Baur, S., Knapp, R., & Warwick, J. (Eds.) - (2008) - Musicological Identities Essays in Honor of Susan McClary (1st Ed.) - Routledge.

Musicological Identities
Taylor & Francis

Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
Musicological Identities
Essays in Honor of Susan McClary
Edited by
Steven Baur
Dalhousie University, Canada
Raymond Knapp
UCLA, USA
Jacqueline Warwick
Dalhousie University, Canada
ROUTLEDGE
Routledge
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First published 2008 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge

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Copyright © Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp and Jacqueline Warwick 2008
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Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp and Jacqueline Warwick have asserted their moral right under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Musicological identities : essays in honor of Susan McClary
1. Music – History and criticism
I. McClary, Susan II. Knapp, Raymond III. Baur, Steven,
1966– IV. Warwick, Jacqueline C., 1969–
780
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Musicological identities : essays in honor of Susan McClary / edited by Raymond Knapp,
Steven Baur and Jacqueline Warwick.
p. cm.
is
ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-6302-7 (alk. paper)
1. Music—History and criticism. I. McClary, Susan. II. Knapp, Raymond. III. Baur, Steven,
1966– IV. Warwick, Jacqueline C., 1969–
ML55.M375 2008
780—dc22
2007014764
ISBN 9780754663027 (hbk)
Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita.

Contents
Tribute to Susan McClary vii

Rose Rosengard Subotnik
Author Biographies ix
Acknowledgements xv
Explanatory Note about Online Supporting Material xvii
Introduction xix
Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp, and Jacqueline Warwick
Part I: Musical Identities: Gender, Sexuality, and Race
1 Value and Meaning in The Magic Flute 3

Lawrence Kramer
2 Whirling Fanatics: Orientalism, Politics, and Religious Rivalry in

Western Operatic Representation of the Orient 17
Nasser Al-Taee
3 Reveling in the Rubble: Where is the Love? 31

George Lipsitz
4 “Waltz Me Around Again Willie”: Gender, Ideology and Dance in the

Gilded Age 47
Steven Baur
5 “And the Colored Girls Sing . . .”: Backup Singers and the Case of the
Blossoms 63
Jacqueline Warwick
6 The Universe Will Tell You What It Needs: Being, Time, Sondheim 77
Paul Attinello
Part II: Music and Temporality
7 Making Time: The Soundtrack and Narrative Time 95

Daniel Goldmark
8 Sleights of Time in the Music of Cassandra Wilson 107

Charles Hiroshi Garrett
vi Musicological Identities
9 Temporal Turntables: On Temporality and Corporeality in Dance
Culture 121
Stan Hawkins
10 Resisting the Sublime: Loose Synchronization in La Belle et la Bête

and The Dark Side of Oz 135
John Richardson
11 Of Railroads, Beethoven, and Victorian Modernity 149

Ruth A. Solie
12 Marking Time in Pacific Overtures: Reconciling East, West, and History

within the Theatrical Now of a Broadway Musical 163
Raymond Knapp
Part III: Reinventing Analysis
13 Three Little Essays on Evanescence 179

Mitchell Morris
14 Gender Sonics: The Voice of Patsy Cline 191

Richard Leppert
15 Shoddy Equipment for Living? Deconstructing the Tin Pan Alley Song 205
16 Musicology Beyond the Score . . . and the Performance: Making Sense

of the Creak on Miles Davis’s “Old Folks” 219
David Ake
17 Uninvited: Gender, Schizophrenia, and Alanis Morissette 235

Robert Walser
Susan McClary: Bibliography 243

Index 249
Tribute to Susan McClary
A woman goes to an astrologer to find out what lies ahead in her career. “What are
you doing now?” asks the astrologer. “I’m a Harvard PhD whom no one will hire or
publish,” says the woman. “Easy,” replies the astrologer. “You will become one of
the most famous and admired musicologists in the world.”
Easy it wasn’t. Yet the portents of Susan McClary’s unlikely career trajectory
were visible in responses that I witnessed to her very first job application. “Her cover
letter is too modest”; “Her methods are unorthodox”; “She writes well, and her work
is the most interesting of all the applicants’. But it opens up questions.” Susan didn’t
get the job.
But neither did she remake herself to fit the musicological world of the 1970s.
Instead she held on to the qualities that distinguished her: the brilliant, exciting,
ever-probing mind; the incomparable originality; the unshakable honesty and
independence; the ability to inspire new questions and new ways of questioning; the
beautifully direct writing that cuts through historical and intellectual tangles; and
most impressive of all, despite a résumé that over the decades has become bejeweled
with high honors, the modesty.
Festschriften are no longer in fashion. Once upon a time, a well-known scholar
could count on celebrating a special birthday or two with a collection of essays
by his [sic] colleagues and students. Today most publishers balk at the prospect;
and scholars don’t ordinarily arouse the passion required to produce a Festschrift.
Susan McClary is the exception. An extraordinarily generous scholar, colleague, and
teacher, she has touched each of us in all three capacities. When we are all long
forgotten, Susan’s influence will remain because of her profound effect on the shape
of our discipline and on the minds of so many students—hers, ours, and our students’
students. That astrologer was an astronomer. We offer this Festschrift with love to
Susan McClary, a real star.
Taylor & Francis
Author Biographies
David Ake is Associate Professor in the Department of Music and Dance at the
University of Nevada, Reno. He has played piano alongside many of today’s
outstanding improvising musicians and appears on a number of recordings, including
the solo-piano CD In Between. He authored the book Jazz Cultures (University of
California Press, 2002), as well as articles for American Music, Jazz Perspectives,
The Journal of Musicological Research, and the Cambridge Companion to Jazz.
Ake holds a PhD in musicology and an MA in ethnomusicology from UCLA,
where he studied with Susan McClary and Robert Walser, as well as degrees in jazz
performance from the University of Miami and the California Institute of the Arts.
Nasser Al-Taee is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of

Tennessee, Knoxville. He specializes in eighteenth-century Orientalism as well as in
the political, social, and cultural exchange between East and West. He holds a BA in
Music from the University of Washington, and an MA and PhD in Musicology from
UCLA, where he studied with Susan McClary, Robert Walser, and Raymond Knapp.
He has published in The Opera Quarterly, Popular Music, Echo, and Pride. He is
currently working on two books, one on musical exoticism in eighteenth-century
opera and the other on music of the Middle East.
Paul Attinello is Assistant Professor in Music at the University of Newcastle and has
also taught at the University of Hong Kong and UCLA. He earned his MA and PhD
in Systematic Musicology at UCLA, where he studied with Susan McClary. He has
published in the Journal of Musicological Research, Musik-Konzepte, Musica/Realtá,
and MLA Notes, and his work also appears in numerous collections, anthologies, and
encyclopedias. He created the Newsletter of the Gay & Lesbian Study Group of the
American Musicological Society, editing its first three volumes, and contributed to
Queering the Pitch: The New Lesbian & Gay Musicology (Routledge, 1994).
Steven Baur is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Dalhousie

University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He earned his PhD in Musicology at UCLA,
where he studied with Susan McClary, Raymond Knapp, and Robert Walser. His
primary areas of research include nineteenth-century music, American music, and
cultural studies in music. He has published articles on the music of Felix Mendelssohn,
Maurice Ravel, and the Beatles, and his work appears in the Journal of the American
Musicological Society, American Music, and Popular Music and Society. He co-
edited The Beatles and Philosophy (Open Court, 2006) and is currently working on
a book investigating the role of music in defining and negotiating class relationships
in late-nineteenth-century America.
X Musicological Identities
Charles Hiroshi Garrett is Assistant Professor in the Department of Musicology at
the University of Michigan. He received his PhD in musicology from UCLA, where
he studied with Susan McClary and Robert Walser. His dissertation, Struggling to
Define a Nation: American Music in the Twentieth Century, received the Wiley
Housewright Award from the Society for American Music, and his work appears
in leading journals including the Journal of the American Musicological Society,
American Music, Echo, and Notes. Garrett contributed to the collection Playing
Changes (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and currently serves as Editor-in-
Chief for The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition.
Daniel Goldmark is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Case Western

Reserve University. He received his BA in music from the University of California,
Riverside, with a focus on voice and classical guitar, and he holds an MA and
PhD in musicology from UCLA, where he studied with Robert Walser and Susan
McClary. Goldmark works on American popular music, film and cartoon music, and
the history of the music industry, and he is the author of Tunes for ’Toons: Music
and the Hollywood Cartoon (University of California Press, 2005). He co-edited
The Cartoon Music Book (A Cappella Press, 2001) with Yuval Taylor, and, with
Richard Leppert and Lawrence Kramer, he is co-editor of Beyond the Soundtrack:
Representing Music in Cinema (University of California Press, 2007). His current
research is on music publishing and Tin Pan Alley in the early 1900s.
Stan Hawkins is Professor of Music at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is widely

published within the field of popular music studies and is author of Settling the
Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics (Ashgate, 2002), co-editor (with Sheila
Whiteley and Andy Bennett) of Music, Space, and Place: Popular Music and
Cultural Identity (Ashgate, 2004) and (with John Richardson) of Essays in Sound &
Vision (Helsinki, 2007). He is Editor-in-Chief for the international journal, Popular
Musicology Online and at present is completing a book on British popular music
and masculinity. His approach to identity politics and gender studies within a
musicological discourse is directly influenced and inspired by the work of Susan
McClary.
Raymond Knapp is Professor and Chair of Musicology at the University of

California, Los Angeles. He received his BA from Harvard University (where Susan
McClary was TA for his music history course) and PhD from Duke University. His
books include Symphonic Metamorphoses: Subjectivity and Alienation in Mahler’s
Re-Cycled Songs (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), The American Musical and the
Formation of National Identity (Princeton University Press, 2005), and The American
Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton University Press,
2006). His articles appear in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th
Century Music, American Music, Acta musicologica, Cambridge Opera Journal,
and The Journal of Musicological Research, among others.
Lawrence Kramer is Professor of English and Music at Fordham University

and the editor of 19th Century Music (in which he has published work by Susan
Author Biographies xi
McClary on Schubert). He is the author of nine books, including Why Classical
Music Still Matters (University of California Press, 2007), Critical Musicology
and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays (Ashgate, 2007), Opera and
Modern Culture (University of California Press, 2004), Musical Meaning: Toward
a Critical History (University of California Press, 2001), Franz Schubert: Sexuality,
Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge University Press, 1998), After the Lovedeath: Sexual
Violence and the Making of Culture (University of California Press, 1997), Classical
Music and Postmodern Knowledge (University of California Press, 1995), Music
as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (University of California Press, 1990), and Music
and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (University of California Press,
1984). With Richard Leppert and Daniel Goldmark, he is co-editor of Beyond the
Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (University of California Press, 2007).
Richard Leppert is Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor in the

Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of
Minnesota. His books include Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music. Selected,
with Critical Introduction, Commentary, and Notes (University of California Press,
2002), The Nude: The Cultural Rhetoric of the Body in the Art of Western Modernity
(Westview/Perseus, 2007), Art & the Committed Eye: The Cultural Functions of
Imagery (HarperCollins, 1996), The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, & the
History of the Body (University of California Press, 1993), and Music & Image:
Domesticity, Ideology & Socio-Cultural Formation in 18th-Century England
(Cambridge University Press, 1988). He co-edited with Susan McClary Music &
Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge
University Press, 1987), and his articles appear in numerous leading journals and
essay collections.
George Lipsitz is Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of

California, Santa Barbara and has also taught at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Minnesota. His
books include American Studies in a Moment of Danger (University of Minnesota
Press, 2001), The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Temple University Press,
1998), Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s (University of Illinois
Press, 1994), Dangerous Crossroads (Verso Press, 1994), and Time Passages
(University of Minnesota Press, 1990). He and Susan McClary worked together
as faculty members at the University of Minnesota and as co-editors (with Robert
Walser) of the Music Culture Series at Wesleyan University Press.
Mitchell Morris is Associate Professor of Musicology at UCLA, where he—along

with Susan McClary—has won a Distinguished Teaching Award. He specializes in
music at the fin-de-siècle, Russian and Soviet music, 20th-century American music,
opera, rock and soul, and gay/lesbian studies. He has published essays on gay men
and opera, disco and progressive rock, musical ethics, and contemporary music
in journals such as repercussions and American Music, as well as in collections
such as Beyond Structural Listening?: Musicology and Difference (University
of California Press, 2005), En Travesti (Columbia University Press, 1995), and
xii Musicological Identities
Audible Traces (Carciofoli, 1999). He is currently preparing a book entitled The
Persistence of Sentiment: Essays on Pop Music in the 70s (University of California
Press, forthcoming), and is working on a project entitled Echo of Wilderness: Music,
Nature, and Nation in the United States, 1880–1945.
John Richardson is Research Fellow and leader of an Academy of Finland research

project in Jyväskylä. Prior to this he was Lecturer at City University, London,
and Senior Lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is author of Singing
Archeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (Wesleyan University Press, 1999) and co-
editor of Essays on Sound and Vision with Stan Hawkins (Helsinki University Press,
2007). Currently in the final stages of work on the book Dialogues in Music and
Visual Media, Richardson has published on popular music, avant-garde music, music
and visual media, and contemporary Finnish music in journals including Journal of
Popular Music Studies, Popular Musicology Online, Organised Sound, Echo, and
Popular Music and Society. In addition to his musicological work, he is a performing
musician and composer. Susan McClary was an external examiner for his doctoral
dissertation and supervised his postdoctoral research at UCLA in 1996.
Ruth A. Solie is Sophia Smith Professor of Music at Smith College and was the
founding chair of Women’s Studies there; she has also taught as a visiting professor
at Yale, Columbia, and Harvard universities. She is the author of Music in Other
Words: Victorian Conversations (University of California Press, 2004) and editor of
Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (University
of California Press, 1993). Her articles and reviews have appeared in the Journal of
the American Musicological Society, 19th Century Music, the Journal of the History
of Ideas, the Journal of Women’s History, Victorian Literature and Culture, and
other leading scholarly publications, and she is a former president of the American
Musicological Society. She and Susan McClary have known each other, primarily
as early contributors to the development of feminist musicology, since both were
finishing dissertations.
Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Professor of Music at Brown University, is best known

for having pioneered the study in American musicology of Adorno’s writings on
music. Her teaching career began at the University of Chicago, where Susan McClary
participated in some of her early seminars on critical theory. She has published
two books of essays, Developing Variations and Deconstructive Variations, both
with the University of Minnesota Press, and has held the ACLS and Guggenheim
Fellowships. At present she is at work on a book about Tin Pan Alley songs and the
ethics of American assimilation.
Robert Walser is Professor of Musicology at UCLA. He earned doctorates in both

musicology and musical performance at the University of Minnesota and has taught at
the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College. His books include Running with
the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Wesleyan University
Press, 1993), which won the Irving Lowens Award for Distinguished Scholarship
in American Music, and Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (Oxford, 1999).
Author Biographies xiii
A recipient of NEH and ACLS Fellowships, he was editor of the journal American
Music and has published articles on various topics in jazz and popular music studies.
An accomplished performer of jazz, rock, and other music on trumpet, electric guitar,
and saxophones, he is currently learning to play bass, drums, and trombone. He and
Susan McClary were married in 1990.
Jacqueline Warwick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Dalhousie

