Musicology Now

By Brooke McCorkle

The season of fall horror movies is upon us; It reigns the box office and a slew of Halloween slashers will soon follow, but it is Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! that is generating the most debate.At once a psychological thriller and eschatological allegory,Mother! is perhaps more horrific than horror, though it brushes at the edges of the genre in several regards. The film dissects the relationship between “Mother” (Jennifer Lawrence) and “Him” or the Poet (Javier Bardem). As unexpected house guests arrive at their home, the poet nonchalantly and unceasingly undercuts Lawrence’s character at every turn. In this respect, I believe Mother! serves both as a metaphor for human existence and participates in a lineage of horror films concerning marginalized, tormented young women that undergo some sort of supernatural transformation (Carrie, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Witch come to mind).

The movie closely aligns audience members with the Mother. Over-the-shoulder, hand-held shots follow her throughout the home she has so lovingly restored for the Poet after a fire. Numerous extreme close-ups of Lawrence’s face as well as point-of-view shots strengthen the audience’s connection to the character. We share her sense of beleaguerment when Michelle Pfeiffer’s character, one of many unwanted guests, brazenly leaves the kitchen filthy after making lemonade, teases the Mother about her underwear, and interrogates her about having children. Lawrence’s character begs the Poet to dismiss the rude visitors, who multiply exponentially by the film’s climax. The Mother, now heavy with pregnancy, inspires the Poet to write after a long stretch of writer’s block. The success of the new work brings with it pilgrims hoping to meet the Poet. He refuses to turn the visitors away; he thrives on their adoration and abandons his wife’s love for the blind devotion of strangers. What begins as fanatic fervor transforms into a violent mob of anarchic disciples seeking to steal, consume, and destroy the Mother’s beloved creations: the home, and, eventually, her newborn son. Devastated and desperate, the Mother sets fire to herself and the home. All is char. Yet, she remains conscious in a black coal of a body while the Poet is unscathed. He carries her up to his study, where she bestows him with a final gift: her heart, now a crystal of flame. The Poet digs the crystal out of her chest and places it in a display stand. The world is renewed; the film “returns” to the beginning, with a new Mother.

Just as the narrative and cinematography work to generate audience empathy for the Mother character, so does the sound design. The soundtrack for Mother!exploits sound design to effectively arouse tension and fear. In this, it is hardly unique; horror films from Hitchcock’s The Birds to Peele’s Get Out utilize sound to heighten the cinematic sensorium. Mother!, however, pushes the boundary between sound and music in a specific way. I argue that not only can we consider sound as musical in the film (a Cagean approach to listening that befits many horror films), but that sound in Mother! does the semiotic heavy-lifting that is typically expected of an underscore. In other words, not only does sound seem musical, it acts like music in the film. The aesthetic of sound rendering along with a few key sound effects contribute to this phenomenon.

In Mother!, sounds are hyper-rendered; they are sweetened with reverb and raised to the foreground of the audio mix. From the very opening of the film, this super-sonicity is associated with the Mother. Throughout the film, it is as if auditor-spectators hear through her tinnitus-afflicted ears. The groans of the house reverberate through the auditorium thanks to Dolby stereo. The sounds emitted by the house envelop the audience; it is as if the structure replicates an in utero soundscape. External to the body, electric lights buzz like lightening, a broken teacup rings its destruction without decay, water, wind, crickets all are hyper-realized in the soundtrack. This effect is used most powerfully towards the climax of the film. The Poet steals the newborn son from the dozing Mother’s arms and passes the crying babe to his thralls. Like a demented crowd surfer, the baby floats on the hands of the mob; at the doorway a disgusting thud, offset by a silent pause, reverberates through the soundtrack. I gasped at the shock of it; auditor-spectators, like the Mother, are attuned to the sounds of the newborn and horrified by the sound of his head being crushed. It is the sound of finality. Overall, the hyper-rendering of sound effects lead auditor-spectators to hear from the point of audition of the Mother; they are thus encouraged to empathize with her position in the narrative.

Two other effects work as narrative bookends for the film. The first appears during the opening credits; the sound of a nibbed pen echoes in synchronization with the animated scrawl of Mother! in the title credits. The scratching immediately informs auditor-spectators of writing’s centrality to the story. Yet, the sound is sweetened with an effect reminiscent of the unsheathing of a sword. There is a violence to these handwritten words, a violence made apparent in the film’s final half hour. The end credits complete this impression. After a haunting cover of “The End of the World,” the sound of the slashing pen returns, illuminating the end credits. The ink blots splatter like the blood of the baby and the Mother that the audience saw destroyed a few minutes earlier. When natural sound effects like the chirping of crickets encroach on the sound effect of the pen during the end credits, it seems as if nature might remedy the world of violent logos.

Immediately following the opening credits with the metallic scratch of writing, the audience receives a sound advance. The screen remains darkened while the sound of fire blazes in stereo. A close up of Jennifer Lawrence’s face aflame fills the screen a second later. The emphasis on the sound of fire before the film’s visual narrative begins is a striking one. It indicates through sound the thematic relevance of fire to the story. Beyond this, the sound of the fire is deeply elemental—it is a giver and destroyer of life, ruinous and purifying at once. Over the course of the film, the audience discovers that it is the sound of the Mother, the cyclically ravaged and renewed muse to Him.

While Mother! is not a horror film in the traditional sense, in many aspects it functions like one; its story reveals humanity’s deepest fears and dark desires. What is so haunting about the film is the accumulation of minor offenses into something of apocalyptic proportions. It can be read as allegories of humanity’s relationship to nature, to gender politics, and to Christianity. However we choose to perceive Mother!, one thing is clear: the soundtrack invites us to listen to the marginalized and maltreated. It is in this act of listening that we might lay a foundation of empathy upon which a home can be rebuilt.

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For more on this, see Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 101-140.

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Brooke McCorkle is an opera and film music scholar. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at SUNY-Geneseo. Her published and forthcoming works address topics as varied as Star Trek Concerts, Wagner reception in Japan, and ecological critiques in monster cinema. Please see here for more information.

By Jim Buhler

Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! is an exceptionally bleak film. It offers an ambitious and disturbing allegory of creativity and, evidently, “climate change and humanity’s role in environmental destruction”—though the final blast of total destruction is performed by the central, unnamed character played by Jennifer Lawrence, whom the credits identify only as “her” and, as Lawrence stated in an interview, represents the figure of Mother Earth.

Mother! has also proven a divisive film, less among critics, who have generally given it grudging respect if not love, than among audiences, who have responded with surprising vigor to a film that is faring poorly at the box office. The New York Times even devoted an article to its readers’ responses to the film, with one reader claiming that the film’s “repetitive theme of creation and destruction plays out more like Groundhog Day in hell than a biblical allegory,” a statement that encapsulates well my own experience. Throughout the film, the allegory is nothing if not heavy handed, but it is also not fully coherent. The various levels of allegorical content often collide in a way that gives the film more the heady, disorganized quality of a dream—or a nightmare—than an intelligible story.

The film is also closed-in on itself, almost claustrophobic at times, presenting what Gilles Deleuze would call an “originary world.” In any event, the film accords as well as any film of recent vintage with Deleuze’s category of impulse-image. The originary world of the impulse-image, Deleuze says in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, makes “all the parts converge in an immense rubbish-dump or swamp, and all the impulses in a great death-impulse. The originary world is therefore both radical beginning and absolute end; and finally it links the one to the other, it puts the one into the other, according to a law which is that of the steepest slope.” Characters in Mother! wander in from some nebulous outside, but anyone who is sucked into the vortex of the house seems fated to remain (or if they leave, they soon find themselves back), and the longer they remain, the more destructive they become.

The house offers a world of immanence. This closed quality is also manifest in the film’s treatment of sound, which is virtually devoid of music and so makes it difficult for the film to offer a promise of an exterior, transcendent position. The most overtly musical moment in the film occurs during the apocalyptic sequence in the final act. Here, we briefly hear throbbing club music, the narrative situation forging an association of this music (and dance) with carnal urges and the breakdown of social order. Otherwise, music is used very discreetly in the film, invariably serving as a furthermost point of stylization in the film’s sound design, moments that are mostly reserved for Lawrence’s “her” communing with the house. Although the film is about creativity and explores through allegory issues of responsibility (or irresponsibility) in the creation of a world, the sound design mostly emphasizes realistic rather than stylized sound, which has the effect of presenting the world more as posited than created or constructed.

Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) reacts to the disruptions of Man and Woman.

The house creaks and groans with hyper-realistic detail as the characters move through it—this is especially the case in the early scenes that introduce Lawrence as Mother. This approach to sound gives the house an undeniably haunted quality, and the sound is effective in investing the house with the potential to become a character in its own right rather than simply a space for the action to play out. The Man (Ed Harris) and the Woman (Michelle Pfeifer) soon arrive, however, and if the house doesn’t stop making noises in their presence, those sounds more frequently move to the background behind the seemingly endless chatter of the guests. The house’s potential to become a character diminishes as its sounds recede into the background, and ultimately it haunts no one really, certainly not Mother, who seems if anything drawn to the house, nor her husband, “Him” (Javier Bardem), the self-absorbed poet who should be haunted by the past destruction he has caused. The house seems only to haunt itself, as it recoils from the endless cycle of destruction that it seemingly knows to be its fate. But the film seems to have little empathy for the plight of the house, just as the Poet has little empathy for the plight of his wife, from whom he'll nevertheless demand everything—over and over again.

During the final act, the house becomes populated with an impossibly increasing number of guests, and the action turns violent. The world, already closed off, seems to collapse in on itself, and the geography of the house grows more and more confused as the guests in the house devolve into figures of pure drive and impulse. The action in this final act also traces a rapid line of descent for Mother. She moves from the relative quiet of the upper reaches of the house where she initially escapes with her baby, through the chaos of the middle floors, to the final descent into the basement. Here, Mother traverses the steepest slope of the impulse-image. In this horrifying descent, she and the house are subject to increasing amounts of violence. The sound crescendos and increasingly relates directly to the guests or the violence the guests inflict on the house (and one another). Slipping through to the basement, Mother finds a degree of quiet again, but, despite the pleading of her husband, she destroys everything except Him in a fire. Before she dies, the Poet asks whether she will give him her heart from her charred body. She agrees, he takes it and transforms it into a crystal that will create the world anew, and the film begins again with a new Mother.

This structure of eternal return is another feature of impulse-images. The curvature, Deleuze says, allows beginning and ending to touch, creating a closed loop of time. Brooke’s post notes the significance of the sound of a pen scratching on paper that appears in both opening and closing credits as a framing device that insists on the power and violence of logos. A variant of this sound also appears in the middle of the film, when the Poet writes the poem that will renew him but also bring ruin to the house. The slope of the impulse-image, Deleuze says, either “makes it into a closed world, absolutely closed off, or else opens it up on to an uncertain hope.” In the sounds of the pen, in the sounds of the house, the film offers inconclusive signs of a world that might escape the cycle of bad repetition if only we could hear them as music.

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James Buhler is on the faculty at the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses on music and media. He writes frequently on music and film and is the author of Hearing the Movies, now in its second edition. He is active on Twitter (@jimbuhler), where many of the ideas in this short essay were first broached.

By John Spilker

At the 2017 Teaching Music History Conference, colleagues discussed two potential trends in teaching music history courses: a content-oriented music history survey approach and a methods-oriented musicology approach. A colleague asked how I would describe “Music History: Gender & Sexuality” and “Music History: The Environment.” I responded that these two required music history courses at Nebraska Wesleyan University are “survey adjacent” and we shared a laugh at this new terminology. I teach topic-based music history courses structured around a limited number of case studies and my pedagogy lies in between the content vs. methods poles described above. My students dig deep with the intentionally selective content to develop research and writing skills, which they apply to a semester-long research project that culminates in a thesis-driven paper on any topic of their choice, including music outside the Western art music tradition. This approach is definitely a very different place from when I first started teaching the music history survey in 2007. In fact, I would have never imagined participating in such a strange new pedagogical landscape ten years ago. For example, as an especially fastidious and overly-conscientious teacher of the traditional music history survey, I assigned the textbook reading and three anthology pieces (early, middle, and late exemplars) for the single 50-minute class period on the Renaissance madrigal. (It’s precious to look back at this.) Some colleagues would point out, “They’re never going to do all that work for one class period.” Nevertheless, I persisted…for a while.

Initial Reconsiderations

After having taught the music history survey for two years, I used Kay Kaufmann Shelemay’s Soundscapes to teach my first world music course during the 2010–2011 academic year. I wondered, “what if music history courses were structured using a case-study approach similar to Shelemay’s textbook?” With fondness, I recalled Douglass Seaton’s approach to the Classical and Romantic period courses I took in graduate school. Each class session focused on a single piece and an article connected to the composition and/or genre. During the 2011–2012 academic year, my first semester teaching at Nebraska Wesleyan University, the exiting seniors suggested it would be much more helpful to learn music research methods during their sophomore and/or junior years. They noted that other majors had anywhere from one to three research methods courses as part of the curriculum. I wondered, “Why do we wait until a senior seminar or graduate bibliography course to teach research methods to music students? Furthermore, why is the approach usually so musicology-centric?” (Consequently, a new bookoffers a more comprehensive approach to music research methods.) During my three years of experience teaching the survey, I noticed that student papers often lacked a clear thesis and thorough engagement with scholarly books and articles. Some students didn’t know how to find a topic beyond “The History of the Trombone” or “Beethoven’s Symphonies.” Then it hit me: we guide students through an encyclopedic textbook and anthology about the chronology of compositional newness; then tell them to do research with secondary sources and write a paper. Often, there is scant instruction or hands-on workshop time spent on how to read and analyze articles, gather and organize data, formulate a thesis, construct a narrative, and revise prose…largely because “there’s no time” when you feel compelled to cover so much content. Furthermore, students may not want to research and write about art music from the time periods encapsulated by the survey course because it doesn’t seem readily relevant to their professional goals.

Skills and Topics: Lessons Learned from the Liberal Education Curriculum

I learned how to use less content to help incoming students develop skills in analytical reading, research, and writing as part of professional development activities for NWU’s first-semester seminar. In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer discusses “Teaching from the Microcosm” as a way to engage students in the practices of the field, rather than merely covering disciplinary content. I struggled with the idea of cutting content to build in time for developing intellectual skills (e.g. research, writing, public speaking, etc.). How could I possibly let go of all this good information that the students need to know? A religion colleague shared a perspective that changed her outlook about coverage and curriculum design: “I don’t need to educate my students as if I’m training my replacement.”

As NWU worked to create a new liberal education curriculum, we discussed the idea of scaffolding skills across the curriculum. Accordingly, both of my music history courses are upper-level writing instructive. Music History: Gender & Sexuality is diversity instructive. George Kuh identifies writing and diversity as high-impact educational practices. The integrative core of our new curriculum requires students to take courses in “threads,” cohorts of courses from various departments organized around a single topic or issue. A senior music colleague inquired, “could you re-design your music history courses so they will simultaneously satisfy the requirements for specific threads?” He likely expected a surface-level fulfillment; however, musicology has been moving in the direction of engaging deeply with interdisciplinary topics like, ecomusicology. I could offer music history courses that connect with concepts from environmental and gender studies, while remaining connected to the context of the music history survey by constructing each course from case-studies. Furthermore, a topic-based case-study approach freed me to select repertoire that represents the diversity of music that extends beyond “art music,” which is laden with issues of race and socio-economic status. My new courses include blues, hip-hop, pop music, Broadway musical theater, film music, monophonic secular song, the madrigal, opera, and varied 20th-century art-music genres, some of which reference genres from earlier time periods such as the mass, symphony, and piano character piece.

The Case Study

For my new courses, each case study typically focuses on a single musical work and a related piece of scholarship. Each case study comprises two to three seventy-minute class sessions, during which students develop musicological research skills associated with historical social/cultural context, stylistic analysis, and current scholarship. Students apply these skills by completing required reading, listening, watching and/or analysis before class, engaging in activities and discussion during class, and working on the scaffolded research and writing assignments that culminate in their research paper. The case study on Edgard Varèse’s Déserts from “Music History: The Environment” illustrates the construction of a single case study. First, the “historical social/cultural context” class session addresses information about the historical period, genre, performance practice, intellectual history, and developments across disciplines including music. Students are assigned to read “Prelude to the Twentieth Century” from Mark Evan Bonds’s textbookand “Second Half of the 20th-century” from Douglass Seaton’s text. Students also research information about Transatlantic U.S. modernism, experimental music, and electronic music. Second, for the “stylistic analysis” class session, students have access to the score and a recording of the work. They guide their listening and score study by taking notes on salient features of each element of music: scoring, dynamics, rhythm, melody, harmony, texture, and form. Third, the “current scholarship” class session requires students to understand, analyze, and critique the content, research methods, and writing found in a scholarly publication. For the Déserts case study, students prepare notes on Denise Von Glahn’s essay “‘Empty Spaces’: On the Conceptual Origins of Déserts” in Edgard Varèse.

“Survey Adjacent” (Don’t worry. I’ve got your back.)

Although NASM accreditation guidelines do not require coverage of the six historical periods, both of my new music history courses provide students with a foundation rooted in the music history survey. “Music History: Gender and Sexuality” includes concepts and genres from the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods and “Music History: The Environment” addresses the Classic period through the present. This information complements content from other required music courses ranging from theory to ensembles and applied lessons. It also provides a helpful frame of reference for students who need to prepare independently for graduate school entrance exams or the Praxis II exam for music education certification. For these students, process remains paramount: they need to apply their research skills to approach the task of studying for a comprehensive exam. One colleague, who teaches graduate students at a R1 institution, helped me see the big picture as I swirled in insecurity and self-doubt about doing something new: “Your new courses are actually preparing students for the things they will need to do in graduate school, not just exposing them to the information that could appear on the music history entrance exam.” At the end of the day, my courses use discipline-specific content to help students build the skills they need to excel in any career and lifelong-learning endeavors, whether or not grad school beckons. After all, even I can say to my students that my current job routinely requires me to do many things that I never learned as a part of my degree coursework, pedagogy being chief among those.

