroes who are portrayed as having forged new paths in gender and sexuality through popular music. In addition to recognizing the incredible spirit of music makers and audiences, contributors to the book provide a comprehensive analysis of ambiguous musical contexts, by embracing both positive and negative forces and effects that are inevitable in any political action, thus complicating feel-good heroic narratives premised on idealized constructions of difference. We examine both difference and similarity from mainstream cultures, as well as the possibility that undefined but emergent forms of gender and sexuality may arise.

Of the many other accounts of ambiguity, Gillian Rodger’s chapter in the book contains a subtle assessment of two female cross-dressing (trouser role) impersonators on the nineteenth-century American variety stage, Ella Wesner and Annie Hindle, who were also life partners. While they subverted gender and sexual norms, their success stemmed from their comic musical performance, which affirmed their working class male audience’s view of middle-class men by portraying stereotypes of the latter. Audiences were generally ignorant of same-sex attracted male impersonators’ personal, sexual lives, and received their cross-dressing as a confirmation of conceptions about masculinity. Looking across the Pacific Ocean to China, Wang Qian also examines theatrical cross-dressing through the career of Li Yugang, who specializes in the nan dan (female impersonator) in Peking opera. At the end of his concerts, Li typically appears in his everyday male attire, drops his voice by an octave, and talks about what Wang calls his “mysterious ex-girlfriend.” Li has inspired over 3,000 online video clips of female impersonation in China, even as the online discourse strictly adheres to heterosexuality. All the above chapters tell us that we are prone to misrecognize multiple musical contexts if we are fixated on idealized hero narratives.

Aside from analyzing the ambiguity of musical politics, authors in the book theorize ambiguity as a condition of existence. Kirsten Zemke and Jared Mackley-Crump’s chapter examines the proliferation of terms—“fierceness,” “bitch,” “cunty”—that map out the evolving gender and sexual field of black gay American rappers such as Cakes da Killa, a field which contextualizes those terms in particular ways that intersects ambiguously with heteronormativity. Ellie Hisama examines the multivalent possibilities of walking through the huge panels that comprise Isaac Julien’s art installations such as True North (about the first successful expedition to the north pole in 1909), theorizing that this ambiguity is aligned with Julien’s disruption of masculine polar exploration through the casting of a black woman, Vanessa Myrie, in the role of Matthew Henson, Commander Robert Peary’s black companion who reached the north pole ahead of the Commander. My own chapter argues that the desire of gays can be queered so that it roams away from male bodies in Andrew Christian underwear music videos towards pleasurably aestheticized surfaces in Britney Spears’s music videos. By gesturing towards the real world and inner world complexity of music makers and listeners, we open a register for recognizing the power of difference while making room for the ambiguities that have perhaps always been a point of departure for queer theory.

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<1>Routledge press page for the book: https://www.routledge.com/Rethinking-Difference-in-Gender-Sexuality-and-Popular-Music-Theory-and/Lee/p/book/9781138960053
<2>https://feministkilljoys.com/about/

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Gavin Lee is Assistant Professor of Music at Soochow University. His research is anchored in queer, globalization, and Deleuzian theory.

By Rachel Mundy

Note: This essay appears simultaneously in the blog of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, SLSA New Creations.

Some readers may recognize my question “Why Listen to Animals?” as a play on the title of John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?” which was printed in 1980 as the first chapter of his book, About Looking. Berger argued that the animals who once looked at us have been replaced in the past two centuries by animals at whom we look: in the zoo, the circus, and the toy store. Just as Berger’s About Looking is not about looking, but about seeing our own glances, I want to advocate in this essay not just that we listen to animals, but that we hear the way we listen. Listening is a practice that has been built with, against, and through cultural beliefs about interiority and human identity that rely on animals—not any animal, but “the” animal, the category of the animal—to persist. In hearing ourselves listen to animals, we can begin to notice foundational notions of difference that inform both how we hear, and how we see, animals and other Others.

I’m addressing this thought to two sets of readers, scholars of music and scholars of animal studies. While music scholars are unlikely to talk about animals, the historians and literary critics who populate animal studies are unlikely to talk about sound. My own disciplinary home base, the American Musicological Society, is made up of highly skilled listeners, but we tend to share a background in classical music that leaves animals far outside our purview. At last year’s conference, only one of the over 300 paper presentations explicitly referenced animality in its title (Michael Puri’s “The Rise of the Humanimal: From Schumann to Ravel, via Barthes”). Members of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts are far more likely to talk about animals than musicologists are. Here it is listening and the other senses that are outliers: with only eight papers devoted to sound in 2017, the majority were about words and images, reflecting members’ grounding in textual and visual analysis. I want to show in this essay why it is so important to take critical approaches like Berger’s into the realm of sound—and to take sound into the study of animals and their representation.

Foucault introduced the notion of the gaze in 1960s France as a power relationship in which looking and being looked at established both dominance and subjection. The concept has been borrowed by scholars in gender studies, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, and elsewhere, and it has also been adapted by scholars of animal studies. But representations of animals, visual and otherwise, are not quite one among many such adaptations. The category of the animal is easier to compare to “the Other” than to gender, race, class, sexuality, or nationality.

Studies of sound, especially of music and song, bring traditions of interiority and sentience to bear on these questions of representation. Voice, speech, testimony, and music-making have been used as vehicles for beliefs about the rights, worth, and dignity of those who are different. Like Berger, many scholars in animal studies have framed our glances at animals as exertions of power and ownership. Listening reveals the spectacle of the nonhuman as a ground for comparison, an evaluation of ability, and an assessment of rights that extends from the animal to those deemed less than fully human. At stake are issues of power and representation that extend from animals to all the other Others.

We can’t think about animals without contending with the practice of listening; we also, I believe, can’t think about the practice of listening without contending with animals. This seems particularly important to do at a moment when it is becoming increasingly clear that humanism’s categories of nature and culture are tied to the disposability of those who are considered less than fully human. Roy Scranton, Alexander Weheliye, Sylvia Wynter, and Jane Bennet are a few among the many who have mapped the limits of the humanistic tradition around its ethics of human life, often while still praising its strengths. Drawing on their precedents, I recently argued that modern ethics are grounded in notions of life that come from a postindustrial rupture between the animal and a white and Western notion of the human, using the invented phrase “the animanities” to describe the work of historicizing and re-imagining connections between modern ethics and notions of life. In asking my readers to bring together sound and representations of animals, I am inviting new ways to hear past the boundaries that limit both humanism and modern ethics.

SEEING AND HEARING

In her chapter, “Seeing Animals” in Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? Kari Weil writes about looking at animals as a problem of visual representation. But despite the chapter’s title, her language slips between the voice and the realm of the visual. She begins her thoughts on representation by turning her readers back to the 1970s, when women’s studies scholars began to consciously incorporate the writings of women and minorities into their work. Although her subject is ostensibly visual, Weil begins with an auditory metaphor, describing the “voices” of those women and minorities who had been “silenced” but were nevertheless “authors of their own representations; their voices were speaking loudly and demanded to be heard.” (Weil 2012, 25) Weil then shifts back to both animals and vision to explain that the self-representation of nonhuman species brings a different but related set of challenges. “Even though artwork by chimps or elephants has produced much cash for some dealers lately, we cannot expect to find a chimp authoring his or her own self-representation—at least not in the languages we recognize.” (26) Here, voices are about inclusion, images are about representation, and both together are about authorship. Weil uses these metaphors to outline profound questions about the transference of authorship, authority, representation, and power across species boundaries. And although she identifies her chapter with seeing, Weil’s point is actually much broader, stretching across text, voice, and image. It is a reminder that in Weil’s work—indeed in most reflections on human ways of seeing animals— the question of how we see isn’t just about seeing, but gets at much broader questions about power, inclusion, authority, and representation. If elephants and chimps can’t paint their own portraits, who has the authority to do so? And how can one assess a human’s authority to speak for other species, if we so often use the power of speech to marginalize and disenfranchise “Other” human beings?

Here is a Janus-faced problem of power and alterity. Seen through the visual lens that has been favored within animal studies, looking at animals tells us that we use images of other species to explore the Western “Other” at its most radical. But looking at animals also shows us the limits of our own subjectivity. Both of these notions have been explored at length by Haraway, Derrida, Berger, Weil, and many others. From the first perspective, images of animals don’t just symbolize one kind of difference among many, but represent a radical way of being Other that serves to define and justify what all the other Others are. The corollary to this way of seeing, however, is that in addition to serving as a visual symbol of radical Otherness used for human ends, nonhuman species possess a real alterity that exists outside of the limits of human subjectivity. Other species, with their multiple stomachs and jagged foliage and perpetually growing teeth, have ways of experiencing life that human beings don’t have. And both of these kinds of alterity—the symbolic Western Otherness, and the material difference that emerges in cultural and biological contexts—have been seen, but not often heard, in the lives and bodies of animals.

THE GAZE

I first encountered animal studies through its critique of vision. In the early 2000s, I confessed to one of my graduate professors, Jason Stanyek, that instead of listening to Debussy I wanted to record birdsong in my urban Manhattan neighborhood. Rather than chiding me for spending my time unwisely, he handed me an Edirol recorder, sent me down the street to meet the founder of New York University’s animal studies program, Una Chaudhuri, and loaned me Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions. Although critical listening still formed the basis of what I was doing, I began discovering a host of remarkable ideas that came from a literature about looking and seeing. For me, the critique of vision in animal studies literature was unexpectedly a one-way street, a point of no return. Once I saw Tom Palmore’s gorilla odalisque Reclining Nude reproduced on page 11 of Haraway’s Primate Visions, once I read Haraway’s and Mieke Bal’s histories of gazing at dioramas and visited the American Museum of Natural History myself, all of the texts about sound and sight which I had so painstakingly read as a graduate student seemed to shift. The male gaze, the white gaze, and the imperial ear felt as if they were permanently realigned by the act of looking at animals. I couldn’t articulate why or how, but I had been convinced by pictures that representations of animals informed not just some of my visual aesthetics, but all of them.

This sense that looking at animals shapes the taxonomy of our world is shared by many scholars in animal studies. Almost thirty years ago, Donna Haraway traced the creation of biological, taxonomic Orders to modern political and social orders. More recently Una Chaudhuri wrote that animal studies scholars still want to “intervene radically in established discourses and their terms of art” (Chaudhuri 2007, 8). Haraway, Chadhuri, Jacques Derrida, Peter Singer, Cary Wolfe and Kari Weil are just a few who have questioned the ways that looking at animals restructures human power, hierarchy, and knowledge. Once we see the way we see animals, we can never see ourselves the same way again.

Perhaps this tendency to radical re-thinking is one reason why animal studies is not always cool. Posthumanism, with its nanotechnology and history of science and critical theory, is definitely cool. But writing about animals suggests that the scholar in question has taken an emotional turn that leaves her mistaking “the animal” as a legitimate category, ignorant of continental philosophy and susceptible to PETA radicalization and the Puppy Channel. Or, worse, to veganism. Science, technology, and philosophy endow their followers with masculine reason; an interest in animals is more often associated with emotion, femininity, and childhood. And while it bothers me when I’m reconfigured from a complex thinker into a “lady who does birdsong,” the uncool is a garden of illicit pleasures. Listening can and should be radical, rational, and emotional all at the same time. Radical re-thinking is a place of both emotional engagement and reason, where sophisticated and erudite music scholars set aside their serious interests in bebop and Beethoven to send me videos of dogs barking, birds singing, and concert performances with animals. Proud and fierce musicologists, I could surprise you with the things your colleagues watch on YouTube.

Take, for example, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s sound art installation from here to ear, in which a flock of zebra finches interact with electric guitars in a bounded enclosure.

Visitors walk through this enclosed space and observe the birds as they interact with live guitar strings whose parameters were predetermined by the composer. I’ve been forwarded numerous links to videos of this work posted on YouTube (please keep sending them). The piece was originally premiered in 1999 and has had a number of subsequent performances, the latter being the source of the videos I get sent. From a musician’s perspective, the work raises a number of questions about musicality, authorship, natural-cultural boundaries, intention, and public performance. How, for example, does Boursier-Mougenot’s willingness to share control with birds compare to a traditional composer’s relationship with human performers? Do we think of the birds as “choosing” the sounds they create? How could we decide? What is special about the role of the audience in this piece, as they create their own narrative about what is occurring as they walk through the enclosure?