University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, specializing in gender and music and popular
music studies. She earned her PhD at UCLA, where she studied with Susan McClary
and Robert Walser. Her publications include articles on the girl groups of the 1960s,
the Beatles, and bhangra subcultures in the South Asian diaspora, and her work
appears in book collections and journals such as Popular Music and Society, the
Journal of the American Musicological Society, and Popular Musicology Online. She
is the author of Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s
(Routledge, 2007) and was the founding editor of the online publication Echo.
Taylor & Francis
Acknowledgements
By its nature, this book has required the contributions of many people, and at the risk
of leaving people out, we wish to thank some of them here. The authors themselves
have been wonderful to work with, and our first thanks go to them. Ashgate has been
supportive and helpful throughout; we wish to thank Heidi May, Sarah Charters,
and the rest of the team there for their guidance and diligence. Joseph Kerman was
instrumental in moving the project ahead in the early stages. The UCLA Library has
been both materially and spiritually supportive; we thank Gordon Theil and Stephen
Davison especially, for their generous expertise and for arranging to host the book’s
website. Additional support for the website and indexing were provided by the UCLA
Council on Research and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music’s Department of
Musicology. Special thanks go to Marcus Desmond Harmon for his splendid work
on the index and assistance in proofing the book, and to Holley Replogle-Wong, who
designed and built the website, tirelessly managing its sometimes vexing details.
And thanks to Gordon Haramaki, who conceived and drafted the first iteration of the
book’s cover, which so beautifully projects the spirit that has inspired and guided
this book: the generous, transformative mind of Susan McClary, who has, always,
our most profound thanks.
Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp, and Jacqueline Warwick
Taylor & Francis
Explanatory Note about Online
Supporting Material
Supporting material for this book, in the form of audio examples, pictures, film clips
and stills, musical examples, facsimiles of historical material, and supplementary
annotation and bibliography, is available online at http://epub.library.ucla.edu/
knapp/mcclaryidentities
Each example is keyed to its appropriate place in the text, and numbered
sequentially within each essay, using the following notation (this particular indication
is for the eighth example for chapter twelve): 12.8
To see or hear an example, simply click on the appropriate icon on the website.
You must have RealPlayer installed on your computer; a link on the main website
will direct you to a source for this program if it is not already installed.
Ashgate takes no responsibility for the content of the website mentioned here.
Taylor & Francis
Introduction
As Galileo is reported to have uttered after he was forced to recant his theories before the
Inquisition, “And yet it moves.” It doesn’t really matter that academic disciplines have
tried to insist that music is only music, that it cannot mean anything else. In the social
world, music achieves these effects all the time.
Meaning is not inherent in music, but neither is it in language; both are activities that are
kept afloat only because communities of people invest in them, agree collectively that
their signs serve as valid currency.
When Susan McClary wrote these sentences in 1991, she was responding to the
fact that standard approaches to studying music did not at that time involve much
attention to questions of cultural meaning. The ways in which music narrates,
communicates and engages emotion, constructs identities, and manages our sense of
time and movement, were not of paramount importance to the field of musicology
at the end of the 1980s. Instead, music scholarship of the post-war era tended to
steer clear of this messy business in favor of quasi-scientific projects such as sketch
studies, biographies, and formal and reductive analyses. The resulting insistence
on positivist research on the one hand, and form as content on the other, did not
simply eschew important dimensions of musical experience—these approaches
actually came to circumscribe the repertories that counted as Great Music worthy
of scholarly attention.
And so, the most important project of the “new musicology,” which came to
prominence in the 1990s, was, arguably, to interrogate deeply ingrained notions
of Great Music’s autonomy, timelessness, and ability to transcend social context.
Taking their cue from earlier scholars such as Joseph Kerman, Leo Treitler,
Maynard Solomon, and Christopher Small, new musicologists—including many of
the contributors to this volume—have created a significant body of writings that
works both to break down artificial distinctions between great, timeless music and
(ostensibly) trite, ephemeral music. The work of these scholars tries also to get at
the ways in which musical texts produce their meanings. Susan McClary, the most
widely known of the new musicologists, has wryly referred to this endeavour as
“effing the ineffable.”
McClary’s extraordinary influence both inside and outside her discipline is
unmatched by any other musicologist, and she has received many honors, including
a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1995–2000) and invitations to deliver the
Ernest Bloch Lectures at University of California, Berkeley (1993) and the Donald
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis,

University of Minnesota Press, 2002 [1991]), p. 21.
Susan McClary, “Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in Seventeenth-
Century French Music,” Echo, 2/2 (2000), paragraph 30.
xx Musicological Identities
J. Grout Lecture at Cornell University (1993). Her work has been translated into
more than twelve languages, and her ideas have resonated in the work of feminist
theorists, literary critics, media scholars, dance historians, theater historians, and
sociologists. It is hard to name another scholar of music who has had such a profound
impact on contemporary thought, and McClary remains one of the most sought-after
speakers working today, accepting lecture engagements internationally. In this book,
seventeen distinguished scholars contribute essays celebrating her transformative
contributions to scholarship.
Because her work addresses a diverse range of repertories and intellectual
issues, it is fitting that an essay collection honoring her should be similarly broad.
The overriding concern in McClary’s writings and in this book is with retaining
an awareness of the social context of musical practices, and the ways in which
music both reflects and directs social relationships. This focus can be applied to
diverse genres, and it also inspires a diversity of method and approach, as this book
demonstrates, with chapters on opera, jazz, pop, rock, film music, music theater, and
orchestral works.
But it is important to note another reason that any collection of essays honoring
Susan McClary must of its nature be diverse in these ways. Those scholars and
students who have benefited most from her work, example, and guiding presence have
not become McClary disciples; rather, they have gone more boldly and effectively
where their own aptitudes, interests, and situations have led them. As a scholar, she
has offered a powerful model, but more importantly an empowering lesson in what
personal courage, close attention to how and why one values music, and a passionate
clarity of voice can accomplish. As a colleague and teacher, she has offered not only
guidance and access, but also rapt, engaged attention and discussion. To converse
with Susan McClary is to take on a collaborator, and that word also describes better
than “advisor” her role in working with students.
The richness of this collection is thus manifest on several levels. There is a wide
range of scholarly situation, from colleagues who were with her at the vanguard
of the new musicology, to former students of hers (including all three editors of
this volume) who have endeavored to secure the beachhead she and her cohort
established. Writers treat by turn a variety of popular musics and musical practices
as well as the most venerated of traditional repertories, and they address many points
in between; approaches to these repertories range as widely. Despite this collection’s
eclecticism, however, it coheres, fundamentally, for two reasons: it would be hard
to imagine any of these essays if musicology had not been reinvigorated by Susan
McClary’s vision, enthusiasm, and eloquence, and yet each essay speaks with its
author’s distinctive voice and perspective.
Without sacrificing this inherent diversity of perspective, subject, and approach,
we have encouraged our essayists to work within three broad rubrics, closely
associated with McClary’s distinctive contributions to musicology. She is perhaps
best known for her work on gender, sexuality, and race, foregrounding the ways
in which music contributes to these categories of identity, whether in formation,
performance, or representation. The essays in Part I, Musical Identities: Gender,
Sexuality, and Race, all respond to her pioneering work in this broad area, which is
for many the cornerstone (or at least the most public face) of the new musicology.
Introduction xxi
Part II, Music and Temporality, takes as its jumping-off point some of McClary’s
most intimate and subtle work, regarding music’s capacity to define and regulate
perceptions and experiences of time. Part III, Reinventing Analysis, honors the
important ways her work has taught us to reconsider the tools of our trade, to develop
new ways to approach music and musical experience so as to detail the variety of
ways both canonic and non-canonic musics and musicking can matter. Inevitably
and usefully, many essays included here bridge among our chosen categories. In
the ways these essays thus converse, willfully, between and among their separate
“rooms,” they also do homage to Susan McClary.
Part I: Musical Identities: Gender, Sexuality, and Race
McClary’s ground-breaking Feminine Endings drew on feminist strategies to reveal

the ways in which gender identity is encoded musically in repertories ranging from
the canonical to the contemporary. Although her book met with fierce resistance
within the worlds of both musicology and music journalism in 1991, scholars
working in its wake have found it far easier to address difficult questions of gender,
sexuality, and race as constructed through music. Indeed, the field of musicology
has gained a new relevance within the intellectual world in large part because of the
work of scholars seeking to elucidate music’s role in identity politics. As the essays
included in this collection show, not only has music participated in the construction
and performance of identities, but it has also ordered identities in specific ways,
in keeping with the political agendas of their respective contexts. We present the
essays in this part within two groupings, the first two dealing with representation in
opera and the remainder exploring identity formation in less culturally prestigious
traditions.
Within the former grouping, Lawrence Kramer and Nasser Al-Taee address
two sides of the same representational coin. Al-Taee traces and discusses the many
specifically Muslim males (Cadis, Calendars, and Dervishes) that have—alongside
a parade of such well-known orientalized females as Carmen, Delilah, and Lakmé—
long populated European operatic stages, from Rameau to Saint-Saëns, as a legacy of
the Crusades. While such figures may have until now largely escaped musicological
comment, the various ways in which Mozart’s The Magic Flute displays its gendered
and racial biases have long been known and openly discussed inside and outside
musicology—without, seemingly, in any way deterring audiences from fully
embracing the opera as among the most beloved in the repertoire. In his provocative
contribution to this book, Kramer addresses this situation, taking the opportunity to
probe more deeply the tension between aesthetic pleasure and other cultural values.
Framing this part’s second subsection are two essays that starkly contrast with
each other in many respects. One locates individual aesthetic agency within an
ongoing cultural process, while the other reasserts the capacity of the composer to
stand above such processes, both to represent and, often implicitly, to comment.
Thus, George Lipsitz’s essay takes as its starting point the phenomenon of the cover
song as a site for “exploring the social premises of musical repertories and the
musical premises of social repertories,” using a particularly fraught case study to
xxii Musicological Identities
illuminate larger processes of identity formation and appropriation. Paul Attinello’s
essay on Sondheim, on the other hand, reinstates the composer as principal auteur in
one of the most collaborative of genres, the Broadway musical. Attinello illuminates
a thematic strand that runs through several of Sondheim’s shows: his use of temporal
processes as a means to delineate a variety of cultural negotiations.
Within this frame—or, perhaps, standing outside it—Steven Baur and Jacqueline
Warwick address dimensions of musical practice that have, in different ways, retreated
to the background of our awareness, in part because the largest stake involved in
both the situations considered is held by women. Baur draws significant parallels
between discourse about the waltz craze of the nineteenth century and controversial
dance practices of our own day, revitalizing older debates and connecting them to
contemporary cultural issues—specifically, to the specific threats the waltz craze
posed to then-formative notions of domestic femininity. Warwick’s focus is the
more recent past, and she brings race into the picture as well; her discussion of the
Blossoms—“arguably the most visible and audible backing group of all time, for
all that many listeners have never heard their name”—more broadly considers the
“function and meaning of backup singers from the 1960s to the present.”
Part II: Music and Temporality
The project of reconnecting musical works to their times is inextricably linked to

analyzing the ways in which music uses time as raw material. The “timeless” canon
of great musical works emerged at a historical moment when managing time became
a priority; hence, the canonic repertory reflects or adapts to ideologies of time
associated with bourgeois sensibilities and industrial capitalist priorities. Musical
works that demonstrated teleological, linear urgency came to be prized more highly
than music based on structures of repetition and pleasure in the moment. It is in this
context that much of McClary’s work has helped reclaim repertories that do not fit
the preferred paradigm, not only in the realm of popular music, but also within such
dance and keyboard traditions as those associated with the Chaconne and the Court
of Louis IV.
The essays in this section connect the manipulation of temporality in music directly
to the temporal sensibilities of its creators and audiences, whether unselfconsciously
or consciously—in the latter case, at times projecting difference in this realm as a
token of cultural otherness. These essays cover a range of repertories: three deal
directly with twentieth-century popular traditions; one finds shared space between
popular idioms and the avant garde; one looks at older traditions from a fresh
perspective; and one considers how manipulations of temporality address cultural
concerns on the popular musical stage.
Within popular traditions of the twentieth century, music has managed temporality
in many separate realms. As Daniel Goldmark demonstrates, it is often left to music
to “keep time” as film collapses temporality or expands it according to narrative or
expressive needs, and it assumes this role across a wide range of filmic environments
(his examples include The Matrix, Koyaanisqatsi, The Triplets of Belleville, Risky
Business, Garden State, Rushmore and Witness). Charles Hiroshi Garrett considers
Introduction xxiii
Cassandra Wilson’s imaginative approach to the genre of jazz vocal covers, tracing
a variety of ways that she engages with temporal issues, both referentially and
sensually, in such covers as “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “I’m Old Fashioned,”
“Come On In My Kitchen,” “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” “Blue Light ’Til Dawn,” and
“Sleight of Time.” Stan Hawkins probes the relationship between music’s beat and
the dance pleasures it elicits, as expressed through bodily movements and gestures
that are experienced as a form of creativity while remaining largely subordinate to a
preset and overpowering rhythmic impulse. Fourth within this larger grouping, John
Richardson revisits concerns addressed in Daniel Goldmark’s chapter by looking at
how apparent randomness has operated in a postmodern musical context to create
a nexus of meanings when combined with pre-existing film. This essay shows how
resistant the resultant pleasures are to a range of descriptive terms that have been
evoked to categorize and explain seemingly similar practices.
The final two chapters in this section address temporal worlds of older traditions
and times. In the first, Ruth Solie probes the linking of Beethoven and express
trains in an 1883 essay by Ernest Foxwell, who—somewhat anachronistically in
Victorian English writings, which tended to use Wagner as their central musical
referent—finds both to be emblems of human “buoyancy,” through their creation
of the “illusion of infinite capability.” Finally, Raymond Knapp traces the dynamic
between two temporal modes in Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, with its historical
narrative of cultural negotiation and assimilation: that of a circular (or floating)
sense of time, representing Japan prior to the 1853 arrival of Commodore Perry,
and the more linear and urgent sense of time characteristic of modern Western
sensibilities.
Part III: Reinventing Analysis
While conversant with traditional modes of musical analysis, McClary’s analytical

methods have often been eclectic and even unorthodox. Because her goal has
been to get at the cultural meanings of music, she has had to be creative in her
mix of conventional and unconventional analytical methods, at times analyzing the
meanings of conventional forms themselves, at other times placing culturally laden
musical gestures in the foreground. Even more radically, she has often adopted a
perspective on the music that stems from the physical experiences of hearing, playing,
and dancing to music. This strategy has unsettled the more contemplative models of
musical engagement supported by most long-established analytical methods within a
process that Rose Rosengard Subotnik has termed “structural listening.” McClary’s
work has thus been an extension of and response to Joseph Kerman’s call for an
engaged musical criticism, and it has served time and again to demonstrate how
little of musical experience is actually addressed through traditional analysis. What
is more, McClary’s approaches reveal how diligently such methods have served to
reinscribe the dominant (mostly German) historical narrative at the expense of other
traditions and other varieties of what Christopher Small calls “musicking.”
Most exciting to many, then, are the many possibilities McClary’s work has
opened up for exploring aspects and categories of musical experience otherwise left
xxiv Musicological Identities
out of what “counts” in musical analysis; such is the starting point for the third
and final section of chapters in this book. In a virtuoso three-part engagement with
the rock band Evanescence, Mitchell Morris not only shows how one might—and
must—engage with the new receptive environments created through the internet and
other recent accretions to modernity’s shared musical spheres, but he also uses that
platform to revisit the central issues of the previous sections, addressing first the role
of singing within the otherwise expressively restricted worlds of adolescent girls,
and then the role music plays in memory formation and re-formation over time.
Richard Leppert’s discussion of Patsy Cline is directly related to the central part of
Morris’s essay; he addresses gendered identity-formation while at the same time
reimagining how we might think and talk about Cline’s performances and impact.
And, continuing this dual perspective, Rose Rosengard Subotnik demonstrates how
a central but lightly regarded American genre, the Tin Pan Alley song, has been ill-
judged from a variety of perspectives that have found it “unacceptably commercialized
and sentimental.” Her evidence ranges from Adorno, for whom it lacked “musical
individualization and social resistance,” all the way to Hayakawa, who found it to
be inadequate “equipment for living”; she then ventures an alternative approach that
responds more vibrantly to the musical practices the type has supported.
David Ake’s contribution revisits the “random” dimension introduced in John
Richardson’s essay by “analyzing” an apparently inadvertent furniture squeak in
Miles Davis’s “Old Folks” in order to reflect on how such relics of “live” recording
contribute to our pleasure, both expressively and emblematically. Finally, Robert
Walser combines musical analysis with cultural criticism in order to “dissect the
tensions of contemporary female identity as it is constructed through the mass
media,” to demonstrate how we, as musicologists, might explain the powerful
appeal of works such as Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited,” whose music “embraces
the contradictions of the lyrics while refusing their literal sense.”
***
This book represents the generational arrival of the “new” musicology into full
maturity, dividing fairly evenly between path-breaking work by pre-eminent scholars
of music and a group of promising younger scholars at earlier phases of their careers.
Besides thus bridging the generational gap within recent musicological scholarship,
this volume should, as has its dedicatee, contribute usefully to many other academic
disciplines, such as History, Anthropology, Philosophy, Aesthetics, Media Studies,
Film Music Studies, Dramatic Criticism, Women’s Studies, and Cultural Studies.
With that hope and expectation, and in profound admiration and gratitude, we offer
the chapters that follow to Susan McClary.
Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp, and Jacqueline Warwick, editors