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John D. Spilker holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from The Florida State University and is Associate Professor of Musicology and Gender Studies at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He serves as the co-coordinator for the campus-wide liberal education assessment initiative, a project sponsored by the Higher Learning Commission’s Assessment Academy. He has received the United Methodist Church Exemplary Teacher Award (2014-2015), NWU Faculty Advocate for Diversity Award (2017), and the Margaret J. Prouty Teaching Award (2016-2017). At the 2016 national meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Dr. Spilker presented his work on music history curricular revision and integration with NWU’s new liberal education program. He has presented his scholarship on writing pedagogy, care pedagogy, and alternative approaches to the music history survey at national meetings of the American Musicological Society. His research on dissonant counterpoint and Henry Cowell has been published in American Music and the Journal of the Society for American Music.

By Gwynne Brown

To teach any survey course is to resign oneself to a series of regrettable omissions, generalizations, and compromises. I was keenly aware of this fact a few years ago when I prepared to teach a new course that had been added to my institution’s music history sequence for majors. The two-semester sequence had been dedicated almost exclusively to the Western classical tradition, with a couple of weeks for jazz. The new third semester (“Western and World Music Since 1914”) was to include popular music and some non-Western music—topics whose prior absence was rightly understood as unacceptable in a 21st-century college music curriculum.

The university catalog’s description of the new course demonstrated our ongoing preoccupation with the Western classical tradition, however. It promised that the new course would offer the following smorgasbord of topics: “the legacy of modernism, neoclassicism, the post World War II avant-garde, postmodernism, jazz and popular music, and representative non-Western traditions.”[1] The third semester didn’t just broaden the survey’s scope: it also made more room for Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

I was daunted by the logistical challenge, but also excited to teach a class that combined virtually all of my favorite things. I divided the semester into thirds. The first, on art music after The Rite of Spring, concluded the prior two semesters’ overview of classical music history. The second unit attempted a concise overview of the “official version of jazz history” so ably identified and fileted by Scott DeVeaux in “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography” (which I assigned).[2] The third provided a swift introduction to the field of ethnomusicology, followed by a taste of Shona mbira music and South Indian vocal music, chosen largely because these were of particular interest to me.

Since the catalog had promised that the course would include popular music, I shoehorned it in. There was obviously no point trying to survey every major pop style in three class meetings, so instead I explained that our goal was to sample some of the different methodological approaches in pop music scholarship. I assigned three readings that ranged widely both in their authors’ scholarly perspectives and in the music under consideration. We had particularly lively and worthwhile discussions of Jeffrey Magee’s revelatory song biography of “Blue Skies” and Peter Mercer-Taylor’s dazzling and eccentric analysis of R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People.[3]

On the whole, that first semester went smoothly, but by the end it was clear to us all that we had plowed through jazz history, pop music scholarship, and two non-Western musical traditions at an almost comically accelerated pace. The students were openly critical of the disproportionately lavish amount of time the music history sequence had bestowed on Western classical music. My new third course, designed to improve the inclusiveness and diversity of our music history curriculum, had rendered unmistakable that curriculum’s ongoing imbalance—not to mention its overwhelming whiteness.

Ultimately, and perhaps obviously, the roots, structure, and priorities of my institution’s music history sequence need to be reconsidered, and we are not alone. Many of my AMS colleagues (including my AMS 2016 co-panelists Vilde Aaslid, Ryan Raul Bañagale, and John Spilker) have been thinking deeply about these issues for years now, and radically revised music history curricula are emerging around the country. As my own department peers warily into the future, I wish to share what I have discovered to be a reasonably satisfying approach to my interim “Band-Aid” of a course—one that could certainly be applied to other music history courses as well.

The seeds of this approach lay in my pragmatic solution to the challenge of dealing with popular music in three measly class sessions. When I abandoned comprehensive stylistic survey as a realistic goal, I discovered the advantages of calling my students’ attention to the diverse values, goals, and tools that musicologists bring to their work on the music they care about. I have made this “meta” perspective a unifying theme for the semester. Major styles, canonic repertoire and recordings, and important individuals and groups remain important, as one would expect in a typical music history survey. However, when students consider questions like “What kind of evidence does the author use?” and “What relevant topics does this scholar leave out?” they gain additional knowledge: that music history is constructed, brick by brick, by individuals with particular priorities, strengths, and limitations.

The jazz history unit offers a good example of this perspective in action. (Incidentally, I have taken to starting the semester with jazz history, having discovered that beginning with the classical music unit only served to underline the curriculum’s implicit devaluation of other musics.) Early in the term, the students read Brian Harker’s “‘Telling a Story’: Louis Armstrong and Coherence in Early Jazz.”[4] The article offers an impressively detailed and insightful musical analysis of several of Armstrong’s solos, but equally noteworthy is Harker’s framing of his analysis. He acknowledges that Armstrong would have had no use for the article’s meticulous, microscopic account of motivic connections. Nonetheless, Harker argues that by applying these analytical tools, he is able to describe and understand the processes that Armstrong’s contemporaries said they heard unfolding in his miraculous solos of the 1920s. In other words, Harker claims that although his methods may be alien to the musicians about whom he writes, he is nonetheless paying due respect to those musicians’ values.

Soon after, we spend a day on the two chapters on Billie Holiday in Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.[5] Davis writes forcefully and persuasively about many aspects of Holiday’s career, artistry, public persona, and cultural significance. She brilliantly unpacks the politics of Holiday’s incendiary performances of “Strange Fruit,” and also of seemingly innocuous love songs like “You Let Me Down.” Davis does not, however, write in any detail about the music, making her a perfect foil for Harker. Students typically express a visceral preference for one approach or the other; with guidance the discussion goes deeper, into fundamental questions of authorial voice, objectivity, evidence, and values. The humanness and individuality of the writers comes into the picture: their personal and professional backgrounds, their stated goals, and their careers. For some students, the discussion sheds a disquieting light on the invisibility of race and gender in their previous thinking about music history and those who write it.

By paying attention not only to the “what” of music history but to the “who” and “how” of musicology, I believe that my students gain more than knowledge about some major styles, figures, and repertoire. First, they learn to approach assigned readings more critically and more compassionately, understanding that published scholarship is biased and limited, yes, but also that it strives doggedly—and sometimes courageously—toward knowledge and understanding. Scholars are human, and music history, much like Soylent Green, is (spoiler alert) people.

The second gain follows from the first: students discover that music history, like music history pedagogy and curriculum-building, is an ongoing endeavor. There are new topics waiting to be explored, and venerable ones still capable of surprising us when approached from a new angle. If this Band-Aid course disillusions students about the completeness and trustworthiness of the historical narrative they’ve learned over three semesters, at least now they know that it’s up to people, perhaps even themselves, to continue working on it.

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[1] https://www.pugetsound.edu/academics/departments-and-programs/undergraduate/music/for-prospective-students/course-descriptions/
[2] Scott DeVeaux, "Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,"Black American Literature Forum 25/3 (1991), 525-60.
[3] Jeffrey Magee, "Irving Berlin's 'Blue Skies': Ethnic Affiliations and Musical Transformations,"Musical Quarterly 84/4 (2000), 537-80; Peter Mercer-Taylor, "‘Stupid, stupid signs’: Incomprehensibility, Memory, and the Meaning (Maybe) of R.E.M.’s ‘Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite,’"The Musical Quarterly 88/3 (2005), 456-86.
[4] Brian Harker, “‘Telling a Story”: Louis Armstrong and Coherence in Early Jazz,"Current Musicology 63 (1997), 46-83.
[5] Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 161-97.
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Gwynne Kuhner Brown, Associate Professor at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, teaches classes in music history, music theory, and world music. She received her university’s President’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2013. Her writing has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music and in Blackness in Opera, a collection edited by Naomi André, Karen M. Bryan, and Eric Saylor. She has conducted archival research on 20th-century arrangers of African American religious folk music, including Eva Jessye, Hall Johnson, Jester Hairston, and especially William Levi Dawson, about whom she is writing a volume for the University of Illinois Press’s American Composers Series. She is a classical pianist and player of the Shona mbira.

By Nicholas Stevens

In September 2017, I pasted a link to an interview into an email, and sent it to my former doctoral advisor with the subject line “!!!!!!!!” In the interview, the film director Darren Aronofsky had hinted that he might pursue an adaptation of his surrealist horror hit Mother!: an opera, to be scored by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhansson. Two men, coming together to depict the abuse and murder of a woman in an operatic allegory of the misdeeds of humanity – I had seen this movie before, so to speak. Just as the concluding minutes of Mother! imply unending repetition of the film’s grisly scenario, so did Aronofsky’s statement suggest, in light of my recently completed research, that the trend I had been examining might renew itself for years to come. To put it plainly: expect opera’s undoing of women, named as such by Catherine Clément in the context of the historical operatic canon, to continue and even intensify in new works by living composers.<1> Expect these new works to reproduce familiar musical and dramatic contours, no matter how subversive the intent.

In my dissertation, Lulu’s Daughters: Portraying the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Opera, 1993-2013, new opera serves as both a focal point and a gateway to history. Over the course of the dissertation’s introduction and four case study chapters, I argue that opera’s anti-heroine archetype – one of the most familiar in the genre’s traditional repertoire – returned to prominence at the turn of the twenty-first century, along with many of its associated tropes and plot trajectories. However, I also document the cultural changes and shifting media landscapes that informed the creation of several pieces: Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face (1995), Louis Andriessen’s Anaïs Nin (2009-10), Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole (2011), and Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu (2012). The project implicates reality television as well as experimental theatre, the history of cinema as well as that of the operatic voice, and urgent concerns of real-world violence as well as aesthetic debates amid European art music circles.

Between 1993 and 2013, these and other leading composers chose to update and adapt the basic scenario of a transgressive heroine who rises within her society, only to fall silent in the end. Each of the creative teams behind these works advances a novel way to modernize, transform, disrupt, or critique opera’s long tradition of doomed anti-heroines, yet each also draws upon a common, historically rooted set of musical and dramatic devices in characterizing their compromised protagonists. Like Alban Berg’s landmark Lulu of 1935, these operas include gestures toward American popular music in otherwise late-modernist scores. They also foreground and thematize forms of audiovisual media, such as film, photography, and recorded sound – a tendency that has assumed even more importance since I completed my research.

In the introduction, I trace the phenomenon of opera’s anti-heroine type back to its historical heyday: the decades between 1875 (Georges Bizet, Carmen) and 1935 (Berg, Lulu) in which many male artists, writers, and psychoanalysts took up misogyny itself as the bedrock on which their aesthetic theories, narratives, and treatises would rest. The first two case studies cover new opera’s depictions of two real women who came of age between the wars. Margaret, Duchess of Argyll becomes a complex concatenation of archetypes in Adès and Philip Hensher’s Powder Her Face, and Anaïs Nin, the posthumous librettist and sole physical character of Andriessen’s eponymous monodrama, becomes an insatiable femme fatale in the Dutch composer’s tightly edited biographical sketch. The second pair of case studies, devoted to operas about protagonists enmeshed in U.S. culture and history, opens with a look at a third quasi-biographical account of a female celebrity’s demise: Turnage and Richard Thomas’s Anna Nicole. A satire influenced by the tabloid culture of the 1990s and 2000s, the piece lifts the velvet rope between opera and pop musical theatre in service of ripped-from-the-headlines tragicomedy. In the final chapter, I turn to a work that eschews the depiction of a real woman, instead featuring a new version of a pre-existing character: Berg’s Lulu, reimagined as a New Orleans native and Josephine Baker-like dancer in Neuwirth’s experimental American Lulu.

The project emerged at the intersection of my earliest academic interest – the work of the Second Viennese School composers – and the topic of a seminar I took early in my graduate career, “Opera since Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach.” Fascinated with Lulu and its entanglements with jazz and film, I entered the seminar thinking that composers had, at midcentury, simply left such opera scenarios behind, and that the works of our putatively more enlightened age would bear little resemblance to the shockers of yore. Pieces by Glass, Kaija Saariaho, Unsuk Chin, and others initially bore out this expectation. Adès, whose third opera The Exterminating Angel had its stateside premiere in October of 2017, had by then become best known for his 2004 adaptation, with librettist Meredith Oakes, of Shakespeare’s Tempest.

Yet something familiar growled in the bass saxophone lines of Adès’s earlier Powder Her Face– an undertow of fate, pulling the protagonist toward a dark denouement. Something familiar glimmered in the eyes of Cristina Zavalloni, the mezzo-soprano and jazz musician who created the title role of Andriessen’s Anaïs Nin, based on especially sordid episodes from that literary luminary’s diaries. Something familiar lay just behind the rhetoric that Thomas, the librettist of Anna Nicole, advanced as he assured many an interviewer that his and Turnage’s satirical romp would underscore the tragedy of the title character’s demise. Neuwirth, opting for a more direct approach, had gone back to the source, crafting an elaborate audiovisual palimpsest over and around Berg’s score for Lulu. As I looked more deeply into Powder Her Face, I realized that Adès had done something similar, folding the anti-heroine archetype into a sort of meta-opera: an allusive late-modernist masterpiece as history of the form. Yet even in Neuwirth’s bracing, subversive treatment of the Lulu tale, a stubborn truth remained: somehow, over the two decades around the turn of the century, the set of musical, visual, and theatrical ideas that suffuse pieces like Berg’s had become not just newly viable, but intensely appealing to living artists.

In writing the dissertation, I aimed to expand the small but growing literature on contemporary opera.<2> However, I also hoped to issue a wake-up call to creators and practitioners. As the librettist, producer, and performer Aiden Kim Feltkamp has recently pointed out, contemporary operas tend to celebrate fondly remembered male characters while clinging to age-old negative depictions of women. With figures like Saariaho, Chin, Chaya Czernowin, and Tania León increasingly recognized for their operatic innovations, and relative newcomers such as Du Yun, Missy Mazzoli, and Ashley Fure winning some of contemporary art music’s highest honors, the needed change may come soon, without much help from the academy. However, my dissertation asks a simple question, still in want of an easy answer: why must opera lovers, like the titular mothers of Aronofsky’s film, keep waking to find the same horrific scenario laid out before them?

***

<1>Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
<2>Writers who have examined these pieces include Emma Gallon [“Narrativities in the Music of Thomas Adès” (PhD diss., Lancaster University, 2011)]; Drew Massey [“Thomas Adès and the Dilemmas of Musical Surrealism” (paper presented at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society, Milwaukee, November 5-9, 2014]; Heidi Hart [“Silent Opera: Visual Recycling in Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu,” Ekphrasis 2 (2013): 126-7]; Clara Latham [“What Makes American Lulu American?” (paper presented at the 42nd annual conference of the Society for American Music, Boston, MA, March 9-13, 2016)]; and Jennifer Tullmann [“Confronting the Composer: Operatic Innovations in Olga Neuwirth’s American Lulu” (paper presented at the 80th annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Milwaukee, WI, November 6-9, 2014)].

***

Nicholas Stevens studies art and popular music after 1920, and lectures in music history and methodology at Case Western Reserve University. His recently completed dissertation considers the aesthetics and ethics of contemporary operas that aim to depict archetypal fallen women, with emphasis on their gestures toward popular music, film and broadcast media, and historical convention. His current projects include a monograph on new opera as medium, and a journal piece on the music of Thomas Adès. He was a fellow at the Library of Congress in 2015, and an Affiliate at the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities in 2016. He also writes concert reviews and program notes, tweets about new music and musicology @sufjan_wallace, and maintains a personal website and blog at nickstevenswrites.com.

By Kristi Brown-Montesano

“Now am I allowed to say rapist.” — Rose McGowan tweet, 10 Oct. 2017

“No one took Rose McGowan’s claims seriously. Now everyone is listening.”— Headline in the Los Angeles Times, 13 Oct. 2017

At the end of summer 2016, just before the fall semester started, I received a commission from the Bilbao Opera to write a program note on the women of Don Giovanni. The requested subject was not a surprise. I finished my dissertation on the female characters of Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte in 1997; ten years later, in 2007, my book came out, expanding the coverage to Le nozze di Figaro and Così fan tutte. While I subsequently stepped away from Mozart studies, I have never tired of coming back to these characters who still have a lot to say to us.

My editor at Bilbao, Willem de Waal, took a rather gutsy stance: he encouraged me to illuminate readers about ethical criticism and to address seriously the elements of sexual assault and coercion that are central to the Don Juan stories and Don Giovanni in particular. Contemporary relevance was obvious. Willem mentioned the recent arrest of Spanish porn-film producer “Torbe” who was charged with selling child pornography, abusing female minors, and sex trafficking; there were separate accusations of forcing girls to have sex with famous footballers. Here in the US, Bill Cosby has been ordered to stand trial, charged with three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault against women. A mistrial followed when the jury deadlocked. A few weeks after I submitted my piece to Bilbao, the Access Hollywood tapes of Donald Trump surfaced: “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. This girl—beautiful, young, flirty—I met her on the street; I came up to her, took her hand; she tried to escape…”

(A parte: Oh, wait: that last bit was the Don, not The Donald.)<1>

Let me backtrack. About 25 years ago, I read The Operas of Mozart (Oxford, 1977) by William Mann, one-time principal music critic of The Times of London. The book had been listed on the Metropolitan Opera’s recommended reading for Don Giovanni in 1991, the bicentennial of Mozart’s death and the same year I decided to do a dissertation on Mozart opera. Covering the complete stage works, Mann offers historical background and lightly analytical descriptions of the musical numbers, all seemingly aimed—much like Mozart’s music—to engage both the opera connoisseur and newbie amateur. His prose is eloquent, his humor mostly English, clever and dry. But in the middle of his discussion of Don Giovanni, Mann suddenly goes into the red zone, excoriating Donna Anna, the first woman character we meet in the opera and the only one who consistently denounces Don Giovanni:

Anna is an upper-class Spanish lady who has etiquette where her feelings and brains should reside. Duty and honour are her watchword. Towards all her fellow-creatures she presents a coldly correct personality. If she loves her father it is because the Bible told her so. Her censorious anger against others is a juvenile trait. All men, to her, are beasts, and it would be beneficial to her personal growing-up if she had been pleasantly raped by Don Juan.

