Doctoral Writing Group : Many shades of blue

Much of contemporary music derives from Southern Folk music. This is problematic in that musicians frequently appropriate styles and profit in a way that is disrespectful of the sources, e.g. Iggy Azalea, a white Australian, rapping, sampling African American artists, and twerking (a highly sexualized dance technique). Such performances reflect modern day minstrelsy. The problem of appropriation has been investigated at length from Georgina Born Western Music and its Others and Christopher Small Music of a Common Tongue, but they do not offer solutions to how can composers write music that is sourced from a material without disrespectfully exploiting the sources?

I attempt navigate around these problems of appropriation by analyzing the musical sources in the same way conservatory students analyze and exercise counterpoint and harmony. I clearly state who are my sources and how I adapted the musical technique. I refrain from using samples and instead perform and record all the instrumental, vocal parts and field recordings myself. Avoiding sampling allows me to express music from my own position and not literally distort the voices of others. And I choose the subject material to reflect contemporary issues both from the sources and in the present day.

The musical drama Hamlet/Ophelia follows the emotional trajectory of Hamlet and Ophelia in the play. The composition is devised through Signifyin(g) theory and Intertextuality by exploring the homologies between Southern Folk idioms, contemporary music to Shakespeare and intertextual interpretations of theater, Shakespeare’s writing and my musical interpretation the characters’ behavior. I look for meeting points between all these elements and strive to represent them through technique, form, instrumentation, tonality, harmony, rhythm, performance delivery, signifiers and their interpretational meanings.

In the following text, I begin by explaining describing structure of the musical drama and then delve into the “songs” individually. I describe problematic issues colliding from technique and delivery between the different sources, where elements succeeded and failed.

Re: Many shades of blue

by Donald Wetherick - Tuesday, 16 May 2017, 9:23 PM

Hi Johanna. Thanks for playing some extracts from your work, and the sources, on Tuesday. Apologies for the delay! Re your abstract, and following the Kalmer and Thomson guidelines:

Locate: I wasn't clear who your 'community of practice' is here. Is it musicologists like Small and Born (focusing on the ethics of appropriation of 'others' music) or the Signifying Theory/Intertextuality community (don't know much about them!) which seems to address more the combining of materials from different sources (e.g. Shakespeare and Southern Folk)? Or composers/music theatre directors? Or if all of these, is there a single common question/debate out there that you can relate your project to?

Focus: I don't know Iggy Azalea (my ignorance) but for that reason it didn't 'grab' me as an example of what you mean. It's struck me, though, that people often appropriate things from Shakespeare too in ways that could be called 'disrespectful', yet this doesn't get the response that you raise regarding Southern Folk. Are some (or all) sources fair game? Is the project perhaps about your process of creation, rather than debates about cultural appropriation themselves? You've decided to use Southern Folk and Shakespeare as inspirations because that's what you as a composer/performer/artist feel will work! The challenge is how to make this work, and the ethical aspect of appropriation of Southern Folk music is only one part of this. For example, the technical approach you describe (analysis) could be seen as a compositional choice, not necessarily an ethical one. So even how you reached that choice could be explored as part of the project... I'm getting carried away, but there's something about how the study (as research) and the creative process (as project) relate to each other that could go in a number of different ways, and you could try other ways of doing this. The current abstract may not be the only, or best, way to connect the two?

Report: You set out what you have already done/are doing compositionally/creatively. But only in the last sentence do I get a sense of the research angle/output itself: where you plan to discuss the issues involved in actually making the songs. And now the ethical issue of appropriation you started with no longer seems the main issue at all - all sorts of other valid and important considerations come into play. Perhaps this is where to start, and work backwards?

Argue: I don't think you reach an argument stage in the current abstract. Is that fair? You talk about evaluating your own work ('success' and 'failure' - whatever that means?) rather than contributing to a debate. Yet I see enormous potential for this piece of musical theatre to be a case study of how to combine/rework existing sources (Shakespeare and Southern Folk) in a contemporary way (ethical, relevant, original, inter-textual, whatever...).

I'm playing with what it might look like to start with paragraph three - your work Hamlet/Ophelia - and the ideas in it, and then problematise this: is it ethical? is it relevant? is it 'successful'? What problems does it raise, and how did you address them as creator?

Hope this is helpful, and happy to talk further.

best,

Donald