PART
PART I
Musical Identities:
Gender, Sexuality, and Race
Taylor & Francis
Chapter One
Value and Meaning in The Magic Flute

Lawrence Kramer
The Magic Flute is a “classic” that has clearly outlived its ostensible values––and
outlived them very well, thank you. This is an opera that worships authority, breezily
accepts social inequality as natural, denigrates women, incorporates a racist subplot,
and blithely continues to be enjoyed worldwide. And not by dummies: judging from
my students, audiences are perfectly aware of these “problems.” They just don’t
care about them. It thus makes little sense to huff and puff that the opera conceals
its invidious values behind a seductive symbolic and auratic apparatus. No one is
concealing anything; that’s precisely the trick. The real question is how The Magic
Flute gets away with it. What’s its secret?
One answer is that the opera’s sheer artifice encourages a nimble attitude toward
the serious issues it raises. Not that the moments of gravity are dismissible; as in
any comedy, they affirm the serious truths that govern (and ultimately justify) all
the fun. But there is a systematic loosening of the tension between the serious and
contrarian elements, so that it not only becomes easier to entertain both attitudes at
once, but also becomes evident that inhabiting this “contradiction” is precisely the
higher wisdom that the opera encourages. Sarastro’s apparent tyranny is vindicated,
and so is the social order embodied by the forming of marriageable couples, but the
audience seems encouraged to accept all this provisionally while also getting around
it: noting, with pleasure, how Pamina sidesteps the libretto’s misogynist clichés, how
her union with Tamino is less theatrically and musically marked than Papageno’s
with Papagena, and how the latter union forms the opera’s climax––a position no
less effective for reflecting the desire of the librettist and first Papageno, Emmanuel
Schikaneder, to shine.
Granted, the technique is not flawless. Some things are just too distasteful to
stomach, in particular the hopelessly racist figure of the blackamoor Monostatos,
who, unlike Osmin in The Abduction from the Seraglio, bears not a hint of humanizing
ambivalence. Still, this ugly patch has not managed to jam the machine, and the
opera continues to flourish––as it should. It even feels curiously postmodern, as if it
were proleptically dramatizing today’s state of aesthetic play.
During the 1970s and 1980s, in the first invigorating shock waves of cultural
politics on aesthetics, it seemed crucial that many celebrated figures of Western
tradition did not see eye to eye with us––whoever “we” thought we were––on key
matters of value. It therefore seemed crucial either to condemn or vindicate them.
Their works had to be “put into question,” as the phrase went. The spirit of the time
made this enterprise seem both hectic and heroic, enough so that its prosecutorial
edge could plausibly be overlooked. But difficulties quickly arose: a desire to
4 Musicological Identities
avoid crude pro or con judgments, a reluctance to apply ideological tests to works
of art, a recognition that those same works were often rife with heterogeneity and
ambiguity.
The most influential result was the development of a value calculus that sought
out internal points of resistance or subversion in works that conveyed insupportable
values. There were risks involved; like any interpretive protocol, this one could
become formulaic. But its acknowledgment of heterogeneity was important. It did
not fully settle the questions it arose to address, but it has not become expendable,
either, as some of what follows will testify. And it helped secure a principle that,
although still challenged every day by oblivious claims to the contrary, marked a
turning point in the general construction and construal of Western traditions. Works
passed down as masterpieces could neither be excused any more for being of their
time nor praised for transcending it.
They still can’t be. But it has become increasingly clear that they don’t need to
be. As Susan McClary likes to point out, what such works can do is show people
struggling with their time, which is exactly what we do with ours. For many of us, the
urgency about securing values has simmered down. Zeal has given way––at least in
academia; the rest of the world has not been so lucky––to a cosmopolitan tolerance,
exactly the attitude recommended by this opera. Tolerance, not neutrality or timidity
or quietism: the point is not to abandon judgment, but to use it well. The shift (or
so I would wish) is from a litmus test on values to a concern with how matters of
value are dramatized, explored, and engaged with. The issue is no longer ideological
content per se. Process vies with content because process changes content.
Concomitant with this is a focus away from how matters are settled at the last
minute and toward the ways they unreel and unravel, regardless of closure and unity.
Aesthetic play trumps ideological form, including the form of the ideology of the
aesthetic. Instead of a focus on how values are concentrated into a calculus of power
and resistance, ideology and subversion, there is an observation of how values are
dispersed and circulated, how they find their own fields of action without necessarily
forming consistent patterns or hierarchies. There is the recognition, first, that belief,
obligation, trust in authority, skepticism, and sympathy may all go in different, quasi-
independent directions within the same work, and, second, that there are many ways
other than resistance or subversion to circumvent insupportable principles, including
reinterpretation, negotiation, ducking, dodging, finding loopholes, separating public
and private attitudes, and enjoying displaced or symbolic forms of what must be
given up in literal form. And so on. And so forth.
This shift of emphasis marks a new chapter in the recent history of musical
understanding, as exemplified, for example, by McClary’s path-breaking work. The
“cultural turn” that reached musicology some two decades ago is now mature—
mature enough to confront its own conflicted relationship to the aesthetic. It was for
a time necessary to subordinate aesthetic appreciation to cultural critique so that the
latter could find its voice. But the aesthetic is insubordinate by nature. The refusal of
audiences to surrender their pleasure to their knowledge when presented with works
like The Magic Flute cannot simply be written off as a result of ideological blindness
or regressive listening. On the contrary, it can claim to be a refusal of those failings,
as measured by an unwillingness to adhere too literal-mindedly to the very values
Value and Meaning in The Magic Flute 5
that the opera seems to infringe, or by a desire to inhabit in imagination a world of
values that seem different from one’s own and just find out what happens. Audiences
know that they can find the opera or whatever else attractive, even seductive, without
being bamboozled by it.
To clarify this situation, we need to return to an arena that some of us have
never left: the musical work. The suspicion under which the work-concept currently
labors is partly well-earned; historically, the concept has too often been a cover for
escapism or the tyranny of taste. But the point is to consult the work, not to idolize
it. When audiences enjoy The Magic Flute despite its declared values, they posit
alternative values in the medium of aesthetic pleasure. The pleasure becomes an
immanent critique of the work that gives it. Pleasure complicates understanding by
assuming cognitive value; cognitive claims lose coercive force by failing to support
pleasure.
With The Magic Flute, these issues readily focus on misogyny. The opera not only
articulates a particularly nasty form of it, but also makes that articulation central to
its value system. The rigorous subordination / depreciation / punishment of women
by men becomes the metonymic embodiment of Enlightenment tout court. Tamino’s
wisdom and self-control finds its key test in his ability to deny Pamina the elemental
contact of human speech, cruelly rebuffing her in order to obey a rule of silence
governing his initiation––a kind of reverse hazing.
For at least one feminist critic, Renée Cox, these valuations pose a conflict
between the music’s aesthetic power and its power to do her injury. Cox does not
want to yield to the second, but neither does she want to forgo the first. Neither does
Catherine Clément, whose pioneering book on the operatic “undoing” of women
was influential throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Like Cox, Clément asserts that
the opera’s formal technique––vocal beauty for her, the resolution of chromatic to
diatonic harmony for Cox––underwrites its sententiousness and coercive ideology.
For her, too, the price of pleasure is injury. The lyrical irony of her prose is a
retaliation, but one that tacitly knows itself to be hopeless.
Perhaps the best way to deal with this dilemma is to try, not to solve it—how can an
impossible problem be “solved?”—but to dissolve it, much as the opera’s audiences
seem to do, only more reflectively. The place to begin is the observation that the
dilemma comes as much from how we address the opera as from how it addresses
us. Both Cox and Clément postulate an either/or logic that may feel imperative
without really being so, especially with the music in our ears. Both understand the
opera’s musical disposition as identical with that of its official apparatus rather than
as extending into the potentially contrarian energies that the apparatus incorporates
but may not quite be able to contain.
My aim here is to describe that extension and evoke what it produces: a permanent
state of friction and mutual dependency between the normalizing apparatus and the
“abnormal” pleasures and energies that the norm must summon up in order to regulate
Renée Cox , “A History of Music” (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 48 [1990]:
400–402).
Catherine Clément, Opera; or the Undoing of Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, introduction
by Susan McClary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
them. The shimmer and flicker and mercurial motion of that encounter, extended into
a full-blown condition of permanent intermediacy between norm and abnorm, helps
make The Magic Flute one of the paradigms of what opera would become as a modern
genre. This is especially so because Mozart does not wrap the tension, as many
later composers would, in the elevating sheen of tragedy; its fluctuations between
norm and abnorm have a striking, even discomfiting transparency. Paradigmatically,
too, The Magic Flute focuses its particular intermediacy on an excessive form of a
prominent trope, in this case of marriage as alliance—and misalliance.
What might this mean, given that both names and costumes, not to mention social
rank, assure us from the beginning that the right couples are formed at the end?
One possibility is that we don’t have to take anyone’s word for it; each marriage is
validated by a ritualized test. Another possibility is that the tests may be unreliable.
Perhaps there is something wrong with the right couples, or at least with one of
them.
That possibility can be taken as the core of more than one Mozart opera. The
same composer who brought you Tamino and Pamina also delivered Donna Anna
and Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni and the famously mismatched couples of Cosí
fan Tutti, especially Fiordiligi and Ferrando. It might be said of both Donna Anna
and Fiordiligi that they are necessarily mismatched because matching them is
impossible, no matter with whom. They embody a feminine excess of subjectivity
that, as Susan McClary showed in a classic essay, opera commonly requires to
secure its expressive power but that it must also confine in a tight frame to secure
itself against that power.
Don Giovanni and Cosí try to comply—and, much to their credit, fail. Donna
Anna rejects the frame when she defers marrying Ottavio in the finale, not for the
first time and not, one suspects, for the last. Her fury is matched only by Giovanni’s
lust, a mirroring that could only end, and more or less does end, literally, in a
marriage made in hell. The mechanics of plot drag Fiordiligi away from her musical
communion with Ferrando and into a union with Guigelmo that leaves audiences
unhappy and will probably leave her more so. The Magic Flute avoids this kind
of dissatisfaction through a double displacement. It diverts romantic interest from
the noble couple, Tamino and Pamina, to the couple moyen sensuel, Papageno and
Papagena; and it diverts feminine excess—or rather too much of it, excess carried to
excess––from Pamina to her mother, the Queen of the Night, who, as the archetypal
Bad Mother (think Strauss’s Klytämnestra) can safely be loathed and disposed of.
But there is an escaped excess even here. We would not want it otherwise. As
McClary observes, between them Pamina and her mother represent the ideologically
suspect extremes of writing for women’s voice: the harpy’s screeching and the
maiden’s coo. But we are not necessarily unhappy about the first, and Pamina
On norm and abnorm in opera, see my Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and
Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), especially pp. 1–41.
4
“Excess and Frame: The Musical Representation of Madwomen,” in Susan McClary,
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991), pp. 80–111.
4 McClary, Feminine Endings, p. 114.

cannot quite be confined by the second, or, for that matter, and despite her lack of
flamboyance, by anything else. We need to ask just what subjective excess becomes
in her hands, or rather in her voice, and where it goes and what she does with it.
Some remarks by Robin Wood can get us started. For Wood, what allows The
Magic Flute to circumvent its own message is its composer’s psychology. The
Mozart involved is something of a nineteenth-century cliché, from which, however,
Wood manages to get some good mileage:
Mozart’s tendency to identify with female characters . . . manifests itself most strikingly,
perhaps, in The Magic Flute, where [he] involved himself in a project shot through
with sexism and racism in which misogyny runs rampant: the music given to the arch-
villainess the Queen of the Night is simply so much more interesting than that given to
the supposedly godlike father figure (and crashing old bore) Sarastro, and both her arias
are through-composed, while Mozart gives Sarastro, in his major aria, musically identical
stanzas. . . . It must also, I think, be generally agreed that the emotional core of . . . [the]
frustrating opera is the music given to Pamina. It is the Mozartian bias that finally disrupts
the project, rendering the work (taken as a whole) quite unintelligible.
Psychology aside, the musical and aesthetic points are credible enough, even if
they leave music analysts little to chew on. Audiences clearly enjoy the high-flying
acrobatics of the Queen’s arias; who would rather listen to Sarastro drone on? And
Pamina does belong to the musical order of transformation rather than the order
of repetition; who better to guide Tamino (a bit of a wimp, after all) through his
ordeals?
But Wood’s approach does not go far enough. “Bias” and “identification” on
their own won’t explain the success of this opera against its own official biases and
identifications, which, no less than their opposites, have formal correlatives (just
think of the ritual repetitions of the fire-and-water scene, or the grand choral finale).
The recognition of the opera’s anti- or unofficial biases and identifications will
remain inert until we ask what the opera makes of them, and what we can make of
them. Unless we accept the notion that listeners just enjoy a pretty potpourri (which
some no doubt do), we need to ask for the very intelligibility that Wood skips over, a
counter-intelligibility that listeners can intuit even if they can’t articulate it.
At another level, we have to address the differences in social status that Wood
himself attends to in Cosí. General agreement might well suggest that the emotional
core of The Magic Flute is the music given, not to Pamina, but to Papageno as he
longs for a counterpart and, having found her, burbles over with joy just before
the defeat of the Queen of the Night leads to the communal finale. But perhaps we
can adjudicate this contest peaceably. There is one pivotal number in which Pamina
Robin Wood, “Renoir and Mozart,” Sexual Politics and Narrative Film (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 87.
On social status in The Magic Flute see Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Whose Magic
Flute? Intimations of Reality at the Gates of the Enlightenment,” in her Deconstructive
Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996), pp. 1–38, and Richard Middleton, Voicing the Popular: On the Subjects of
Popular Music (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 6–21 and 27–28.
and Papageno sing together with their social and even their romantic differences set
aside: the duet “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen.” Perhaps the core of Mozart’s
project (as we imagine it, claiming some distance for him, “correctly” or not, from
the opera’s official message because we don’t want him too close for comfort) lies
right there. We’ll see shortly.
Cosí again provides a precedent for the ostensibly more idealistic Magic
Flute. The intersection of critical power and aesthetic appeal in Cosí arises in the
equivocation between psychological realism and farcical artifice as the lovers—half
automatons, half all too human—find themselves shuffled and reshuffled. The opera
is something like a paradigmatic expression of the crisis in subjectivity marked by
the historical accession of the “barred” modern subject of Enlightenment, a being
always at a remove from the most powerful sources of its own identity and desire,
alienated not by contingency but by the unavoidable closures and mystifications of
language and custom.
But the crisis has two sides. With Dorabella and Guigelmo, the partner-switching
suggests that subjectivity has no authentic or interior substance. The subject is merely
a function or position of discourse, and so, accordingly, is gender––along with trust,
morality, and the mandates of the symbolic order. But with Ferrando and Fiordiligi,
especially the latter, subjectivity takes on a proto-Romantic form. It postulates a depth
and richness strongly supported by the music. It claims—intricately––that there is
indeed a true, inner, authentic self; that this self and its desires are, however, only
available outside the mandates of the symbolic, via a lack or surplus in discourse; and
that, nonetheless, the definite content of this authentic, often transgressive self may
be no more than an appearance meant to dissimulate the realization of subjectivity as
a void, with the concomitant realization that the dissimulation itself may be the only
difference between Dorabella and Fiordiligi as subjects.
The Magic Flute apportions these same divisions between its two couples, but
because the couples are defined by social position rather than by temperament or
convention, the results are quite different. The opera assumes a nominal bias toward
the noble couple that makes the fictitiousness of subjectivity a feature of class rather
than of subjectivity as such. Tamino and Pamina are supposed to discover their
true selves. Papageno and Papagena must simply stick with their roles and the real
but lesser happiness that goes with them. But the opera’s dramatic bias runs the
other way, not just in giving the earthier couple the last romantic word, but more
importantly in having “Bei Männern” join the two subjectivities in an impossible,
transgressive, yet endearing whole. This duet voices a dream that the ultimate duet-
union of the two feathery P’s both consummates and reinterprets: the brief crossover
romance of those other two P’s, Papageno and Pamina.
For Pamina is a crossover figure throughout, although no one is supposed to say
so. As already noted, she effortlessly contradicts every misogynist bromide uttered
by Sarastro and friends (Tamino included). She refuses mindless obedience to her
mother’s assassination plot, she takes the lead in the ordeal by fire and water, she
Alike as two Ps in a Pa: Pamina’s name ties her as closely to Papageno and Papagena
as it does to Tamino, with whose name it is only partially assonant. As we will see, the simple
syllable does considerable work here.
affirms the ideal of truth while helpless in the face of captivity, and she never chatters
idly as women are solemnly said to do. The opera’s normalizing order responds
by treating her as an exception, even initiating her into the mystery religion. Yet
she can be performed compellingly enough to deny the exceptionalist ethos, to
imbue the whole opera with a powerful element of feminine agency. She has a great
opportunity in “Ich werde alle Orten,” the solo by which she takes over Tamino’s
fire-and-water ordeal and sets its terms. As she reveals the power and history of the
magic flute, Pamina counters Sarastro’s earlier decree of separation by appropriating
its authoritative arioso style as the complement to the expressive floridity she shows
elsewhere.
This florid style is a resource, not a fate or a reflex mechanism. Pamina shows
it first in “Bei Männern,” not coincidentally her first number and the very one that
lingers on the impossible. The duet’s unique pairing holds in nuce the romantic
music shared by Pamina and Tamino on the one hand and Papagena and Papageno
on the other.
“Bei Männern” aims to articulate an ideal of companionate marriage that falls
outside Sarastro’s sphere. It is an ideal that fuses feeling and reason and depends only
on common humanity, as shown by its singers, rather than on privilege or esoteric
knowledge. It is also an ideal strongly inflected with feminine expressiveness, voice,
and agency; Pamina introduces all three with her persistent touches of melisma and
fioriture against Papageno’s blunter vocal line. But her vocal excess is ratified by
the ideal it voices, and while it surpasses what Papageno can express it never passes
him by. At any moment she might be singing beyond him or singing with him. Taken
in context, this alternation (not unusual in itself) forms a symbolic articulation of
the unity-in-duality of the ideal and invertible couple, “Mann und Weib, und Weib
und Mann” [Man and woman, and woman and man]. The purely vocal difference
flowers at the end of the duet into a pair of florid measure-long roulades by Pamina,
interspersed with phrases requiring upward leaps of a tenth and a thirteenth, against
Papageno’s supportive near-silence. But after each roulade the voices again find
common ground, and their final phrase is a cadence in rhythmic unison (1.1).
The substitution of Papageno for Tamino here––Mozart treats the scene as a love
duet, which the text does not require––is rooted, not only in Papageno’s representation
of the frank earthiness that Tamino refines and regulates, but also in the suggestion
that true marriage can flourish only outside the temple walls. The essentially middle-
class ideal of companionate marriage finds its musical realization in a comfortable
pace (Andantino) and a glowing orchestral texture combining strings with clarinets,
bassoons, and horns, the warm sound of which excludes any possibility of shrillness
or discord and may suggest the “middle style” that traditional rhetoric applies to
convivial topics. Companionate marriage provides a temple of feeling with its own
sources of truth and divine inspiration: “Ihr [der Liebe] hoher Zweck zeigt deutlich
an, / nichts Edler’s sei als Weib und Mann, // Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann /
reichen an die Gottheit an [Love’s high goal is clear to scan, / Nothing’s more noble
See http://epub.library.ucla.edu/knapp/mcclaryidentities for this and other items