Pleasantly raped by Don Juan. I have never forgotten these words or stopped objecting to what they represent: deceptive and toxic misogyny masked as authoritative criticism. Mann’s oxymoronic formula relies on one of the oldest and most pernicious excuses for rape: she really wanted/needed it. And while his wording might be the most egregious, Mann’s basic position is widely echoed in the critical reception of Don Giovanni, which skews heavily in favor of the libertine aristocrat, recalling what Sunday Times book critic Raymond Mortimer wrote about James Bond in 1963: What every man would like to be, and what every woman would like between her sheets<2> . Commentators and directors have idealized Mozart’s willful, seductive, and violent protagonist, crediting him with virtues (unflagging bravery, triumphant self-determination, revolutionary resistance to oppressive societal power, and sensual idealism) that are, at best, only equivocally suggested in the original libretto.

The female characters, in turn, are judged largely in terms of charm and receptiveness to the Don’s don’t-say-no sexual advances. Resistance to him is understood as a flaw—or a lie. In the words of Kierkegaard’s fictional Mr. A, “a foolish girl it would be who would not choose to be unhappy for the sake of having once been happy with Don Juan.” Fast forward 170 years later and you find conductor James Conlon rhapsodizing that all three female characters have experienced a sexual metamorphosis, compliments of Don Giovanni: “their erotic impulses awakened, magnified and irrevocably changed by their encounter with this mythical seducer.”<3>

Yes, Don Giovanni comes from a different time. But this is a poor excuse for partitioning opera/art from contemporary ethical values, forever justifying behavior that—in any age—is predatory and exploitive. Does the work benefit from this protection? Do we?
The original libretto repeatedly points to abuse of power and sexual trespass, beginning with this exchange between master and servant:

LEPORELLO
Bravo! Two pretty deeds!
Force the daughter, then murdered the father!

DON GIOVANNI
He asked for it: his own fault.

LEPORELLO
And Donna Anna, what did she ask for?

DON GIOVANNI
Shut up, and stop annoying me. Come with me,
unless you’re asking for something, too.

Leporello tellingly uses the word sforzare to characterize Don Giovanni’s treatment of Donna Anna, corroborating the young woman’s own statement: “He came up on me silently and tried to embrace me; I tried to break free, he held on even more tightly; I screamed; no one came. He held a hand over my mouth to silence me, and gripped me so tightly with the other hand, I thought I was beaten.” Two other incidences of what we would categorize as sexual assault make Donna Anna’s testimony more compelling: Zerlina shrieking for help at Don Giovanni’s ball after he drags her to an antechamber, and the libertine’s own account of physical intimacy with a woman using false pretenses (she mistakes him for her boyfriend, Leporello). The woman starts yelling when she recognizes her mistake, and the nobleman has to escape over a wall.

Erotic impulses awakened, my ass.

This season, like all seasons, Don Giovanni is being staged in cities all over the world—cities in which dead-serious conversations about sexual assault are also taking place. Here in the US, the bravura rage arias sung by Rose McGowan and other victims who would not be silenced finally unmasked the scellerato Harvey Weinstein. Like Donna Anna, the original “assalitrice d’assalita,” McGowan is outspoken and resolute. If she doesn’t conform to public expectations of a victim, this should not make her accusation less forceful, her willingness to go public less courageous, her pain less profound. We should know better.<4>

So what do we do with Don Giovanni now that the work’s headliner brand of masculinity is finally facing the heat of full-coverage public denunciation in the real world? We could chuck the whole thing, of course, but I’d like to think there are more creative ways to deal with the challenge of canonic opera’s pervasive misogyny. As a staged art form, opera offers a unique opportunity to engage thoughtfully with the racial, class, and sexual politics that old operas dramatize for new audiences. Along these lines, Adrienne Rich offers a pointedly feminist perspective, addressed to women for the deliverance of women:

“Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for [women] more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.”

“Let us rescue the innocent!” exclaim Donna Anna, Donna Elvira, and Don Ottavio at the end of Act 1, rushing to defend the honor of a common girl, a country bumpkin, a “no one” in their class-conscious world. Soon the whole crowd will confront il dissoluto revealed. No one buys his cover story, the attempt to shift the blame to Leporello. Aristocrats and peasants alike join in condemnation: “Tremble, scoundrel, the whole world will know of your black, horrendous misdeeds, of your cruel arrogance.”

This is the moment that the women of Don Giovanni have been waiting for: the seducer-predator unmasked, judged, and found guilty. Too bad the work couldn’t just end with this scene, the three sopranos united in musical line and dramatic purpose. (How often does that happen in canonic opera?) Instead, tradition dictates that Don Giovanni meet his match in the form of a supernatural patriarch, complete with hellfire and terrific scoring.

In real-life sexual assault cases, of course, there are no vindicating Stone Guests—just a rocky judicial process that stirs to life only when victims are brave enough to tell their story and take the stand. Likewise there are no “mythical seducers” who “pleasantly rape,” only men who won’t take no for an answer<5> . Powerful, educated, creative men like Matt Lauer, John Lasseter, Mark Halperin, Charlie Rose. Like Don Giovanni.

Many of the acclaimed men who are now face serious consequences for sexual harassment and assault have long operated in a culture that preferred to look the other way, not least because corporate employers and board members saw these men as too big to fail. Their brand was more important than the rights of alleged victims. The classical music world is no less implicated in this gentleman’s agreement. There have long been rumors and “open secrets” around conductors and applied teachers, who are often gatekeepers to major career opportunities. And few such secrets have been more open than those around James Levine, operating at the very heart of opera culture in this country. The self-interested and institutional protections around these men are finally--finally--toppling under the broad societal pressure for serious investigation.

Don Giovanni falls into a parallel category: an art product whose aesthetic value and guaranteed box-office receipts have deflected critical charges against the main character. My program note for Bilbao drew a hard line: the only way to make Don Giovanni worthy of our time, if indeed that is possible at all, is to listen more closely to the women. And if we really care about opera’s continued relevance, then everyone who loves the art form—directors, conductors, singers, critics, educators, audiences—must acknowledge the connection between what we applaud on stage and what we permit in the workplace, school, home. Because Donna Elvira could tell you, the “Catalogue Aria” is not so funny when your name, or the name of someone you love, is on the list.

***

<1>On 28 November 2017, the New York Times reported that Donald Trump is now denying the authenticity of these tapes, allegedly suggesting that the voice in the tape was not his. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/us/politics/trump-access-hollywood-tape.html
<2>Often misattributed to Raymond Chandler. http://jamesbondmemes.blogspot.com/2012/07/what-raymond-chandler-didnt-say.html
<3>https://www.laopera.org/news/blog/Dates/2012/9/Don-Giovanni-the-Unknowable/
<4>And yet this just in: the presiding judge in the recent “wolf pack” rape trial in Spain decided to allow evidence about the alleged victim’s personal life and character into court, but barred the prosecutor from presenting texted conversations between the accused which apparently made plans to rape women.
<5>http://video.newyorker.com/watch/harvey-weinstein-caught-on-tape

***

Chair of the music-history faculty at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles, Kristi Brown-Montesano received her Ph.D. in musicology from UC Berkeley, combining her strong interest in both musical performance and scholarly research.
Her book The Women of Mozart’s Operas (University of California Press, 2007) offers a detailed study of the female characters in the Da Ponte operas and The Magic Flute. Dr. Brown-Montesano has presented and published essays on music in contemporary film, opera, trends in marketing classical music, and musical culture in late 19th-century England.
In 2014-15, she was honored to participate in the UCLA Musicology Department’s Distinguished Lecture Series. An active “public musicologist,” she has been engaged by numerous organizations in Los Angeles, including the LA Opera (“Opera for Educators”), the Opera League of Los Angeles, the Mason House Concerts, and the Colburn Orchestra. She is especially thrilled to join the LA Phil’s “Upbeat Live” faculty this concert season.

Musicology Now is delighted to offer a series of Quick Takes on music and sound in the reboot of David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Featuring posts by Brooke McCorkle, Katherine Reed, Frank Lehman, and Reba Wissner, the series takes us into the holiday season with an ear to the often uncanny music and sound design of Dean Hurley and David Lynch.

By Brooke McCorkle

David Lynch has always walked the fine line between painter and cinema director, and I believe we can attribute another title to his name: sound artist. Lynch, who has recorded two studio albums of his own, regularly participates in development and placement of sound in his films. For example, in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (FWWM) he personally calibrated sound levels when mixing the music. As explained in a New York Times interview, Lynch’s involvement with sound design continued with the unexpected and welcome extension of the Twin Peaks story in 2017’s The Return. Throughout the season’s eighteen episodes, ostensibly diegetic sounds are hyper-rendered; that is, they are not faithful reproductions of realistic sound. Instead, sounds are manipulated (rendered) to evoke the desired feelings, emotions, and affects of the given situation. Hyper-rendering itself is not an uncommon technique; it is a staple of horror films and avant-garde cinema. Twin Peaks: The Return fuses these genres in terms of sound as much as narrative, a combination Lynch rehearsed in previous works ranging from Eraserhead (1977) to Mulholland Drive (2001).

Yet the sound design in The Return stands apart from the previous two seasons of Twin Peaks. Most notably, the specificity of the sound rendering marks effects as playing a significant aural role relevant to the narrative. That is, these sounds are hyper-rendered not just for an ephemeral “jump scare” moment, but rather are in service of the story and/or the overarching aesthetic of the Twin Peaks world. Lynch paints his apocalyptic portrait as much in sound (and in music, as Reba will discuss) as he does in visuals and in dialogue (a kind of sound object as well, especially when treated by Lynch). The hyper-rendering endows sound with an element of viscerality; it feels real, tangible, plastic. Sounds such as the buzz of electricity, the repetition of a bit of dialogue on television, the rumble of an atomic bomb all, despite being just vibrations in the air, certainly have tangible effects on the human bodies of auditor-spectators. The viscerality of these hyper-rendered sounds thus reinforce the corporeality of the audience as well as the characters. The people of Twin Peaks feel more real to us because the sounds feel more real. And perhaps none are more real than Laura, the tortured sweetheart, the dark woman, the damned daughter. The unnatural sounds of a distorted diegesis as exemplified in the many Black Lodge scenes are the very incarnation of the wrongness of Laura’s life and death. Hints of this slip into the real world of Twin Peaks in the form of everyday sounds like near-omnipresent electric humming. If we don’t listen, these seem fine, common, normal. But attending to them reveals a twisting of the real world into something surreal.

Lynch and his team’s creative use of mixing works to musicalize sound effects, allowing them to enter the “fantastical gap” as outlined by Robynn Stilwell.<1> The blurring between the real and the fantastic is a Lynchian aesthetic prominent in many of his works, including The Return. In other words, sound punctures the boundary between the “real” sound of the diegetic world and the “fantastic” sound of the non-diegetic realm. For the remainder of this essay, I want to focus on one specific sound effect that illustrates this porosity: Electricity.

Why electricity? It is an effect that fascinates Lynch, as evidenced by his response to a fan at a Cambridge, MA screening of Inland Empire. Electricity is a striking effect in FWWM, and works in a sense to bring the film’s aesthetic into the televisual episodes of The Return. It is an effect that permeates the overall soundscape regardless of the location—the Great Northern Hotel, small-town trailer parks, Las Vegas, suburban homes, diners, bars, morgues, and middle-of-nowhere roads. The aural effect is ever-present, yet rarely is the source of it completely revealed. Almost anything can produce the sound of electric buzzes, whether it is a low humming or whiny whirr; thus, the sound is suggested but unlocatable. That is, there are many possible sources, but in the many instances where the effect is present not one definitive source can be singled out. By hyper-rendering the sound of electricity, Lynch compels auditor-spectators to question the electrical sources. We may search for the sound source, but our hunt is as hopeless as Ben and Beverly’s similar pursuit for the source of a mysterious sound in the Great Northern hotel.

Occasionally, however, electricity does seem to be emitted by specific sources. Pole number 6 is an example of this. It appears in FWWM as well as in Episode 6, after a little boy’s death in a hit and run. The pole also appears in the final episode, in front of the house of Carrie (Laura Palmer’s alternate-reality twin) in Odessa, Texas. And while there are numerous theories about the relationship between these appearances of pole number 6, there are no definitive answers to its location nor to why its sound is so prominent, so loud in the mix. Electricity in a sense is transitory, as it is rooted in energy. It can travel distances, even planes of existence in Lynch’s world. This quality links it to the evil of the dark lodge, Bob, and Judy. Like electricity, the evil is transitory, or to put it better, transmigratory. Bob is a metempsychotic spirit, as is (I suspect) Judy.

But good can also be linked to electricity and mobility as much as evil. In Episodes 15-16, Agent Cooper finally returns thanks to a jolt of electricity brought on by his (alter-ego/former-future tulpa) Dougie Jones sticking a fork into an electrical socket. In this scene, maybe we can better understand the sound of electricity as a characteristic of this invisible ether, an amoral tool for spirits beyond the tangible world. Indeed, electricity is something a bit magical. We observe its effects in lights, appliances, and such, but we never see the thing itself. To touch it is to invite pain and even death. Perhaps by emphasizing the hyper-rendered sound effect of electricity, Lynch is asking us listeners to consider how invisible forces act upon us humans in the reality of our existence.

In Episode 14, Lynch’s character Gordon Cole recalls his dream with Monica Belluci, “We are like the dreamer who dreams, and then lives inside the dream...But who is the dreamer?” The sound design is what puts us as auditor-spectators inside the dream of the Twin Peaks world; if we listen, we can hear sound as both real and fantastic, and we become both the dreamer and the resident of dreams. Sound is the vehicle for slippage between reality and dreams in Twin Peaks. And the hyper-rendering of effects like electricity, with the affect of anxiety, lingers long after we leave our screens for the mundane. As Lynch proves, an uneasy dream slipping into reality is still better than no dream at all.

***
<1>Robynn Stilwell, “The Fantastical Gap Between Diegetic and Nondiegetic,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 184–202.

***

By Katherine M. Reed

Part 13 of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return approached its close, as had become expected, with a performance at the Roadhouse. As the opening guitar riff began, though, a collective groan rose among Twin Peaks fans. Creator David Lynch, in his perversity, had brought back one of the most mocked musical moments of the original series: James Hurley’s heartfelt throwback, “Just You.”

This musical performance was just one of many gigs at the Twin Peaks hotspot in The Return. Most episodes were marked by a final performance on the stage of the Roadhouse; most of these came from bands who exist in our own world, not just the fictitious narrative of the show. These Roadhouse scenes received a fair amount of fan attention<1>: did these vignettes have secret meanings? Just what was going on at the Twin Peaks Roadhouse?

Though this string of musical performances is diverse and resists easy interpretation, we can see each of them as serving an important narrative purpose. Here, with “Just You,” Lynch and Frost open up the world of Twin Peaks, questioning our nostalgic view of the town and the show, and bringing it much closer to our own world. Lynch is tapping into a favorite trope throughout his oeuvre: the performance of a familiar song by characters within the diegesis.<2> Typically providing us with an onscreen surrogate through whom to understand the performance, Lynch plays with our connections to the selected pre-existing music while giving us a lens through which to make sense of the scene and to enter more deeply into the narrative world of the work.<3> As Kathryn Kalinak has noted of the original Twin Peaks, the series’ music “gains its power by activating powerful conventions embodied in these models [film and television] and then both transgressing and reconstructing them.”<4> The Return plays with the expectations set by the original series, drawing on twofold nostalgia (for the song and the era it represents, and for the show itself) to complicate our experience.

Of course, The Return can be watched and enjoyed without previous knowledge of the show’s original run. I would argue, though, that Lynch and Frost seem to have conceived of this revival as existing in dialogue with their earlier work. In visual allusions, character interactions, and reused footage, The Return makes itself very difficult to watch without reference to the 1990-91 episodes. Twin Peaks has long been concerned with the passage of time (“I’ll see you again in 25 years”<5>), and this focus continues through Mark Frost’s summation of the show’s history to this point in The Final Dossier.<6> Given this, I approach this scene from the position of a repeat viewer of the show, drawing connections among episodes, though I acknowledge that this is not the sole possible spectator position.

The original “Just You” is sung in the second season of Twin Peaks by James, Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle), and Maddie Ferguson (Sheryl Lee). Singing in the Hayward living room, the three perform for no audience but each other. The song is presented as a simple (if melodramatic) expression of teenage love, and its musical expression is built to match. “Just You” begins with a simple guitar riff that will serve as the counter-melody for James’ repetitive vocal line in the first verse. At the end of the verse, a bass line and spare drum set accompaniment enter, though neither instrument is present in the scene. The girls also join with echoing vocal interjections that flesh out a bit of sparse harmony. The sound of the song is unnatural, with vocal echoes on James’ line and phantom instruments. It intentionally sounds like a transmission from the past in its doo-wop style.<7> In line with the song’s lyrical content, the scene shows the growing feelings Donna has for James, brought to the fore by James’ love song. As Michel Chion notes, James and Donna are both characters whose legibility as types allows them to “enable identification” for the audience and draw us deeper into their drama.<8> Lynch’s careful use of reaction shots<9> (see chart below) accomplishes much the same.