Eventually such questions about musicality and intention give way to questions about inclusion, sentience, mediation, and control: if the birds have a choice in the sounds they create, do they also have rights? Are they in some sense laborers in Boursier-Mougenot’s piece? Who arbitrates such questions about zebra finchs’s rights and needs, and how? And what is at stake when all of these questions are circulated through digital media on YouTube, sent by friends and colleagues to me, the lady who “does” birdsong?

These are questions where both seeing and hearing become negotiations of power. Foucault’s notion of the gaze has been adapted by scholars of animal studies as it has been adapted elsewhere. But the category of the animal isn’t interchangeable with categories such as gender, race, class, sexuality, or nationality. It includes all members of the kingdom Animalia, the non-plants, the multi-celled, and the singled-celled who pass a certain measure of complexity. Human beings are technically included in the category of the animal, but we are excluded by connotation and tradition. In a work like from here to ear, there is a radical split, a rupture, that leaves listeners hearing “animal” first and individual and collective zebra finches, classified Taeniopygia guttata, second if at all.

Although I don’t have space in this essay to explore this idea fully, I would argue that images of “the animal” as a radical Other tell us something important about the way difference itself operates as a category in relation to identity. The animal and the different are twins, for both operate as a broad swathe within which categories of simians, Asians, women, and other Others seem “different” in inexplicably similar ways. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality, which was designed to combat the invisibility of black women within antidiscrimination law, doesn’t serve studies of the animal as well as it serves questions of race and gender. For the scope of the animal is so large, and its potential realm of associations so broad, that to tackle the intersectional references to race, gender, Orientalism, sexuality, and so on in an image like Palmore’s Reclining Nude or a zebra finch on a guitar is more like navigating a poorly designed seven-highway exchange with clover leaf on/off ramps than like crossing an “intersection.”

For many of us who work in animal studies, re-thinking the practice of looking at animals has not just added one more way of expressing power through the gaze; discovering the way our eyes are directed at animals has changed the way many of us understand the notion of the gaze itself. The startling breadth of questions and issues that circulate through an image like Palmore’s Reclining Nude, or Boursier-Mougenot’s from here to ear, reflect backwards for me, changing the way I see Manet’s Olympia and hear Varèse’s Poème électronique. Once I’ve seen the animals in one context (and heard them in another), I can’t unknow how pivotal their absence is in all the other places. It is as if representations of animals are not one among many possible intersections, but the place where the intersections come from.

WHY LISTEN

Listening to animals is not the cultural equivalent of seeing them. I want to turn from looking to listening for a moment, and think about what each practice brings to the other’s interpretation. This isn’t a turn to the vibrant and creative literature about animal musicality by authors such as Rothenberg, Doolittle, Krause, Taylor, or even Schafer, but a turn in response to our peculiar gazes. The critique of vision provided by animal studies is a kind of magical creation. It makes visible an invisible world, working backwards in time to reconfigure every masterwork and every glance of modern humanism. That invisible world is the unacknowledged space where identities intersect, in which notions of nature and animality have served to ground measures of otherness and personhood. And studies of listening are well versed in this invisible world. Although visual analysis has made us aware of the category of the animal, it is our habits of listening that have the most to tell about traditions of aural identity, interiority, and personhood that circulate through the invisible world of alterity. I want to end my essay by suggesting that our habits of listening tell us something meaningful about the borders and boundaries that have been formed with, against, and through the category of ultimate difference, the animal.

When I first started recording birds in Manhattan, I began to think differently about sound and visibility. [Audio Clip] Listening to birds taught me to hear spatially, using my ears to locate birds I couldn’t see through walls or foliage. I learned to recognize the songs and calls of various species, and tried to understand those sounds as symbols of a rich invisible world. Eduardo Kohn, Steven Feld, Walter Ong, and others have described such moments of hearing invisible meaning as transcendent. Kohn describes how learning to listen like a hunter during his fieldwork in Ecuador taught him to hear specific meanings in the barks of dogs and the movement of wild pigs; these auditory signs, in turn, forced Kohn to re-think what it means to have a self, to be a person. Like Kohn, and like many other ethnographers and naturalists, I learned to hear sentience, selfhood, and meaning in sound too. Before seeing them, I could hear a deer stamp his foot in the scrub; I’d hear the local hawk’s chicks begging for food; and I’d hear the alarm calls of thrushes warning me that something they considered dangerous, probably another pedestrian, was on the path ahead.

Just as birders learn to recognize species by ear, I learned in graduate school how to identify invisible differences in music: how to recognize French baroque styles by ear, how to hear sung representations of women’s hysteria in 19th-century opera, and how to tell twentieth-century counterfeits of eighteenth-century music from the original. Listening in this way, whether walking in the woods or watching a YouTube video, raises many of the questions that I already wondered about when hearing from here to ear. What kinds of music, or what species of animal, do I hear? How can I identify them? Should I imagine these sounds as machine-like productions, or as intentional? How should authorship be ascribed? How would I know? As soon as these questions engage with intention or meaning, they enter the sphere of invisible meanings created by persons, selves, who are outside the limits of human subjectivity.

This leads me back to the zebra finches in Boursier-Mougenot’s from here to ear. Scientists have documented these birds’ alternate selves as they sing to their unhatched eggs and dream of singing while they sleep. Originally from Australia, zebra finches were imported to Europe during the 1800s after the British colonization of the continent. They have been kept as pets and used in laboratory research for over two hundred years, and the birds used today in Boursier-Mougenot’s work have distinct genetic profiles, cultural behaviors, and physical traits unique to their histories of forced migration. It’s a multi-species tale of colonial history and global economies that forces the listener to rethink the category of nature that grounds traditional questions about selfhood. One might try to salvage that version of nature by comparing the zebra finch to the deer, hawks, and thrushes I encountered in the woods. But those species––wood thrushes, white-tailed deer, and Cooper’s hawks–– are likewise inadvertent migrants whose bodies and habits have deployed transculturation in the aftermath of colonial economies, industrialization, and urbanization.

This terrain has already been trod in studies of human music. Music scholars such as Roshanak Kheshti, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Bennett Zon have shown how colonial and racist agendas are at play in Western representations of music as filters through which selfhood can be heard. For power is also at play here: who determines what sentience sounds like? Who decides what is a song and what is noise? Whose voice can be heard as human, and therefore as a person? What is at stake in contrasting the human voice with animal nature? It is no coincidence that Weil, Spivak, and so many others have needed metaphors of voice and silence to describe both the marginalization and the agency of women and non-white persons. For it is in voice and sound that we have been trained to hear both selfhood and alterity.

It is here that the study of sound spirals outward from the dual gazes of animal studies—the Westernized glance at the Other, and the inward glance at human subjectivity. Listening to animals allows us to confront notions of the invisible self that are built upon the limited foundations of human identity. “Why Listen to Animals?” is, in the end, a question about the relationship between identity, alterity, and the categories of modern humanism. Alterity, badly created, doesn’t even foster good humanism; it just keeps lagomorphs’, macaques’, nits’, or pelicans’ questioned rationality satisfying to unctuous vanity, wherein xenophobia yields zoo-ontology. Listening has much to tell us about the way categorical notions of alterity have set the terms of selfhood, subjectivity, and human identity.

Berger ended his essay by mourning the isolation of human glances in modern capitalism. I would like to end mine by reiterating how much our listening ears still have to teach us about the promise and perils of humanism. This essay isn’t a study or an analysis; it doesn’t even begin to explain the connections that tie together sonic culture, selfhood, and human identity. But understanding those connections means understanding how nature became a disposable resource; how nonhuman lives became invisible and silent; and how human life came to be circumscribed by notions of subjectivity that privilege only some types of selves. We are only beginning to recognize the ways that we measure subjectivity through sound; and that we measure alterity, in so many ways, by comparing ourselves with other species. Music scholars and scholars of animal studies have much to teach one another, and I very much hope this essay encourages interested readers towards new collaborations and interests.
***

REFERENCE LIST

Bal, Mieke. 1992. “Telling, Showing, Showing Off.” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 3: 556-594.

Berger, John. 1980. About Looking. NY: Pantheon.

Bennett, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke
      University Press.

Cavalieri, Paola and Peter Singer. 2008. “The Declaration on Great Apes.” https://web.archive.org/web/20080820011354/http://www.greatapeproject.org/declaration.php

Chaudhuri, Una. 2007. “(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance.” The Drama
      Review 51, no. 1: 8-20.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a
     Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist
     politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum Volume 1989: 139-168.

Derrida, Jacques. 2002 (original version 1997). “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to
     Follow).” Trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2: 369-418.

Doolittle, Emily. 2008. “Crickets in the Concert Hall: A History of Animals in Western Music,”
      Trans. Revista Transcultural de Música 12.

Feld, Steven. 1982. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli
     Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of
      Modern Science. NY: Routledge.

Kheshti, Roshanak. 2015. Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World
      Music. NY: New York University Press.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the
      Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Krause, Bernie. 2012. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in
      the World’s Wild Places. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company.

Mundy, Rachel. 2018. Animal Musicalities: Birds, Beasts, and Evolutionary Listening.
      Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Ochoa, Ana María Guatier. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in
      Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. NY: Routledge.

Rothenberg, David. 2013. Bug Music: How Insects Gave us Rhythm and Noise. NY, NY:
      St. Martin’s Press.

Schafer, R. Murray. [1977] 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the
      Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny.

Scranton, Roy. 2015. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. San Francisco: City Lights.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and
       the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. London:
      Macmillan, 271-313.

Taylor, Hollis. 2017. Is Birdsong Music? Outback Encounters with an Australian
       Butcherbird. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Weheliye, Alexander. 2014. Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and
      Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Weil, Kari. 2012. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? NY: Columbia
       University Press.

Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species,
       and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom:
       Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR
       The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3: 257-337.

Zon, Bennett. 2017. Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture. NY: Cambridge University Press.
***

Rachel Mundy is Assistant Professor of Music in the Arts, Culture, & Media program at Rutgers University in Newark. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century music at the juncture of sound studies, the history of science, and animal studies and he work brings music’s history to bear on broad questions about the arts as a vehicle for modern notions of dignity, rights, and privilege in the West. Her book, Animal Musicalities, traces histories of modern sound through comparisons between animal and human musicality, drawing on the history of biology, anthropology, psychology, and comparative musicology. She is currently working on a comic-book inspired visual biography of music ethnographer Laura Boulton, and a second monograph entitled Hearing Beyond Humanism.

By Stefan Greenfield-Casas

San Antonio, TX. Best known as the home of the Alamo, the Spurs, and some of (if not the) best breakfast tacos in the US.<1> (It is also, incidentally, the meeting place of this year’s joint meeting between the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory). The city is currently celebrating its 300th anniversary, and with this Tricentennial have come myriad artistic and cultural projects commissioned by the city to celebrate its rich heritage. Music has been no exception, and a number of pieces have been written in honor of the city’s founding. Drawing on interviews conducted during summer 2018, this essay examines a few of these pieces, especially those connected to two prominent San Antonian artists: composer Ethan Wickman and poet John Phillip Santos.<2>

The origins of these musical projects extend back a few years prior to the Tricentennial with Ethan Wickman’s cantata, Ballads of the Borderlands. Though not officially affiliated with the city’s anniversary at its premiere in February of 2017, the piece still celebrated the history and mythos of San Antonio. For the work, Wickman drew on texts from San Antonian poets, including Carmen Tafolla (San Antonio’s first poet laureate) and John Phillip Santos.<3> When asked how he chose these works, Wickman responded that he was looking for texts that dealt with “identity and assimilation,” but which would also lend themselves to a “mythical, spiritual” narrative. Upon reading Santos’ poem “La Ruta,” Wickman felt an instant connection: “He was thinking on a plane that I was just imagining musically.”<4>

This collaboration between Santos and Wickman led to a Tricentennial event centered around the creative process of Ballads of the Borderland. The two were given a grant by the city to commission other artists to create similarly collaborative pieces. This resulted in the Ballads Educational Initiative, which involved both a mentorship program, as well as the composition of three new songs for San Antonio’s SOLI Chamber Ensemble and the mezzo-soprano Tynan Davis.<5> The songs were created by pairs of UTSA students (San Antonio’s next generation of artists), with texts written by creative writing majors and set by composition majors. The pairings of students included Letslie Aguirre (music) and Eric Pitty (text); Jamail Chachere (music) and Fernanda Covarrubias (text); and Angelo Salgado (music) and Daniela Riojas (text). Wickman envisioned a kind of familial documentary process in these works: “how can your family stories inspire something you make?” Yet, according to the students, they were empowered to adapt this prompt as they saw fit. Riojas, for instance, noted they could connect it “to whatever we wanted to talk about or express in terms of our experience living here or experience even in south Texas or speaking to… the desert landscapes.” How each pair (and indeed, each individual) approached their original piece speaks to their unique stories.