referred to in the text with the symbol ; for more information, see the Explanatory Note at
the beginning of the book.
than woman and man, / Man and woman and woman and man, / Reach up to the
Godhead’s span].”
The duet between a highborn woman and lowborn man overtly supports a
generalized form of this marital ideal, on the assumed principle that pairing will
work itself out universally with appropriate counterparts at each social level. But
although this principle is present theatrically, i.e., visually, it is dispelled musically,
and above all dispelled vocally. And this, too, is right, since solo and duet singing
also flourish only outside the temple, the musical signature of which is the collective
voice of the chorus.
Vocally, Pamina and Papageno become a romantic couple in “Bei Männern,”
establishing a degree of intimate connection that Pamina never shares with Tamino.
Her most impassioned “duet” with the latter is actually a quartet involving two
mysterious men in armor; it’s a public declaration, not an intimate utterance. Both
vocally and theatrically, Pamina and Papageno remain a couple, acting and singing
in consort, until the moment of Sarastro’s impending appearance. At that point
Pamina reaches defiantly for a higher ideal (the truth) while Papageno cowers (and
seeks excuses). The force that separates them is administrative, almost bureaucratic,
personified by Sarastro as he pronounces commands and judgments.
The same associations return later in enhanced, now decisive form, though not
with the simple hierarchical effect they are supposed to bring. Before the ordeal by
fire and water, Tamino and Pamina sing in complementary “Weib/Mann-Mann/Weib”
fashion, first antiphonally and then (with the armed men) contrapuntally. So far, so
good. But the ordeal brings a transformation, just as it is supposed to. During and
after it the couple harmonizes together in rhythmic unison. Just that: nothing else.
The free alternation of vocal styles in “Bei Männern” has become a strict succession.
The change at one level obviously represents the lovers’ union, but at another it
represents a homogenization, associated with the temple order, that deprives them of
genuine agency and the kind of vocal unity-in-duality basic to the duet.
Or rather, deprives her. Tamino’s agency consists largely in his being an apt
pupil. Pamina’s embrace of a “higher” unison with him alienates her from the
enfranchisement shown in the music of their colloquy before the ordeal. The loss
is particularly acute in view of her heroic solo, a passage in which Pamina makes
Tamino the beneficiary less of his own courage (real enough, but futile without her
instructions about the magic flute) than of her unconditional choice to espouse him.
The choice, too, is compromised or alienated by the unison singing. It’s odd, perhaps,
except for the music, to find W. H. Auden, the least sentimental of poets, mooning
over the outcome of this scene:
But Tamino and Pamina

Walked past [the] rage,
Sighing O, sighing O,
In timeless fermatas of awe and delight.
(“The Proof”)10
10 W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 (New York: Random House,

1967), p. 274. “Metalogue to the Magic Flute,” from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, ©
Or did Auden remember perfectly well that the only fermata in this part of the score
precedes the ordeal with a silence filled by the noises of fire and water, thunder and
howling wind? Did he install the self-referential “Sighing O, sighing O,” with its
mimicry of unity in duality and its ballad rhythm intimating darker fates, to catch the
traces of emptiness, even automatism—a big 0—that hover just out of earshot?
Matters go much better in the later scatty love duet (“Pa-pa-pa-pa”) between
Papageno and Papagena, which advances the “Mann/Weib” reversals of “Bei
Männern” into a free field of verbal/sexual play/friction. Here the complementarity
of “Mann” and “Weib” disappears into the similitude of “pa” and “pa”; gender
difference manifests itself as voice, not role. The pleasure of the voices’ f(r)ictive
union intensifies as the number of successive nonsense syllables increases both
within the introductory passage (accumulating one “pa” at a time) and across the
span of the duet. Echoing Tamino and Pamina, Papageno and Papagena sing their
“pa pa” syllables in unison—but only sometimes; at others one partner syllabifies
while the other holds a note; their entrances on the “pa pa” syllables overlap rather
than coinciding; their unisons feature quicksilver alternations between octaves and
other intervals, creating a resonant shimmer absent from the thirds and sixths that
predominate with Tamino and Pamina. The unison here is not a destination but a
premise. As noted earlier, this scene, preceding the temple finale, upstages it with no
trouble at all to become the actual climax of the opera.
Similarly, after the unisons that bind and the ordeal that ratifies them, the noble
lovers stand at a far remove—farther than ever––from the dialogical romantic/erotic
energies that play between Papageno and both Pamina and Papagena. The opera
registers this as a loss, but also partly recoups it by deferring the climactic emergence
of those energies until after the noble lovers’ triumph, once again in the Papageno/
Papagena duet, the buoyancy of which is explicitly sexualized as nowhere else in
the opera. With its connection to the earlier marriage duet, this show-stopping scene
may be understood not only to give the opera its real climax and conclusion but also
its imaginary “organic” outcome. The coupling of the marriage duets intimates a
coupling of another sort: the marriage, in displaced form, of Pamina and Papageno,
the only two lovers in the opera who offer to die for love.
The purely imaginary event of that marriage manifests itself otherwise only in
the pleasure celebrated by the unlikely couple in “Bei Männern.” The pleasure is
one that Pamina and Papageno nominally pursue in the way appropriate to each,
concurrently but independently, each with a different, still-imaginary partner in
mind. Musically, though, this is a pleasure they share, and share in excess of their
nominal relationship.
Into this excess, another inserts itself. The imaginary marriage is also the locus
of feminine excess in a wider sense than the one introduced earlier. Both here and
in the “Pa-pa” duet it embodies the impossible surplus of the Lacanian Real, the
magnet of an impossible and inadmissible desire that is produced by the necessarily
disrupted symbolization of that desire. In full Lacanian regalia such excess combines
the ecstatic and the obscene; here, in the more genial arena of comic romance, it
1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the
Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
combines spontaneous fantasy with humorous incongruity. The Real here proves
able to unlink itself from the extravagant and the monstrous, something that on
strict Lacanian principles it should not be able to do. But it does it. This moderating
or civilizing of the Real finds expression in the tonal quality of Pamina’s fioriture,
which is purely diatonic even at its most florid. The harmony tempers the excess of
the gesture it supports.11
The later “Pa-pa” duet concretizes the imaginary marriage primarily in the
echoing and reverberating of the nonsense syllables, which transfer the touch of the
Real to the actual union of Papageno and Papagena. The “pa pa” syllables are kiss-
like performatives that already begin to enact what they anticipate. “Bei Männern”
hovers in an indefinite fantasy space that sustains itself, for a time, by separating
performance from any possible enactment. Here the difference between the partners’
vocal styles defines Pamina throughout as in excess in relation to Papageno. (This
excess disappears once the duet is over; until Sarastro parts them, Pamina and
Papageno mostly just sing together, as Pamina and Tamino will after the final ordeal.)
At the close, after giving way to a sotto voce unison celebrating the attainment of
Godhead in marriage, the excess breaks forth fully, concentrated and concretized in
Pamina’s roulades and leaps. In the familiar Adornian terms, the concluding fioriture,
and more broadly the duet as a whole, constitutes the utopian moment within the
ideology of The Magic Flute. Within, not beyond: for the desire that this moment
celebrates cannot be produced outside the ideology that prohibits it.
The opera thus moves in a broad arc from Pamina’s colloquy on marriage with
Papageno to the celebration of the impending marriage between Papageno and
Papagena. The celebration is a moment of truth as well as pleasure; as the first time
Papagena holds the stage in her true form, it completes the previously incomplete
doubling of the principal characters. We have known it all along, but now we see
and hear it: Papagena is the earthy form of Pamina. In this connection it’s important
to note that Pamina and Tamino end the opera dressed in priestly robes, that they are
not necessarily to be married, have had no love duet to speak of, and are thus not
necessarily joined in a sexual relation––no wonder, given that one falls in love with
a picture, the other with a word. The split between the characters seems to articulate
the constitutive split within the Enlightenment subject (the barred subject cited
earlier, based on a historicized reading of Lacanian theory): a subject that cannot
both be and mean, that cannot inhabit both realms.
The opera locates this split most forcefully in the ordeal by silence, which
Papageno, notoriously, finds too hard, and Tamino perhaps too easy. Shortly after the
Queen of the Night’s inhuman version of pure voice, which Pamina rightly rejects,
she herself meets rejection from Tamino in the form of his silence. She responds with
“Ach, ich fuhl’s, es ist verschwunden,” a lament that gives vocal excess free rein.
What her mother grounds in vengeance, Pamina grounds in the capacity to suffer. She
seems to be seeking a humanized form of pure voice in the aria’s roulades, melismas,
11 On these vicissitudes of the Real, see my “Speaking Melody, Melodic Speech,” in

Word and Music Studies 5, ed. Suzanne Lodato and David Urrows (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2005), rpt. in my Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006).
and wide leaps. Her aria exposes the needless cruelty of the ordeal––implicitly of
the initiation tout court—that it unwittingly supports, and specifically the cruelty of
being denied a position in dialogue, the denial of answer that would be, were it not
for her outburst, a denial of voice. That denial, as the words of the aria conclude by
saying, is a matter of life and death.
But Tamino proves his worth by rejecting Pamina again. As he holds his tongue,
she flees the stage. He renounces both the source of bliss and his ethical bond to
the bearer of it in return for election to the symbolic order. We know that this rift
will be healed, and has been imposed only in order to be healed, but we may not
be able quite to un-know what its imposition demonstrates. The gap between the
wisdom of the initiate and the warmth of the human may narrow but not quite close,
and the all-together-now ceremony that ends the opera, a kind of Enlightenment
pep rally, may pry it wider again. So it is neither unlikely nor much of a wonder
if the sympathies of the audience, and even of the opera, remain with the “lower”
characters. Tamino never manages to match Pamina’s ardor or her emotional range;
without the “Pa-pa” duet as a climax there would not be very much to cheer about. It
can hardly be an accident that the two marriage duets that give The Magic Flute its
basic armature omit Tamino in favor of Papageno, the least heroic, least mysterious,
and least pretentious of partners, and also the one who by common consent is most
endearing to audiences.
This swerve, which is also a swerve from an aristocratic to a popular ideal, can
be extended by re-examining the role of the magical instruments, Papageno’s bells
and Tamino’s flute. When first used, these serve as magic charms to ward off danger.
The bells are apotropaic for Papageno (they turn Monostatos’s crew into a chorus
line); the flute is Orphean for Tamino (a sublimated apotropaic, it charms the beasts).
Later on, however, the instruments become vehicles of sexual wish-fulfillment.
The charms become fetishes. This role becomes explicit in Pamina’s genealogy
of the flute, which establishes the instrument’s phallic credentials in a patriarchal
order––though, intriguingly, this is an order outside Sarastro’s rule, a point Mozart’s
epic-heroic music for Pamina underscores. The power may be patriarchal, but it can
nonetheless be transmitted only by her choice. The same fetish character is suggested
by the exact recapitulation of the flute music when applied successively to fire and
water.
Papageno’s bells have a different fate. For one thing, the music of the bells-as-
fetish, split between two scenes, keeps varying, shedding the ritualized/compulsory
usage typical of the fetish. In the aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen,” the bells
announce the tune by which Papageno admits and submits to his romantic longings.
For the first two strophes he begins by singing what he has just heard, as if charmed
by his own magic (pleasurably coerced to the truth reserved for him, as by the
spiked wine that prompts his singing). For the third strophe the bells break into
rippling accompaniment figures, anticipating their role in the subsequent “Klinget,
Glöckchen, klinget,” the prelude to the “Pa-Pa” duet. Here the rippling bells simply
support Papageno as he conjures Papagena to his side with a little incantation of his
own. By the second time around, Papageno has appropriated his own desire.
Thereafter, as if the power of the fetish could be both dissolved and incorporated
as the result of the release of carnal/reproductive energy between the bird-lovers,
the chiming of the bells is displaced into the “Pa-Pa” vocalizing of the duet. If the
bells are a fetish, they are a happily self-deconstructing one. And if Papageno also
triumphs within a patriarchal order––his duet, after all, celebrates him as a “Papa”––
it is an order in which the “pa-pa–” vocalizing applies to both genders in the persons
of two lovers who both mirror and complement each other, and whose argumentative
friction (about their children’s sex) is explicitly erotic. At the level of reception,
anyone who feels, as if secretly, more attached to the bird-lovers than to the noble
pair, and whose pleasure in the union of the latter is slightly compromised by its
solemnity, is realizing the “contrapuntal” energies of Mozart’s music drama.
Consistent with this, we may find that the official closing scene is both parodied
and animated by Papageno and Papagena’s “birding” music (vogeln = to copulate,
roughly equivalent to birds in Chaucer “makyng melodie” or modern English-speaking
couples “making it”). The final scene opens predictably with noble sentiment and
ceremony, but the music that actually brings down the curtain is not ceremonial but
celebratory and physical, with a family resemblance to the just-preceding “birding”
music. (Here, as in the marriage duets, affinity of style and gesture is paramount;
more formal linkages, though perhaps possible, are not necessary to produce a
hermeneutic window.) This closing music somewhat rudely displaces the ceremonials
at the initiative of a temple chorus dominated for the first time by female voices, as
if Pamina’s assumption of agency were being infused into the very temple built to
exclude it. The choral sopranos even splay out the key phrase “die Schönheit und
Weisheit mit ewiger Kron” ([crowns] beauty and wisdom with [an] immortal crown)
through a double spell of florid fioriture. So while Mozart is clearly serious about
his valorization of a paternalistic and misogynist Order of Things as the order of
Enlightenment, he cannot valorize it quite as much as Sarastro would like him to.
Realizing this, we can also realize (but we always knew this, too) that Sarastro is
only the masculine form of the Queen of the Night, and at least partly exposed as such
by the opera. The vocal extremes to which the two characters gravitate, the Queen
too high and Sarastro too low, make the point musically. The Queen’s shrilling in the
scene of her visit to Pamina finds its masculine counterpart in Sarastro’s denial of
freedom to Pamina after the latter’s capture: “Zur Liebe will ich dich nicht zwingen,
/ Doch geb’ ich dir die Freiheit nicht” [I will not compel you to love, / Yet I do not
give you freedom]. The Queen’s jabbing for vengeance on multiple high C’s and her
infamous ultra-high F’s matches the choke-hold of Sarastro’s successive low F’s as
he repeats the forbidding “Doch.” His later aria of comfort to Pamina, “In diesen
heil’gen Hallen,” echoes this dark sonority in its closing passage, compromising the
comfort by the very music that means to crown it. Though still beautiful, the passage
is depersonalized. What begins with the warmth of a father figure ends with the force
of authority, cool and still coercive, however benign.
An intriguing aftershock of Sarastro’s dark word shows up a century later in one
of Freud’s patients, in whose world a thorough knowledge of The Magic Flute goes
without saying. This woman hears Sarastro’s denial of freedom, and presumably
its music, too, in the context of social restriction and unsatisfied love.12 By her own
12 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. James Strachey (New
York: Avon, 1965), pp. 324–26.
account, her allusion to the capture scene and its ominous “Doch” represents her
own loss of autonomy and sexual satisfaction to the authority of an inadequate
husband. Auden, clearly in a darker mood than in “The Proof,” provides a mid-
century update—in the voice of eighteenth-century satire:
In Nineteen-Fifty-Six we find the Queen