In The Return, the song operates differently, both evoking and challenging its original presentation, though the sound itself remains exactly the same. We witness “Just You” through the eyes of an underdeveloped character, Renee (Jessica Szohr), whose backstory is unknown. Given the lack of information about the character, we are unable to identify with her engagement in the performance. Rather, we can see her reaction as a reflection of Donna’s, and the performance as an echo of the original. The end result is that, rather than being drawn deeper into the insular diegesis of the show, we are forced to confront these performances as existing in our own world. At the Roadhouse, we as audience members are witnessing performances of songs we may know, by their original performers, in a space which seems to transgress the boundaries of Twin Peaks’ narrative as we have come to know it. Lynch embraces the idea of the Roadhouse as a liminal space, but here it is a space between the reality of The Return and our own reality.

“Just You” illustrates this liminality perfectly. First, the sound of the song: The Return uses the same recording from Season Two, as many online commenters immediately noticed. Indeed, James Marshall himself was surprised at Lynch’s reuse of the recording without any editing. Just as Mark Mazullo has described in the original iteration, this recording again makes its remove from live performance felt very clearly. In this new performance, there’s yet another remove: the presence of our memory of the original, and this performance’s very direct doubling of it.

That doubling is not only musical, but also visual. Accompanying James on stage are two young brunette singers, dressed in cardigans and strikingly reminiscent of Donna and Maddie. More than that, though, Lynch frames this sequence to subvert our expectations, built from our repeated experience of the original.

As the chart below shows, Lynch shoots the opening of the performance similarly: showing James performing, and his love interest responding. It’s in the second verse, though, that The Return forces us to confront the falseness of our nostalgic reading. Lynch gives a wide shot of the entire stage, revealing the Maddie and Donna dopplegängers. We’re confronted with an image of James, aged more than 25 years since the original, as we hear his voice from the 1990 recording and see the reflection of his former youthfulness in the female singers. It’s here that Lynch inserts wide shots of the audience, dark and anonymous, further shattering the illusion that we could somehow witness the return of the childlike, intimate original performance. In conjunction with Renee’s incongruously intense crying, we are unable to enter the scene by identifying with her and are instead left to grapple with the distance from which we, andThe Return, regard the memory of Twin Peaks.

It’s fitting that this performance comes in this particular episode. Though The Return was deeply concerned with nostalgia and the passage of time, Episode 13 in particular reminds us, in each storyline, of the disruption caused to our memory of Twin Peaks by the passage of time. A stultified Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) shows a glimmer of recognition at the smell of coffee and the sight of cherry pie – but that glimmer is soon snuffed. Big Ed Hurley (Everett McGill) and Norma (Peggy Lipton) appear to have finally found a way to be together when we see them at the Double R Diner—but it quickly becomes apparent that they’re still just friends. Even the Double R’s legendary cherry pie isn’t safe from the ravages of time, as Norma’s new business partner tells her it’s simply not profitable anymore. Throughout The Return, Lynch and Frost shatter our nostalgic view of the original Twin Peaks, but it is in this Roadhouse performance that the passage of time, in Twin Peaks as in the real world, is most clearly communicated, and our nostalgia for the Twin Peaks of our memory is questioned.
***
<1>For more on the Twin Peaks online fan community, see Henry Jenkins, “’Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?’: alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery,” in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 115-133.
<2>Gene Willet has discussed Lynch’s use of popular music as a catalyst for the shift into Lacanian fantasy. See, for example, Gene Willet, “Popular Music as Fantasy in David Lynch,” in Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers After MTV, ed. Arved Ashby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 87-108.
<3>For more on this practice in Lynch’s films, see Katherine Reed, “’We Cannot Content Ourselves with Remaining Spectators’: Musical Performance, Audience Interaction, and Nostalgia in the Films of David Lynch,” Music and the Moving Image 9, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 3-22.
<4>Kathryn Kalinak, “’Disturbing the Guests With This Racket’: Music and Twin Peaks,” in Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, ed. David Lavery (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 83.
<5>Link to clip from season 2 finale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL57-9171pk
<6>See, for example, Mark Frost, Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier (New York: Flatiron Books, 2017), “Interoffice Memorandum, September 7, 2017.”
<7>James Marshall notes that the song was essentially composed on set as a collaboration between Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch, and himself. See Pieter Dom, “How David Lynch, Angelo Badalamenti, and James Marshall Wrote James Hurley’s ‘Just You,’” Welcome to Twin Peaks, August 13, 2017. Accessed October 21, 2017.
<8>Michel Chion, David Lynch, translated by Robert Julian (London: BFI Publishing, 2006), 101.
<9>For more on Lynch’s manipulation of reaction shots, see Chion, David Lynch, 177-179.
***
Katherine Reed is an assistant professor of musicology at California State University, Fullerton. Her research interests include musical semiotics, the use of pre-existing music in film, and British popular music, particularly David Bowie’s works of the 1970s. Reed’s work has appeared in Music and the Moving Image, The Avid Listener, and the Society for American Music’s Digital Lectures series. Her current book project, Hooked to the Silver Screen: David Bowie and the Moving Image, is supported by a research fellowship at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame library and archive.

By Frank Lehman

As an ardent fan of Lynch's oeuvre, I have trained myself to relax my critical faculties when watching his films. I prefer to simply surrender to the fantasy, to let the work act on me according to the oneiric terms the creator himself endorses. But music-theoretical habits die hard, and midway through Part 8, my ears perked up when something surprising began piping over the soundtrack: pantriadic chromaticism, the use of simple triads in unconventional progressions and routines, outside the bounds of natural, ‘rational’ tonal syntax.

Pantriadic harmony can seem phantasmagoric, as though steered by its own arcane will, rather than by human hands. Richard Cohn (2012, x) notes its affiliation with “altered and heightened” realities. It is a style tailor-suited for uncanny affects, its basis in familiar sonorities lending it that critical element of familiarity necessary for something to feel truly unsettling. This harmonic idiom is extremely rare in the Twin Peaks soundworld, and in most forms of commercial and popular music more general. However, it is positively rife in original film and television music, where it often connotes the fantastic, the dreamlike, and the sublime.

What was doubly ear-catching to me was the fact that, rather than being incorporated into non-diegetic underscore as is typical for cinematic pantriadicism, this music was issuing from an on-screen source...

We find ourselves in an ornately appointed parlour, one room within an immense tower situated somewhere in an endless mauve sea. Music can be heard coming from a vintage phonograph player, its exact melodic contours garbled and clouded in mechanical noise. An elegantly dressed woman--"Senorita Dido," according to the end credits--sits motionlessly on a couch, listening intently to the partially-occluded jazz vamp. A large bell-like structure begins sounding an ominous knell, which seems to draw forth the Fireman (identified, with quintessential Lynchian obscurity, as “???????” in the credits). After some slow inspection, he somehow shuts off the mysterious device. The phonograph continues playing. Throughout, no dialogue is uttered, and the scene lasts three and a half minutes.

Senorita Dido's phonograph appears to be some hybrid of industrial ambient music and slinky 1930s instrumental jazz. The record cycles repeated through a glacially paced chordal succession with basically no functional or teleological foundation.[2] The diagram below charts the tonal progress of this cue, if progress is the right word. The music cycles through four "passes" of comparable progressions, beginning with fifth-based transpositions of the initial vamping module, but eventually migrating to more chromatic realms, through functionally unassimilable moves like that between B-flat minor and G-minor. The progression covers a great deal of ground, but never goes anywhere, kind of like the harmonic equivalent to a barber-shop pole illusion.[1]

Harmonic Reduction of Senorita Dido’s Phonograph

The primary effect of the music here is dislocation. The cue has enough trappings of familiar jazz to evoke standard generic associations concerning time-period, sexuality, cosmopolitanism, nostalgia, and so forth. But its aimless, looping pantriadic structure works to contradict—or at least confuse—the clean cinematic connotations of jazz, rendering cryptic what is normally semiotically clear, surreal what is often filmically coded as "realistic." The uncanny implication being, of course, that Senorita Dido has been listening to these nine chords repeat for basically all eternity; the purposeless repetition goes beyond mere minimalistic semantic saturation, verging on the horror of eternal recurrence.

Lynch is an accomplished sound-designer and a talented musician in his own right, but the carefully orchestrated jazz of this cue did not strike me as bearing his specific creative fingerprint. In fact, the pantriadic strains that haunt Dido's parlour are the result of a long chain of musical "repurposings." The cue as it is identified in the episode's credits, "Slow 30s Room," was imported from an album co-composed by Lynch and his frequent collaborator, Dean Hurley: "The Air is on Fire." When taken as a stand-alone listen, "Fire" consists of a continuous industrial ambient soundscape, of which this mutated jazz is only a small part, a tiny concession to triadic harmony near the end of its otherwise thoroughly atonal runtime.

That album, in turn, was assembled from the music Lynch and Hurley composed for an exhibition of the director's visual art in 2007 at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. Just as in Twin Peaks, the music's purpose was ambient and textural, intended to fill an oddly-appointed physical space, to be explored at a languid pace, with equally unusual sound.

The question remains—since neither Lynch nor Hurley is a jazz-band arranger, where did this music come from originally? The answer lies in a now obscure technology: the Optigan, a fascinating hybrid juke-box/musical instrument created by the Mattel Corporation during a short window in the early 1970s. The Optigan was a marketed as a miniature dance-band for your living-room, its various functionalities evident in this commercial starring TV-dad Carl Betz.

The instrument required proprietary optical soundtrack discs, on which a variety of prerecorded instrument sounds, loops, and vamps could be played back at the press of a key. In addition to a standard organ keyboard, the Optigan included a set of 21 buttons for chord-loops--divided into 7 major, minor, and diminished triads respectively. A given Optigan disc was oriented around a specific musical style or mood, with pre-recorded samples ranging across genres from the "Country Sunshine" to "Latin Fever" to "Bluegrass Banjo"—nothing cutting-edge, stylistically, but music with a certain square, bourgeois charm nevertheless.

The Optigan

The Optigan never seems to have been more than a mid-century domestic novelty.[3] Though the sound-quality was far from crisp, and the electronics were prone to technological malfunctions, it was ahead of its time in numerous respects, predating comparable looping and sampling functions of home-synthesizers by a decade. The kitschy obsolescence of this instrument must have tickled Lynch in just the right way. One could imagine one buzzing away in the background of Dean Stockwell's suburban drug den in Blue Velvet, the instrument of choice of a twisted pater-familias, left chugging so that “there’s always music in the air.”

The particular disc Lynch and Hurley turned to for Dido's parlor is called "Big Band Beat." A quick listen to the various sounds of that proto-sample library (usefully demonstrated here on YouTube) reveals that the nine distinct chords of "Slow 30s Room" correspond to nine right-hand instrumental vamps from the Optigan. These chords are ordered seemingly ad-libitum, and with thick layers of electronic distortion and filtration applied long (long!) after the fact.[4]

Despite his reputation for inscrutability, Lynch is not a purveyor of the 'weird' for its own sake. Rather, his primary modus is to peel away the membrane of the "normal," so as to reveal the strangeness that lurked underneath all along, squirming and hungry. The number of layers being peeled away in this cue is remarkable, and characteristic of the depth of Lynch's work. By the time the big-band Optigan loop makes it to Twin Peaks: The Return, it is a sample-of-a-sample-of-a-sample, each stage further degrading the original meaning (and recording fidelity!) of the loungy jazz that served as its source. Between the meandering chromaticism, the cryptic generic allusions, and the basis in a material object only dimly remembered by most listeners, this strange Optigan ambiance is a perfect embodiment of the Lynchian aesthetic.

***
[1] Some of the material in this analysis is adapted from my forthcoming book, Hollywood Harmony (OUP, 2018).
[2] Note similar aesthetics of inexplicable looping at play in Sarah Palmer’s living room in Episode 13.
[3] And, if for any reason you’d like to reconstruct Lynch’s creative process with your own fingers, a virtual Optigan has just been released this week for iOS. The app even comes with the “Big Band Beat” proto-sample-library for free.
[4] For the curious, here's what "Big Band Beat" could sound like when performed as intended, to support a more traditionally structured piece of jazzy music, here played by Mattel's leading proponent of the instrument, Johnny Largo.
***

Frank Lehman is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Tufts University. His work on chromaticism in film music will appear in a forthcoming monograph with Oxford University Press. Website HERE

By Reba Wissner

When Part 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return aired on Showtime in June 2017, fans and critics alike referred to it as revolutionary. The centerpiece of the episode was an extended scene of the Trinity atomic bomb test in White Sands, New Mexico, accompanied by the entirety of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). While some viewers were not sure how to interpret Lynch’s use of the atomic bomb detonation, others read it as a creation narrative for the demonic BOB (Frank Silva), the spirit who takes over the bodies of various townspeople in order to commit murders in the town Twin Peaks throughout the series. Notably, in this scene, he emanates inside of a black orb from the mouth of a creature known as The Experiment. This is the first and only time in the series’ three seasons that we see the creation of the town’s personification of evil. Lynch has used Penderecki’s music in the past in some of his films, but here, the use of Threnody musically mirrors, both in sound and topic, the subject of the atomic bomb.

BOB’s Birth in the Orb

The Trinity test occurred on July 16, 1945 and was a part of a larger series of atomic bomb tests that formed the culmination of the Manhattan Project. It is unclear exactly why the test was called Trinity, but it is speculated that the name came from an allusion to John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, to which Oppenheimer was introduced shortly before working on the test [1]. As the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb, the Trinity test opened the floodgates for future atomic bombs that subsequently allowed for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bomb has been a symbol for both death and birth, so it is fitting that it is used in the context of the chaos that allowed for BOB’s birth but also as the catalyst for the various murders that he causes in Twin Peaks through the possession of a human host.

The atomic bomb has a dichotomous role in popular culture. On the one hand, it represents the power of man to create. On the other, it represents man’s power to destroy. Upon seeing the Trinity bomb detonate, Dr. Robert J. Oppenheimer’s first words were a quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer, therefore, assumes the role of a deity that with one thing, the Bomb, he has the power to simultaneously create and destroy. There have been various discourses surrounding the pregnancy, birth, and death symbolism of the atomic bomb. As Evelyn Fox Keller notes, from its inception, the atomic bomb and its testing have been riddled with metaphors for pregnancy and birth with writers of the day using those terms not only in the context of the bomb’s genesis but also how the bomb created events and established mainstays of popular atomic culture [2]. Often, the bomb was credited with the “birth of a new world” [3]. For example, President Truman was notified of the Trinity test’s success with the announcement that “It’s a boy.” According to this account, if the test were a failure, they would have announced “It’s a girl.” [4]

The atomic bomb, and more specifically the Trinity test, plays a crucial role not only as a plot device in The Return but also as an explanation for the personification of evil that inhabits Twin Peaks and leads to Laura Palmer’s murder. The Trinity test scene in The Return, according to David Lynch’s sound supervisor Dean Hurley, is an extreme scene about the collapsing of time [5]. David Lynch remarked in an interview with Pitchfork after The Return ended that the atomic bomb was, in fact, a portal: “One thing or another can open up portals.” [6] In an interview after The Return ended, Lynch was asked whether he always had Threnody in mind to use for the atomic bomb scene. He continued, “I was going to experiment with Angelo [Badalamenti, the series’ composer] but that thing was, in my mind, made to order. I did chop it up a lot so that I could get different sections for the visuals, but it was just meant to be.” [7]

As is well known, Penderecki did not originally give Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima that title. The work was originally titled 8’37” as an homage to John Cage’s 4’33.” The work, composed for 52 strings, is comprised of extended techniques, microtones, and various other Expressionist effects. After the premiere, Penderecki felt that the work would be suited to having an association tied to it and realized that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima would be the perfect solution. He stated, “I was struck by the emotional charge of the work... I searched for associations and, in the end, I decided to dedicate it to the Hiroshima victims.” Four years after the completion of the work, he remarked, “Let the Threnody express my firm belief that the sacrifice of Hiroshima will never be forgotten and lost.” [8]. Given Penderecki’s fascination with historical events associated with trauma, his choice to use Hiroshima is unsurprising [9] Penderecki’s Threnody channels the destruction and chaos caused by the detonation of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially given the composition’s pre-existing association with the disaster.

What is especially interesting is the way the Trinity Bomb is used here both visually and sonically. The scene opens with a black and white screen with an overlay informing the viewer of the location and the date, followed by the countdown to zero. We then see the detonation and the white flash of light simultaneous with the first notes of Threnody. Given the extreme sound power of an atomic detonation, described by one eyewitness to the Trinity test as having “the quality of distant thunder, but was louder,” it is almost surreal that we cannot hear it explode but only see it while we can hear the countdown; its power is still drowned out by the sound of Penderecki’s non-diegetic score [10]. Randolph Foy has written that the piece’s sense of drama comes from its opposition between “sustained clusters and points of sound” and indeed, these musical oppositions are reflected through vantage point that occurs simultaneously [11]. The camera pans to the INSIDE of the Bomb (a CGI rendering and not the actual footage from the 1946 test), of both the mushroom top and the stem, shifting from its black and white exterior to its colorful interior. These colors reflect first-hand accounts of the Trinity test, with observers remarking on the purples, reds, yellows, and blues that were visible as the Bomb exploded [12]. This unique vantage point is illustrated by the varying timbres of Threnody, from playing between the bridge and the tailpiece and striking the soundboard with the nut of the bow, for example, which are constantly changing throughout the work. By being cognizant of the musical language and techniques in operation at each moment, paired with the visuals, the piece can offer listeners both an exterior as well as an interior listening. With each section of music and timbral change, the image onscreen changes, varying from extreme close-ups to the top of the mushroom cloud to the pulsing and flying of the fallout dust and the rapidly changing colors, thus visually highlighting the piece’s structure.

