Analysis of New (sometimes American) Music
Upcoming: Interpretive Agency: Flexibilities, Constraints, and Departures in Reena Esmail’s Jhula Jhule (AMS/SMT Denver CO 2023)
A piece of music is an ecosystem; it “lives” because of an interconnected community of individuals who each contribute to the creation of the work. A composer can curate musical parameters–duration, feel or style, motivic material, large-scale form–but a score also creates and restricts interpretive space. While scholars have offered extensive engagement with the musical experience of the listener (Sessions 1962, Kozak 2020) and the performer’s role in communicating musical structure (Said 1991, Cone 1968) an underexplored portion of the musical continuum from composer to listener is the flexible, interpretive space from score to performer.
Drawing on the analytical frameworks of Daphne Leong (2019), Alexandra Pierce (2007), and Pauline Oliveros (2005) which center the performer’s experience as a crucial site of interpretive analysis, this paper traces the transitions and distributions of musical ownership along a continuum from composer, through performers, to listeners, cycling and recycling along the spectrum. Using Jhula Jhule (2013) by Reena Esmail as an analytic case study, I outline the limitations and affordances of the notated score (Figure 1) as a foundation for a performer’s analytical work. Adherences, departures, and movement beyond the artifact of notation are traced aurally, through three different recordings of the piece.
This paper highlights a crucial and under-discussed aspect of analysis: the in-time artifact of a performance. The proposed analytical framework accounts for the elements Esmail seeks to control in her notational choices while also documenting the room made for a performer’s own, individual interpretation. The first portion of the paper expounds the limits and freedoms offered by notation, and highlights points where the score encourages artistic choice (Figures 2 and 3). By building a clear sonic and gestural world with more fixed notational parameters, Esmail empowers the performer to make informed, interpretive choices in the more pliable moments of the piece.
The second portion of the talk engages the interpretive freedoms taken by performers in the three cited recordings from an embodied, or body-first perspective. With Pierce’s gestural models (Figures 4.1, 4.2, and 5) as a starting point, I further disengage the common conduit of score-to-listener in service of highlighting the embodied mode of knowing present in performer-oriented analysis. I scrutinize how the artifact of the score invigorates flexible performance outcomes through the omission of historically standardized expectations.
Esmail’s score bridges her non-western source material and the typical constraints of standardized western notation. She crafts an additionally unique entry into her work by including detailed program notes and links to her external source material on her website. This extra-musical offering provides a contextual support for performers, an effort which expands and deepens the ways to inform interpretation and performance practice. By challenging perceptions and historical, composer-centered frames in western classical traditions, I shift the artistic attentions of music-making into a more equitable balance between involved parties, recognizing the ways in which a performer’s analytic work and interpretive choices shape our attention to—and beyond—the score.
Past: Society for American Music (New Orleans LA 2019)
Margaret Bonds’ Three Dream Portraits as it Reflects 20th-Century America in Song
Margaret Bonds’ compositional craft is impeccable, yet her work is significantly less performed than the works of white male composers from her time. Three Dream Portraits (1959) deserves recognition equal to art songs by composers like Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem; Bonds’ work artfully illuminates an under-recognized part of 20th-century art song. The song cycle reflects trajectories of Classical American music and, in her selection and setting of texts by Langston Hughes, unflinchingly folds in sonic aspects of and imbues Bonds’ identity as an African American into her work in a way that is deliberate, important, and artful. This paper examines the reflections of Bonds’ identity into her music and the reflections of her music onto the larger fabric of 20th-century America and American music. Linked specifically to text setting and melodic composition, performing this triptych brings issues of Civil Rights, voice, visibility, and acceptance into discussion within the concert hall.
Currently, composers like TyShawn Sorey (Cycles of my Being, Josephine Baker: a Personal Portrait) and organizations like American Modern Opera Company (staging Tom-Tom and Where You There) are working to raise up previously silenced or passed over voices of women and minorities in their respective media. Their work exposes more audiences to issues and identities they may not expect to encounter in current classical music programming. In scholarship, much of Bonds’ work remains unexplored, though it offers a viewpoint crucial to America’s musical identity; Three Dream Portraits occupies a long-hollow space in the library of the 20th-century song.
In Progress: Prosody and Text Setting in Langston Hughes’ and Margaret Bonds’ “Dream Variation(s)”
An article/interactive project that excavates the space between text setting, rhythm, and detailed analysis of Langston Hughes’ own recitation of “Dream Variations.”
There is more than one way to successfully set a text. While Margaret Bonds’ setting of “Dream Variation” is the focus of the article, many composers have set this poem, all (in my opinion) successful interpretations in their own sphere. Bonds’ setting is unique, however, because of its close alignment with Langston Hughes’ own spoken performance of the same poem.
The article opens with an introduction to the working relationship between Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes, and explores Hughes’ poem, “Dream Variations,” on its own. It then dives deeply into Bonds’ song, building a sonic and compositional palette for the piece as a way of more effectively situating Hughes’ prosody in the song. In addition to explorations of rhythm, meter, and contour in relation to text setting, I establish modes for discussing harmony and pitch choice as it supports--and creates friction with--the vocal line.
After the sonic footprint of the piece is established, I compare elements of Hughes’ own recitation of his poem with Bonds’ setting of the text using pitch and rhythm visualization software. I additionally highlight text setting that shows Bonds’ artistic sensitivity to text beyond her own prosodic reference to Hughes. To close, I consider the treatment of key points in Hughes’ poem as they are set by Florence Price, Ricky Ian Gordon, and Richard Thompson, highlighting commonalities and differences at these moments as a way of further recognizing Bonds’ particularly unique treatment.
In Progress: Prosody and Text Setting in Langston Hughes’ and Margaret Bonds’ “Dream Variation(s)”
An article/interactive project that excavates the space between text setting, rhythm, and detailed analysis of Langston Hughes’ own recitation of “Dream Variations.”
There is more than one way to successfully set a text. While Margaret Bonds’ setting of “Dream Variation” is the focus of the article, many composers have set this poem, all (in my opinion) successful interpretations in their own sphere. Bonds’ setting is unique, however, because of its close alignment with Langston Hughes’ own spoken performance of the same poem.
The article opens with an introduction to the working relationship between Margaret Bonds and Langston Hughes, and explores Hughes’ poem, “Dream Variations,” on its own. It then dives deeply into Bonds’ song, building a sonic and compositional palette for the piece as a way of more effectively situating Hughes’ prosody in the song. In addition to explorations of rhythm, meter, and contour in relation to text setting, I establish modes for discussing harmony and pitch choice as it supports--and creates friction with--the vocal line.
After the sonic footprint of the piece is established, I compare elements of Hughes’ own recitation of his poem with Bonds’ setting of the text using pitch and rhythm visualization software. I additionally highlight text setting that shows Bonds’ artistic sensitivity to text beyond her own prosodic reference to Hughes. To close, I consider the treatment of key points in Hughes’ poem as they are set by Florence Price, Ricky Ian Gordon, and Richard Thompson, highlighting commonalities and differences at these moments as a way of further recognizing Bonds’ particularly unique treatment.