A highly-paid and most efficient Dean
(Who, as we know, really runs the College),
Sarastro, tolerated for his knowledge,
Teaching the history of Ancient Myth
At Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Bennington or Smith;
Pamina may a Time researcher be
To let Tamino take his Ph.D.,
Acquiring manly wisdom as he wishes
While changing diapers and washing dishes.
(“Metalogue to The Magic Flute.”)13
The date signifies. The poem was written to commemorate the Mozart bicentenary,
and is, incidentally, supposed to be spoken by the singer who plays Sarastro.
This is not to say that the opera offers anything as simple as a “subversion”
to negate power’s official message. Even Freud’s latter-day Pamina could “resist”
only by becoming neurotic. When Auden planted Sarastro at what were all women’s
colleges in 1956, he knew what he was doing. The manly ethos of The Magic Flute is
real enough. Its creation of bonds between men by the demeaning of women remains
vexing. Tamino is an all too willing pupil in this matter, and even Papageno boasts,
after turning a cold shoulder to Papagena, that he can be quiet when he needs to. It’s
interesting, though, that these events are from the Spiel part of the Singspiel; they’re
all talk. Musically, Mozart combines the idealization of manly order, and manly
orders, with a transgressive social and sexual energy of quite another order.
Once tapped, this energy may behave itself, but it will not resign itself. It spills
over in moments of negotiation that are conceptually complex but perceptually
simple. Its overflow is always delighting itself somewhere out of bounds. The opera
means what it says, like it or not, but it also allows us not to care—which so many
audiences clearly don’t. That’s why they flock to Julie Taymor’s Metropolitan Opera
production, which channels the overflow into spectacular visual effects: opera as
phantasmagoria. They are not well served by the earnestness of Graham Vick’s 2005
Salzburg production, which turns Sarastro into a figure of shadows and the Queen
to a vision in white. Why turn the opera upside down as if Mozart, of all people,
were insensitive to ambiguity? Why call up the shades of Adorno and Foucault to
review the familiar ills of Enlightenment when Pamina emerges as the true voice of
Enlightened subjectivity and Papageno and Papagena, already endlessly reproducing
themselves in the feathers they wear and the syllables they sing, steal the show every
time?
13 Auden, pp. 277–278.

Taylor & Francis
Chapter Two
Whirling Fanatics: Orientalism, Politics,

and Religious Rivalry in Western
Operatic Representation of the Orient
Nasser Al-Taee
According to Carl Dahlhaus, the Orient offered nineteenth-century opera librettists

“an untapped reservoir of material that virtually cried out for exploitation, especially
in view of the endless stream of Oriental literature in France following Napoleon’s
Egyptian campaign.” Aside from ignoring the political imbalance of power in the
nineteenth century between East and West, this observation suggests that the Orient
played an active role in promoting Europeans’ misrepresentation and exploitation of
the Middle East. Equally troublesome are Dahlhaus’s remarks regarding an engraving
from the Paris International Exhibition of 1878 picturing a Tunisian ensemble
playing on original instruments, which simply equate “genuine” and “exotic” music:
“This genuine, imported exoticism was no different from the imaginary exoticism
then fashionable in opera. For the European public, music that it did not understand
merely functioned as audible local color.”
Dahlhaus’s imperialist view of musical exoticism, once unremarkable, has been
duly challenged in recent years. Matthew Head, Ralph Locke, and Susan McClary,
for example, engage more vigorously with the political and social dimensions of
Orientalism, drawing on the work of Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and other
critical theorists concerned with understanding the role of Western intellectual
culture in sustaining structures of power over non-Western Others. But while
musicologists have recently begun to explore the cultural significance of Orientalism
in nineteenth-century opera, examining mainly seductive women such as Carmen,
Delilah, and Lakmé, less attention has been paid to religious male figures, such as
Cadis, Calendars, and Dervishes.
Carl Dahlhaus, trans. J. Bradford Robinson, Nineteenth-Century Music (Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), p. 302. My emphasis.
Ibid., p. 303.
See for example, Matthew Head’s Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish
Music (RMA Monographs 9, London: RMA, 2000); Ralph Locke’s “Constructing the
Oriental ‘Other’: Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila,” in Richard Dellamora and Daniel Fischlin
(eds.), The Work of Opera: Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997) pp. 161–184; and Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Europeans have generally depicted these as repulsive, hypocritical fanatics, and,
confirming Said’s argument concerning Orientalism, European music for these kinds
of characters eventually reinforced these stereotypes through invented rhythmic,
melodic, and harmonic clichés designed to strip them of all spiritual associations.
Jonathan Bellman, Locke, Derek Scott, and others have shown that invented musical
topics (alla turca, style hongrois, etc.) convey a distorted vision of Oriental music to
conform to Western attitudes. Scott argues that in Western music, “Orientalist styles
have related to previous Orientalist styles rather than to Eastern ethnic practices, just
as myths have been described by Levi-Strauss as relating to other myths.” Similarly,
Bellman claims that the fascination with the Turkish style was “almost entirely the
product of the European imagination.” Locke, following Said, identifies a mixture
of attitudes and tropes associated with these figures, ranging from idealization and
enlightenment to ridicule and defamation, all designed to buttress prevailing cultural
views.
The Femininization of the Orient
Opera can transform the musical stage for the audience, using spectacle and illusion
to construct a world of distant fantasy and desire. In eighteenth-century opera, music
did not always play the major role in depicting Otherness, but rather took a back
seat to elements such as scenery, costume, and stage effects, which were designed to
create the illusion that the action was indeed taking place in the Orient. Consequently,
most Orientalist operas in the eighteenth century centered around the seraglio, the
symbol of the sultan’s political power, but—more significantly to Europeans—the
site of the harem, the place of pleasure and eroticism where women are held against
their will under the supervision of potentially violent and depraved eunuchs. This
setting may be explicit, as in Pasha Selim’s palace in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus
Dem Serail (1782), or implicit, as in the cigarette factory in Bizet’s Carmen (1875).
In the former, the women are abducted Europeans, thus adding an element of sexual
danger and cultural threat to fragile East–West relations, while in the second, their
presentation as a group in scanty clothing evokes the harem and gratifies Europeans’
voyeuristic impulses.
Derek Scott, From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 155.
Jonathan Bellman, The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1993), p. 14.
See Edward Said, Orientalism, 2nd edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), and
Ralph Locke, “Cutthroat and Casbah Dancers, Muezzins and Timeless Sands: Musical
Images of the Middle East,” in Jonathan Bellman (ed.), The Exotic in Western Music (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1998), pp. 104–136; and Derek Scott, From the Erotic to the
Demonic.
Leslie Peirce describes the harem as the most “prevalent symbol in Western myths
constructed around the theme of Muslim sensuality”; see The Imperial Harem: Women and
Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
p. 3.
Whirling Fanatics 19
The rapid decline of the Turkish Empire (which continued until the First World
War), in conjunction with increasing Western colonialism, profoundly affected
Oriental representation on the Viennese operatic stage. By the late eighteenth century,
the masculine image of the Orient was already changing. In plots concerning Sultan
Süleyman (“the Magnificent”), for example, sensuality and irrationality—both
“feminine” qualities—began to replace the figure of the violent sultan and became
the banner traits of the Orient for the following century. Said explains:
One of the important developments in nineteenth-century Orientalism was the distillation

of essential ideas about the Orient—its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant
mentality, its habit of inaccuracy, its backwardness—into a separate and unchallenged
coherence.
In the nineteenth century, Western colonialist expansion reinforced negative images

of the Orient. Western exploration of the Orient and its study of Oriental cultures
were motivated in part by colonialist attitudes of superiority. Beginning with the
Description de L’Égypte, the Napoleonic adventure in Egypt and Syria signaled a new
colonialist era, during which Oriental culture was put under a Western microscope
for the sake of exploitation and control. Once the Orient had been studied and
properly put into its place with clearly identified margins, it was easier to force it
into submission and control. Under such circumstances, Orientalism flourished and
expanded.
The “feminization” of the Orient grew apace. In opera, Orientals appeared in
massive productions such as Weber’s Oberon (1826) in England; Cornelius’s Der
Barbier von Bagdad (1858) in Germany; Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri (1813),
Verdi’s Aida (1871) and Otello (1887) in Italy; and Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (1865),
Bizet’s Carmen (1875), Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (1877), and Delibes’s Lakmé
(1883) in France. Interestingly, most of these titles refer to the Oriental female, a
departure from the eighteenth-century Germanic approach in “Turkish” opera. Thus,
the German agenda seems different from those of the French and the Italians, who,
with the exception of their Shakespeare-derived works, highlight the femininity of
the Orient.
Varied in her excess and availability, the Oriental female was portrayed as
seductive, a locus of often dangerous desire which Europeans apparently could not
resist. Replacing the Pasha and his harem guard, the Oriental woman emerged with
all of her extremes and excesses, ranging from the gentle and submissive to the
dangerous and seductive, assuming center stage in Oriental operas. In the process,
however, the Oriental woman would suffer a fate similar to her male counterpart.
Within the colonial enterprise, she is doubly threatening as an Oriental and as a
woman, and she must be dealt with accordingly.
European condemnation of the seraglio never ceased to be an attack on Islam, the
religion behind the “legitimization” of such practices. Felicity Nussbaum has shown
that the representation of the seraglio further illustrated the power relations between
Said, p. 205.
9 See Ralph Locke, “Reflections on Orientalism in Opera and Musical Theater,” The
Opera Quarterly 10/1 (1993): 48–64, 52.
nations, mapped onto gender and race; but religion is also an important factor since,
in the context of the enforced monogamy of European Christianity, Islam is shown
to permit and endorse sexual license and polygamy.10 The seraglio theme thus serves
to embody the Orient, its political anarchy, its corrupt social system, and its immoral
religion, where both its men and women are prisoners to their sensual urges. But
above all, it was about European fascination with sexuality, real or fantastic. Rana
Kabbani elaborates: “He (the European) entered an imaginary harem when entering
the metaphor of the Orient, weighed down by inexpressible longings. His century had
pushed women into rigid roles: the leisured middle-class wife who was supposedly
a doormat sexually, the domestic servant whom labour unsexed, and the prostitute
who was burdened with all that the wife was protected from.”11 The Oriental woman
offered Europeans a male fantasy image, through her mysterious character spiced by
a hint of violence.
Orientalism in the Arts
Victor Hugo’s preface to his Les Orientales (1829) acknowledged his seduction
by everything Eastern, a seduction he felt would prove to be too strong for other
artists to resist.12 The driving force behind this seduction, according to Kabbani,
was sexuality, as embodied in a woman or a young boy.13 Kabbani argues that the
nude paintings of women in the nineteenth century established the framework for the
European male erotic fantasy. Whether in dance or a sexually suggestive pose, the
Oriental woman is painted within “realistic” venues (slave market, Turkish bath, the
harem) that are easy to imagine:
The onlooker is admitted into the Orient by visual seduction; he encounters the woman
in a state of undress, emerging from the intimacy of the bath—in a state of pleasing
vulnerability. He is not vulnerable: he is male, presumably in full dress, European, rational
(since even when faced with such erotic liability he can still recount the precise details
of the apparition quite coolly), and armed with language—he narrates the encounter in a
reflective post-facto narrative; he creates the Orient.14
10 See Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in

Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1995), especially Chapter 6, “Feminotopias: The Seraglio, the Homoerotic,
and the Pleasures of ‘Deformity,’” pp. 135–166.
11 Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1986), p. 67.
12 Hugo writes: “The Orient, as image or as thought, has become, for the intelligence
as well as for the imagination, a sort of general preoccupation which the author of this book
has obeyed perhaps without his knowledge. Oriental colors came as of their own accord to
imprint themselves on all his thoughts, all his dreams; and his dreams and his thoughts found
themselves in turn, and almost without having wished it so, Hebraic, Turkish, Greek, Persian,
Arab, even Spanish, because Spain is still the Orient; Spain is half African, Africa is half
Asiatic” (quoted in McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen, p. 30).
13 Kabbani, p. 67.
14 Ibid., p. 73. Kabbani’s emphasis.
Oriental males, on the other hand, receive a harsher treatment, which establishes a
dichotomy between the violent fanatical Muslim and the seductive alméh (dancing
woman). Consider the following statement by Lord Cromer, the long-time British
Consul-General in Egypt:
The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he
is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature skeptical and
requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence
works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his
picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most
slipshod description. Although the ancient Arabs acquired in a somewhat higher degree
the science of dialectics, their descendants are singularly deficient in the logical faculty.
They are often incapable of drawing the most obvious conclusions from any simple
premises of which they may admit the truth.15
Arabs are shown to be lethargic, lacking in clarity, logic, and direction. As argued
by Tariq Ali, the idea here is not only to pit the European male against his Arab
counterpart, but more importantly, to exoticize, vulgarize, and distort the Middle
East and its culture while asserting the superiority of Europe, thus advancing
Europe’s colonial exploitation of the Middle East and legitimizing its hegemony
over the Orient.16
To trace how these attitudes take form in Western representation, I will consider
here three paintings by two prominent nineteenth-century French Orientalist painters,
Jean-Leon Gerome and Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres. Gerome’s The Whirling
Dervish (c. 1889) (2.1)17 is a colorful painting that displays the ritual of dancing
by a Sufi sect during one of their ceremonies. At the center stage is an elegant dancer
in what seems to be a plain place of devotion with some Islamic ornamentation and
calligraphy, but the size of the skewers used by them to pierce their bodies is greatly
exaggerated. There also seems to be a great contrast between the central dancer
and the choir behind him. Unlike the dancer, who appears in a plain white gown,
members of the chorus are adorned in colorful clothing. Their facial and physical
demeanors, however, depict them in a state of a trance. Their faces are Bohemian-
looking with long hair and beards; their facial expressions are woozy; their mouths
are open; their eyes are in a daze. It is as if their bodies have given in to the power of
music, which has carried them into a barbarous and irrational state of being.
Despite differences in venue and focus, The Whirling Dervish shares some
features with Gerome’s Slave Market (1866) (2.2) and Ingres’s famous Turkish
Bath (1862) (2.3). The Slave Market displays apathy toward this horrific practice,
as reflected in the facial expressions of six slave women. The women’s bodies
15 From Cromer’s Modern Egypt (New York: Macmillan Co., 1908), volume 2,
pp. 146–148, as given in Said, p. 38.
16 See Tariq Ali, “Remembering Edward Said,” New Left Review 24 (Nov–Dec, 2003):
59–65.
17 See http://epub.library.ucla.edu/knapp/mcclaryidentities for this and other items
vary from being completely nude to fully clothed. Like the figures in The Whirling
Dervishes, the women in The Slave Market appear to be drugged and hopeless.
Their mouths are open, and their eyes are fixed on the floor or are gazing into the
infinite space. Despite their multiplicity and different racial backgrounds, they share
the same demeanor, fate, and sense of helplessness. Similarly, Ingres’s The Turkish
Bath is crowded with nude “Turkish” women engaged in a sexual orgy under the
ecstatic influence of music and opium. Aroused by these stimulants, they caress
each other’s bare breasts as they play and dance for one another in the nude. As
in Slave Market, the women’s facial expressions are dazed, but here stimulated
by music, opium, and circular dancing. These paintings are consistent with Said’s
observations concerning Orientalist representations of gender, religion, and race.
While nineteenth-century Muslim males were associated with violence, barbarism,
irrationality, and obsession, their women were portrayed as erotic, and thus a
dangerous allurement. This close affiliation between religion, ritual, and sexuality
is linked to the Orient in order to imbue the region with aspects of primitivism,
barbarism, and sexual promiscuity, and to differentiate it from its civilized, rational,
and moral Western counterpart.
The Dervishes in Western Accounts
The Dervishes belong to the Mevlevi order founded by the followers of Jalal al-
Din Muhammad Rumi in the thirteenth century shortly following the poet’s death.
Within their tradition, dancing is accompanied by dhikr, or the remembrance of
Allah. Within their mystical and spiritual rituals, incense, meditation, singing, and
dancing are used to intensify the practice of hadhra, or presence, as a means of
connecting with their Creator. The whirling itself is a symbolic practice of turning
towards truth, emulating movements of the planets, and displaying their submission
to God.
During the Ottoman Empire, European historians, travelers, and theologians
were fascinated by the peculiar customs, rituals, and physical appearances of the
Dervishes. Their abandonment of earthly pleasures in favor of a spiritual destiny
placed them at odds with their own society. To the uneducated observer, these
foreign bodies, often naked but for a felt garment—a symbolic stripping oneself of
all material objects—appeared alien. Some would sleep on the ground, supported
by alms contributed by others. Most remarkable to the European visitor were
the elaborate ceremonial dances and music, which were the means by which the
Dervishes attained the divine. The 1496 account of the Abdäls sect of Dervishes, by
Konstantin Mihailovic, describes the Sufi rituals and the role of the music in their
circle, but focuses on its hypnotic and repulsive effects:
They burn themselves on the arms with fire and cut themselves with razors. In what they
walk about, so do they sleep. They never have anything of their own, but walk about the
cities like lunatics… At vespers they dance, going around [in a circle]. Having placed a
hand on each other’s shoulder, nodding their heads and hopping with their feet they cry in
a great voice, Lay lacha ylla lach which means in our language “God by God and God of
Gods.” So vehemently do they dance and cry out that they are to be heard from afar just
as if dogs were barking—one low and the other high. This dance of theirs is called the
samach, and they hold it to be some sort of sacred thing with great piety. And they whirl
about so violently that water flows from them, and they froth at the mouth like mad dogs.
They overexert themselves so much that one falls here and another there. Then having
recovered from this insane overexertion, each goes to his den.18
Another account of Sufi figures of Calendars—Qalandars in the Ottoman

Empire—comes from Cantacuzene Theodoros Spandounes. His account from the
early part of the sixteenth century illustrates the prevailing stereotypes of this mystic
group that would eventually saturate travel accounts about Islam and its religious
leaders:
The torlacchi [beardless youth] are naked and wear the hide of either sheep or some other
[animal] on their shoulders. In addition, the great majority of them wear felt [cloaks]
without any kind of garment and are thus afflicted with horrible colds in excessively
cold weather. For this reason, they cauterize their temples. They shave their beards and
moustaches and are men of a most evil nature. They are not to be found in convents like
monks, but are thieves, rascals, and assassins…. They carry on their heads a felt cap that
has wings and they demand alms with great importunity from Christians, Jews, and Turks.
Each of them carries a mirror with a long handle that he holds toward all people and says,
“Look in and consider how before long you will be different from what you are now; so
become modest and pious, think the better of [your] soul.” Having spoken in this manner,
he gives [the listener] an apple or an orange, which obliges one to give him one asper as
alms in return. They ride donkeys during the day while they beg in the name of God, and
at night they couple with these [same donkeys] like women.19
Spandounes paints a damning picture of the Calendars from their dress to their
behavior, accusing them of theft, murder, and bestiality. This terrifying image of
this sect persisted into the twentieth century through the writings of traveler Edward
Manuel Newman (1870–1953), who described a 1928 encounter with the Dervishes
in Cairo:
Strangest of all the dervishes I have seen at Cairo are the dancers or whirlers. The people
seem to consider them as monks or priests, altho I was told that they live in their own
homes with their wives and children and take part in the religious orgy only on Friday
afternoons. They assemble in an auditorium provided with what we should call a dancing
floor. As they arrive, they put on what appear to be voluminous white skirts that hang from
the armpits. Musicians—flute and cymbal players—begin what seems to be Persian or
Turkish music, and the dervishes begin to whirl slowly and move in a huge circle around
the room. The music increases in tempo and volume, and the dancers accelerate their steps
until they are literally spinning, and their white garments fly into the air like animated
umbrellas. If one of the devotees shows an inclination to slacken speed, there is a deacon
18 See Konstantin Mihailovic, Memoirs of a Janissary, trans. Benjamin Stolz, as given

in Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle
Period, 1200–1500 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), p. 74.
19 From I commentary di Theodoro Spandvgino Cantacvscino Gentilhuomo
Costantinopolitano, dell’origine de’ princip turchi, & de’ costume di quella natione, as given
in Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends, p. 66.
to slap him upon the shoulder and remind him of his task, and he starts whirling more
rapidly. This continues for what seems an incredible length of time. The dancers pant and
groan the name of Allah. Some of them have staring eyes, and their mouths are wide open.
Still they keep up the mad whirling, until they fall from exhaustion. When I witnessed the
spectacle, one whirling dervish fell to the floor and emitted a gurgling sound, while white
foam came from his mouth. He seemed an object of particular veneration, and members
of the congregation approached and touched him for his “blessing.”20
Towards a Topos? Whirling Dervishes on the Western Stage
The association of Oriental music with noise and violence can be observed in the early
diaries of European travelers. Writing in 1608, Salomon Schweigger (1551–1622),
the parson for Wilhermsdorf, and later a cleric at the Frauenkirche in Nuremburg,
provides an early description of Janissary music, written during his trip to the Holy
Land:
The Turks use such instruments when they are on campaign, at weddings and at their
other festivities. Similarly, when the emperor wants to hear music, then there are also two
small and tapered drummeln [kudüm], which would be used instead of the Heerbaucken
[military drum]; it is like a high German hat in size. However, this music, fundamentally
speaking, has no charm or grace in it; on the contrary, it is quite violent and hostile and
furthermore is entirely contrary to the art of true music which is practiced in Christendom,
and everything is dissonant. In sum, there is no sense or skill to be found in it, to which
anyone who has experienced music and heard Turkish music only once must bear witness.
Only when it is so absurdly loud that an entire battlefield is shaken by it will it be praised
by the Turks and thereby be boisterous enough; then they will use four, five, six or more
of the same instrument, all disorderly and without regard to whether an instrument is
louder or softer than another. Nor do they know of the division of musical parts, which
is now strong, then weak, according to what suits the Poem. In sum, it is a graceless and
charmless clamor, which the shepherds and village fiddlers in Germany could far surpass
in sweetness.21
Although Turkish music had, in reality, complex rules and regulations, eighteenth–
century European renditions of Janissary music made no subtle distinctions, depicting
Turkish music as 1) associated with the masculine and violent energy of war and
abduction, 2) set “against,” or contrary to, Western music, a crude foil to the latter’s
relative beauty and superiority, and 3) fanatically obsessive in its redundancies,
lacking skill, grace, and sophistication.
On the eighteenth-century European operatic stage, the epitome of the evil
Muslim character appears in the figure of the Calendar in Gluck’s La rencontre
imprévue ou Les Pèlerins de la Mecque (“The Unforeseen Encounter, or The
Pilgrims of Mecca,” Vienna, 1764) and Haydn’s L’incontro improvviso (Esterházy,
1775). The former, first performed in Vienna’s Burgtheater on January 7, 1764, was
20 Edward Manuel Newman, Seeing Egypt and the Holy Land (New York and London:
Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1928), pp. 71–77.
21 As translated by Robert Martin for Turkish Music Quarterly 3/4 (Autumn 1990): 8.
conceived for Austria’s imperial family, achieved wide success, and served as the
direct predecessor of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus Dem Serail (1782).
In La rencontre, the hypocrisy of the Calendar is demonstrated through his love
of wine. Act III opens in a shop in the bustling caravansary. The slimy figure of
the Calendar meets with one of his old friends, the leader of a caravan. During the
conversation, we learn that the leader has given the Calendar twenty bottles of “Corfu
marasquino.” The Calendar laments, saying, “What a pity the Franks can drink it.
A wine of such fine savor should be preserved for the children of the Prophet.” The
leader then pulls an open bottle from under his belt, and the two start drinking. After
the Calendar asserts that the Prophet was not in his right mind when he forbade wine,
the caravan leader sings a drinking aria:
Mahomet notre grand prophète / N’avait pas la cervelle nette, / Quand il a défendu le vin.
/ Cette liqueur enchanteresse, / Qu’il crut contraire à la sagesse, / L’antidote du chagrin. /
Qu’une maîtresse fasse la tigresse / Et vous reçoive avec dédain, / Buvez jusqu’à l’ivresse,
/ Bravez sa rudesse, / Moquez vous de son air mutin. / Ami, voilà, voilà la sagesse. / A
plein gosier boire du vin, / C’est là le plus heureux destin. / Du vin, du vin, buvons du
vin.
[Mahomet, our great prophet, / Did not have a clear mind / When he forbade wine. / This
magic drink / Which he thought to be the opposite of wisdom, / Is the antidote for grief. / If
your mistress plays the tigress, / And receives you with disdain, / Drink until you’re drunk,
/ Brave her rudeness, / Stand up to her harshness. / Friend, that, that is wisdom, / To drink
wine with a full throat / It’s the happiest lot of all. / Wine, wine, let’s drink wine.]22
The Muslim prohibition to drink offers Europeans the satisfaction of ridiculing