Like the Bomb’s visual impact, the musical score has a dramatic visual impact. Unlike conventional scores, the music is written using graphic notation consisting of symbols such as squiggles and large blacked out blocks that represent tone clusters. The use of microtones also gives the work a sense of eeriness and otherworldliness, especially combined with the extended techniques and rapid timbral changes. Further, Threnody plays from beginning to end, an unusual directorial choice for a piece as long as this, but given the power represented in this extended scene, it is warranted and serves to amplify the tension present in the visuals.

In this context, BOB’s birth came out of the chaos generated by the Bomb detonation, despite its carefully planned execution. We see that out of the mushroom cloud a figure emerges, one that is dubbed both The Experiment. In the midst of the detonation, which appears to have generated The Experiment, we have a period of silence before we once again see the inside of the mushroom cloud and hear the remainder of Threnody. The Experiment spits out what looks like a series of eggs, one of which bears the face of BOB. This sequence illustrates that the Bomb birthed The Experiment, which then births, among other bizarre creatures (like the frog moth that will hatch later in Part 8), BOB.

This, of course, is not Threnody’s first appearance in film or television, nor is it the first time that David Lynch has used Penderecki’s music prior to Twin Peaks. In this scene, however, he directly channels the association of the music with the visuals in order to make a statement and tell the story of one of Twin Peaks’ most iconic characters. Lynch’s use of Threnody has evocations beyond the association with the atomic bomb that Penderecki intended; that is, the birth of atomic bomb as the birth of evil that haunts the town of Twin Peaks. The title of the piece evokes mourning for the dead so perhaps, in this case, Lynch uses the atomic bomb as a metaphor for the birth of the town’s evil and with the use of Penderecki’s underscore for the scene, Lynch is amplifying the association between scientific chaos and humanity’s creation of evil.

***
[1] Stephen Hilgartner, Richard C. Bell, and Rory O’Connor, Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Visions, and Mindset (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982), 30.
[2] Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 189.
[3] Peggy Rosenthal, “The Nuclear Mushroom Cloud as Cultural Image,” American Literary History 3, no. 1 (1991), 66.
[4] Carroll Pursell, Technology in Postwar America: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 60.
[5] Synchblog, “Q&A with David Lynch’s Music Collaborator Dean Hurley – Part 2: Being Open Creatively and Knowing When to Walk Away,” July 24, 2017, accessed July 30, 2017, http://www.synchblog.com/qa-with-david-lynchs-music-collaborator-dean-hurley-part-2-being-open-creatively-and-knowing-when-to-walk-away/
[6] Daniel Dylan Wray, “David Lynch on Bowie and the Music that Inspired the New ‘Twin Peaks,’” Pitchfork, September 19, 2017, accessed September 19, 2017, https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/david-lynch-interview-on-bowie-and-music-that-inspired-the-new-twin-peaks/
[7] Darren Franich and Jeff Jensen, “Talking to David Lynch about Twin Peaks: The Return,” Entertainment Weekly, September 15, 2017, accessed September 17, 2017, http://ew.com/tv/2017/09/15/david-lynch-twin-peaks-finale/
[8] Susan Chaffins Kovalenko, “The Twentieth-Century Requiem: An Emerging Concept (Ph.D. diss., Washington University in St. Louis, 1971), 4.
[9] Adrian Thomas, “Krzysztof Penderecki,” Grove Music Online, November 26, 2003, accessed December 5, 2017, http://www.oxfordmusiconline/
[10] Robert Serber, Eyewitness Account—Trinity Test, July 16, 1945, U.S. National Archives, Record Group 227, OSRD-S1 Committee, Box 82, Folder 6, “Trinity.”
[11] Randolph Foy, “Textural Transformations: The Instrumental Music of Krzysztof Penderecki, 1960-1973” (D.M.A. diss., Peabody Institute of the John Hopkins University, 1994), 64.
[12] Ferenc Morton Szasz, The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 86-91.

***
Reba Wissner is on the music history faculty of Montclair State University. She is currently at work on her third monograph, Music and the Atomic Bomb in American Film and Television, 1950-1969. She is also co-editing a volume on the music and sound design in Twin Peaks with Dr. Katherine Reed, also of this series. See more here

Justin aDams Burton

Critics haven’t really loved Sia’s album of Christmas originals, Everyday is Christmas. For that matter, neither have listeners, as Everyday’s metacritic score is lagging significantly behind her other albums. Katherine St. Asaph at Pitchfork describes the listening experience as being “like opening a gift where someone’s forgotten to remove the tags.” Rachel Aroesti of The Guardian finds Sia’s vocals “mewling, monotonous,” while at Huffington Post, Sara Boboltz wonders why there wasn’t a copyeditor somewhere who could have spotted the grammatical error in the title (it should be Every Day is Christmas). All of these reviews foreground the speed with which Sia and collaborator Greg Kurstin pumped out Everyday; the singer told Zane Lowe that the album was a two-week project. For these reviewers, it’s not just that the music is disappointing, it’s also that the process was half-baked. They’re disappointed with the album, and they can’t even fall back on the idea that it’s the thought that counts, as Sia admits—brags?—that it was a slapdash job. Though all of these critiques are couched in terms of aesthetics or process, I argue here that the response to Everyday is Christmas is conditioned more by what Christmas does and doesn’t allow us to hear than by the album’s aesthetics.

There’s one more recurring theme in these critical reviews, and the positive ones, too. In each case, Everyday is received as an earnest expression of seasonal joy. And why wouldn’t it be? “Christmas” is, among other things, a tightly-structured system that affords a very narrow range of acceptable emotional output. Joy, wonder, joyous wonder—these all pass Christmas emotional muster. While we pay lip service to the idea that the holidays can be a trying time for people, holiday depression is typically considered deviant, a pathology that needs to be overcome. A recent Huffington Post article offers a few answers to“Why We Get Depressed at the Holidays,” and those answers all ultimately lay the blame on the person who is depressed. You have “unrealistic expectations,” you’re “trying to do too much,” you’re “comparing your insides to someone else’s outsides,” or you’re “slacking on self care.” Yup, you know why you feel shitty during the holidays? Because you’re a lazy good-for-nothing who isn’t taking care of yourself well enough, misering away your self-care energy like some Scrooge. And it’s ruining Christmas for the rest of us.

Our broad social acknowledgement of holiday depression boils down to the idea that Christmas is for happiness, and if you don’t feel happy, well, you’re doing it wrong. In a post on Cyborgology, Jenny Davis describes Facebook’s public analysis of the emotional pitfalls of social media in similar terms, and I think a parallel reading of Facebook alongside Christmas can be a useful way to hear what’s going on in Sia’s album. Davis is unimpressed with Facebook’s conclusion that one’s emotional response to social media platforms is the result of how you use it: “‘It’s how you use it’ is wholly unsatisfying, philosophically misguided, and a total corporate cop-out that places disproportionate responsibility on individual users while ignoring the politics and power of design.” Davis describes these “politics and power of design” as technological affordances, what a user is or isn’t able to do as a result of the way the social platform is designed. An example that Davis offers involves Facebook’s algorithmic bias toward popular content, which pushes users to engage posts and profiles that are already receiving attention and discourages interaction with posts and profiles that don’t already have attention—it’s like a regressive tax for your social media world. Christmas isn’t a technology in the way Facebook is, but it is a multimedia institution that structures the US social world for a solid six weeks each year. And part of Christmas’s structure involves compulsory happiness, that overarching sense that the only emotions afforded us during the season are the joyful ones.

Davis has theorized Facebook’s own methods for enforcing compulsory happiness, and this is where Facebook-as-system and Christmas-as-system diverge: there’s no centralized power center, no Santa CEO who determines Christmas algorithms and rolls out updates that directly shape our interactions with the holiday. Rather, it’s a much looser social negotiation that we all (regardless of whether and how we celebrate Christmas) participate in to some degree. One part of that participation is the listening praxis that surrounds Christmas music: when and where we listen, and how we create meaning through the act of listening. The reviews of Everyday that I opened with demonstrate some of what happens when our listening praxis is conditioned by Christmas’s compulsory happiness. The usual range of possibility that we’d expect—and probably laud—from Sia is cordoned off so that her Christmas album only registers within that narrow band of seasonal joy that compulsory happiness affords. In this context, Sia’s hastily produced offering strikes music critics and listeners alike as something of a failure.

Listening outside Christmas constraints, however, I hear Everyday is Christmas as an album that is about the failure to meet Christmas’s emotional affordances. The failure is a feature, not a bug; it’s the kind of performance one must undertake during the holidays to appear and sound acceptable. To listen in this context is to shift what we can hear. If the vocals are “mewling, monotonous,” it’s because they’re trying to convince us that everything’s totally fine. They add a compensatory “seasonal twinkle,” as Rolling Stone Australia’s Annabel Ross describes it, that provides just enough cover for what is otherwise a more emotionally turbulent collection of songs. I think it’s this tension between the surface-level joy cranked to sometimes ridiculous levels—“Puppies are foreveeeeerrrrrrr!!”—and other visual and aural signifiers which let slip the lie of joy that makes Everyday tricky for listeners and critics. It sounds like a Christmas album full of holiday cheer, fueling our shopping sprees when it blasts through department store speakers, but there’s something just a bit off about it.

Sia released a video trilogy for “Candy Cane Lane,” “Ho Ho Ho,” and “Underneath the Mistletoe” that pulls this tension nearly to its breaking point. A holiday jaunt, a yuletide drinking song, and a Christmas love ballad, respectively, the three tunes hit all of the Christmas emotional affordance marks, and the claymation visuals featuring a smiling little girl with green and red hair tap into a nostalgic aesthetic indebted to seasonal television fixtures like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The narrative begins whimsically enough, with a girl and her mother decorating their house—presumably on Candy Cane Lane—but things quickly veer into something far darker and more traumatic. The girl spots a snowman stuffing himself uninvited into chimney holes, then follows him into the woods. They play together in the snowman’s house, a tableau that features the snowman turning himself into a shark’s fin and circling the girl as she repeatedly forces smiles to the sounds of Sia’s unhinged drinking song. Finally, the girl makes her way home, and the departure takes on a “Baby It’s Cold Outside” vibe as the snowman encourages her to stay. The return’s soundtrack is “Underneath the Mistletoe,” a grown-person love song that carries none of the innocence of “Candy Cane Lane.” The girl finally emerges from the woods to hug her worried mother, even as the snowman appears the next morning to continue his pursuit.

The visuals do what the album as a whole does: all the surface markers of Christmas joy—snow, candy canes, snowmen, magical houses tucked away in the woods, smiling children—are right there so that a casual viewing or passive listening allows Everyday to register within Christmas’s emotional affordances. Once we listen past the edges of what Christmas affords, though, we can hear a melancholia permeating the album, whether it’s in lyrics like “Santa is Coming for Us” or the vocal performance of “Everyday is Christmas”’s chorus, a slurred repetition of “Everyday is Christmas with you by my side” that sounds more like lament than celebration.

Even that grammatical error in the title makes a little more sense. If one’s everyday existence lacks joy, then Christmas doesn’t afford the ability to feel any differently; instead, it papers over melancholia with shiny bows and the enforcement of compulsory happiness. In this context, Every Day is Christmas would be nothing short of a horror story. The grammar of Everyday is Christmas—in the title and in the album’s sonic aesthetic—captures the mundanity of the everyday, the reality that Christmas is just another time of year to fake a smile and sing about joy at the top of your lungs and vocal range so as not to ruin it for everyone else. Everyday is Christmas is a failure to hold the façade, a rumination on the fact that Christmas is just more of the everyday.

Justin aDams Burton specializes in popular music, race, and gender and is the author of Posthuman Rap (Oxford University Press, 2017).

By William O’Hara

(Source: screen grab from https://vimeo.com/88165960)

Flanked by two wrought iron lamps, a young woman sits in the center of the frame. To her right, a large glass holding two fingers of red wine sits among a nest of electronics: a small keyboard, a squat black “harmonizer” box, and a glowing, gridlike MIDI controller. The room is richly textured: with an expansive table of reclaimed wood and the exposed stonework of the wall hovering just out of focus, the woman's surroundings are far removed from the run of the mill "American Room" that often characterized early viral videos: beige, generic, poorly lit, and shot from the upward angle of an open laptop. This is YouTube 2.0, and the production values have risen exponentially.

Yet, as the film rolls, there is a palpable sense of being “before the beginning.” The woman looks askance at a second camera, which bobs as if its tripod is still being adjusted. She speaks into the microphone: “Yup, yup, is this thing on?” The harmonizer splits her voice into cacophony. “Yeah!” she sings triumphantly in response to her own question; given a pitch to grab onto, the black box's voices coalesce into a chord, supporting her cry with a deep bass tone and a piquant minor third.

The young woman is Kawehi (kuh-VEH-hee), a Lawrence, Kansas-based musician. Kawehi’s solo performances layer together loop upon loop, combining her voice with an array of synthesizers, drum machines, and guitars. While she writes original songs, tours nationally, and has released several records, much of her initial exposure came from a series of well-choreographed videos of recognizable cover songs. Her cover of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” went viral in the spring of 2014, garnering extensive online coverage and more than 3 million views between Vimeo and YouTube.

[image source:https://www.instagram.com/p/lz7BSQFFBY/ ]

Kawehi’s videos often start by showcasing her process: she builds the song piece-by-piece before it properly begins. The economy of pitches and rhythms used--Kawehi crafts her accompaniment out of only three notes--and the versatility with which those elements can be layered and re-contextualized by altering a single note, reveal the degree to which Kawehi has analyzed the song, paring it down to a skeleton and re-animating it one layer at a time. As shown in the video below, she artfully records the pieces of “Heart-Shaped Box” in reverse, assembling it “in plain sight” (or sound?), but in a manner that obscures what the final product will sound like until it is complete. Beginning with her voice (filtered through the harmonizer), she records the upper voices of the two-chord post-chorus interlude. Next, she fills in its bass notes with the keyboard, and then records the vocal percussion loop that will underpin the entire song. Cutting off her initial loops with a few keystrokes, Kawehi next records backing vocals for the verse (an acapella chant, made eerie by the vocoder’s minor third) and the chorus (the energetic “YEAH!” first heard at the beginning of the video). After recording another synthesized bass line, she performs the song’s famous guitar riff. Finally, with another off-camera keystroke, she silences the thicket of loops she has constructed; Kawehi sings unadorned, and the song as we know it begins.

Kawehi’s cover of “Heart Shaped Box” brings together at least two distinct brands of solo performance: the well-established practice of live looping, and the younger, distinctly YouTube-era trend of “full band” covers executed by single musicians.[1] The former tradition can be traced from fourteenth-century England (which saw performers playing pipes and drums simultaneously, one in each hand), through the more familiar “one (wo)man bands from the late-nineteenth century to the present.[2] With the advent of delay pedals, samplers, and other tools, contemporary carriers of this tradition include pop stars such as Ed Sheeran, the intricate improvisations of Reggie Watts, the layered collages of Zoë Keating, and the multimedia performances of artists Laurie Anderson, and Pamela Z. In fact, Susan McClary’s description of Anderson might well apply to Kawehi:

[H]er compositions rely upon precisely those tools of electronic mediation that most performance artists seek to displace. … most modes of mechanical and electronic reproduction strive to render themselves invisible and inaudible, to invite the spectator to believe that what is seen or heard is real. By contrast, in Laurie Anderson’s performances, one actually gets to watch her produce the sounds we hear. But her presence is always already multiply mediated: we hear her voice only as it is filtered through Vocoders, as it passes through reiterative loops, as it is layered upon itself by means of sequencers. … The closer we get to the source, the more distant becomes the imagined ideal of unmediated presence and authenticity.[3]

Kawehi’s videos also open up onto a separate tradition that has developed on YouTube over the past decade: solo musicians using multitrack recording and visual effects to “clone” themselves into entire ensembles. Searching YouTube for “solo cover” or “solo full band” turns up hundreds of videos. Many of them use Brady Bunch-like tiling, echoing visually the parallel construction of a multitrack recording. They vary widely in the genre (heavy metal and video game soundtracks are particularly popular), and complexity, from guitar/bass/drum combos recorded in bedrooms and basements, to entire acapella choirs and virtual armies of synthesizers and guitars, as in the example below.

As scholars like Kiri Miller and Phillip Auslander have emphasized, musical performances are always a matter of both authenticity AND artifice, particularly when they are being presented digitally.[4] Kawehi presents a kind of cinema verite, letting us see behind the scenes by frequently leaving a few trailing seconds at the beginnings and ends of videos. She sometimes broadcasts live “vlogs” (video blogs) to her fans, such as a 2016 pre-tour video in which she describes all of her equipment, and responds to fan chats in real-time. At the same time, her performances themselves are carefully staged, framed, and lit: polished productions far beyond the casual, bedroom-and-basement fare so common to YouTube.

Pop arrangements are supposed to unspool slowly, over three or four minutes. The introduction showcases the chord progression, and perhaps a hook. The first verse is spartan; harmonies enter at the chorus, if not later. Backup singers, countermelodies, and horns join in. A guitar solo might signal a song’s moment of maximum excitement, while an extended fade-out (often featuring every instrument laying around in the studio that day) seems to imply that the jam could go on forever, if not for the limitations of time and tape.

Kawehi playfully inverts this rising action. Every riff she records is a piece of Chekov’s Gun, disassembled on the table for cleaning; the entire introduction is a structure of promise that lays bare the anatomy of the song: a musical analysis performed as entertainment. The iconic guitar riff, for example (the first recognizable fragment of the song that we hear), foreshadows the climactic moment of the chorus, when she will sing along with it in unison: a moment made all the more intense because we heard its piecemeal construction earlier in the video. Kawehi manipulates these musical pieces with the nonchalance of an expert, her economical fingers dancing across the neon grid of the MIDI controller. Not a cycle is wasted as she hums and beatboxes, blending mechanical synth pads with the pitch-bent simulacrum of an electric guitar. With her economical use of pitch material and deft manipulation of Ableton, Kawehi acts as much a DJ or a conductor as she does a singer.