Pitty’s poem for his and Aguirre’s piece, “Dead Horse,” was based on his experiences with death while living in rural south Texas: from the eponymous dead horse, to the abandoned infrastructure and mass murders in and around the town in which he was raised. Pitty noted that he “wanted the landscape itself to serve as a connection between so many painful stories.” To match this feeling, Aguirre composed the music in Messaien’s 7th mode of limited transposition. She noted that even within this framework, she was frequently employing extended tertian chords, and that “even without a pitch center, I kept coming back to an E-flat augmented 7th chord as if it were a chord of resolution.” The two also decided to include a (musical) quote from a border song: “Tragos de Amargo Licor” by the Norteño artist Ramón Ayala.

In contrast to the arid imagery of death and decay in “Dead Horse,” Covarrubias’ poem, “Madre Azul,” tells the tale of a primordial and mythic mother-character. She stated that “I wanted to create a piece where time is not linear, the narrative... of this mother is not linear, where the past, present, and future all coexist and interact with each other in this common space agua… I wanted to demonstrate the idea of how migration is a birth on its own, and how birth can occur at any point. Water is a life source for all, whether that be physical, spiritual, or giving us a chance at a new life.” Though Chachere’s setting of the text is predominantly tonal, the piece cycles through no less than five tonal centers, harmonically suggesting the fluidity of water, of time, and of (familial) migration.

The last piece in this trio of works, “La Tierra de San Antonio,” was created by Angelo Salgado and Daniela Riojas. Similarly to Covarrubias’ text, Riojas’ poem deals with notions of time. She draws attention not only to the 300 years of San Antonio-as-city’s existence, but also to “the land” and “the indigenous people before us… There’s a sacredness here, and if we can pray to that while we celebrate today, then we can sort of move forward more consciously with the two hand in hand.” The process of composition for this piece was somewhat different than that of the other two, in large part because Riojas is the lead singer of the genre-eluding band Femina-X, and brought her experience as band member to the collaboration.[<6> While Salgado (a member of another local band, Mírame) composed the majority of the piece, Riojas contributed her own musical ideas to certain sections which Salgado then incorporated into the composition. Salgado noted in an email that Riojas “having a musical background helped a lot in communicating what sonic soundscapes we wanted to create. Daniela even participated in the creation of the music, she would send me recordings of her singing melodies to the text she wrote and [I] would transcribe it and put it in the piece.” Likely because of the collaborative nature of composition between band members, this level of musical collaboration seemed typical to Riojas (and indeed she seemed surprised when I suggested their piece was unusual in this regard).

These three pieces were premiered at the Institute of Texan Cultures on March 25th, 2018 as part of the Ballads of the Borderland concert series. There was an additional encore performance (which also featured Wickman’s cantata) held at the Basilica of the Little Flower just two days later.

Outside of his collaborations with Wickman, Santos was also asked by the city to write the libretto for an opera dedicated to the newly restored San Pedro Creek. Though he joked that all the operas he had attended “were either by Pete Townsend or Andrew Lloyd Webber,” Santos was familiar enough with LA-based composer Joseph Julian Gonzalez’s Misa Azteca (1997) to approach the composer to write the music: “He was really literate [in the operatic tradition]—an expert in symphonic writing. So he was the natural person to [approach].”<7> The collaboration with Gonzalez (as well as Gonzalez’ wife, Monique Gonzalez) led to the creation of Las Fundaciones de Béjar: A Mythic Opera on the Founding of San Antonio de Béxar. The first act of the opera was premiered on September 8th, 2016; it features a Wagnerian sabor regarding its narrative: a kind of creation myth about the creek’s deity (the “Lady of the Creek”) and her relation to the mortals who would settle on her banks.<8> As a whole, Santos noted that the opera “is very much about origins and early emergence.” The rest of the opera is planned to be premiered sometime this year.

Other musical projects for the Tricentennial outside of Wickman and Santos’ projects and collaborations include works by James Syler and George Cisneros. Syler was commissioned by the San Antonio Choral Society to write El Camino de las Misiones (premiered on May 20th, 2018 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower). The five-movement work musically explores the five Spanish missions in San Antonio (of which the Alamo is most likely to be “remembered”). Outside of the concert hall, musician George Cisneros has a sound and video installation entitled “The Cacophony” currently on display (on loop) at The Witte Museum. The piece, described as a tone poem, is comprised of recordings Cisneros has taken all throughout San Antonio, played across 16 channels, along with six video projections. In my own time listening to the installation, I heard everything from songs of prayer to the roar of planes flying overhead; ringing church bells to a solo violin—not to mention the sounds of guests of the museum walking through the installation, talking amongst themselves.<9>

Early in his first memoir, Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation, John Phillip Santos poses a set of quasi-rhetorical questions: “Where did our forebears come from and what have we amounted to in this world? Where have we come to in the span of all time, and where are we headed, like an arrow shot long ago into infinite empty space? What messages and markings of the ancient past do we carry in these handed-down bodies we live in today?”<10> Many of the pieces written for San Antonio’s Tricentennial have similar preoccupations. They meditate on, elaborate upon, question, and critique the histories and myths of San Antonio and South Texas. Though there is a definite awareness of the past in these projects—from the familial and familiar to the ancestral and mythic—there is also a focus on the future of San Antonio in the hands of its buddings artists. Though the arrow of Santos’ forebears was “shot long ago,” it continues on through the legacy of its next generation, simultaneously bound up with(in) the past, present, and future.
***

<1>Unlike their northern neighbor-city, Austin—which has joked about growing breakfast tacos in a lab—San Antonio takes the quality of its breakfast tacos quite seriously.
<2>In addition to his writings (both poetic and prosaic), Santos has worked as a documentary film maker, a “South Texas Geomancer,” and is currently the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Distinguished Scholar in Mestizo Studies. He was also the 2017 Texas Medal of Arts in Literature honoree.
<3>Both poets came at the suggestion of one of Wickman’s colleagues in the English department at UTSA.
<4>See John Phillip Santos, “La Ruta,” in Songs Older Than Any Known Singer: Selected and New Poems, 1974-2006 (San Antonio: Wings Press, 2008), 108. This poem would eventually become the text for the second movement of Wickman’s Ballads (the first movement with text).
<5>These musicians were among the core performers who premiered Wickman’s cantata in 2016.
<6>Riojas is a multidisciplinary artist, focusing not only on writing and music, but also photography and performance as well. Indeed, while not officially associated with the Tricentennial, Riojas’s band has released two music videos this year focusing on San Antonio—both its mythic past (“Black Tongue”) and historical present (“Las Caderas”).
<7>It might be worth noting that Santos had not yet met Wickman when he was asked to take on this project.
<8>Though not premiered in 2018, Santos noted the premiere was still considered a Tricentennial event, suggesting a kind of “long Tricentennial.”
<9>Specific compositions that were imported included the Star-Spangled Banner, Amazing Grace, The Yellow Rose of Texas, and “Is Anybody Going to San Antone?”
<10>John Phillip Santos, Places Left Finished at the Time of Creation (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 9.
***

Stefan Greenfield-Casas grew up in San Antonio, TX. He holds a BMus with Highest Honors from the University of Texas at San Antonio, an MM in music theory from The University of Texas at Austin, and is currently a PhD student in music theory and cognition at Northwestern University. His research interests include ludomusicology, critical theory, and the relationship between music, myth, and (pop/mass/trans-)media epics. He has previously presented on these topics (amongst others) at a number of conferences, including meetings of the Texas Society for Music Theory, Music and the Moving Image, and the North American Conference on Video Game Music.

By Dan Blim, James Deaville, Naomi Graber, and Dana Gorzelany-Mostak

On August 25, 2018, John Sidney McCain III—naval aviator, war hero, senator, two-time presidential contender, and stalwart Republican—succumbed to complications arising from an aggressive brain tumor at the age of 81. After lying in state at both the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix and the rotunda of the United States Capitol in Washington, heads of state, foreign dignitaries, congressional colleagues, and family gathered to celebrate McCain’s life and service at the Washington National Cathedral on September 1. The service itself was one that McCain had a direct hand in. Shortly before his death, McCain convened his closest aides to plan for his own funeral. According to the New York Times, the former POW “obsessed over the music.”<1>

The media did not share this preoccupation, but it did obsess over the political meanings of the event. Although he was not present (in accordance with McCain’s wishes) and his name was not uttered at the actual service, President Donald Trump’s presence loomed large, if only in the form of an unseen foil to emphasize McCain’s public persona of humble heroism. The senator’s friend, John F. Lehman Jr., did not believe the funeral arrangements were directed at Trump. But he added, “Trump was definitely a catalyst to get [McCain] focused on pushing those symbolic issues.’”<2> Others agreed with this assertion, referring to the event as a “resistance meeting,” an “exercise in civic communication,” a “funeral for the loss of American ideals,” and “a two-and-a-half hour rebuke of Trump.”<3> Might the symbolism Lehman (and others) have noted extend to the music programme the candidate curated for his final farewell? If so, what meaning might such a programme hold for a nation as it comes together to mourn an American hero against the backdrop of a fractious political landscape?

Memorial services are shaped by multiple competing forces. In the case of a politician, they are both private affairs for the family and public affairs for the nation. They mourn a loss and celebrate a life. Church and state intermingle throughout. We can see evidence of these dualities in Meghan McCain’s speech, balancing private memories with acknowledgements of her father’s public service, and hear it in the sounds as John McCain’s casket entered: reverential silence and tolling bells alongside the clicking of cameras from the media. Music served these multiple functions too, marking McCain’s multiple identities (e.g., war hero, presidential candidate, senator, father, Christian, “maverick”), and directing the emotions of those in attendance.<4>

John McCain as Bipartisan Politician

Before the service of McCain’s funeral began, organ music played as attendees gathered and greeted one another. The selections were a mix of hymns and classical music transcriptions—Handel’s Largo from Xerxes, Tchaikovsky’s Andante cantabile from the Symphony No. 5, and Elgar’s “Nimrod” from the Enigma Variations, among others. Comforting and familiar, these works not only infused the National Cathedral with solemnity and pathos, but also functioned effectively as background music for the attendees.

And yet, one might wonder if the selection of “Simple Gifts” caught anyone’s attention. Perhaps not—the music is, like many of these selections, familiar and it easily fits with both genres employed, being a religious Shaker melody adapted for Christian worship and playing a prominent role in Aaron Copland’s iconic Appalachian Spring. But then again, perhaps it did. Unlike most of the other works played before the service, this melody has a nationalistic sentiment woven into its history. Indeed, it foreshadowed the overtly patriotic music performed as part of the service, and called attention to the political functions of the ceremony.

“Simple Gifts” would seem to be an especially meaningful selection; its cultural life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been multifaceted, much like McCain’s career. The first modern printing of the tune dates from 1937, and soon thereafter it entered the national spotlight during wartime via Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.<5> Annegret Fauser notes that Copland’s use of the melody merged wartime nationalism with postwar optimism, and turned the melody into “a signifier of Americana.”<6> McCain’s career similarly merged wartime hero with postwar service. In the notes to a Copland-themed episode of Keeping Score, an educational music series on PBS led by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, “Simple Gifts” is painted as expressing a utopian ideal, mirroring their attitude toward Copland’s style in general: “The late war years were an uncertain time for Americans. But Copland’s music seemed to give them a new purpose. Copland’s great insight was that he could rouse and unite people not by scaring them or making them angry, but by helping them confirm a sense of ownership and pride that they all shared as Americans.”<7> While heavily romanticized, this attitude toward Copland and “Simple Gifts” nevertheless echoes McCain’s own public rhetoric. His final address to the Senate emphasized his pride in the United States, “a nation of ideals,” and his desire for a nation and government united by that belief in a similarly uncertain time: “We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down.”<8>

Following Copland’s use of the tune, “Simple Gifts” grew in popularity as both a folksong and a religious hymn. Roger Lee Hall comments that, as a Shaker song, the music and lyrics stress two key principles of the Shaker Faith: simplicity and unity.<9> While these ideals fueled its prevalence with the folk revival, and by extension leftist communitarian politics, simplicity and unity also seem apt in the context of John McCain. His public persona revolved around his trademark “straight-talk” and policies like campaign finance reform, both emphasizing a straightforward simplicity in his politicking, while his bipartisan work touted a desire for political unity across the aisle.<10> By the 1970s, the hymn had also entered the mainstream of Christian music as “The Lord of the Dance,” with new lyrics written by English poet Sydney Carter in 1963. The music’s dual nationalistic and religious nature speaks not only to its suitability for a state funeral, but also perhaps hints at the frequent intersection of Christian religion and politics in McCain’s own Republican party.