Islam and its followers as easily led astray from following the Prophet’s mistaken
proscription.23
Paul Wranitzky’s Oberon, König der Elften (1789), which served as the inspiration
for Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, was the most performed exotic Viennese Singspiel in
the eighteenth century,24 falling out of the repertory only in 1826, when it was ousted
by Weber’s version. The success of the opera was not limited to Vienna, as it was
performed in cities throughout Europe and was translated into Dutch, Polish, and
Russian.25 In Oberon, which takes place in Baghdad and Tunis, Wranitzky paints the
Dervishes as obsessive fanatics. For the Baghdad scenes, the composer constructs
vivid depictions of the Orient, even prior to the arrival of the European characters.
22 Text and translation as given in John Sidgwick’s liner notes to Gluck’s La rencontre,
conducted by John Eliot Gardiner (Paris: Erato Disques, 1991).
23 In Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Pedrillo seduces Osmin into drinking
the forbidden wine in order to flee the seraglio. In a duet that pays tribute to Bacchus, Osmin
questions the risk, and as the wine begins to take effect, he mutters to himself, “That’s true
wine … wine’s a beautiful drink; and our great Prophet shan’t make me think ill of it.”
24 See my “Fidelity, Violence, and Fanaticism: Orientalism in Wranitzky’s Oberon,
König der Elfen,” The Opera Quarterly 17 (Winter 2001): 43–69.
25 For a comprehensive list of performances of Wranitzky’s Oberon, see Christoph-
Hellmut Mahling and Joachim Veit, eds., Oberon: König der Elfen (Munich: G. Henle Verlag,
1993).
Following their chorus number, Oberon interferes and sends the Dervishes into
a frenzy as they cavort literally until they drop to a frantic 3/8 dance in C minor
marked presto (2.4). The stage directions to the number are as follows: “Oberon
lets himself down a little, swings his lily scepter; the festive music transforms itself
into a wild dance. The Dervishes dance around each other as if they were possessed.
One Dervish grabs Scherasmin, and waltzes off with him in spite of his screaming. As
soon as the music stops, the Dervishes tumble down and remain lying unmoving.”26
It is clear from the directions that the music’s effect on the Dervishes is gradual,
frantic, and involuntary. The first section begins with a single note in the first violins
ornamented with a grace note of a half–step (F–G) before the entrance of the high
winds. While the bass seems frozen on the tonic, the upper parts fragment the melody
into arpeggiated triads and clumsy leaps. That the piece cannot get beyond the three
notes outlining the C minor triad demonstrates not only the “barbarity” of Oriental
tunes, but also the obsessive redundancy of this religious sect. Accordingly, the piece
is marked forte throughout, except for the coda, which starts piano and fades out
to pianissimo; as the number progresses, it becomes thinner and thinner in texture
until it is reduced to the single pitch of G, which started the piece. The dance is thus
circular not only in its choreographed motion, but also in its musical vocabulary. On
stage, the fading of the music parallels the sect’s gradual collapse under the hypnotic
effects of the music. Hypnosis is achieved through the gradual acceleration of the
music, which intensifies the motion of the Dervishes. Toward the end of the piece,
the bass becomes “stuck” on the note G, as if it is incapable of reaching its tonic (C),
exhausted like the now enfeebled and entranced Dervishes. The solo oboe at this
point repeats the same phrase six times under the marking of perdendosi (“dying
away”).
The dance is designed to reflect the irrationality of the Dervishes, who are often
portrayed in the West as lunatics with bizarre rituals accompanied by frenzied music.
Wranitzky’s strategy involves harmonic stagnation and the repetition of phrases,
melodies, and rhythms. Unlike other works in which repetition produces a drone
effect, the obsessive redundancies of this piece seem designed to create a sense of
frenzy and to suggest hallucination, which the West routinely associated with this
highly mystic sect of Islam. In many exotic works from the eighteenth century,
Eastern men are portrayed as “possessed,” either by alcohol, religion, music, or
some irrational force, placing them in direct opposition to their rational Western
counterparts, who appear to be noble, brave, and in control.
Nineteenth-Century Stage Representations of the Dervishes
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the strategy of writing for the whirling
Dervishes became standardized in exotic operas, regardless of the gender of a given
26 “Oberon lasst sich etwas herunter, schwengt seinen Lilienstengel, die feyerliche
Musik verwandelt sich in einem wilden Tanz. Die Dervischen tanzen wie besessen durch
einander. Eine Dervisch bekommt Scherasmin zu packen, und waltz, troz seines Schreyens,
mit ihm fort. Sobald die Musik aufhort fallen die Dervischen taumelnd nieder, und bleiben
unbeweglich liegen.” My translation.
character. In fact, the topos seems to apply more commonly to dances for women,
which are also invested with sexual overtones. While this compositional strategy
confuses male with female and sacred with secular, it reinforces the Orientalists’
practice of constructing categories with no concern for authenticity. What remains
consistent is the emphasis on deviant qualities, marked by strong rhythms that target
the body and pose a threat to the rational order of Western music.
In Russia, works such as Borodin’s Prince Igor (1890), Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan
i Lyudmila (1842), and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888) established a
practice of writing nationalistic works with “Eastern” themes, based on seductive
maidens and irrationally violent men, so as to legitimatize Russia’s colonialist
projects of Central Asia.27 In France, both Carmen and Samson et Dalila incorporate
the Dervish style despite the fact that neither opera features Dervish characters,
nor do their plots refer to an Islamic theme. An example of this can be found in
“Gypsy Song,” at the opening of Act II in Carmen, which takes place in Lillas
Pastia’s establishment, Carmen’s favorite rendezvous for entertaining her “guests.”
When the curtain rises, Carmen, Frasquita, and Mercedes are discovered seated at a
table, entertaining officers. Gypsies accompany the Gypsy girls dancing with guitar
and tambourine. The number starts pianissimo with a tempo marking of Andantino
before changing several times until it eventually erupts into a frenzied Presto.28 The
dance starts with the hypnotic and consistent vamp in the bass before the winds
punctuate a circular theme in E minor. This sultry theme reminds us of the preceding
numbers by Carmen, which mark her as a Gypsy: excessive ornamentation, slippery
chromaticism, unexpected turns, and a sensual rhythm targeting the lower torso
and hips. There is an extravagant feel to this number, primarily due to the fact that
it is a set piece rather than a number integrated into the dramatic presentation. In
accordance with opera comique and its affiliation with dance, all action stops.
Bizet’s “gypsy” numbers are set against the predominant Western vocabulary of
the opera, as distorted and deviant, thereby associating the gypsies with decadence and
irrationality. Several traits of the style hongrois, as outlined by Bellman, contribute
to this effect, through which Bizet contrasts Carmen’s whorish promiscuity with
Michaëla’s angelic purity.29 In the dance, the opening melodic theme by the flutes is
ornamented with grace notes, staccato markings, and rests that are more concerned
with bodily motion than with enhancing the melody. The punctuating rhythm is
followed by the serpentine swirling of sixteenth notes, chromatically ascending
and descending, exploring different keys and contributing to the tonal ambiguity.
As the prelude draws to a close, it becomes more erratic by contracting its melodic
27 For more on this, see my “Under the Spell of Magic: The Oriental Tale in Rimsky-
Korsakov’s Scheherazade,” in Arabian Nights, ed. Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming); and Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia
Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1997).
28 See McClary, p. 90.
29 See Jonathan Bellman, Style Hongrois and “The Hungarian Gypsies and the Poetics of
Exclusion,” in The Exotic in Western Music, pp. 74–103. For more on this aspect of Carmen,
see Susan McClary’s “Sexual Politics in Classical Music,” in Feminine Endings: Music,
Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 53–79.
scope and alternating its dynamic from piano to forte before Carmen enters with her
strophic aria (2.5).
Like the Dervishes, the Gypsies defy Western society’s rigid adherence to
structure and rationality. Historically, the Roma culture celebrates wandering as an
eternal search for the unattainable; we may well equate the sense of Gypsy wandering
with Dervish whirling, since both are marginalized practices and both represent an
endless quest to move beyond the physical world. What make them at once attractive
and repulsive to the West is their irrationality, frenzied spirit, and hypnotic music.
Samson et Dalila also uses ritualistic dances derived from the whirling Dervish
topos. Its famous bacchanal takes place shortly after the capture of Samson and
his seduction by Delilah. Inside the temple of Dagon, the Philistines celebrate their
triumph with music that has been described as “savage” because of its heavy use of
percussion, intended to evoke the barbarity of the Philistines.30 Locke describes the
rhythm of the bacchanal as “hypnotic,” built around asymmetrical ostinatos (3 + 3 +
2) delineated by the castanets, timpani, and strings. The florid melodies and sensual
harmonies are based on the Arab Hijaz Kar mode, which uses the augmented second
between the second and third, and sixth and seventh intervals.31
Both Locke and Francis Affergan agree that the number is both “attractive”
and “monstrous” at the same time, thus re-enforcing the prevailing attitudes of the
Orient as a place of mystery, seduction, bizarre rituals, and torture.32 Along these
lines, Gustave Kobbé describes how the bacchanal exhibits “wonderfully seductive
music before degenerating into orgy.”33 The Philistines are depicted as “agents
of an oppressive government and a cruel, superstitious religion, thus consistent
with Orientalist stereotypes of Middle Eastern males as smug, single-minded,
intolerant, power-mad despots and fanatics, impulsive and prone to violence.”34 In
his examination of Samson, Locke establishes a code of binary oppositions with
Samson, the European man of faith set against Delilah, the Oriental idol-worshiping
seductress. 35 To Locke, the added elements of national liberation, Western piety,
and the femme fatale “reinforce rather than contradict the opera’s underlying
binary opposition between a morally superior ‘us’ (or ‘collective Self’) and an
appealing but dangerous ‘them’ (‘collective Other’) who come close to causing
‘our’ downfall.”36
The slithering opening of the bacchanal is semiotically feminine and Other
(2.6). The indication recitativo ad lib, the use of the augmented second, and
the solo oboe over a drone suggest freedom from the strict boundaries of Western
30 See Hugh MacDonald, “Samson et Dalila,” Grove Music Online ed. Laura Macy
(Accessed 14 November 2006), <http://www.grovemusic.com>. While MacDonald describes
the bacchanal as “savage,” he does not discuss the Orientalist dimension of the number.
31 Locke, “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other,’” p. 266.
32 Ibid., p. 267; and Francis Affergan, Exotisme et altérité: Essai sur les fondements
d’une critique de l’anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1987), pp. 27–28.
33 See Gustave Kobbé, Earl of Harewood (ed. and rev.), Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book
(London: The Bodley Head, 1987), p. 656.
34 Locke, “Constructing the Oriental ‘Other,’” p. 280.
35 Ibid., pp. 261–302.
36 Ibid., p. 263.
rhythms and metric scales, but can also allude to the irrationality of the Orient
described by Cromer. The opening tune, which has come, in Western music, to
be associated with the snake charmer, aligns the Orient with the bizarre and the
grotesque—even, perhaps, suggesting a proclivity for deviant acts with animals.37
Like Carmen’s “gypsy” numbers, the bacchanal targets the body through its heavy
use of percussion and sensuous orchestration. Despite the ballet’s strong roots in
French operatic tradition and its function as a divertissement, following the practice
of Meyerbeer and others, its exotic color distinguishes it from the rest of the opera.
Following the short introduction, the dance starts quietly at a moderately fast
pace (Allegro moderato), and gradually rises to fortissimo before fading out. Like
the opening recitative, the main melody is circular, hovering around its tonic note
(A) before ascending towards the upper octave. The bass provides the ostinato
necessary for the ritualistic dance, growing louder and faster with each repetition.
Following the first of many eruptions, the orchestra is reduced to a stagnant rhythmic
motive at the lower octave, marked piano. This pattern of intensification and release
is repeated several times as Saint-Saëns manipulates rhythm, tempo, and dynamics
to create an increasing level of hysterical whirling in the orchestra.
Delilah herself functions within narrative codes similar to those of Carmen, while
her Philistine priestesses parallel Carmen’s cigarette factory workers in their overt
sexuality. Both Carmen’s gypsies and Delilah’s Philistines act as foils for a morally
superior culture, which prevails through the destruction and annihilation of the Other.
Carmen and Delilah are themselves murdered violently onstage by protagonists
who are “seduced from their transcendental quest by feminine sensuality, … heroic
victims who must either rise to the occasion and destroy—or else be destroyed.”38
Like Bizet’s Carmen, Saint-Saëns’s Samson entails “the necessity for white bourgeois
codes of behavior … to reign supreme in the face of the apparently more permissive,
more sinister lifestyles of the ‘darker race.’”39
Saint-Saëns’s bacchanal defies rationality with a vengeance, which is why it
remains powerful and engaging to its Western audiences. Following its improvisatory
opening, suggesting the shifting sands of the Orient, the wild and savage dance of the
Philistines evokes primitive rituals with obsessively insistent rhythms, and awakens
exotic sensuality with insinuating augmented seconds, at once inviting and grotesque.
The piece refuses to pursue any rational thematic or harmonic development, as the
drones in the bass and the sustained chords in the upper register obsessively reiterate
a singular tonal center. The music is also melodically static, built around a repeating
three-pitch motive (A, B, C) marked by the “exotic” sounding augmented second.
The only development occurs, not within the tonal realm, but within changes in the
dynamic intensity and rhythmic complexity of the percussive patterns that saturate the
texture until, finally, the melody descends chromatically through whirling sixteenth
37 See Jean-Leon Gerome, The Snake Charmer, which is also the cover for Edward
Said’s Orientalism; also, see Ali Jihad Racy, “Symbolizing Otherness: The Snake Charmer in
Western Imagination” (unpublished paper presented at the National Meeting of the Society for
Ethnomusicology, Honolulu, Hawaii, November 2006).
38 McClary, Feminine Endings, p. 55.
39 Ibid., p. 63.
notes before slowing down, exhaustedly, to eighth notes. The brief flickering of a
sensual melody reignites the dance, leading to a final crescendo and a frantic finish.
***
Sander Gilman argues that racial and sexual stereotyping provides a “universal
means of coping with anxieties engendered by our inability to control the world.”40
In Islam, rituals held at Sufi lodges or shrines are designed to unite worshippers
with their Creator. Ecstatic movements of the body are recognized as spontaneous
expressions of a divine experience. For Western travelers, artists, and composers
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the rituals of this divine sect
provided an exotic difference ripe for exploitation. Dervishes were understood to
enact a particular way of losing control, spurred on by specific kinds of music that
defied the strictures of Western rationality and so became associated with barbarity,
perversion, and violence. As with Western associations of Turks with violence and
sensuality, and Gypsies with thievery, superstition, and easy virtues, the Dervishes
were associated with fanaticism and hypocrisy. The “rational” laws of Western music
had no place for the improvised and spiritual aspects of Dervish music. In fostering
this alienating and defaming stereotype, the West asserted ontological control over
the Orient.
In his book on the style hongrois, Bellman identifies a number of rhythmic,
melodic, harmonic and orchestral devices common in Western representations
of Gypsy music, some of which “might be a holdover from the Turkish Style.”41
Bellman’s overlapping of topics mirrors the overlapping of images on stage. The Turk,
the Arab, and the Gypsy are conflated not only by virtue of their Otherness, but also
and more importantly through their essential difference from the White European.42
The stereotyped Dervish spawned a large musical lexicon in representations by
European composers, whose consistent elements included exotic instruments
and scales, “whirling” rhythms, frenzied tempos, and primitive harmonies. Yet
Orientalist processes extend deeper than the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic topics
used to denote the Orient. Orientalism is, as Said asserts, “a language” and a “means
of creation.”43 These topics are crafted and reconstructed to distort, subdue, and
incorporate the Orient, as Other, within a larger, more “universal” Western culture.
40 Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and

Madness (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 12.
41 Bellman, Style Hongrois, pp. 91–97.
42 Gilman discusses the case of Mérimée’s Carmen, whom the author labels as a Moor,
a Jew, and a Gypsy (Difference and Pathology, p. 30).
43 Said, p. 87.
Chapter Three
Reveling in the Rubble:

Where is the Love?
George Lipsitz
…Western musicians have always been reveling in the rubble.

Susan McClary
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Henry David Thoreau
In the introduction to her brilliant, inspiring, and transformative book, Feminine