Cover songs are ripe for this sort of treatment, and rather than striving for fidelity -- as the complex “full band” covers found elsewhere on YouTube do -- we see in minimalist covers like Kawehi’s, the transformative potential of arrangement. The pleasure of a cover song lies in juxtaposing familiar melodies or well-known lyrics with unfamiliar textures, timbres, or tempos. The frisson of recognition collides vertiginously with an unfamiliar affect, or the unexpected intimacy of an acoustic vocal: a phenomenon also exploited to great effect in movie trailers and comedy acts. In his book Listen: A History of Our Ears (2008), philosopher Peter Szendy evocatively calls this kind of double listening plastic, or even elastic.[5] Indeed it is: in Kawehi’s cover, we can often hear both Nirvana’s original, and her deconstruction of it. The song is stretched, squeezed, and molded into something new. As Kawehi teaches us how to re-listen to a familiar song, the original is left forever changed and enriched.
***
[1]For more on live looping and other techniques of electronic performance, see Mark Butler, Playing With Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[2]For more information, see The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 2: Performance and Production (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 48-49.
[3]Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 137.
[4]See Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Phillip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 2008).
[5]See Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 35-39.
***

William O’Hara is Assistant Professor of Music at Gettysburg College, and taught previously at Tufts University. He received his PhD from Harvard in 2017, and from 2013 to 2016 was an editorial assistant for JAMS.

By Jacob Sagrans

On December 13, 2017, Danish entertainer Claus Pilgaard (stage name: Chili Klaus) released a YouTube video he made with the Herning Boys Choir, the main church choir in Herning, Denmark. Pilgaard explains that he grew up singing in the choir and is now returning “to add a little extra passion to the music.” He and the choir then begin singing the Christmas carol “O Come, All Ye Faithful” in a rather reserved manner. At the end of the first verse, the mood changes: the conductor holds up a chili pepper, the cue for the singers to take out their own peppers and ingest them. The description for the video alleges that they are ghost peppers, one of the world’s spiciest.<1> As the choir continues to sing, the boys increasingly feel the effect of the peppers: their faces go red, their eyes water, and they cough, pant, grimace, shift weight, and shake in discomfort. By the end of the performance, many are no longer able to sing, although some of the older boys manage to sing loudly and look unfazed. After finishing the carol, the singers frantically run off to get ice cream, milk, and bread in hopes of neutralizing the spice.

In the month after it was released, the video scored nearly 1.4 million views on Pilgaard’s YouTube channel. Classic FM also shared it with 2.5 million Facebook viewers. Popular newspapers, magazines, and websites ran stories on the video, including theIndependent, People, and BuzzFeed. The video’s novelty and humor appealed to viewers. I also believe the video resonated by upholding sacred choral traditions, particularly the tradition of all-male sacred singing. In addition to seeing and hearing boys in a church, accompanied by an organ, we witness male bonding and competition through the challenge of singing after eating hot peppers. The stereotypical notion of a “real man” or “real boy” is one who is tough and can withstand pain, and the members of the Herning Boys Choir fit the mold by standing in place and singing (or attempting to sing) until the end of the carol. The choir, then, is not only exclusively male, but the singers behave as expected of boys and men (in other words, they “perform” masculinity in a traditional/stereotypical way). The overwhelming maleness of the choir can assure us that, at least in Herning, the long tradition of all-male sacred singing is continuing, despite greater participation of women and girls in church choirs and religious life as well as increasingly secular societies.

The ways in which the Pilgaard/Herning video evokes issues of gender and religious tradition become more apparent when it is considered in relation to similar depictions of other all-male church choirs. For example, in 2014, The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge released a prank April Fools’ Day YouTube video entitled “King’s College Choir Announces Major Change.” The college chaplain explains the “major change”: due to complex new regulations, the choir can no longer employ underage boy trebles. But thankfully, a chemistry professor came up with an ingenious solution to keep the choir all male—and no, not the surgery that produced the castrati that sang high parts in church choirs and opera in the 17th and 18th centuries. A quartet of undergraduate choral scholars demonstrate the “solution” by singing a verse from Allegri’s Miserere. Before the countertenor’s high C (a challenging note for even child singers and women), he breathes helium from a large yellow balloon, allowing him to reach the note, albeit with a comically squeaky sound. Over 3 million people have viewed this video, making it the choir’s most popular on YouTube. Like the Pilgaard/Herning video, the King’s College video is original and comical. It also draws attention to the all-male nature of the choir, although here the issues of gender and tradition are more explicit. The choir’s exclusion of female singers in an increasingly egalitarian age may be problematic, but the popularity of this video suggests that viewers/listeners value the tradition of all-male sacred singing and want it to continue.<2> Several other depictions of the King’s College Choir also reinforce the sense that the choir’s all-male composition means it embodies longstanding sacred choral traditions and that these traditions “should” be preserved.<3>

The Pilgaard/Herning video and the King’s College video are humorous and creative. They also bring our attention to the choirs’ male personnel and assure us that the tradition of sacred male choral singing is still going strong. It would be worth considering in more depth how all-male sacred choirs project their gender identity to foster a sense of tradition. One could look at other popular portrayals of sacred choirs of men and boys, such as the annual Christmas Eve Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols service sung by the King’s College Choir and broadcast on radio and TV around the world. To what extent are all-male sacred choirs trying to reference concerns about gender and tradition (while also trying to be innovative)? How important are gender and tradition in attracting listeners to these choirs? How do sacred choirs with female singers negotiate concerns that they are breaking with tradition? More research is warranted, but based on what I have found so far, I believe that issues of gender and tradition greatly inform the modern performance and reception of sacred choral music.
***
<1>Pilgaard later admitted that some of the peppers were milder, specifically the ones given to the youngest boys.
<2>One could also read the King’s College video as saying it would be futile to exclude female singers “at any cost” and maybe someday girls and women will sing in the choir.
<3>See the discussion in my doctoral dissertation, pages 87–96.
***

Jacob Sagrans studies sacred choral music and traditions, the early music revival, and music and medievalism. In 2017 he received a PhD in musicology from McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, where he wrote his dissertation on “Early Music and the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, 1958 to 2015.” Jacob has taught music history and music appreciation at McGill, Tufts University, and Brown University. An active chorister, Jacob sings in Coro Allegro, Boston’s acclaimed LGBTQ+ and allied classical chorus. See more here.

Día de muertos (Day of the Dead) is a Mexican holiday that celebrates the memory of the dead, taking place the evening of October 31 and ending November 2. During this period, people remember their departed loved ones, creating ofrendas (altars) adorned with marigolds, photographs of the deceased, sugar skulls, and pan de muerto (Day of the Dead bread). Although a popular tradition, its incorporation in Mexican cinema is underwhelming. Films from the 1930s, such as Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva México! (1931) and Janitzio (1934, dir. Carlos Navarro) incorporated Día de muertos into their narratives, exhibiting rites and rituals of the event. Later fictional films featured narratives about crossing over to the Land of the Dead, including El ahijado de la muerte (The Godson of Death, 1946, dir. Norman Foster) and Macario (1959, dir. Roberto Gavaldón). Recently, the practices and iconography of Día de muertos has swept through the United States. Hollywood, whose visual and narrative representations of Mexicans and Mexican culture have focused on narco violence, kidnappings, and brutality, have jumped on the bandwagon to provide their own cinematic representations of the holiday.<1> The newest film to take up the reins is Pixar Animation Studio’s Coco (2017).

Coco is a visually stunning film that tells the story of young boy named Miguel who ventures into the Land of the Dead. Miguel aspires to be a musician much like his deceased idol, Ernesto de la Cruz (voiced by Benjamin Bratt), but his family, who have been forbidden to perform music by the deceased matriarch Mamá Imelda (voiced by Alanna Ubach), encourage him to continue in the family business of shoemaking. In pursuit of his dream, Miguel is magically transported to the Land of the Dead during Día de muertos where he encounters his deceased family members transformed as calacas (skeletons), who again forbid him to become a musician. He evades their clutches with the help of the calaca Héctor (voiced by Gael García Bernal), who encourages his musical talents and guides him through the Land of the Dead. What follows is a narrative that explores familial relationships, the precarious nature of tradition, and the process of forgiveness. In addition to this, Coco is brimming with fantastic references to Mexican popular culture, including popular colloquialisms (“No manches”), luchadores (masked wrestlers), la chancla (the infamous flip flop that functions as a threatening tool used by mothers), and humorous cameos of surrealist painter Frida Kahlo (1907—1954), whose paintings have been the subject of numerous exhibitions internationally, and whose image has become part of the cultural capital of Mexico. While all these elements and references paint a vibrant tapestry of Mexican culture, at the heart of the film is music and Mexico’s cinematic epoca de oro (Golden Age).

The epoca de oro is a period in cinematic history (roughly 1936—1952) that showcased a rising star system, box office success, and the development of film genres that became crucial components of national filmmaking, such as the comedia ranchera (ranch comedy) and the revolutionary melodrama. The films, players, and music from this period are still significant fixtures in Mexican popular culture and Coco evokes this in numerous ways.<2> The most apparent is through the characters and their musical performance, which pay homage to the musical film genre the comedia ranchera and its singing macho charro (Mexican cowboy). Miguel wants to follow in the footsteps of actor and musician Ernesto de la Cruz, whose character is loosely inspired by the career of epoca de oro actor Pedro Infante (1917—1957). Infante personified the charro in comedias rancheras and provided his velvety voice and signature gritos (cries) to many rancheras and ballads. His tragic death in 1957 sent the country into national mourning. De la Cruz mirrors Infante. His persona, his confidence, and his ability to charm the crowd construct him, much like Infante, as a cinematic and musical icon, and a national treasure.

De la Cruz’s legacy is initially shaped by the film’s theme song “Remember Me,” which also functions as a nostalgic anthem for the protagonists, but in contrasting ways. De la Cruz’s ranchera-inspired interpretation is introduced in a black and white film clip, which shows him performing on a large stage. The lyrics, written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, describe the bittersweet parting of two people and the desperate need to live on in one’s memory:

Remember me
Though I have to say goodbye
Remember me
Don’t let it make you cry
For even though I’m far away I hold you in my heart
I sing a secret song to you each night we are apart.

The lyric’s melancholy sentiment becomes buried underneath the quick tempo and vibrant orchestration, complete with blaring trumpets, strummed guitars, gritos, and female backup singers. The music here moves away from the musical characteristics of the epoca de oro, which typically did not consist of such heavy instrumentation and dramatic flourish. This performance, rather, mirrors more of a Hollywood musical construction from the same period. As De la Cruz sustains the final note, the large decorative bell above his head comes crashing down on him, sending him to the Land of the Dead and forever associating “Remember Me” as both his signature (or exit) song and his last words. Although the song ends tragically, it is no question that De la Cruz’s polished performance showcases him as an attention seeking star and a darling in the national imagination.

Other iterations of “Remember Me” offer more emotional significance. Héctor, we find out, is the song’s real composer. The song was originally intended not as a showy piece for the stage, but as a slow and charming lullaby for his daughter Coco, who is Miguel’s great grandmother. In a flashback, a living Héctor sings the first two verses accompanied by acoustic guitar to the young Coco. This segment is brief and encapsulates the tenderness and love that the song’s lyrics depict. This feeling continues when Miguel, back in the Land of the Living, sings the song to Coco, now elderly and confined to a wheelchair. It is here that the film tugs unmercifully at the heart-strings as Miguel slowly sings the lullaby to coax Coco into remembering her deceased father. Coco (voiced by one of most well-known actresses of cine mexicano, Ana Ofelia Murguía) gently begins to sing along, her deep and raspy voice blending with Miguel’s, bringing the memory of her father back to the living while preserving his existence in the Land of the Dead.

Coco’s song list consists of mainly original music by the film’s numerous composers.<3> One exception, however, is “La llorona” (“Weeping Woman”), a son istmeño from the Isthmus of Tenhuantepéc that is performed in the film entirely in Spanish. Based on a popular folk legend, “La llorona” tells the dark story of a woman who kills her children by drowning them in a river after she is betrayed by her lover. Her ghost wanders the countryside typically at night, crying out for them. Ana Alonso Minutti notes that while this son is well-known and traditional, there is no “authorative” version; verses are added and/or reordered in performance.<4>

In Coco, “La llorona” is performed by Mamá Imelda who turned into a calacaCatrina (an elegant or well-dressed woman), reflecting the art of José Guadalupe Posada (1852—1913). While she was alive, she believed her musician husband left her and their child. In her grief, Mamá Imelda forbids her family from listening to and performing music, believing music to be the root of evil. Mamá Imelda’s interpretation comes at crucial moment in the narrative, taking place at the Sunrise Concert that commemorates the beginning of Día de muertos. In escaping De la Cruz on stage, she begins singing self-consciously and timidly. While beginning slowly and with rubato, she quickly speeds up the tempo and is joined by the orchestra, turning the ballad into a lively and rhythmic number with implied zapateando (tap dancing). She is soon accompanied by De la Cruz, who takes over the performance and brings the son to a dramatic end with his declamatory gritos. Mamá Imelda’s performance serves as a turning point for her and her family. In singing this son, she becomes La llorona; she was, in her mind, abandoned by her husband. Although she did not kill her children, she did kill music for her family, filling them with her own bitterness and resentment.

The performance of “La llorona” by Mamá Imelda links to other cinematic interpretations in both Mexico and Hollywood. Variations of this son have been interpreted by performers including Eugenia León in the Día de muertos inspired short film Hasta los huesos (To the Bones, 2001), which features a calaca catrina melodramatically singing the son; and also two crucial performances in the pseudo bio-pic Frida (2000, dir. Julie Taymor), one by the versatile Lila Downs, and the other by Chavela Vargas (1919—2012). Vargas’s performance of “La Llorona” and her intimate relationship with Kahlo have recently been part of a presentation completed by Ana Alonso Minutti for the University of New Mexico Art Museum.<5> In these performances, “La llorona” becomes an anthem for women, and an anthem for the dead and Día de muertos. Its inclusion in Coco as well as the other embellishments of Mexican popular culture function together to create a love letter for Mexico, making this Pixar’s most culturally relevant film to date.
***
<1>Films that have references include Frida (2000, dir. Julie Taymor) and Spectre (2015, dir. Sam Mendes). The animated feature Book of Life (2014, dir. Jorge R. Gutiérrez) is more specifically set during Día de muertos.
<2>In addition to cameos by a calaca Frida Kahlo, the film also references a calaca Mario Moreno “Cantinflas” and the luchador Santo.
<3>Michael Giacchino composed the original score while the songs were composed by Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Robert Lopez, Germaine Franco, and Adrian Molina.
<4>Ana R. Alonso Minutti, “Chavela’s Frida: Emancipatory Songs of Love and Pain,” University of New Mexico Art Museum Insight Lecture Series in conjunction with the exhibition “Frida Kahlo—Her Photos” and the 15th Annual Southwest Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, October 17, 2017.
<5>Ibid.
***

Dr. Jacqueline Avila is an Assistant Professor in Musicology at the University of Tennessee. Her research focuses on film music and sound practice from the silent period to present and the intersections of identity, tradition, and modernity in the Hollywood and Mexican film industries. She is currently writing her book manuscript titled Cinesonidos: Cinematic Music and Identity in Early Mexican Film (1896-1952), which is an examination of the function and cultural representation of music in the Mexican film industry.

By Matthew J. Jones and Martín Vega Olmedo

Is Miguel Musical?

Philip Brett once winkingly asked “Are you musical?” noting the historical slippage between musical and gay identities which “exist in an uneasy relation.”<1> Both represent dissident forms of being in a macho-normative culture, and as Brett trenchantly put it, “All musicians are faggots in the parlance of the male locker room.”<2> For LGBTQ children who experience disproportinate amounts of bullying from peers, disapproval from parents, and the scorn of community and political leaders, “music appears as a veritable lifeline.”<3> Reflecting on his adolescent habit of listening to Broadway soundtracks in a suburban basement, D. A. Miller wondered how many other young queer boys harnessed “the strength to endure a depressive status quo” and realized through music’s “interruptive mode-shifting” their fantasy of “sending the whole world packing?”<4> Miguel Rivera, the protagonist of Disney/Pixar’s Coco, is one such boy.

Generations ago, the premature death of her musician husband left Miguel’s great-great grandmother, Imelda, brokenhearted with a child to raise on her own and a smoldering hatred of musicians. Banishing music forever, the Riveras stewarded subsequent generations away from the dishonorable musical lifestyle, toward the sensible family shoemaking trade. Although his family reprimands him that “a Rivera is a shoemaker, through and through,” Miguel resists, insisting that “I am not like the rest of my family.” He longs to escape the humdrum banality of a cobbler’s life and dreams of becoming a famous musician, playing to huge crowds, and sharing his talents with the world. While Miguel’s desires clash with those of his family, he embraces his innate musicality and, deus ex Disney, embarks on a fantastical quest to pursue his destiny. Miguel’s plight constitutes a queer narrative framed as a specifically musical struggle.

Miguel’s Musical Closet

Closed spaces factor in the lives of many Disney characters who face tensions between social norms and their identities. For instance, Ariel stores a vast collection of human stuff in a secret grotto concealed behind a massive stone door whose metaphorical suggestions myriad: the tomb of Christ from which the transfigured savior emerges or the homosexual closet which Sedgwick identifies as the central trope of contemporary culture. Ariel’s closet provided her comfort but also elicited anxiety that she would be discovered. Upon discovering Ariel’s secret space, Triton panics, destroying her collection in the process and propelling Ariel’s quest to inhabit a body that feels natural to her, a journey Spencer interprets as a transgender narrative.<5> Miguel, too, has a secret hidden behind an old sign above the family workroom. There, he escapes his music-hating abuela to find solace among musical bric-a-brac: album jackets, photographs, and VHS tapes containing black-and-white movie musicals starring his idol, the late Ernesto de la Cruz.