As a work of Americana, “Simple Gifts” has been performed at presidential inaugurations, including those for Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Most recently and most conspicuously, the melody was heard at Obama’s presidential inauguration in 2009, where composer John Williams premiered a set of variations on “Simple Gifts.” In a rather tepid review of the piece, Washington Post critic Anne Midgette called the work “functional, representational music” that “allowed everyone some downtime before the main event of the oath and the new president's speech. For although it was only four minutes long, a lot of people stopped paying attention and started talking to each other before the music was over.”<11> But the choice of the tune at Obama’s inauguration may have entailed more complex symbolism than was perhaps recognized that day. In discussing the use of Aaron Copland’s music in Spike Lee’s film He Got Game, for example, Krin Gabbard suggests that by scoring black bodies with Copland’s Americana music, “Lee may be asserting that these African Americans [sic] youths are as uniquely and thoroughly American as anything that Copland’s ballet music might signify.”<12> Performing “Simple Gifts” at Obama’s inauguration achieved a similar effect, persuasively arguing for the Americanness of a black President whose birth certificate was questioned.

After McCain’s death, one video that circulated showed McCain standing up to voters who claimed Barack Obama was Muslim and not American.<13> In this video, McCain performed similar political work as Copland’s music by arguing for the Americanness of his electoral rival. The inclusion of “Simple Gifts” at McCain’s funeral was perhaps similarly symbolic. In light of the music’s connection to Obama’s inauguration, coupled with McCain’s own decision to have President Obama speak at the funeral, the service gestured openly to McCain’s persona as a bipartisan and generous politician. Moreover, the music’s ability to layer identity, from sacred to secular, from Shaker to Protestant, from wartime to peacetime icon, matches McCain’s own mercurial and unpredictable political nature over a long career of service. For many, McCain’s political career may have been a gift, but it was far from simple.

John McCain as War Hero

There are certain musical staples of patriotic events in the United States: “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “My Country, tis of Thee,” “America the Beautiful,” and many, many others. These events commemorate beginnings and endings, and range from somber to celebratory, which means that the music must evoke multiple moods and ideas. Patriotism, after all, encompasses a multifaceted matrix of signs and signifiers. One successful amalgamation of patriotic signifiers is Peter Wilhousky’s 1944 arrangement of Julia Ward Howe and William Steffe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” as orchestrated by Phil Snedecor. The arrangement incorporates a range of patriotic ideas, such that the context of the performance can change or nuance its meaning. A comparison between the arrangement’s performance at President Trump’s inauguration festivities in January 2017 and Senator McCain’s funeral in September 2018 demonstrates how context can define musical signals of patriotism.

Wilhousky and Snedecor’s arrangement provides a wealth of patriotic references and gestures, from the historical to the martial to the religious. While the original song became popular as a musical representation of the Union during the Civil War, the interjections in the second verse clearly recall “Dixie,” the anthem of the Confederacy. Setting those interjections in the piccolo (as most orchestrators do) recalls the fife-and-drum sounds associated with the Revolution. The opening drum rolls and martial bugle reference the nation’s military might—a point of pride for many citizens. The instrumental verse sounds like a John Philip Sousa march, and hymn-like texture in the third verse speaks to the United States’ historical reliance on a Christian moral framework.

By using a variety of patriotic musical markers, Wilhousky and Snedecor created an arrangement that can mean different things in different settings. At Trump’s inauguration, “Battle Hymn” served as the finale to the “Make America Great Again” concert at the Lincoln Memorial the evening before the swearing-in ceremony. In this context, the martial opening of drums and bugle calls called attention to the military might that candidate Trump promised to restore.<14> The “Dixie” interjections of second verse were also striking; on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the references to “Dixie” harmonized seamlessly with the broader context of “Battle Hymn,” speaking to the hope that the nation would come together after a difficult campaign season. Just as the Union reintegrated the Confederacy into the national body politic after the Civil War, the Wilhousky/Snedecor “Battle Hymn” absorbs “Dixie” into its musical framework. Similarly, in his election-night victory speech, President-elect Trump called for the nation “to bind the wounds of division” and “to come together as one united people.”<15>

However, at McCain’s funeral, the Wilhousky/Snedecor “Battle Hymn,” had slightly different connotations. In this context, the third verse stood out. The hymn-like setting recalled “Eternal Father, Strong to Save” sung earlier in the service, an anthem associated with naval servicemen.<16> Combined with the martial drums and bugle calls in the beginning, the moment served as another reminder of McCain’s military career. The celebratory ending of the Wilhousky/Snedecor arrangement also worked in both contexts, but with different signification. The final cries of “glory, glory, hallelujah” signaled triumph and a new beginning at the inaugural concert, but indicated a heavenly ascent at McCain’s funeral. By weaving together a number of complex sounds and ideas, Wilhousky and Snedecor created a flexible arrangement that avoids sounding bland.

Still, despite the myriad themes and ideas this arrangement evokes, its patriotic signifiers may not resonate with all Americans. Although “Battle Hymn” takes its tune from the abolitionist anthem “John Brown’s Body,” this arrangement emphasizes the song’s military pedigree with sounds associated with the predominantly white armies of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars (which is not the case with all arrangements of the song, even from the 1940s). That focus on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical emblems of patriotism also excludes the swaths of citizens whose families arrived in the twentieth- and twenty-first century waves of immigration. And the Christian references in both the lyrics and the music exclude citizens of other or no faith. Even an arrangement as flexible as this has limits.

John McCain as Everyman

McCain listened to the beloved ballad “Danny Boy” on the porch of his Sedona home while he was battling terminal brain cancer and expressed his wish that it be included in his funeral service to his family. He tapped the critically acclaimed American soprano Renée Fleming for this performance following a suggestion made by his former campaign manager and friend Rick Davis.<17> In the days leading up to the funeral, pundits and politicians pondered the late senator’s choice of musical eulogists, as well as other aspects of his funeral plan--Fleming even appeared on CNN’s Inside Politics where she shared her own thoughts on the role of music in national rituals and the meaning of “Danny Boy.

English songwriter and lawyer Frederic Weatherly (1848-1929) penned the words to “Danny Boy” in 1910, the same year he lost both his son and his father (though there is some conjecture over whether the text came before or after these tragic losses). In his memoirs, Piano and Gown (1926), Weatherly credits his sister-in-law with introducing him to “Londonderry Air,” the tune that he eventually paired with his lyrics after reworking them to fit the Irish melody.<18> While the relationship between the song’s narrator and addressee remains ambiguous, and the titular Danny’s destination an enigma, “Londonderry Air” (with “Danny Boy” or other lyrics) has set a somber tone for several high-profile funerals and memorials: Princess Diana’s funeral (as “Air from County Derry” with a text by Howard Arnold Walter; sung by a boy choir); John F. Kennedy’s funeral (as “Londonderry Air” with the text “Above the Hills of Time the Cross Is Gleaming;” sung by the Naval Academy Catholic Choir); and various 9/11 funerals and memorials, including the 2015 memorial in New York City (as “Danny Boy;” performed by flutist Emi Ferguson).

Much like the tune “Danny Boy,” Fleming’s voice has served as the soundtrack for national rituals, including the 9/11 memorial event Concert for America (2002) and We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration (2009). Whether appearing in the Broadway proscenium or the Super Bowl pitch, Rosenkavalier or rock, Late Night with David Letterman or Lord of the Rings—Renée Fleming has deftly occupied an enviable array of positions within the musical world over a career that spans four decades. She dominated the opera scene up until her April 2017 Met farewell, and her crossover performances and collaborations have resulted in an equal amount of critical attention.<19> It is perhaps Fleming’s presence at such events of civic and national importance, penchant for cross-genre collaboration, and well documented approachability and humility that have earned her the title “The People’s Diva.”<20>

Fleming performed lush operatic renderings of “Danny Boy” which in an interview she described as a “nostalgic piece” that she associates with her childhood, at the American Voices Festival concert and she included the song on her album Guilty Pleasures (2013). For the McCain funeral performance Fleming traded lavish orchestration for a more pared down arrangement featuring a string quartet and an accordion, which offered accompaniment in the form of unobtrusive sustained chords, rich with tension-building suspensions in the introduction and interludes. This instrumentation is noteworthy. The string quartet, with its Classical, Western-European roots, carries strong connotations of elitism, gentility, and cultivated taste, while the accordion is more closely aligned with popular, folk, and “ethnic” musics, such as klezmer, Norteño (Mexico) and Cumbia (Colombia). The arrangement begins in C major and then modulates to D major at the interlude between the first and second verses—both keys sitting quite low in the ambitus for a lyric soprano. (In the earlier performances of “Danny Boy” cited above, she chose the much higher key of F.) Fleming uses her belt voice (sometimes with less vibrato) when singing at the bottom of her range and pairs this timbre with vocalisms and phrasing more aligned with musical theatre than opera.<21> When she nears the apex of each verse, the voice seamlessly transitions into the signature, full-blown operatic sound that had made Fleming an international star. The accordion’s judicious sprinkling of grace notes (which mimic the sound of pitch bends) adds a fleeting bluesy sound, while a longer trill salutes the tune’s (and perhaps McCain’s) Irish origins. Like the string quartet-accordion combination, Fleming’s agile shifting between a more musical theatre-esque timbre and an operatic one is notable in that it blurs generic boundaries, and by association, racial, ethnic, and class lines as well.

Fleming’s funeral performance and biography, one might argue, would fall in line with the “symbolic” agenda Lehman described. Throughout his career, McCain was branded a maverick, a non-conformist, and a champion of bipartisanship—a trifecta he reasserted when he voted against the repeal of Obamacare on the Senate floor shortly after receiving his diagnosis. Similarly non-conformist, Fleming, through her chameleon-like reinventions from jazz to opera to rock to musical theater, and her crossover collaborations, pushes against the boundaries of what defines an opera diva in the 21st century. A musical microcosm of these reinventions is woven into her performance of “Danny Boy” with its catalogue of diverse generic signifiers and melding of folkish, popular, and high classical-style timbres. Fleming’s recent excursions on the Great White Way, both with Living On Love (2015) and Carousel (2018), and the music theatre-styled singing in parts of “Danny Boy,” align her with mass culture, the vox populi, and perhaps give a nod to the musical’s defining role in the maintenance of American identity.<22> John McCain similarly laid claim to everyman status, and in one interview even presented his lack of musical taste as evidence of this stature.<23> Last, with her “anti-diva” persona and the simplicity of expression that defines her stripped down performance of “Danny Boy,” Fleming becomes the perfect musical counterpart for the plainspoken McCain, who referred to his 2008 campaign bus as the Straight Talk Express.

Politicians and journalists alike viewed McCain’s funeral as a rebuke of the current president and his policies. Considering the unadorned simplicity, contemplative nostalgia, and harmonious coexistence of generic markers in Renée Fleming’s “Danny Boy,” perhaps we can argue that her performance mounted an analogous critique in sound as its reminded mourners of Meghan McCain’s eulogy: “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.”

John McCain as Patriot

After the concluding prayers, the singing of the anthemic “America the Beautiful,” and the Commendation, Blessing, and Dismissal—standard components at the end of a funeral service—participants and outside observers heard instrumental music for the Recessional that stood out for its unfamiliarity. The internet was ablaze with queries about the music’s identity, like this one posted on Quora: “What was that weird song at the McCain funeral?” A number of similar inquiries went out on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, and even the “Talk Classical” social media site featured a question about the title. Those who recognized the tune variously labeled it, according to their personal histories with the music. The funeral program called it “’The Jupiter Hymn’ from The Planets, Gustav Holst; arr. D.J. Miller.”

The Recessional—performed by the Navy Band Brass Ensemble—was indeed music originally from Holst’s The Planets: more specifically the theme from the middle section of the movement entitled “Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity.” A segment of the public who did recognize the original source of the melody expressed on various social media platforms the widest possible range of responses, from admiration—“Love ‘Jupiter’ from The Planets for the recessional”—to ironic bemusement—“Jupiter represents Zeus, the ruler of Mount Olympus…Just one more insult directed at the ignoramus in the White House.” Certain commentators recognized the music under the title “I Vow to Thee, My Country,” from the first line of a hymn that used the music from “Jupiter.”

