Frottola Schmottola: Rethinking Italian Song ca. 1500 (AMS) (original) (raw)
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“Rags and Old Iron”: Memory, Masculinity, and Polyvocality in Oscar Brown Jr.’s Song-Poems
American Musicological Society Conference, San Antonio, Texas, 2018
Oscar Brown Jr.’s music, poetry, and theatrical works challenged generic boundaries within and across medias. An artist-activist of the Black Arts Movement, Brown developed a Black aesthetic strategy based in intertextuality, collaboration, and theatricality. Responding to his assemblage of medias, Amiri Baraka categorized Brown’s work as “poem-songs” or “song poems.” Within his performances, Brown manipulates musical genres and vocal timbre to move through various personas, presenting multiple and simultaneous Black identities. This essay explores Brown’s use of African American folk traditions and considers his aesthetics and politics within the context of the Black Arts Movement. Though often marginalized in discussions of Black Arts poetry and music, Brown’s weaving of speech and song precedes the development of the New Black Poetry as defined by Stephen Henderson. Additionally, Brown disrupts the hypermasculized Black identity central to notions of Black militancy and Black Power politics. I suggest that Brown’s polyvocality presents a layering of identities, which challenges singular notions of Black masculinity within the Black Power Era. Brown achieves this by moving through multiple vocal timbres, but also by reclaiming African American folk traditions such as street cries and hollers. I read and hear Brown’s poem-songs through Toni Morrison’s trope of “rememory” presented in her novel, Beloved. Brown’s use of African American folk tales and music can be understood as a reclamation of culture and heritage, which he uses not only to provide a memorial and record of these traditions, but also to connect them to Black Power politics.
Alan Lomax recorded almost 1,500 folk songs throughout Spain between June 1952 and January 1953. The material results of his journey, which are preserved at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, include music on magnetic tape, but also photographs, field notebooks, invoices, annotated maps, letters, diaries, and even the manuscript of part of a book for publication. These documents can only palely reflect the deep impact that Lomax's visit must have had on the inhabitants of all the small villages where he recorded. Lomax's sound recordings offer a unique opportunity to approach the political situation under Franco's dictatorship, the poverty of the country, and the moral constrictions faced by women through the eyes of Lomax and Jeanette Bell, his assistant in this journey. Lomax showed a special interest in Spanish women's lives and his documents contain constant references to Bell, reflecting the important role that she played in helping Spanish women open up for the recordings and talk about topics that they would never have discussed with a man. This paper aims to analyze how women, from their own spaces, contributed to setting up this collection of sound recordings, by analyzing the documents from Lomax's Spain trip, using a conceptual framework drawn from oral history, and technological tools. Bell's memoirs, scattered among Lomax's papers, contain comments on her experiences throughout their journey, her role in the recording process, and her feelings. These demonstrate her connections with Spanish women, and are very rich in comments on the particularities of Spanish female musical culture. The approach to the lives and singing of women through the otherness of Lomax and Bell suggests that oral tradition is a key question that must be asked to challenge the loss of women's voices in historical accounts and to place women on the map of music history. This paper is a result of the project conducted thanks to the Jon B. Lovelace Fellowship for the Study of the Alan Lomax Collection, at The John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress, between January and September 2017.
Surrealist Sounds: French Film Music and the Cinematic Avant-Garde
Surrealist cinema flourished in France in the late 1920s, but following the widespread adoption of synchronized sound in Europe in 1929, its future was uncertain. The anti-musical stance of many Surrealists (particularly André Breton), who believed that the abstract nature of music violated surrealism’s philosophical, literary, and aesthetic principles, made the very concept of surrealist sound film problematic. With the heightened realism of synchronized dialogue and the presence of a recorded musical soundtrack, music’s role in the new audiovisual form threatened to destabilize the dream logic that surrealist filmmakers had established in silent cinema. But the new technology also offered an opportunity for composers and directors to renegotiate music’s role in surrealist film. I argue that music became a crucial tool in early conceptions of surrealist audiovisual cinema, when sound film’s potential energy was at its height. I examine two of France’s first sound films—Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’or (1930) and Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète (1930)—both of which favored an audiovisual aesthetic relying heavily on surrealist principles. These controversial films deliberately avoided realism, employing music as a tool for audiovisual juxtaposition, pastiche, and shock value. For Le Sang d’un poète composer Georges Auric wrote a score that Cocteau proceeded to cut up and reorder, an experiment in “accidental synchronization” and a means of avoiding explicit musical signification. Buñuel incorporated preexisting classical works—by composers including Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner—into L’Age d’or and juxtaposed them with absurd, even offensive, images. Though their approaches to the soundtrack differed, both directors experimented with film rhythm and pacing, with contrasting synchronism and audiovisual counterpoint, and with violating expectations of audiovisual unity. This brief but productive intersection between avant-garde cinematic and musical modernist practices at a critical juncture in France’s nascent sound film production influenced subsequent French cinematic experiments, particularly those of the Nouvelle Vague. My analysis of the music in L’Age d’or and Le Sang d’un poète theorizes the audiovisual elements constituting surrealist sound film; it also highlights the inherently surreal characteristics of the sound film medium itself, characteristics that most mainstream filmmakers would later try their hardest to erase.