Weston identifies three salient characteristics of coming-out narratives, all of which are embedded in Miguel’s story: 1) a sense of deep and enduring social isolation, 2) searching for LGBTQ traces in a variety of media forms, and 3) a draw toward urban spaces.<6> Surveying his ancestors on the ofrenda and in family stories, Miguel can find few traces of a musical past; therefore, he feels isolated and alone, like he might be the only musician in his entire family. Although he identifies as musical deep in his bones and makes numerous direct statements about the queerness of his desire, Miguel fears that his family will neither understand nor accept this part of his identity. So, he turns to Weston’s second stage, “tracking the gay imaginary” in print and broadcast media.

By collecting de la Cruz ephemera, Miguel constructs his own musical/queer genealogy using popular culture for guidance. According to Halperin, LGBTQs “routinely cherish non-gay artifacts and cultural forms [because they] offer a way of escaping from their particular personal queerness into total, global queerness. In the place of an identity, they are offered a world.”<7> Decoding heterosexual artifacts like movies, plays, songs, and music videos, queer folks empty them of straight meaning and refill these cultural vessels with their own meaning. Strong identification with powerful musical figures is a hallmark of queer identity. Opera and musical theater queens obsess over biographical trivia, collect ephemera, and seek out rare recordings—all venerated objects in rites of diva worship.

While the typical diva is female (Maria Callas, Barbra Streisand, or Madonna; Bette Davis and Joan Crawford), de la Cruz presents a masculine spin on the diva figure, a male diva. Modeled after Mexican singer-actors Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, who rose to fame in Mexico’s cinematic golden age during the 1940s, De la Cruz at first appears wholly unreachable, visible only through the fuzzy glow of the television. In his secret altar to de la Cruz (a name meaning, literally, “of the Cross”) centered around the television screen, Miguel performs the rites of diva worship: he practices on his makeshift guitar and mimics the language, vocal inflections, gestures, and sounds of his musical idol.

Rivera Family Ofrenda

Miguel’s family, in turn, traces their heritage through another, older media form: the photograph. Ancestors appear in black-and-white portraits on the family ofrenda for the Day of the Dead. Atop the altar stands a picture of Mamá Imelda, her infant daughter Coco, and the headless body of a great-great grandfather, whose name cannot be uttered. When Miguel accidentally shatters the frame holding this photograph, he discovers that the headless male figure holds a guitar, which Miguel recognizes as the famous instrument of Ernesto de la Cruz who he wrongly surmises is his great-great grandfather.

Miguel Discovers the Photograph

Emboldened by the discovery of his own musical legacy, Miguel flings open the closet door, proudly coming out as a musician. Like King Triton, Miguel’s abuela flies into a rage, denounces his newly-proclaimed identity, tosses his collection of de la Cruz ephemera into the trash, and destroys her grandson’s guitar with a terse rebuff: NO MUSIC! Following Brett’s musical-queer calculus, this action is not simply a rejection of Miguel’s desire to be a musician but also a rebuff against his queerness. Over the ruins of his guitar, a distraught Miguel fires back at the matriarch, “I don’t want to be a part of this stupid family!”

Miguel in his Attic

The explosive confrontation with his family motivates Miguel’s flight from the Land of the Living in search of a broader, musical family in the Land of the Dead. That flight, at the same time, takes Miguel from village to city. For many LGBTQs, the city “represents a beacon of tolerance and gay community [because] its anonymity [offered] a refuge from the discipline of small-town surveillance.” Like another famous queer media icon, Miguel follows his own Yellow Brick Road—in this case, a magical marigold version of the Golden Gate Bridge that leads to the City of the Dead, a necropolis populated with queer figures including the ghost of Frida Kahlo and plenty of musicians, including Ernesto de la Cruz and Miguel’s own great, great grandfather, Hector Rivera. Carrying the stigma of a soiled identity, Miguel flees his family, and like generations of LGBTQ refugees, hopes to discover his heritage and forge a future on his own terms.

The Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco

Marigold Bridges to the City of the Dead

When Miguel crosses over into the Land of the Dead, he enters a Disneyfied version of Halberstam’s “queer time and place,” a neon-infused landscape that turns Mexico’s ancient topography inside out. Monolithic temples anchor the bustling metropolis but also blend into its architecture. The ruins of indigenous empires, literal building Blocks for modern cities, are reconstituted in The Land of the Dead, bringing past and present into direct contact. Miguel’s crossing-over into “musicality” is facilitated by his temporal border crossing into a space where past becomes present. This collision between life/death and past/present parallels the formation of queer identities out of the detritus of straight, mainstream culture, using the passé to refashion fabulous futures. Miguel finds himself caught between two worlds. If he remains in the Land of the Living, he cannot live as a musician. Yet if he remains in the land of the dead, his animated flesh transforms to skeleton and bones. We can literally see inside Miguel and discern his essential resemblance to his musical/artistic/queer ancestors in the Land of the Dead.

Whereas Miguel felt queer in the Land of the Living, he finds support in the Land of the Dead; he even receives the appellation of “artist” from Frida Kahlo. Her validation inspires Miguel to embrace his musical identity by singing a “coming out” song, “Un Poco Loco,” in the Plaza de la Cruz, an inverse of the Mariachi Plaza stage upon which he is forbidden to perform by his living family. Among the dead, Miguel finds the queer musical family he has searched for, exemplified above all by Hector Rivera, Miguel’s true great-great grandfather who first appears as Frida Kahlo in-drag. This cross-dressing ancestor helps to redirect Miguel’s fixation on the ultra-masculine De la Cruz towards a recognition of an even broader musical family that includes Mamá Imelda, whose musical performance toward the movie’s finale helps to expose De la Cruz as a false diva.

Once redeemed in the Land of the Dead, however, Miguel must return to the Land of the Living by securing the blessing of an ancestor before sunrise, when the Day of the Dead ends. Miguel’s race against cosmic time mirrors the mythological journey of the Quetzalcoatl, the mythological Mesoamerican “Plumed Serpent” who sets out to recuperate human bones from the Land of the Dead to repopulate the earth. Miguel will act as such an agent of change in the film’s final scene, bringing with him the lessons of his ancestors to create a new normal in which his queer identity as a musician is accepted and even celebrated.

Miguel and Hector perform “Un Poco Loco”

Miguel receives ancestral blessing

Animal companions are common in Disney films; heroines from Snow White to Ariel have plenty of animal friends but few meaningful human interactions. Miguel befriends a dog called Dante, surely an allusion to the author of the Divine Comedy whose portrayal of purgatory remains one of the most terrifying literary expressions of the Catholic hell. Similarly, the ancient Aztecs, the Land of the Dead (Mictlan in Nahuatl) consisted of nine layers through which a soul journeyed to reach their final resting place. The Mexican hairless dog xoloitzcuintli, xolotl for short, served as a guide for the deceased, taking its canine form from the belief that when burying or digging for bones, dogs dug a path to the underworld. A loyal companion who is easily distracted by the lure of his next meal, Dante is on his own transformative journey to become a fluorescent, rainbow-colored alebrije (spirit guide). In this way, Dante, too “comes out” to reveal his true self and facilitate Miguel’s own self-actualization.

Proud Corázon: Coming Out and the New Family Normal

In the final scene, Miguel’s voice sings over bustling family action: food preparation, gathering of objects for the ofrenda, including a portrait of Mama Coco who died during the intervening year. People spread Marigold petals to guide ancestral spirits home. The camera pans across the Rivera family yard, coming to rest on Miguel dressed in a Mariachi costume. Surrounded by his living family and his departed ancestors, Miguel’s coming out is complete. He sings a song, “Proud Corázon,” about the importance of family bonds, love, and the “song played on the strings of our souls.” The Rivera family has accepted Miguel’s new identity and integrated it into a new family normal in which musical/queer identity registers as an important part of their lineage and, importantly, their future.

The final Scene: Miguel as Mariachi on the Day of the Dead

Works Cited

Brett, Phillip. “Are You Musical?: Phillip Brett Charts the Rise of the New Gay and Lesbian Musicology.” The Musical Times 135/1816 (1994): 370-374 + 376.
---. “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, eds. Brett, Thomspon, and Wood. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Space: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press, 2005.
Haplerin, David. How to be Gay. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Miller, D. A. Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Spencer, Leland. “Performing Transgender Identity in The Little Mermaid: From Andersen to Disney.” Communication Studies 65/1 (2014): 112-127.
Weston, Kath. “Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration.” GLQ 2 (1995): 253-277.
***
<1>Philip Brett, “Are You Musical?” and Brett, “Musicality, Essentialism, and the Closet,” 17.
<2>Brett, “Musicality,” 17-18.
<3>Brett, “Musicality,” 17.
<4>Miller, Place for Us, 7-11.
<5>Spencer, “Performing Transgender Identity in The Little Mermaid.”
<6>Weston, “Get Thee to a Big City,” 257-258.
<7>Halperin, How to Be Gay, 112.

***

Martín Vega Olmedo is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In 2016 he graduated from the University of Michigan with a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures and went on to teach at Harvard University as a College Fellow. Currently he is writing a book on the role of beauty, colors, and cosmetic techniques in the conquest of Mexico. His work deals broadly with indigenous cultures, colonialism and gender in Latin America and the US borderlands.

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.

By Guadalupe Caro Cocotle

I resisted as long as I could before going to see Coco (Pixar, 2017). Since my son was born we have watched every children’s film that has come out and some of them, I must confess, I have enjoyed. My reticence to see Coco was caused by the multiple comments and the innumerable tears and wails the film provoked from several of my friends. I did not want to see a movie that would make me cry. I became interested in seeing Coco when I learned that two versions had been made in terms of editing and post-production: one for Mexican and Latin American audiences and one for the U.S. public. Intriguingly, the version released in Mexico was not the dubbed version of an English language original; for the first time, Pixar produced a film in Spanish featuring the vocal stylings of popular Latin American performers. In this essay, I am interested in reviewing the codification of sound culturally speaking, rather than the specifics of the music itself. I am interested in explaining how the processes of memory and forgetting are relevant in Coco beyond life and death as central topics of the film.

Coco is a film about death, life, and family legacy,all articulated through music. Pixar has embarked on the difficult business of explaining to children the complicated subject of death. For this, it draws from the folklore and culture of the Mexican celebration of Día de los muertos, a tradition that happens every 1st and 2nd of November. Día de los muertos is a day in which both the streets and homes are filled with light and color, music and flowers, and, above all, offerings, which indicate that the people that we love have not been forgotten. The idea of the offering is that of a welcoming for those souls that visit the world of the living once a year. Entire families gather in the warmth of the home to pay homage to their deceased and to remember past times placing la ofrenda (an offering) that usually is made of cempasúchil flowers (Tagetes erecta), food (such pan de muerto, candies, mole, tamales, and so forth), candles, pictures, incense known as copal, and several other objects. Coco shines; it takes on the colors of the Día de los muertos. For this film, instead of using Pixar´s technique of world-building, like in Monsters Inc., director Lee Unkrich relied on several research trips to Mexico and personal stories from Mexican team members. Thus it is possible to identify elements from the Día de los muertos celebrations in Mixquic (Mexico City) and in Pátzcuaro (Michoacán).

Cultural memory and sound memories

For the English version, an actor of Latin descent, Benjamin Bratt, was chosen to voice Ernesto de la Cruz, the film’s main antagonist, while the Spanish version featured the Mexican singer and songwriter Marco Antonio Solís, a.k.a. El Buki, in the role. The character of Ernesto de la Cruz is important because in him the iconic images of at least two of the most popular Mexican singers in the cinema are evoked: Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete. The choice of Solís is interesting because although he performs the main song, “Recuérdame,” his performance utilizes a completely different vocal style from the one that has marked him as one of most popular singers in the Mexican music industry.

Marco Antonio Solís was the lead singer of Los Bukis, a Mexican grupero balada band characterized by a pop sound with a wide use of synthesizers, and romantic and even corny songs.<1> One example of Los Bukis style is the song “Tu cárcel” in which it is possible to appreciate the nasal vocal style of Solis as well as the extensive use of the synthesizer.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FL_kcn_F5s).

In 1996, Marco Antonio Solís launched a solo career. Since he was the main voice and songwriter of Los Bukis, he was identified as “El Buki.” His solo career was marked by the support of Televisa, the Mexican Television public broadcaster, and many of his songs were recorded by mainstream singers. He also became one of the major composers for telenovela theme songs. In his songs, Solís sings about love, lack of love, disinterested love, and exploits the idea that being poor means being morally good. In terms of his voice, Solís has a recognizable nasal vocal style, somewhat opaque and with exaggerated vibrato, and he utilizes an average vocal tenor range. Solís himself has commented on his characteristic sound, stating, “my singing is ugly but it has style.”<2>

The use of Solís’ voice for the character of Ernesto de la Cruz is peculiar because his performance deviates entirely from the vocality that had made him a ubiquitous Mexican pop icon. His performance of “Recuérdame” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB6rRfUXq0s) presents a mix between mariachi song (canción ranchera) and musical theatre, styles that Solís had never been associated with in the past. This new vocality allows him to be placed in a different cultural position, transitioning from a popular grupero icon to a singer that synthesizes mariachi and musical theatre practices. The shift between Solis’ two vocalities recalls the voices of Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, emblematic figures of popular music and film, both of whom are called up in the character of Ernesto de la Cruz, as Jacky Avila notes here. While the two actors embodied a similar persona and even appeared onscreen together, the first was an untrained singer while the the second had formal vocal training and a more polished sound.

Solís’ performance in Coco is useful for understanding how both memory and forgetting works in popular music. In order to accept the authenticity of El Buki’s/Ernesto de la Cruz’ musical performance, viewers need to forget the previous vocal identity of the singer who transforms “Recuérdame” into the film’s hit song. This necessary choice to forget El Buki’s previous musical and cultural associations can be explained using Aleida Assmann´s concept of cultural memory. Assmann analyzes the relationship between remembering and forgetting as part of social transformations and notes that in order to remember some things, to construct a particular narrative of the past—or of the present—other things must be forgotten (Assmann, 2008, 98).<3> Cultural memory accounts for the ways that individual memory enters into a larger social compact regarding whether to forget or to remember key elements or symbols of the past in order to construct meaning in the present. According to Assman, cultural memory is necessary because it is linked to the process of identity formation.

Cultural memory is embodied and transmitted through performances and practices. Solís’ signature voice and its embodiment in the grupero vocal style is part of the symbolic order forming Mexican popular music and its canon. The audience remembers Solís as the singer who came from nothing to be a superstar of the contemporary Mexican grupero style.<4> As Ernesto de la Cruz, Solis’ voice is transformed and resignified through a process of disembodiment. Not only is his voice attached to a deceased character through the animation process, but it also represents a severing of his familiar vocal practice. Gone is Solis’ usual nasal, middle vocal range. Instead, he sings in the bel canto style, able to reach beautiful high notes.

Solis’ voice thus moves away from the mainstream pop sentimentality and romanticism that had previously characterized him and instead presents a new sound capable of transcending the mass-mediated pop sound with which he was associated and crossing into another type of musical canon. Solís himself has declared that his vocal performance of “Recuérdame” represented a notable shift. “Lo disfruté muchísimo porque fue muy divertido. Canté, pero diferente a como lo hago [. . .]—I enjoyed it a lot because it was really fun. I sang, but differently than I normally do [. . .] ”.<5> In order for the audience to appreciate Solis’ new vocal virtuosity in “Recuérdame,” they must forget his previous grupero sound.

Audience awareness of and appreciation for Solis’ vocal transition is evidenced by the multiple comments that appear following videos of the song on YouTube. For example, a user declares, "Mr. Buki, what a beautiful voice you have!” Another says, “Now I respect Marco Antonio [. . ..] when he sings, you don't realize that is him.” A third person points out, "it [“Recuérdame”] has nothing to do with his original voice.”"<6>

This “forgetting to remember” forms the turning point of Coco´s pathos and narrative, a necessary and inescapable negotiation of cultural memory that is as much as the requirement placed on the film’s protagonists as they process their connection with the past as it is on the contemporary viewers who must process the film’s interweaving of sonic and visual signs from the near as well as the distant past. Ultimately, Coco asks us: what do we remember and what do we forget, a process that moves beyond the living and dead.
***
<1>The grupero balada group took on the role of what is called as the grupo versátil, live bands that perform at parties such as quince años, weddings, proms and so forth. They are called versátil (versatile) because they are able to perform many different kinds of styles and genres. Alejandro Madrid has analyzed ties between the development of the balada movement and Televisa, the major Mexican television public broadcaster. However, as Madrid explains, in its beginnings the grupero balada did not have the support of televised media and was “music by low-income working class musicians for low-income working-class people”. Alejandro Madrid, Music in Mexico. Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (New York: Oxford, University Press, 2013, p. 63).
<2>https://www.elsiglodetorreon.com.mx/noticia/384893.acepta-marco-antonio-solis-que-canta-feo-pero-con-estilo.html
<3>Aleida Assman, “Canon and Archive”, Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning eds., Media and Cultural Memory, Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008, pp. 97-107.
<4>http://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/509340.html
<5>http://www.cronica.com.mx/notas/2017/1049092.html
<6>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh36KGOqHEs

***

Guadalupe Caro Cocotle, is a Mexican musicologist and singer. She has a master degree in musicology and she´s is finishing her PhD. She is a professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Estado de México.