The historical context for “I Vow to Thee, My Country” illuminates the probable rationale for its inclusion in McCain’s funeral service. Around 1910, British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice wrote the poem Urbs Dei that combined patriotic and sacred modes of thought in a hymn to country and faith. Holst set it in 1921 to the tune from “Jupiter,” which in the meantime has come to be known as “Thaxted,” from the village where Holst resided for much of his life. By featuring this selection, McCain’s funeral stands in a long tradition: since 1921 the hymn has been performed at Remembrance Day commemorations throughout the Commonwealth, Princess Diana had it sung at her wedding in 1981 (and it was performed at her funeral in 1997), and it stood on the Order of Service for the funeral of Margaret Thatcher in 2013.

The words to the hymn, unsung at the funeral, reflect a strongly nationalist pride, an equation of country with belief that caused one Anglican cleric to call it “obscene, offensive and unfit to be sung by Christians.” Here are the first four lines of each of the poem’s two stanzas, which clearly present the opposition between earthly and heavenly kingdoms:

I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above,
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best…

And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering…

While the cleric’s objections may be justified on theological grounds, the text is not exceptional for British patriotic hymnody from the era of the First World War, which had called forth such poems as “For the Fallen” and “In Flanders Fields.” The phrases in “I Vow to Thee, My Country” that call for unquestioning duty and accepting the willing sacrifice of the “dearest and the best” accorded well with McCain’s own views on the relationship between love for country and military service.

So the choice of this music was no aggrandizing or satirical gesture on the part of John McCain, but rather one based on traditional values of country and faith. As his final words to the assembly and, indeed, to the viewing world, the hymn is not irrelevant to understanding the man and how he viewed his legacy.

A Complicated Legacy

As complex as a state funeral can be, matters become even more complicated when it honors a person as multifaceted as John McCain. One aspect of his public persona was curiously absent from the musical soundscape: maverick. Although he specifically requested eulogies from his political opponents, nothing in the musical selections spoke to his penchant for bucking convention or his life outside public service. Instead, the music emphasized only his heroism, religious devotion, simplicity, and patriotism, so that by the end of the service, John McCain the myth had washed away John McCain the man. His complex legacy on military intervention and civil rights appeared inconsequential in light of the grandeur of the event. Little of the music spoke to his “mischievous” sense of humor (according to Barack Obama), or his love of ABBA.<24> In other words, the details that made him human rather than the larger-than-life figure he became were absent from the service.

Just as the funeral only emphasized a few aspects of McCain’s complex life, the music only represented a very small part of John McCain’s America. The musical selections at this state funeral reflected the idea that “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.” And indeed, the funeral was suffused with sounds from America’s heroic past: military brass bands, simple folk songs, and solemn hymns. The impression was of a heroic (yet humble), white, Christian man representing a heroic (yet humble), white, Christian nation. Still, neither America nor John McCain can be reduced to such simple, overarching concepts. McCain represented the diverse state of Arizona, along with an America that was always more than just our military, our majority ethnicity, and our majority religion. Funerals are myth-making opportunities, and the musical stories we tell ourselves about our past inevitably shape our future. Hopefully, McCain’s (and the country’s) complexities will endure beyond the service.
***
<1> Michael D. Shear and Katie Rogers, “How McCain Got the Last Word Against Trump,” New York Times, August 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/us/politics/mccain-funeral-trump.html.
<2> Ibid.
<3> See Susan Glasser, “John McCain’s Funeral Was the Biggest Resistance Meeting Yet,” The New Yorker, September 1, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/john-mccains-funeral-was-the-biggest-resistance-meeting-yet; Martie Sirois, “John McCain Died, But America May Have Been Reborn,” The Medium, September 2, 2018, https://medium.com/@martiesirois/john-mccain-died-but-america-may-have-been-reborn-17a4766e144f; and Courtney Weaver, “McCain Funeral Delivers a Two-and-a-half Hour Rebuke of Trump,” Financial Times, September 1, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/be1d8bc6-ae16-11e8-8d14-6f049d06439c.
<4> For a complete list of the music performed at the funeral and the timings that indicate where it occurs in the above video, see the following chart. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1t4FwM4_fPin2vsJ4fiYLSK2wj43Zr29cykLTAlxIhpI/edit?ts=5c128dce#gid=0
<5> Roger Lee Hall, “‘Simple Gifts’: The Discovery and Popularity of a Shaker Dance Song,” Communal Societies 36, no. 2 (2016): 108.
<6> Annegret Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 150. See also Chapter Four of Fauser, Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
<7> “Copland and the American Sound,” Public Broadcasting System, http://www.pbs.org/keepingscore/copland-american-sound.html (accessed December 3, 2018).
<8> “Read: Sen. John McCain’s Farewell Statement,” Cable News Network, last modified August 27, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/27/politics/john-mccain-farewell-statement/index.html.
<9> Hall, “Simple Gifts,” 100.
<10> For a more thorough look at how McCain’s bipartisan, “maverick” record evolved over time, see Clare Malone, “John McCain Was A Maverick—And A Politician,” FiveThirtyEight, August 25, 2018, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/john-mccain-was-a-maverick-and-a-politician.
<11> Anne Midgette, “Music Review: John Williams’s ‘Air and Simple Gifts’ at the Obama Inauguration,” Washington Post, January 21, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/20/AR2009012003560.html.
<12> Krin Gabbard, “Race and Reappropriation: Spike Lee Meets Aaron Copland,” American Music 18, no. 4 (2000): 372.
<13> Emily Stewart, “Watch John McCain Defend Barack Obama Against a Racist Voter in 2008,” Vox, last updated September 1, 2018, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/25/17782572/john-mccain-barack-obama-statement-2008-video.
<14> See for example Ashley Parker and Matthew Rosenberg, “Donald Trump Vows to Bolster Nation’s Military Capacities,” New York Times, September 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/us/politics/donald-trump-speech.html.
<15> “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Victory Speech,” New York Times, November 9, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/us/politics/trump-speech-transcript.html?_r=0.
<16> “The Navy Hymn: Eternal Father Strong to Save,” Naval History and Heritage Command, https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/browse-by-topic/heritage/customs-and-traditions/the-navy-hymn1.html.
<17> Dana Bash, “Opera's Renee Fleming 'Touched' to be Singing ‘Danny Boy’ at John McCain's Funeral,” CNN, August 31, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/31/politics/john-mccain-funeral-renee-fleming-danny-boy/index.html.
<18> Anthony Mann, In Sunshine and in Shadow: The Family Story of Danny Boy, www.lulu.com, 2013. This book was written by Weatherly’s great-grandson, but it is self-published, and from what I can tell, some of the details are contradicted in other sources. This source may not be wholly reliable.
<19> For example, Fleming spearheaded the American Voices Festival (2013), which brought singers representing the genres of pop, country, jazz, gospel, broadway, and classical song together for a series of workshops, masterclasses and a performance at the Kennedy Center.
<20> Charles McGrath, “The Diva Departs: Renée Fleming’s Farewell to Opera,” New York Times, April 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/arts/music/the-diva-departs-renee-flemings-farewell-to-opera.html.
<21> From its beginnings on Broadway to the present, belting has been associated with the communication of strong emotion. The actual physical characteristics of “belting” are somewhat contested among vocal pedagogues, but suffice to say for our purposes here, the belt sound is distinct from classical singing. See Christianne Knauer Roll, “Female Musical Theatre Belting in the 21st Century: A Study of the Pedagogy of the Vocal Practice and Performance” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014), 1-6.
<22> See Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).
<23> During the 2008 campaign McCain responded to critics who derided his love of ABBA with the following remarks: “If there is anything I am lacking in, I’ve got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life. I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again.” See Peter Hamby, “McCain Rises to ABBA’s Defense,” CNN Political Ticker (blog), CNN, August 15, 2008, http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/08/15/mccain-rises-to-abbas-defense.
<24> See for example All Things Considered, “Music Picks from Obama, McCain,” NPR, August 12, 2008, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93540755.

By Natasha Roule

Title-piece from an opera libretto printed in Lyon in 1706.

Photo: Natasha Roule. From the author’s collection.

In 2015, Canal+ aired the first episode of Versailles, a Franco-Canadian television series about the young Louis XIV and his efforts to consolidate political power. As the title of the series suggests, Versailles centers its plot around the luxe chateau that the Sun King built on the site of his father’s favorite hunting lodge some 50 miles southwest of Paris. A dramatized historical fiction, the series draws from the vast historiographical literature that explores how Louis XIV cultivated his power from the seat of Versailles. Yet as the king worked to centralize the French government, he had to contend with a large kingdom beyond Versailles – a kingdom characterized by political and cultural heterogeneity that occasionally posed challenges to the king’s absolutist measures. Indeed, the political centralization of France under Louis XIV was a tricky affair: far from simply demanding that legislature be put into effect in each province, the king and his ministers engaged in a game of compromise, negotiation, and sometimes coercion with city magistrates and provincial governors. Though the history of absolutism in French cities has received some study by historians, we can gain a deeper understanding of the implementation and reception of absolutism in provincial France by approaching the subject from a musicological perspective.<1> To do this, the tragédie en musique– the absolutist genre par excellence– is key.

In my dissertation, “The Operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Negotiation of Absolutism in the French Provinces, 1685-1750,” I explore the performance history of Lully’s tragédies en musique in four French cities: Marseille, Lyon, Rennes, and Strasbourg. I argue that productions of Lully’s operas in these cities played a major role in the expansion of absolutism even as they functioned as mouthpieces of provincial pushback against the Crown. On the one hand, Lully’s tragédies acted as vehicles of absolutist propaganda, lending mobility to the king’s image as an absolutist monarch in much the same way as the equestrian statues of Louis XIV that were erected in major cities throughout France.<2> At the same time, many provincial artists altered or satirized Lully’s tragédies, deliberately keying their modifications to critique royal intervention in local affairs.

Musicologists have long acknowledged the political bent of Lully’s operas. Lully (1632-1687) was the surintendant de la musique of Louis XIV and is credited with the invention of French opera, along with his librettist Philippe Quinault. With the king as his patron, the Italian-born composer ensured that references to Louis XIV and his sovereignty were woven throughout his own tragédies, from heroes who preach the importance of duty to choruses that explicitly applaud the monarch.<3> During his lifetime, Lully held a monopoly over the performance of opera that effectively restricted opera production to Paris and the court, where Lully worked.<4> It was not until after Lully’s death in 1687 that theaters across the kingdom began to produce opera, with the exception of the Académie de Musique of Marseille, which was founded with Lully’s permission in 1684. Even after opera spread to the provinces, few works besides Lully’s tragédies were performed until about 1700, a testimony to the composer’s enduring command over the French musical landscape.<5>

Marseille, Lyon, Rennes, and Strasbourg had unique cultural, linguistic, and political profiles that shaped local responses to Lully’s operas. In Marseille, Pierre Gautier, founder of the Marseille Académie de Musique, composed two operas modeled after Lully’s tragédies that asserted the city’s simultaneous loyalty to the absolutist Crown as well as its adherence to its historically civic republican identity.<6> In Lyon, parodies of Lully’s operas performed in the 1690s coincided with the city’s struggle to recover from famine and contagion without significant aid from the Crown. In a parody of Lully’s Phaëton, the character of a Lyonnais municipal sergeant replaces that of Jupiter, who often symbolized Louis XIV in this period; the substitution asserts the ability of the local government rather than the Crown to take care of its subjects in need.<7> In Rennes, Lully’s Atys was performed in 1689 to celebrate the return of the city’s parlement from an exile to which the king had banished it over a decade earlier following a local revolt; this production is by far the most explicit example of a Lully opera used as royal propaganda in the provinces.<8> In 1730s Strasbourg, Lully’s operas were abbreviated to bare minimums of storyline and music. The brusque treatment of Lully’s operas mirrors the cultural resistance that the historically Germanic city felt towards the French Crown, which had annexed Strasbourg in 1681.<9>

Beyond teasing out political struggles over absolutism in provincial opera productions, my dissertation also traces changes that provincial artists made to Lully’s libretti and scores. Opera performances in Lyon are the most richly documented of all provincial Lully productions, thanks to individuals such as Nicolas Bergiron (1690-1768), who curated the performance scores used by the Lyon Académie des Beaux-Arts, a semi-amateur music society. From these scores, we learn, for instance, that Lyonnais musicians did not hesitate to rewrite Lully’s continuo lines or shrink his expansive choruses into less time-consuming affairs. Such changes underscore not so much the mutability of the tragédies, but their locality – that is, how the operas were local phenomena that adapted fluidly to local ideas and tastes.

By exploring the locality of Lully’s tragédies, we expand the network of actors involved in the performance history of this repertoire to encompass singers, directors, and printers who operated beyond Paris, as well as government officials whose ideologies might have influenced the production of an opera. We also push issues of performance to the center, especially in instances where it might seem difficult or impossible to talk about the music: even though the scores of most provincial productions of Lully’s operas have been lost, there are clues in provincial libretti for alterations to Lully’s scores that diverged from how the repertoire was performed in Paris. The canonic narrative of French baroque opera – at least the narrative that we tend to teach in the classroom – often overlooks the locality of the tragédie en musique. We tend to imagine early French opera as a genre that was as rigidly centralized as the absolutist regime of the Sun King. By taking provincial productions of Lully’s operas into account, we gain a clearer understanding of how politics shaped opera – and vice versa – beyond Versailles in Old Regime France.
***
<1>Several historical studies have been particularly influential to my understanding of absolutism as a process of compromise and negotiation during the reign of Louis XIV. These include Roland Mousnier, La vénalité des offices sous Henri IV et Louis XIII (Rouen: Éditions Maugard, 1945); William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in the Languedoc (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Junko Thérèse Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
<2>For further details on absolutist propaganda under Louis XIV, see esp. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
<3>For a concise reading of the politics of Quinault’s libretti, see esp. Buford Norman, Touched by the Graces: the Libretti of Philippe Quinault in the Context of French Classicism (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 2001).
<4>For an overview of Lully’s monopoly, see Caroline Wood, French Baroque Opera: A Reader (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 6; 8.
<5>For a chronology of performances of Lully’s operas outside of Paris, see Carl Schmidt, “The Geographical Spread of Lully’s Operas during the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries: New Evidence from the Livrets,” in Jean-Baptiste Lully and the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony, ed. John Hajdu Heyer (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 183-211.
<6>Pierre Gautier, Le Triomphe de la Paix (Lyon: Thomas Amaulry, 1691); Gautier and Balthazar de Bonnecors, Le Jugement du Soleil. Mis en Musique (Marseille: Pierre Mesnier, 1687).
<7>Marc Antoine Legrand, La Chûte de Phaëton, comédie en musique (Lyon: Thomas Amaulry, Hilaire Baritel, Jacques Guerrier, 1694).
<8>Jean-Baptiste Lully, Philippe Quinault, and Pascal Collasse, Atys, tragédie en cinq actes, avec un prologue mis en musique par M. Collasse, représentée à Vitré devant MM. des États de Bretagne, en 1689 (Paris: C. Ballard, 1689).
<9>See, for example, Lully and Quinault, Isis (Strasbourg: Jean-François Le Roux, 1732).
***

Natasha Roule received her PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University in May 2018, where she was supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship and an American Graduate Fellowship from the Council of Independent Studies.

By Jacques Dupuis

Apple’s June 5, 2017 Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) keynote presentation was, by many measures, a fairly standard, very polished Apple production, full of the usual slick visuals and catch-phrase styled language that reflects the company’s famous, tightly controlled image. Toward the end of the keynote, CEO Tim Cook brought Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller, to the stage to launch an announcement of Apple’s latest product, the HomePod, a product Schiller positioned primarily for listening to music. Amidst his delivery of Apple-typical claims of reshaping the world, Schiller enumerated three key innovations of the product: 1. high quality speakers; 2. adaptive spatial acoustic functions; and 3. a musicologist.

Reactions were immediate as Schiller announced that the “built-in musicologist”—working with the virtual assistant, Siri, as something between an AI disc-jockey and a fact finder—would “help us hear the music we love, or discover the music we’re going to love” through the music streaming service, Apple Music. While many people reacted to the company’s high aspirations or the product’s functionality, others were struck by the word “musicologist.” On Twitter, some users were enthusiastic:

ചെർപ്പുളശ്ശേരിക്കാരൻ (@mathi_dili), June 5, 2017: #musicologist

     #HomePods‬. Apple comes with such cool or strange Names !!

Others were critical:

Shawn Dessaigne (@satansrobot), June 5, 2017: I'm not sure Apple knows what a
      musicologist is or does.

Bronson Foster (@bronsonfoster), June 5, 2017: Still trying to get over @Apple‬'s incredibly
      incredibly ignorant use of the word "#musicologist‬." Feeling bad for my colleagues now
      dealing with it.

Gene De Lisa (@genedelisadev), June 5, 2017: @Apple‬, N.B. "Musicologist" is an actual
      profession and the majority of them hold PhDs. What HomePod is doing is not
      musicology. #WWDC17

Jacob Daniels (@senatordaniels), June 5, 2017: Siri is not a musicologist.

Still others were skeptical the word exists:

Matt LaForest (@mudetroit), June 5, 2017: “Musicologist” is not a word
      @Apple‬ not a word

Looking slightly beneath the surface, a common theme in these responses is uncertainty of what the word “musicologist” is actually doing here, a question that some musicology scholars also grappled with, albeit in a slightly different way. Following Apple’s late-January 2018 announcement of the HomePod’s February shipping date, Linda Shaver-Gleason noted in a good-humored but nevertheless incisive post on her blog, Not Another Music History Cliché, that responses from academics had varied between humorous and self-deprecating:

Gabrielle Cornish (@gcornish91), June 5, 2017: I'll believe Apple's HomePod
      is a musicologist when I hear its response to "Hey Siri, how do you feel about John
      Adams?"

Sam Blickhan (@snblickhan), June 6, 2017: I'm a musicologist who works in handwritten
      text transcription. @Apple‬ came for both my jobs this week but it's cool. #WWDC17

Greg McCandless (@gmccandless), June 6, 2017: "Hey Siri, please explain the influence
      of post-structuralism on this artist's oeuvre via a semiotic analysis." #HomePod
      #musicologist?

While some were decidedly neutral:

William Gibbons (@musicillogical), June 5, 2017: Am I the only musicologist unperturbed
      about this Apple thing?

As many recalled at both the WWDC and release date announcements, however, this was not the first time a music streaming service had adopted the term “musicologist” to address the limitations of algorithm driven music recommendations. Pandora Radio has long employed a team of curators it calls “musicologists” for its Music Genome Project whose goal is effectively to develop stronger metadata for the platform’s algorithms, which select music that “fits” together for automated, personalized radio stations. In September 2012, Nokia introduced an ill-fated streaming service for the similarly ill-fated Windows Phone, where “consumers [could] stream music from a suite of over 150 exclusive playlists that are curated and kept up to date by an expert team of US based musicologists.” And in 2014, Warner Music Group’s music cataloguing and marketing arm, Rhino, issued a call for the individual user to “become a Rhino musicologist,” and “share their superior musical taste with the world,” in the form of playlists submitted via its application within Spotify. In method, Pandora tends more toward machine learning, with a distinctly individual-centered and ephemeral result, while Nokia and Rhino leaned more toward human, static outcomes. And in procedure, Rhino’s crowd-sourced method acts as a foil to the in-house approaches of both Pandora and Nokia.

By the time Apple announced its HomePod, ample precedent had been set for “musicologists” in the music streaming industry, even as there remains conceptual ambiguity in individual idiosyncratic usages of the term by different companies. Still, there are some overarching implications in these usages beyond pretenses of neologism or rebranding established practices. To twist the earlier question toward historical terms: why can the word “musicologist” do any work in this situation, at all? What basis is there for marketing teams at these companies choosing it in the first place?

Nick Matarese (@nmatares), June 6, 2017: “They focused on making Siri a "musicologist" instead of a better generalist. T-shaped assistant.”

When a Google product designer, Nick Materese, tweeted this concatenation on the morning after Apple’s WWDC announcement, he gestured toward a possible interpretation of Silicon Valley’s adoption of a term that seems superficially pretty foreign to the tech industry. Matarese humanizes Siri qua musicologist in her HomePod morph by characterizing her as T-shaped, capable of many things with deep specialization in one. The description is apt, especially accounting for the other functions she performs, but rather than cast Siri as a startup team member, as “T-shaped” connotes, I would suggest that Materese’s reference to generalists invokes, intentionally or not, a historical context of yearning for guiding lights and experts amongst wider publics.

Around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, intellectual atmospheres were in flux, particularly within the college-educated, white, middle to upper class, where emphases on broad-based knowledge lost value to deeper understanding of specific subject areas—from breadth to depth, from generalism to specialism. This philosophical evolution did not simply expunge nineteenth century genteel culture’s generalism for greater sequestration in subfields; rather, significant overlap occurred and gentility lingered well into the time when university curricula began catering to greater depth in ever more insular majors. As Joan Shelley Rubin details in The Making of Middlebrow Culture, this tension contributed to the rise of “the middlebrow,” a historically contingent category that includes products and activities intended to stimulate cultural or intellectual elevation for consumers.<1> Very often, these products bore names like “A Brief History of…”, or the “Five-Foot Shelf of Books,” intended to “furnish a liberal education to anyone willing to devote fifteen minutes per day to reading them”.<2>

Among figures like Will Durant, John Erskine, Stuart Pratt Sherman and Irita Van Doren that Rubin describes, Henry Seidel Canby supplies us with an interesting and demonstrative case. Canby’s origins and education align him closely to genteel generalism as he progressed through studies at Yale, eventually earning a PhD in 1905 and a faculty position there in 1908. Becoming restless with materialism’s specializing influence on curricula at Yale as students sought well-paying jobs over well-roundedness, he eventually left the academy and became editor of Literary Review for the New York Evening Post, a publication intended to inform its audience’s reading choices. Before long, he landed on the Board of Judges for Harry Scherman’s Book of the Month Club, founded in 1926.<3> Canby’s Ivy League pedigree and personal intellectual philosophy made him well-suited to serve as a guiding light before a wider public, part and parcel of an industry partially reliant on this sort of personality for its legitimation.

Henry Seidel Canby<4>

Closely resembling these printed products, educational entertainment also appeared on the radio in the 1920s and 30s, with programming featuring an intellectual guide leading discussions or lectures on classic or contemporary literature. Eventually, universities supported radio lectures by their professors, in a role akin to the work of today’s university extension course lecturers. In products legitimized by professorial experts like Canby, what buyers purchased was as much the opinions of the experts as it was the Book of the Month.

What I want to spotlight here about the figure of Henry Canby and middlebrow products is the strong customer appeal of the guiding expert. Products like the Book of the Month and radio lectures by university experts took shape from a demand for cultural cache, not unlike human or algorithmic curators of streaming music playlists and radio stations. While tech companies’ adoption of the term “musicologist” came as a jolt of humility to those of us who lay claim to that title professionally, offering a patina of expertise and pre-packaged access to elite culture is the actual work that the word “musicologist” does for Pandora, Apple and others. This resonance with historical middlebrow products, I would argue, is a primary reason the term carries any significance at all. Consumers buying legitimacy buy the supposed privilege of being in the know, much like the connoisseur outlets of Pitchfork or Fanfare Magazine.

Taking a step back, applying the term “musicologist” to a digital assistant puts the face of an expert on the thing; more simply, it puts a face on a thing, humanizing and warming it. It seeks to resolve a problem that in March of 2018 Washington Post pop music critic, Chris Richards, saw in platforms like Spotify, where “algorithm-generated playlists often feel like mix tapes made by bots,” which they are. The appeal of humanity explains why, when devising the Book of the Month, Harry Scherman’s decision to cultivate images of personalities to sell his products rather than curate a faceless catalog listing worked as well as it did. Humanization sells.

While streaming services’ adoption of expert “musicologists” puts consumers in the know, it also contributes to platforms’ generation of communities. Generally speaking, individuals who follow an expert (middlebrow or other) form a virtual community akin to Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, where readers gather in common consumption of literature, or slightly adapted, follow the ideas of an expert.<5> In the case of music streaming, literature can be substituted by playlists, which can be curated by “musicologists” (experts). Spotify, as a prominent example, plainly exhibits other markers of community, as well: if they choose, users register by linking a social media account, subsequently follow their contacts’ activities, and even make collaborative playlists with them.