The place of linguistic translation in the musicological enterprise is a topic that attracted a great deal of attention among members of the American Musicological Society this past fall, in response to queries regarding the role of translation examinations in the graduate curriculum. This week, Musicology Now takes on the issue of translation, not in regard to curricular imperatives but rather exploring the issue of translation itself. The platform for this discussion is the recent publication of Fernando Ortiz on Music: Selected Writing on Afro-Cuban Culture, a collection of English-language translations of selected writings by the noted twentieth-century Cuban ethnologist. In a series of four essays, by editor Robin D. Moore, David García, Susan Thomas, and David Font-Navarrete, the authors explore the politics and the ethics of translation, its impact on musical and cultural understanding, and the opportunities, challenges, and risks associated with curating and translating the work of a dominant figure in Latin American scholarship whose work also reveals deeply problematic ties to racist ideology.

By Robin Moore

In conjunction with David Font-Navarrete, David Garcia, Susan Thomas, and others, I have recently been involved in the translation of selected writings by Fernando Ortiz. The resulting book (Fernando Ortiz on Music) will appear in February, 2018 from Temple University Press. Work on the project raised many issues about the purposes of translation, the intended audiences for translation, the semantics of translation, and the appropriate framing of translation in terms of background information, among others. I discuss a few of those issues with you as part of my post, as do the others that follow.

The cover image of the book reproduces a photograph of Fernando Ortiz alongside batá drummers Pablo Roche (center) and Aguedo Morales (left). It was taken on May 30, 1937 as part of the first-ever public lecture and demonstration of Afro-Cuban religious drumming and dance entitled “The Sacred Music of Black Yorubas in Cuba.” As reflected in the visual composition of the photograph that places Ortiz at the center, he dominated these presentations; his academic voice directed all activity and mediated between the Afro-Cuban religious community and the predominantly white middle class.

Here is another photograph of Ortiz from the mid-1950s in the Aula Magna of the University of Havana. It gives a feeling for the many communities and spheres of interest Ortiz engaged with during his career. The photo depicts Ortiz (center, in a black suit) with his collaborators and admirers. To his right stands Afro-Cuban religious devotee and singer Merceditas Valdés, and next to her Dr. Clemente Inclán, Rector of the University of Havana for many years. To Ortiz’s left stands his youngest daughter, María Fernanda Ortiz, and to her left world-renowned ballet dancer Alicia Alonso. Behind Inclán and to the right in the back row stands modernist painter Wifredo Lam. In the front row (third from left) with the large iyá drum sits Raúl Díaz, a key Ortiz informant. To his immediate left is another percussionist he worked with frequently, Giraldo Rodríguez; drummer Pablo Roche is in the second row fourth from the right, in a white shirt. Through his work and public scholarship, Ortiz clearly hoped to bridge the divisions of a racially stratified society, and engaged with academics, artists, and performers of many sorts.

Perhaps the most fundamental question that arose as we initiated this project was how to justify translating the work of a white, privileged scholar and his frequently dated views on black heritage in the present day. I would argue that if one is interested in music of the African diaspora in any country, it is hard to justify a lack of familiarity with Fernando Ortiz and his scholarship. Ortiz essentially created the field of Afro-Caribbean studies and helped establish a foundation for Afrodiasporic studies more generally. Virtually everyone else interested in these topics — Roger Bastide, Harold Courlander, Melville Herskovits, Alfred Métraux, Pierre Verger, etc. — began their studies significantly later than Ortiz and in dialogue with his work. In the Caribbean and beyond, he mentored generations of researchers. Beyond this, he was one of the first authors to focus on varied forms of cultural transformation in post-colonial, post-slave societies, famously championing the notion of “transculturation.” Perhaps most significantly, Ortiz’s changing views through the years correspond to the trajectory of modern Western thought as regards Africa and race. He began his academic career as an evolutionist thinker heavily biased against Afro-descendant expression and ended up being considered one of its first advocates. I view one of the principal contributions of the introduction to the volume as documenting his conceptual shifts in this sense and contextualizing his views within a broader historical framework, as can be seen in the Table of Contents, below.

Those of us involved in the translation project struggled with what representative works of Ortiz to reproduce, on what topics, and from what periods of his life. The decisions ultimately involved reflection on which texts would be useful to English-speaking readers today. Ortiz was extremely prolific; his writing on African-influenced music, dance, and expressive culture alone (as he wrote on countless other topics) would fill at least a dozen 600-page books. Late works are less ideologically fraught, but the early ones provide important insights into his intellectual development. In the end we decided to include one essay from Ortiz’s early “criminology” phase (decidedly racist), one from the early 1920s, and the remainder from the 1940s and 1950s, the apex of his career. A number of works would have been included but for lack of space: on the history of the timbales, the history of the claves, on carnival traditions, essays on iyesá drumming, tumba francesa, yuka, bembé music and dance, Abakuá instruments, and others like the bongó, etc. Certainly many translations projects of Ortiz’s writings could yet be undertaken.

Those interested in Afro-Cuban and Afro-Caribbean music will undoubtedly find important material to study in the volume. But we also hope that students and scholars of more varied research specializations whose languages do not typically include Spanish — for instance those in fields such as in African studies, African American studies, dance, diaspora studies, folklore, subaltern studies —may be interested in Ortiz’s writings as well. Those drawn to the history of anthropology may also find the writings useful, given that they provide information about early ethnographic endeavors by scholars based in locations other than the United States and Europe. Ortiz’s work decenters existing anthropological histories and provides alternate perspectives from the developing world.

As mentioned, the introduction to the book explores Ortiz’s changing views toward Afro-diasporic heritage, when such changes took place, to what degree, and why. The significant shifts in his views on the topic are especially evident in the mid-1930s. Ortiz became a much more outspoken advocate of black heritage and its study at that time, though a substantial degree of ambivalence towards it can still be found subsequently. One issue complicating a discussion about his changing views is that Ortiz never admitted to the overtly racist presumptions in his early publications. Another is that his most controversial statements often come in the form of the citations of publications by others, without comment. I reference only one of Ortiz best-known works from the 1950s here in order to represent his late views.

It is clear that Ortiz was aware of arguments against evolutionist theories of culture as of the 1940s. At one point he states “I am not unaware that studies and analysis of the music of ‘our historical contemporaries’ must be undertaken with caution. So-called ‘primitive’ cultures cannot necessarily be considered antecedents of other more civilized ones that could be viewed as chronologically ‘secondary’ or ‘subsequent.’”<1> Here he makes a statement against evolutionist thought, yet also describes white/European culture as “more civilized.” It appears he was wrestling with the work of younger scholars, trying to make them jibe with his earlier beliefs about global stages of cultural and intellectual development.

One finds many quotes in Ortiz’s later books that suggest condescending views of black heritage (even if unintended), that reinforce negative stereotypes, and that still ascribe, at least implicitly, to evolutionist views. In the same publication cited above, for instance, Ortiz suggests that black African music is much more ‘backwards’ than white music, if we consider it from an evolutionary perspective, but more ‘advanced’ than that of whites in particular aspects…”<2> Quoting the work of archdeacon of Niger, George T. Basden, he writes “Considering what black Africans are and the environment where they live, the value of their music is as impressive, relatively, as the creations of the great masters employing perfected instruments.”<3> A more extended quote by Basden is included shortly thereafter: “The more one hears African music, the more one is conscious of its vital power. It strikes the most intimate cords in human beings and stimulates their primary instincts … Even the white European who has the most basic affinity for music will feel the elemental forces of his nature shaken by the passionate fervor of black musicians, the purveyors of their art.”<4> Given the lack of commentary surrounding such statements, one can only presume that Ortiz agreed with Basden’s views and did not interrogate the problematic terminology and viewpoints found in them.

A more extended quotation taken from the work of Percival Kirby in the 1930s and reproduced below appears to contradict Ortiz’s alleged support of cultural relativism; instead, it suggests ongoing belief in an evolutionist view of culture, despite attempts to nuance that position. The quote and those above also underscore the fact that references to blacks, Africans, and black descendants in the Americas are frequently conflated in Ortiz’s writing, so that it is unclear which critiques apply to which groups.

African music lacks the technical and instrumental possibilities that European music has today. Considering it from an evolutionist perspective, Kirby has said, referring to the music of certain Bantu peoples, that when they initiated their contact with occidental music it was comparable to European music as it existed in the tenth and eleventh centuries. They [African musics and their culture] are merely a few steps behind. And it is not deluded to say that white music, despite its sublime creations, still lacks certain possibilities achieved by blacks. European- and African-derived musics are at different levels, used for different social functions, and expressed in different vocabularies too. But both possess universal appeal and individual merits.<5>

These textual citations underscore some of the issues I have been grappling with related to the Ortiz translation project: how to frame Ortiz’s writings, how to evaluate his legacy, how to situate his work vis-à-vis that of other academics of the early and mid-twentieth century in Latin America, the United States, and Europe, and how to assess his views on race relative to other prominent intellectuals of the day. Certainly Ortiz along with other seminal figures of Latin American musicology (Mário de Andrade, Carlos Chávez, Carlos Vega, etc.) have become “sacred cows” in many respects; scholars even today are loathe to evaluate their works critically. Ortiz and others must be understood as groundbreaking thinkers, but with many ideological limitations. Their work should be included in broader historiographical discussions, put into dialogue with contemporaries around the world, and understood in relationship to broader social and political trends. As Steven Loza (2006) and others have suggested, comparative academic work of this nature extends current understandings about race, nation-building, and music, and provides an important counterbalance to existing literature too heavily focused on the developed world.

References
Loza, Steven. 2006. “Challenges to the Euroamericentric Ethnomusicological Canon: Alternatives for Graduate Readings, Theory, and Method.” Ethnomusicology 50(2): 360–371.
Ortiz, Fernando. [1950] 1965. La africanía de la música folklórica de Cuba. Havana: Editorial Universitaria.
***
<1>Ortiz [1950] 1965, 106, “No ignoramus que los estudios y aprovechamientos de la música de ‘nuestros contemporáneos históricos’ han de hacerse con cautela. No siempre pueden considerarse las culturas llamadas ‘primitivas’ como antecedentes necesarios de las que por más civilizadas se podrían tomar por cronológicamente ‘secundarias’ o ‘ulteriores’.
<2>Ortiz [1950] 1965, 107, “mucho más ‘atrasada’ que la de los blancos, si la consideramos en las perspectivas de una evolución, pero más ‘avanzada’ que la de éstos en algunos de sus valores…”
<3>Ortiz [1950] 1965, 154-55, “Considerando lo que el negro africano es y el ambiente en que vive, los méritos de su música son tan maravillosos, relativamente, como las producciones de los grandes maestros mediante los instrumentos muy perfeccionados.” The quote comes from Caridge’s Black Bush Tribes of Africa London: Seeley, Service, an Co., Ltd., 1922), 222-23.
<4>Ortiz [1950] 1965, 154, quoting Basden’s Among the Ibos of Nigeria from 1938: “Cuando más oye uno la música africana, más adquiere uno la conciencia de su vital poder. Ella hiere las cuerdas más íntimas del ser humano y estimula sus instintos primarios … Aun el blanco europeo, si tiene en él la más humilde susceptibilidad por la música, sentirá las elementales fuerzas de su naturaleza extrañamente sacudidas por el apasionado fervor de los músicos negros, posesos de su arte.”
<5> “Indudablemente, la música africana carece de las posibilidades técnicas, instrumentales, que hoy tiene la música europea. Considerándola de una perspectiva evolucionista, Kirby ha dicho, refiriéndose a la música de ciertos pueblos bantús, que cuando se inició su contacto con la música occidental, era comparable a la europea tal como ésta era en los siglos XI y X. No se trata en esto sino de pasos de distancia. Y no es iluso afirmar que la música blanca, a pesar de sus sublimes creaciones, aún carece de ciertas posibilidades logradas por los negros. Son músicas en niveles distintos, para funciones sociales distintas, y expresadas en lenguajes distintos tambien; pero todas poseen valores de captación universal y sus méritos particulares.” Ortiz [1950] 1965, 154.
***

Robin Moore is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include music and nationalism, music and race, music and socialism, philosophies of music pedagogy, and music of Cuba and the Hispanic Caribbean and Latin America more generally. His publications include Nationalizing Blackness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), Music and Revolution (University of California Press, 2006), Music of the Hispanic Caribbean (Oxford Press, 2010), Musics of Latin America (W.W. Norton, 2012), Danzón: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance (Oxford, 2013, co-written with Alejandro Madrid), College Music Curricula for a New Century (Oxford, 2017), Fernando Ortiz on Music (Temple, 2018), and numerous articles on Cuban music. He currently edits the Latin American Music Review.

By David Garcia

When I began the work of translating Fernando Ortiz’s essays on the instruments of the Cuban Congo and Arará, I had been thinking a lot about the nature of time as it factored into the research of Ortiz and his contemporaries Melville Herskovits, Katherine Dunham, Richard Waterman, and others. Time, it was clear to me, was a necessary epistemological construct for him and others to do their work, the bulk of which involved tracing the African origins of New World Black music and dance. As I was tasked to translate and edit Ortiz’s Spanish into English, I couldn’t help but to also desire translating his utilization of time (Cartesian, Christian, capitalist, national) in tracing the origins of Congo and Arará drums. Could it be that developing proficiency in research temporalities is as important as developing proficiency in research languages? Consider the following passage from Ortiz’s essay on the makuta drums of the Cuban Congo:

Makuta drums, at least the nsumbí, probably had a rope-based system of tightening the heads in the past. But today some of them have been replaced by drums with nailed-on skins that are tuned with fire, as with many other drums. In some cases, makuta drums today have threaded tuning bolts, such as the nsumbí drum of the Kunalumbu cabildo of Sagua la Grande. I do not know for certain the reason for this local adoption of threaded screws on the nsumbí of Sagua, but I imagine that the importance of the railroad in the area must have played a part. Since the time of slavery the region has been home to machine shops that repaired parts for sugar mills and rail cars. All of that probably influenced some black man in the Kongo cabildo there, resulting in the substitution of the primitive roped system of the large nsumbí for its current system of six threaded lugs. And this morphological transculturation of the nsumbí, its tuning by threaded screws, must have occurred after 1880, following abolition. At that time there emerged a violent and foolish repression of all African survivals in Cuba, even cultural, aesthetic, and deeply rooted or widespread popular practices. It was as if the Bourbon colony wanted to rid itself of its conscience and its deeply held sense of culpability for having perpetuated slavery in the Americas much longer than the metropolitan nations of Europe.<1>

In researching why so much scholarship on the African origins of music and dance took hold in the 1930s and 1940s, I came across the notion of subjective assurance in Kurt Koffka’s Principles of Gestalt Psychology.<2> What I settled on, in part, was the idea that excerpts like the one quoted above had less to do with origins and more to do with modernity’s promises of freedom, progress, and equality at a time when the world was under the yokes of fascism, racism, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Moreover, I saw that Ortiz and his colleagues produced scholarship as privileged purveyors of knowledge and, thus, brokers of modernity’s promises. By their own admission, they researched the African origins of New World Black music and dance in order to debunk the theories that buttressed fascist and racist beliefs. Yet, access to the privilege of working as a scientist was forestalled for their women colleagues, including those of color such as Katherine Dunham, Zoila Gálvez, and Zora Neale Hurston.

The idea is this: ontological freedom from modernity’s formations of race was a disorienting or absurd proposition for most, one notable exception being the Frantz Fanon of Peau noire, masques blancs. Again, I drew from Koffka’s writings on audio psychological phenomena to understand the stabilizing forces engendered by race. When we know from what direction a sound comes, Koffka states, we are able to anchor ourselves subjectively in a physical space. When we can’t perceive the direction from which a sound comes, however, we lose subjective assurance. We become, according to Koffka, disoriented and lost.<3>

Perhaps this means that when we engage music making in terms that are temporal (see Ortiz’s words and phrases in italics), we are engaging in subjective acts of anchoring ourselves in the present by virtue of the privileges modernity affords to us. It also means that these privileged positions can preempt un-raced living, as Ortiz, his scholarship, and the Cuban national project more generally did to Cubans racialized and temporalized as Black, Congo, and Arará. In other words, Ortiz’s work, most readily recognized in his notion of transculturation, constituted one kind of Cuban national project, perhaps the most pernicious in that it denied the Cuban Congo and Arará and their music a space in modernity’s present, a space that the modern Cuban nation and he not only inhabited but embodied.

I’ll conclude with a quote from a review of a lecture-concert that Ortiz organized in 1937. This event is notable for being the first time the batá drums of the Yorubá were performed for the Cuban public. Writing in the popular Cuban magazine Carteles, one reviewer reflected on his experience in the following way:

The jungle suddenly arose imaginatively under the spell of the ancestral voices. And the noble audience…felt that unknown gods had entered the temple of the theater. […] A voice started the song, and the others followed it pushed by the jungle’s black wind. […] There were two worlds facing each other.<4>

Directionality, in this instance, is both spatial and temporal: the racialized voice transports the “jungle” and “unknown gods” from the ancestral past into the modern nation’s present and future. The time and place from which the voice comes are irreconcilable with modern Cuba. In short, Ortiz’s transculturation project sustained the Cuban nation’s project wherein whiteness functioned to serve modernity’s goal of preempting un-raced living for certain groups of people.
***
<1>The original text appears in Fernando Ortiz, Los instrumentos de la música afrocubana, vol. 3 (Havana: Ministerio de Educación, Dirección de Cultura, 1952), 430–445 (my emphasis).
<2>Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 220-221.
<3>Kurt Koffka, “Perception: An Introduction to the Gestalt-Theorie,” Psychological Bulletin 19, no. 10 (October 1922), 531.
<4>Ángel Lázaro, “La academia y los tambores,” Carteles, June 20, 1937, 11 (my emphasis).

***

David Garcia is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the music of the Americas with an emphasis on African diasporic and Latinx music. His publications include Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music (Temple University Press, 2006) and Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017). He is currently editing a critical reader on the history of Latinx music, dance, and theater in the United States, 1783-1900.

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