Other features generate not only communities, but what can be termed publics. Literary critic Michael Warner, in his influential essay, “Publics and Counterpublics,” gives a number of criteria required for an entity to garner the status, “public.” Most significantly, Warner revises the all-encompassing and much-critiqued formulation of “the” public from Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into a nimbler, more flexible configuration of multiple publics. His criteria for whether an entity is “a” public include: 1) self-organization, 2) a relation of strangers, and 3) constitution through mere attention.<6> Determining whether music streaming users constitute a public, individuals voluntarily become users, qualifying them as self-organized. Linking to one’s Facebook friends on the platform could disqualify certain regions of Spotify from being a public, per Warner, but users can subscribe to and consume Spotify’s algorithm/musicologist-curated playlists. Such subscriber groups bring together individuals who otherwise would not know one another, creating relations between strangers. Though Warner thinks primarily of written media in his prerequisite of “mere attention” (that is, multiple strangers’ simultaneous consumption of the same piece of writing), sociologist Georgina Born cites Benedict Anderson in positing that music performs the same function: “Music animates imagined communities, aggregating its listeners into virtual collectivities or publics based on musical and other identifications.” Music streaming services do similar work to the online piracy communities Born elsewhere references as facilitating “the virtual or stranger alliances and collectivities generated by the mediation circulation of music and sound.”<8> If these parallels work only as implied evidence of the virtual communities to which streaming services’ “experts” contribute, to a self-consciously literal, nominal extreme, there is even a message board, the Spotify Community, which fulfills one other of Warner’s rules for “a” public: ongoing, reflexive discourse. Surfing alongside all of this is the “musicologist,” with its expertise and curated playlists.

Lest we dismiss these elements as menial or incidental, the proliferation of black markets for playlists shows that there is big business in fostering a healthy community or public, whether in music streaming or in middlebrow cultural products. Realistically, all of these communal features are profit-minded, exploiting the dopamine-inducing potential at the heart of social media’s allure. Nevertheless, each contributes some element of community or public. In reflecting upon what music streaming services do when they adopt a term like “musicologist,” parsing the user experience gives significant insight into why the fictional figure of the music streaming musicologist has any impact, at all. Just as the Book of the Month and university-supported radio programming catalyzed middlebrow publics, music streaming services are the platforms for their publics, to be legitimized and partly constituted by the likes of a Canby or Siri-musicologist.

As a closing thought, Apple’s lexicographic influence is not immense, but it is far from negligible, accounting for the ubiquity of the “i-” on consumer electronics packaging. Terminology (such as “musicologist”) plays an important role in the company’s branding strategy, which is to say that language is carefully selected and crafted. Without flattering ourselves too much by claiming the pushback on Apple by academic musicologists alone swayed a transnational company, it is worth noting that at the time of the HomePod’s release, Apple’s webpage for the product featured this description:

Today, it reads:

To paraphrase another public intellectual, Leonard Bernstein: whither “musicologist”? If a behemoth like Apple has forgone the word for one reason or another, it is difficult to guess if or how the word will surface again. But in this case, what may have felt to some critics like a naive co-opting of a term was actually a shrewd marketing decision connected to history, and for Apple is right at home with the Smart Keyboard, Genius Bar, and myriad Pro models meant to make customers feel in the know.
***
<1>Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
<2>Rubin, 28.
<3>Rubin, 94.
<4>Norman Borachardt, “Sketch of Henry Seidel Canby,” Current Opinion 72 (January-June 1922), 381.
<5>Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 2006).
<6>Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 65-124.
<7>Georgina Born, “Introduction - music, sound and space: transformations of public and private experience,” in Music, Sound and Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 32.
<8>Born, 35.
***

Jacques Dupuis is a PhD candidate in historical musicology at Brandeis University, writing a dissertation on Robert Schumann and early 19th-century popular theater genres.

By Ross Cole

Folk music is near synonymous with the left. This union is so apparent and longstanding in the Anglophone world that we rarely ever think to question it. Haunting the revival of the 1960s, the archetype of a folk singer is beholden to legends such as Woody Guthrie, his guitar emblazoned with the phrase “This Machine Kills Fascists” (now available online for $4 a piece).

Although folk music was employed in the service both of communist state propaganda (vividly illustrated in Paweł Pawlikowski’s recent film Cold War) and in support of the Third Reich, our concept of folklore has tended to remain wedded to a proletarian or progressive vision. Folk music partisans, themselves frequently stalwart Marxists or card-carrying Party members, were at the vanguard of the most iconic political struggles of the twentieth century, from the Industrial Workers of the World and the Popular Front to the civil rights movement, CND, and the movement for reproductive rights.

In the public imagination, the folk revivalist is a dyed-in-the-wool radical, an activist whose commitment to the betterment of the common woman and man was forged in the furnace of anti-capitalist hostility. The frivolous offerings of the commercial music industry only serve to compound this opposition to the marketplace and its profit-hungry moguls. And so the folk singer rages against commerce and decadence with songs of social injustice, their roots firmly grounded in the topography of home.

But this tradition of thought is built upon a paradoxical foundation, one that casts a disconcerting shadow on the vision of folk music as a tool of resistance.

Folkloric thinking echoes what Raymond Williams saw as a form of “idealist retrospect” – a way of measuring change and resisting capitalist injustice nevertheless in danger of reinforcing undemocratic hierarchies “in the name of blood and soil”.<1> Might folk music share a common history with the very forces it has strived so hard to resist?

Indeed it does. Looking back at the work of the most influential and indefatigable British song collector Cecil J. Sharp brings this strange correlation into focus.

Sharp, a Fabian socialist with strong nationalist leanings (he was a member of the imperialistic Navy League), believed that folk song should be used to combat an ostensible erosion of white, English identity. Writing in 1907, he claimed that

Our system of education is, at present, too cosmopolitan; it is calculated to produce citizens of the world rather than Englishmen. And it is Englishmen, English citizens, that we want. How can this be remedied? By taking care, I would suggest, that every child born of English parents is, in its earliest years, placed in possession of all those things which are the distinctive products of its race…If every child be placed in possession of all these race-products, he will know and understand his country and his countrymen far better than he does at present; and knowing and understanding them he will love them the more, realize that he is united to them by the subtle bond of blood and kinship, and become, in the highest sense of the word, a better citizen, and a truer patriot.<2>

Although many of his contemporaries fought vociferously against such ideas, Sharp’s vision of revivalism emerged triumphant on both sides of the Atlantic, pairing a commitment to organic nationalism and racial hierarchy with a socialist resistance against cultural degeneration and the ravages of industrial capitalism.

On the surface, these political commitments may seem baffling––what Dave Harker describes as a “bizarre mixture of radical and reactionary”.<3> But they are by no means inconsistent. As the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell has argued, such a confluence must be seen not simply as the precursor to fascist regimes but rather as a powerfully attractive nexus of ideas circulating throughout Europe at the fin de siècle predicated on a revision of Marxism in which a “revolution of the spirit” trumps revolution proper.<4>

This ideology sought above all to unify a class-ridden society through the idea of the nation viewed as a racial community with sacred ties to the soil. “Before it became a political force,” Sternhell affirms, fascism was “a cultural phenomenon”.<5>

Our conception of folk music from Somerset to Appalachia is indelibly marked by this moment largely as a result of Sharp’s interventions. As the collector Lucy Broadwood wrote in a personal letter to her sister in 1924, Sharp elected himself “King of the whole movement” and “was by the general ignorant public taken at his own valuation”.

What’s surprising is the extent to which his ideas—deeply conditioned by extreme nationalism, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia—have managed to circulate without having their political meanings fully scrutinized.<6> In this sense, he has been supremely successful: such ideas reverberate silently and all the more powerfully within objects and cultural practices that, for many people, exist as innocent tokens of the past.

Sharp, in other words, holds a profound sway over public memory. Even within academic circles today, the term “folk” is often employed in its Sharpian guise without due attention paid to the broader discursive ecology that afforded its emergence and proliferation. Instead, it is taken as a given and hence becomes a blind spot.

Lurking under the surface of folk culture’s celebration of the past is a call not to international solidarity, equality, and brotherhood but to blood and soil nativism. This contradiction plagues the folk revivalist project, its songs and dances always endeavoring to reconcile the conflicting pull of history and locality with human unity.

In the current political climate it is worth pausing to reflect on how many ideas, assumptions, and institutions are indebted to the same patterns of thought as was Sharp. His ugly ideology rears its head as the mouthpiece of white supremacy when the majority feels under threat, from Paddy Tarleton’s noxious “Charlottesville Ballad (War is Coming)” to neo-Nazi investment in the mythology of Celtic music. To what degree, we should ask, can folk song escape this darker aspect of its intellectual heritage?
***
<1>Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), 35–6.
<2>Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (London: Simpkin & Co., 1907), 135–6.
<3>Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British “Folksong”, 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), 175.
<4>Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, translated by David Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 272.
<5>Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, translated by David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3.
<6>Notable exceptions include Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) and Daniel J. Walkowitz, City Folk: English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

***

Ross Cole is a Junior Research Fellow in music at the University of Cambridge.

By Jacek Blaszkiewicz

My first time in front of Notre Dame was in 2014. I had just passed my PhD qualifying exams and had flown to Leeds to attend a conference. A spur-of-the-moment decision—and cheap European airfare—found me in Paris days later. I was just beginning research on a dissertation that aimed to uncover the parallels between Paris’s musical and urban histories during the nineteenth century. I had heard the music and read the books, but had never seen the place, so I was expecting to be blown off my feet and into the Seine at the sublime sight of Paris’s most famous sacred monument.

I resisted the urge to reach for my phone to take a picture. To do so, I feared, would be to succumb to that touristic faux pas: to see a place in order to have seen it, as art critic Robert Hughes once quipped.<1>

On Monday, April 15, a fire engulfed Notre Dame’s roof and spire, devastating large parts of the cathedral. As gruesome images flooded my social media feeds, I noticed a common theme among posts by those who, like myself, had spent time in Paris. Their photos, which they once thought inconsequential, became personal relics. These photos now bore the weight of their grief. While the philanthropic outpouring in the wake of the Notre Dame fire is understandable and justified, it should also remind us of the sacred spaces that have also suffered destruction but do not benefit from the prestige of being urban/national monuments. Cities, in other words, must hold both the monumental and the mundane in their care.

The city of Paris has seen its share of destruction, both accidental and deliberate. Before 1860, Notre Dame was the center of a dense working-class district. As do documented by Charles Soulier’s photographs of the Île de la Cité, Notre Dame shared the skyline with a dense collection of municipal buildings and working-class housing (See image below). After 1860, Emperor Napoléon III’s right-hand bureaucrat Georges-Eugène “Baron” Haussmann oversaw the near-total demolition of the Île de la Cité, razing nearly every edifice associated with the working class and leaving only the cathedral and a few other government buildings. This is the Île de la Cité we now know, an island whose sole purpose—to tourists, at least—is to provide vantage points from which to admire Notre Dame’s monumentality at a distance.

The Second Empire did not grieve the destruction of centuries-old houses, alleys, and squares, as those structures stood in the way of the streamlined urban utopia for which Napoléon and Haussmann both pined.<2> But as aesthetic trends shifted in the 1850s from the romantic to the realistic, composers increasingly issued nostalgic tributes to Le vieux Paris, or the working-class Parisian landscape that preceded Haussmannization. Entire books were written on the subject, such as Victor Fournel’s Paris nouveau, Paris future (1865) and Amédée de Ponthieu’s Légendes du vieux Paris (1867).

Writers, musicians and artists had of course mined “Old Paris” for inspiration well before 1850: Janequin’s Voulez ouyr des Cris de Paris (c. 1530) is an entertaining example that I use in my music history classes to discuss how musicians translated the chaotic din of the city into ordered polyphony.<3>

But nostalgia for Paris’s landscape became a dignified literary trope during the Second Empire, taking a more serious, methodical tone than preceding treatments of the subject. The liminal spaces of working-class Paris became to French musicians and writers what historian Pierre Nora would call lieux de mémoire, or physical or symbolic spaces that accumulate meaning through invented traditions such as consecrations, visits, and artistic reproductions.<4> Lieux de mémoire are palimpsests, in that their perceived immortality is due to frequent additions and reconstructions over time. As vast networks of liminal spaces and lieux de mémoires, cities undergo a continuous process of destruction and reconstruction. As Michel de Certeau so eloquently put it, “the surface order [of a city] is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning.”<5> Notre Dame was not built to last forever, at least not in any particular version. The cultural memory of an urban space is constructed out of both material and immaterial substance: stone, wood, and glass, but also poetry, music, journalism, and literature.

Music can also assume the role of a lieu de mémoire. It can evoke memory, interpret shared experience, and—via a programmatic association or tie to a political event—directly contribute to discourses around identity formation. Three musical works dating from the mid- to late-nineteenth century encapsulate this fusion of what Alexander Etkind would call “hard” and “soft” cultural memories.<6> Jean-Georges Kastner’s Les voix de Paris, Augusta Holmès’s Lutèce, and Gustave Charpentier’s Louise are not repertory staples, neither in the U.S. nor in France. But each work engages meaningfully with the material and immaterial forces that constituted the imagined landscape of le vieux Paris.

Kastner, Les cris de Paris (1857)

Jean-Georges Kastner (1810-67) married rich, so he did not need to compose to make a living. Today he is best remembered for his treatises on orchestration (1844) and military band music (1848). In 1857 Kastner published Les voix de Paris, a quasi-ethnographic essay on the history of street hawkers in the French capital. Kastner includes musical examples to buttress his ideas about the timbre and contour of different street industries. At the end of the essay is a fully scored, three-movement work for orchestra and chorus titled Les cris de Paris.<7> Despite the work’s humorous tone, noted critics such as François-Joseph Fétis and Joseph d’Ortigue were struck by the nostalgic tone of Kastner’s writing; indeed Kastner frequently refers to hawkers as fellow members of his musical community.<8> No recording of the work exists, but Ensemble Janequin arranged a madrigalesque version of a portion of Kastner’s work:

http://www.harmoniamundi.com/#!/albums/1375

Holmès, Lutèce (1878)

Lutèce was the name of the Roman-era Gallic settlement on which the city of Paris was built. In the late 1860s, during a massive bulldozing of the 5th arrondissement, the archaeologist Théodore Vacquer discovered the ruins of an arena, which turned out to be the largest remaining structure from the city’s Lutèce era.<9> In the wake of its discovery, the Arènes de Lutèce became a divisive subject of debate. On one hand, it presented an obstacle to building an omnibus depot on the city’s Left Bank. On the other, it reinvigorated a preservationist movement that directly challenged Haussmann’s irreverent attitude towards the city’s historical geography.

It was in the midst of this debate that, in 1878, the City of Paris sponsored a competition for a new, large-scale musical work. Augusta Holmès (1847-1903) submitted a work titled Lutèce, a symphonie dramatique for orchestra, soloists, and chorus. Although it came in second (after first-prize entries by Benjamin Godard and Théodore Dubois), Lutèce was unanimously praised by the composers on the jury. Le mènestrel praised Holmès’s work, despite expressing surprise that it was indeed “written by a woman.”<10> The text, by Holmès herself, features themes fit for a government-funded contest: a call to battle, war, defeat, and redemption. Lutèce is a tour-de-force of stylistic hybridity, fusing Wagnerian chromaticism, leitmotivs, neo-medieval fanfares, and tightly knit choral polyphony.<11> Viewed in the context of the ongoing debates about the city’s Roman ruins, Holmès’s work was a powerful reminder that Third-Republic Paris’s self-fashioning was tied to the city’s Gallo-Roman past.

https://imslp.org/wiki/Lut%C3%A8ce_(Holm%C3%A8s,_Augusta_Mary_Anne)

Charpentier, Louise (1900)

Louise is the story of a seamstress who navigates relationships with her parents, her neighbor Julien, and her working-class milieu in Montmartre. Scholars have explored the opera’s ties to Wagnerism and to fin-de-siècle realism.<12> But what is most striking is how Charpentier weaves street hawkers’ melodies—known for centuries as the Cris de Paris—into the orchestral fabric of the prelude to Act II. Charpentier had clearly consulted Kastner’s Les voix de Paris; the sweeping modal melody heard in the example below had been attributed by Kastner to the marchande de plaisir, a street vendor who sold candies and other trinkets to passersby in the streets. The same motive also appears in Offenbach’s Mesdames de la Halle, a one-act opérette-bouffe from 1858 that features Parisian market vendors in protagonist roles.<13> Kastner, Offenbach, and Charpentier not only drew on the same subject material, but also imbued Paris’s working-class community with musical agency. The hawkers’ melodies transcend mere couleur locale and play key structural and dramaturgical roles in the composers’ respective works. In each of these cases, le vieux Paris takes center stage.

As I have argued here, musical works, like monuments and cities, are palimpsests. Their caretakers add meaning to them, update them, reinterpret them, or slavishly preserve them. In the nineteenth century, Parisian musicians actively participated in discourses around urbanization, giving credit where it was due, but also resisting the modernist impulse to sacrifice the everyday to make room for the exceptional. The nineteenth-century notion of le vieux Paris became a revisionist ideology that expressed care for the unremarkable, forgettable, and un-monumental aspects of modern life. Rebuilding Notre Dame will add new layers to the cathedral’s rich history, not only as a lieu de mémoire, but also as a center of community. Just as the vieux Paris narrative granted agency to everyday spaces and communities, so too should Notre Dame inspire us to think and act locally.

The Society for French Historical Studies, H-France, the Society for the Study of French History, and the Western Society for French History are collectively soliciting donations to the rebuilding effort of Notre Dame cathedral. You can read about it here.
https://www.societyforfrenchhistoricalstudies.net/announcements

Donations for the rebuilding of the Seventh District Baptist Church, the St. Mary Baptist Church, and the Greater Union Baptist Church can be made here.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/church-fires-st-landry-parishmacedonia-ministry
***
<1>See Robert Hughes’s documentary The Mona Lisa Curse (2008).
<2>On urbanization and Second-Empire notions of utopia, see David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: the Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York: Free Press, 1995); and David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2005).
<3>On polyphony and the Parisian soundscape before Janequin, see Emma Dillon, The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260-1330 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
<4>See Pierre Nora, “From Lieux de mémoire to Realms of Memory,” in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, under the direction of Pierre Nora, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
<5>Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 107.
<6>See Alexander Etkind, “Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory,” Grey Room 16 (Summer, 2004), 36-59.
<7>On street cries as a literary trope, see Aimée Boutin, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015).
<8>See my article “Listening to the Old City: Street Cries and Urbanization in Paris, ca. 1860,” in Journal of Musicology, forthcoming.
<9>See Colin Jones, “Théodore Vacquer and the Archaeology of Modernity in Haussmann’s Paris,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 17 (2007), 157-183.
<10>See Jann Pasler, “The Ironies of Gender, or, Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holmès,” Women and Music 2 (1998), 1-25.
<11>See Mark Seto, “Luigi Cherubini and Augusta Holmes,” in Nineteenth-Century Choral Music (New York: Routledge 2013), 220-21.
<12>See Steven Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Emily Laurance, “Varieties of Operatic Realism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Case of Gustave Charpentier’s Louise,” PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2003.
<13>See my chapter “Street Cries on the Operetta Stage: Offenbach’s Mesdames de la Halle,” in
Musical Theatre in Europe, 1830-1945, edited by Michela Niccolai and Clair Rowden, 63-89 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017).
***

Jacek Blaszkiewicz completed a PhD in musicology at the Eastman School of Music in 2018, where he was supported by an Alvin Johnson AMS-50 Fellowship. Currently the Sorkin Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Williams College, Jacek will join the music history faculty at Wayne State University in Fall 2019.

By Alex Ludwig

This year is certain to test the Ironborn assertion, “What is dead may never die,” as three pillars of popular culture attempt to bring about a satisfying conclusion to their stories. The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) just completed its “Infinity Saga,” after 22 films and 11 years; Game of Thrones (GoT) is in the midst of its eighth and final season; and in December, the Star Wars franchise, which began in 1977, will conclude its “Skywalker” saga.

All three of these endeavors demand a tremendous amount of time from the viewer: the nine Star Wars films will clock in at roughly 30 hours, while GoT and the MCU are nearly double that length. Given this investment, it is no coincidence that the musical design of these franchises looks for inspiration to a similarly immersive work of culture, Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.

Wagner’s extensive use of leitmotifs, in which musical phrases represent people, places, and even emotions, is appropriated here in Game of Thrones so that people, places, and great houses all have their own musical material. Using Wagner’s Ring as a model, I examine the dramatic deployment of both diegetic and non-diegetic musical cues in a Game of Thrones episode titled, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” (S8E2).

In many ways, this episode is unusual: most of the main characters are gathered in one place, awaiting the army of the dead; and it functions like a giant anticipation, or upbeat, for the upcoming battle. The episode avoids action in favor of quiet contemplation, and reunites many pairs of characters (and swords) that have been long separated.

Ramin Djawadi’s musical score, which combines both diegetic and non-diegetic cues, enhances these quiet moments with additional layers of information. In the first scene of the episode, Jaime Lannister—known as the Kingslayer—arrives in Winterfell, despite having fought against the forces assembled there nearly his entire life. He does so at great personal risk, which only subsides once Lady Brienne vouches for him. After this point, Djawadi includes a musical reference to Jaime’s past, a direct callback to the first statement of Jaime’s “Kingslayer” theme, heard in the episode titled, “Kissed By Fire” (S3E5).

This callback is made more powerful given its initial dramatic framework: in the past scene, Jaime has explained that he killed the Mad King to save the realm, draining the “Kingslayer” moniker of its power; additionally, this confession furthers Brienne’s understanding of Jaime, enhancing her admiration for him. Djawadi’s inclusion of this “Kingslayer” leitmotif here in S8E2 illustrates not only the growth of both Sir Jaime and Lady Brienne, but also the deep connection that they share.

“Kissed By Fire” is also referenced later in this episode, and in a much darker emotional context concerning Shireen Baratheon, the daughter of the fallen king Stannis. Earlier in the series, she has not only befriended Sir Davos Seaworth and Gilly, but also taught them to read. In “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” these two characters come across a young girl suffering from greyscale—the same illness that afflicted Shireen. Beneath this interaction Djawadi supplies a musical quotation of a ballad, “It’s Always Summer Under the Sea,” that Shireen first sang in “Kissed By Fire.” This quotation is non-diegetic, so Davos and Gilly can’t hear it, but its appearance here confirms for the viewer that Davos and Gilly are thinking about Shireen.

Ironically, the screenwriter for this episode, Bryan Cogman mentioned in a podcast called Still Watching: Game of Thrones that an early draft of the script called for a long, static conversation about Shireen between Sir Davos and Gilly. Transforming this conversation into a seemingly innocuous interaction with a Shireen-like cipher allows the audience to discover a subtle, yet deeply emotional, moment of recognition.

Near the end of the episode, Podrick Payne—formerly a squire for Tyrion Lannister, now working with Brienne of Tarth—sings a mournful ballad to a ragtag assortment of men who have just witnessed Lady Brienne’s ascension to the title of knight. This diegetic cue, performed first by the actor Daniel Portman in the scene and later by Florence + the Machine during the end credits, is simple, yet powerful in its dramatic impact. The music itself betrays a modal influence: sung by a solo male voice, the melody is characterized by an initial leap upward followed by a persistent repetition of the fifth scale degree; the consequent phrase is frequently decorated by the lowered third and sixth scale degrees. The somber music emphasizes the images on the screen, as the camera finds each member of the audience. Podrick’s singing becomes a voiceover as a montage quickly shows a series of couples, ending with Daenerys and Jon in the crypts below Winterfell.

This entire sequence amplifies the emotional heft of Jaime Lannister knighting Brienne as “Sir Brienne.” It functions like an opera's aria: halting the plot, the filmmakers pause on the characters as they consider the momentous occasion; similarly, the montage showing characters outside the room reinforces the emotionally fraught moments on the eve of an apocalyptic battle. By foregrounding this piece of diegetic music, the filmmakers provide time for both the characters and the viewing audience to process this iconic moment.(For more on the lyrics and their narrative function, see this Vox explainer.) Whether this song carries a narrative implication remains to be seen.

Nonetheless, the sonic signals in Ramin Djawadi’s score for this episode — including the diegetic song and two non-diegetic cues discussed above — exemplify the musically complex and multivalent opportunities available to an extensive franchise like Game of Thrones. Whether in leitmotivic recollections inspired by Wagner’s Ring Cycle or in diegetic performances that draw on mythology of the story, musical memories in Djawadi’s score for Game of Thrones are often essential elements in creating meaning and narrative for the viewer.

Alex Ludwig is an assistant professor of the liberal arts at the Berklee College of Music, where he teaches courses on film music, pop music, and string quartets.

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