Endings, Susan McClary allegorizes her own quest to ask and answer serious
questions through the story of Bluebeard. As narrated in the classic fairy tale and in
Bartok’s opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, the story concerns a young bride given the keys
to six of the seven rooms in her husband’s castle, but forbidden to unlock the door
to the seventh room. Each chamber exposes the young woman to a presentation of
her husband as he wishes to be seen. Except for some disquieting clues, the rooms
reveal her husband’s wealth, taste, political power, and personal strength. Opening
the seventh door, however, breaks the illusion and exposes the bride to horrible truths
hidden behind it. McClary argues that the story offers a parable for feminist scholars,
that the versions of reality bequeathed to us by patriarchy have been inaccurate and
misleading, that we need to open the seventh door to see the truth behind the façade,
no matter how horrible it might be.
During the summer of 2003, hip hop recording artists Black Eyed Peas released
“Where is the Love?,” a complex multi-layered exploration of truths that lie hidden
behind the seventh door (3.1). The recording reprised and honored parts of the
1972 rhythm and blues hit of the same name by Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack.
In the original song’s lyrics, the singer bemoans the broken promise by a lover who
had pledged to leave a man she did not love, as soon as she could get free. Yet as the
song unfolds, the singer realizes that the promise was a lie, and wonders “where is the
Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2000), p. 169.
2 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854).
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 3.
love you said you’d give to me?” The Black Eyed Peas capture the affective power
of the original song but channel it in another direction. They fuse this narrative of
intimate personal betrayal to a broader societal betrayal, asking “where is the love?”
in a time riddled with hate and ongoing suffering, a time when “a war is goin’ on but
the reason’s undercover.”
The song’s strong anti-war message, coupled with the Black Eyed Peas’ inter-
racial identity (the group consists of one Afro-Filipino, one Black, one Mexican, and
one White), helped “Where is the Love?” secure critical and commercial success,
culminating fifteen years of exploration and development by the group’s founders
William Jones (aka “Will.I.Am”) and Alan Pineda (aka Apl.de.Ap.). Pineda moved
to Los Angeles from the Philippines in 1989 when he was in the eighth grade. Almost
immediately he joined the breakdancing crew Tribal Nation. He formed a hip hop
group, Atban Klann, with fellow eighth grader Jones, an African American. They
soon recruited Mexican American Jaime Gomez (aka Taboo) from the breakdancing
crew Devine Tribal Brothers and the hip hop group Grass Roots into what would
become the Black Eyed Peas. Their first commercial releases, Behind the Front in
1988, and Bridging the Gap in 2000, displayed eclectic tastes, a guest appearance
by Macy Gray, and a propensity to have all three MCs rapping in front of live bands
rather than samples. They did not achieve broad commercial success, however,
until the three connected with two white pop music singers, Stacy Ferguson (aka
“Fergie”) from the group Wild Orchid, and Justin Timberlake, formerly with the
“boy band” ‘NSync.
Jones made the initial contacts with both Ferguson and Timberlake. He asked
Ferguson to sing “Shut Up” on the Elephunk album, and the collaboration went so
well that she joined the group. Jones met Timberlake at a club in Hollywood where
they discovered a common enthusiasm for dancing in circles, old school style. A week
after Jones showed him a version of the lyrics to “Where is the Love?,” Timberlake
came up with the melodic chorus that helped make the song so memorable. The
group had Timberlake sing his melody on the recording, and later joined with him to
perform it in person as part of a massive tour headlined by Timberlake and Christina
Aguilera. The tour helped give the song a visibility with audiences and propelled it
onto the pop charts as a best selling single, helping to make Elephunk an extremely
successful album.
The success of “Where is the Love?” on the pop charts did not translate into sales
or credibility with hip hop audiences, however. The group’s success on the pop charts
and association with Timberlake and Aguilera tempted many hard core hip hop fans
to dismiss the song as not hip hop at all, as a pop song aimed at white listeners and
buyers, and successful because of that calculation. There was indeed calculation in
the group’s decision to work with Ferguson and Timberlake, but it was a calculation
consistent with, rather than contrary to, the spirit, tradition, and aesthetic concerns
of hip hop. The group’s insistence on dancing in circles when they performed paid
tribute to their origins in late 1980s and early 1990s hip hop in Los Angeles. Their
Atlantic Records 28798, Joel Whitburn, Top R&B Singles, 1942–1988 (Menomonee
Falls, WI: Record Research, 1988), pp. 151, 183.
6 Elephunk, A&M Records, B00009V7RF.
Reveling in the Rubble: Where is the Love? 33
decision to mix rapping in front of live musicians with only occasional samples
followed the example of the great Philadelphia hip hop ensemble, the Roots. Even
their eclectic tastes in music and their decision to incorporate the pop sounds of Justin
Timberlake and Fergie into their oeuvre had parallels with earlier efforts within hip
hop such as Afrika Bambaataa’s samples from Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europe Express,”
and Run DMC’s tribute to and collaboration with Aerosmith on “Walk This Way.”
Politics more than aesthetics motivated the Black Eyed Peas in their decision
to add Fergie to the group, to collaborate with Timberlake, and to feature him
prominently in the promotional video for “Where Is the Love?” As Will.I.Am
explained to Corey Moss of MTV News about the video, “I don’t wanna get Dixied
with it,” referring to the campaign by the Clear Channel Radio conglomerate against
the Dixie Chicks because the country music trio’s Natalie Maines criticized President
Bush. Clear Channel had contributed significant funds to the Bush campaign and
been the beneficiary of rulings by Bush appointees to the Federal Communications
Committee that added greatly to its profits. Clear Channel executives alerted their
stations to ban music that they considered inconsistent with the national interest
after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11,
2001, focusing on songs by Bruce Springsteen and others that might be construed
as critical of capitalism, war, or the U.S. government. When Maines told a British
audience that the group was not proud of being from the same state as President
Bush, Clear Channel attempted to ban the Dixie Chicks’ music and to have its disc
jockeys foment hostility to the group in hopes of ending the group’s career. At a time
when a group of white country music artists could receive this kind of treatment,
a time when Paris, Public Enemy, KRS-1 and other “conscious” rap artists were
shunned by the corporate entertainment and media industries, the Black Eyed Peas
came up with a strategy that would enable their music to be heard by millions. “It
has to do with our own form of propaganda,” Will.I.Am explained. “The media have
their way of doing it. And we’re going to inform the people what it is that we want
them to know, how we think about life and how we live our life and what consumes
our mind socially.” Observing that no current popular songs dealt with these kinds
of issues, he proclaimed, “The world needs this song right now.”
By attaching themselves to the mass market sex appeal of Fergie and Timberlake,
the marketing power of the Timberlake/Aguilera tour, and the marketability of
Timberlake’s catchy refrain, the Black Eyed Peas might seem to be collaborating
with the very things that the song’s lyrics criticize—the power of glamorous media
images that make young people feel insignificant unless they imitate them, people
making decisions with “only visions of them dividends,” and a selfish individualism
that overwhelms the values of fairness, equality, and love. It would be one thing
to appropriate the power of the mass market in order to promote the politics of
fairness, equality, and love, but quite another to harness the positive reputation of
fairness, equality, and love in the service of augmenting the star power and market
appeal of Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera. Even the massive success of
“Where is the Love?” does not answer the question, because we have no way of
Corey Moss, “Vow Timberlake Clip Won’t Get Dixie Chicks Treatment,” MTV News,
13 May 2003, p. 1.
assessing the long or short-term effects of its lyrics compared to its other dimensions
as entertainment and marketing. Are the song’s lyrics best understood as one part of
a broader political moment or as a key element in differentiating one mass marketed
product from all the others?
This is a familiar question in cultural studies: one that can only be answered
through concrete case studies rather than through philosophical abstraction. But
because all the evidence will never be fully accessible by any investigator or group
of investigators, it is also a question that needs to be posed in terms of reasoned
speculation as well as empirical inquiry. In the case of “Where is the Love?,” it is
necessary to analyze the song in terms of the historical moment in which it emerged.
At a time when the largest peace movement in the history of the world failed to
stop the U.S. war in Iraq, when government-sanctioned media mergers produced
stultifying sameness in the interests of corporate synergy across media forms, when
hip hop’s huge socially conscious and participatory do-it-yourself audience could
find precious little with which to identify within mass marketed music, and at a
time when popular music artists were as quiescent and complicit with the corporate
agenda as any time in recent memory, the stage was set for a different kind of
music within commercial culture. Even more important, at a time when the most
powerful forces in the U.S. political system encouraged people to place their desires
as consumers and accumulators above their responsibilities and obligations as
community members and citizens, “where is the love?” was the right question—not
just a better question than “who let the dogs out?,” but a question of enormous
personal and social significance.
In a way that had been long absent from mainstream commercial culture, the
Black Eyed Peas’ song came up with a question capable of expressing profound
personal and political concerns in vernacular language. Their question connected
diverse constituencies, allowing for many different moments of mutual recognition,
affiliation, and alliance. The musical content and personnel on the recording brought
different constituencies in contact with one another. The question “where is the
love?” brilliantly identified what has been taken from people during three decades of
deindustrialization, privatization, economic polarization, and social disintegration.
The song’s lyrics connect desires for social justice with desires for what Tricia Rose
calls “intimate justice.” They attack the dominant system for its crimes against mind
and spirit, not just for its failure to deliver the affluence it constantly promises.
Perhaps most important, by blending musical styles, embodied identities, and non-
identical but non-antagonistic historical memories, the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where is
the Love?” enacted the politics that it envisioned.
Few people today remember that “where is the love?” was one of the main
questions raised by the civil rights movement forty years ago. In his 1963 book,
Strength to Love, Martin Luther King, Jr grappled with the problem of love in a world
ruled by hate, hurt, and fear. “Evil in all its ugly dimension” permeates everyday life,
he observed. “We see it expressed in tragic lust and inordinate selfishness,” King
complained. He added, in words that seem as apt for our own time as for his: “We see
it in high places where men are willing to sacrifice truth on the altars of self-interest.
We see it in imperialistic nations crushing other people with the battering rams of
social injustice. We see it clothed in the garments of calamitous wars which leave
men and nations morally and physically bankrupt.”
This public evil caused unremitting private pain, according to King. What he
named as the “dark midnight” within the social order was paralleled by an attendant
midnight within the inner lives of men and women. King saw people plagued by
pervasive fear, anxiety, and depression, disillusioned by their experiences with
what G. K. Chesterton called “cures that don’t cure, blessings that don’t bless, and
solutions that don’t solve.” Dr King sought to build a social movement capable
of transforming both the inner and outer lives of humans. He sought to change our
society, not simply to desegregate it.
No matter how narrowly he has been remembered—in popular entertainment
and journalism as simply an eloquent dreamer and parochial advocate for Black
inclusion into the full rewards and benefits of U.S. society, and worse, within neo-
liberal and neo-conservative fables as a believer in color blind competition and
atomized individualism—Dr King and the radical Black prophetic tradition he
reflected and shaped stood for the betterment of our entire condition as members
of a global community, not just for a renegotiation of our rights as citizens or our
rewards as workers. He believed in justice, not just us.
Forty years after Dr King published Strength To Love, thirty-five years after his
assassination, and twenty years after his birthday became a national holiday, we
find ourselves facing another dark midnight. In some ways our problems seem even
more painful today than they did four decades ago. The “Second Emancipation”
in which Dr King played such a large role turned out to be very much like the
first emancipation—a victory without true victory. Sharecropping and Jim Crow
segregation replaced racialized chattel slavery in the wake of the defeat of radical
Reconstruction in the nineteenth century, while neo-liberal economic restructuring
at home and abroad after the passage of the civil rights acts of the mid-1960s has
produced a re-racialization of opportunities and life chances in today’s world.
The betrayal of the first Reconstruction was not only a defeat for Black people
but for democracy itself; the betrayal of the social warrant won by egalitarian social
movements of the mid-twentieth century has exacerbated inequality, austerity,
and insecurity for the majority of the world’s population, reinforcing old forms of
dehumanization, exploitation, and oppression while bringing into being new ones at
the same time.
Today too, midnight in the economic order has its corollary in the inner lives of
men and women, in wounded psyches, blasted hopes, and broken hearts emanating
from the calculated cruelty of economic and social policies imposing the most arduous
costs of social change on the most defenseless groups—on the poor, on aggrieved
racialized groups, on women, on children, and criminalized sexual minorities. For
African Americans, the devastation has been particularly severe, in part because anti-
Black racism is the ideological linchpin of neo-conservative and neo-liberal attacks
on public education, public housing, public health care, and public employees, but
8
Martin Luther King, Jr, Strength to Love (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981),
pp. 77–78.
Ibid., pp. 58–59, 75.
also because Black people and Black communities have suffered most from the
unraveling of the social wage and social services. The abandonment of efforts to
enforce civil rights laws and the subsequent green light given to discriminators
and haters has exacerbated inequality and severely impacted the social distribution
of suffering, pain, pleasure, and joy. This midnight in the economic order and
the political order influences every seemingly private and personal aspect of our
lives. It promotes disillusionment, despair, and internalized self-hatred. As George
Rawick used to say in another context, “in its final stages, genocide starts to look
like suicide.”
The Black Eyes Peas’ song “Where is the Love?” addresses these realities through
clear, compact, and direct lyrics. The song bemoans people “living like they ain’t got
no mamas.” It criticizes thrill seekers “addicted to the drama,” attracted “to things
that’ll bring you trauma.” It exposes the hypocrisy of a government that devotes
massive resources to fighting “terrorism” without addressing the “terrorism” at home
of the Ku Klux Klan and “the big CIA.” By rhyming the “KKK” with the “CIA,” the
song plays to the collective memory in black communities of the role played by U.S.
intelligence agencies in raising money for the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s and
1990s by collaborating with drug dealers poisoning the black community. Exposed
in a great book by the late Gary Webb and condemned on the floor of Congress and
in public hearings organized by Los Angeles Representative Maxine Waters, this
history of crack in the ghetto had been silenced by the mainstream media before
Black Eyed Peas found a way to give it prominence again.10
Yet the song does not place all the blame outside the ghetto. In the same breath
that it identifies the KKK and the CIA as terrorists, the first verse names as “terrorists”
Los Angeles street gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, and warns that fighting racism
with hatred only adds to the problems rather than reducing them. The song shows
that Black people pay a price for what has been done to them, and part of that price
is paid with disrespect for one another.
The Black Eyed Peas remind us that sexism within and across communities
contributes to the dark midnight we find ourselves in. Dr King could imagine a
“beloved community,” but he could not delegate meaningful power to women
activists like Ella Baker. Dr King understood the power and perils of different kinds
of loving, through painful personal contradictions as well as through intellectual
analysis. But without an analysis grounded in feminist critiques of unequal power
and unequal pleasure, he could not open the seventh door, could not reckon with
the ways in which exploitation and injustice writ large in the state are also writ
large within the personal understandings of gender and sexuality within which most
people operate. Without such an analysis, Dr King could not open the seventh door,
and neither can we.
In this midnight, the publication of books by feminists Tricia Rose and Lisa
Duggan promise and prefigure a new dawn. They help us understand why the question
posed by the Black Eyed Peas resonates so powerfully with a mass audience. Tricia
Rose’s Longing to Tell presents powerful and eloquent testimony by Black women
10 Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998).
about love, sexuality, and intimacy. It registers, in a way that previously only the
most skilled works of fiction have been able to do, what Black women in the U.S.
have been through in the age of de-industrialization and what they have learned as a
result. Rose enables us to see that while sexuality seems to be experienced as private,
personal, intimate, and isolated, it has what she calls “a powerful and volatile public
life.” The private and personal choices we make about intimacy, sexuality, and love
cannot be detached from the pervasive power of media images, advertising appeals,
and self-help stories, from the consequences of public policy decisions that shape
the quality and character of interpersonal relations in homes, schools, communities,
and work places.
In The Twilight of Equality, Lisa Duggan demonstrates how the public political
projects of labor exploitation, income inequality, and gender and racial subordination
that have dominated public policy since the successes of the civil rights movement
have depended on the mystification and glorification of an imaginary private sphere
where properly gendered marriage produces families capable of managing social
crises by imbuing their members with morality, restraint, and civility.11 Bad social
conditions are blamed on bad families, while selfishness and greed are lauded and
legitimated as efforts to protect and promote the interest of one’s own family in
competition with others.
Dr Du Bois noted in Black Reconstruction in America that the practical function
of the discourse of white supremacy in the ante-bellum era actually served to
determine which whites would rule, not whether whites will rule. The dominant
political rhetoric about “family values” today is not about whether families will be
valued, but rather about which families will be valued. Duggan shows how in our
time the public deployment of discourses about private behavior serves to blame the
victims, to represent inequality and injustice as natural, necessary, and inevitable,
while making collective caretaking and interpersonal empathy seem impractical,
inefficient, and even immoral.
Duggan’s analysis enables us to see how we are actually governed, how identity
politics actually functions in our society. Public policies produce the private spheres
they purport to protect, while subsidizing and structuring the racial, sexual, and
familial relations they deem normative and natural. A counter-subversive consensus
condemns “identity politics” when the identities are those of women, gay/lesbian/
bisexual/transgendered subjects, or people of color, while at the same time obscuring
how access to the “universal” identities of “citizen” and “market subject” is structured
by wealth, whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality.
Although they may seem to belong to a realm far removed from everyday life,
state policies shape the ways we experience our private and personal identities. Tax
codes, zoning regulations, and the criminal justice system posit the family as the
privileged locus of personal affiliation and association. They favor hostile privatism
and defensive localism over community consciousness. Labor laws, investment
incentives, and environmental regulations help give some social groups access to
decent incomes, health care, housing, and other amenities, while forcing other groups
11 Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the
Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).
to become fractured and fragmented because their members have to work long hours
at dangerous jobs for low pay, because they lack access to environmental protection
and health care, because they face unjust impediments to the accumulation of assets
that appreciate in value and can be passed down across generations.
State policies subsidize people whose sexualities conform to dominant norms,
while punishing gays and lesbians by depriving them and their partners of insurance,
inheritance, and health benefits. Tax breaks for capital gains and inherited wealth
increase the dollar value of past and present racial discrimination, providing white
families with unearned rewards that augment intergenerational transfers of wealth.
At the same time, the non-enforcement of civil rights laws and the reluctance to
prosecute hate crimes combines with the mass incarceration of minorities as part of
the war on drugs to give communities of color very different horizons for intimacy,
sexuality, and love than are present for the more favored sectors of society. Public
health policies that suppress access to information and resources about birth control
and reproductive rights while allocating millions of dollars to sermons advocating
abstinence have clear and calamitous consequences for communities struggling with
HIV and AIDS, with sexually transmitted diseases, with unplanned parenthood.
In Longing to Tell, Rose reveals how these intersections of public policy and
personal desire have an impact on Black women who make brave and meaningful
choices for themselves despite the many obstacles in their paths. The book reflects
an extraordinary and unusual choice by a Black scholar, a choice that reveals much
about the promise and peril of our present moment. Nearly a decade ago, Rose won
remarkable recognition and reward for Black Noise, the first—and still the best—
serious book on hip hop. Critics noticed Rose’s brilliance as an interpreter of cultural
texts, especially her analysis of how the aesthetics of rupture, layering, and flow
that permeated break dancing, graffiti writing, sampling, and rapping continued
longstanding African American aesthetic traditions while at the same time reflecting
how contemporary Black youths experience time, space, commodities, and identity
in the age of deindustrialization. Rose won respect for her sophisticated critiques of
sexism within hip hop, but also for her knowing support for sex-positive and self-
affirming stances toward pleasure articulated by women rappers.
Many people missed, however, that Black Noise was a collection of oral
testimonies by inner city minority youths about how deindustrialization and
economic restructuring affected their lives, that it was not only the best book about
hip hop, but also the most valuable archive of the ideas and aspirations of inner
city life in the post-civil rights era. Rose could have built on the success of Black
Noise to position herself as a spokesperson about popular culture, as a translator
and interpreter of Black culture for the corporate media, as a visible token of racial
inclusion at prestigious universities. These are all honorable and important roles,
but Rose did something different. She turned back to the community, to the voices
of Black women, to the nettling problem of sexuality that defines so many people’s
hopes for pleasure and fulfillment yet causes so much personal and public pain. She
offers us testimonies from women who have unlocked the seventh door, entered the
room, and examined its contents. What they have to say is often not pretty, but it is
honest.
In illuminating both the differences and commonalities among Black women
of different ages, sexualities, and classes, Rose disrupts any simple ideas about
Black life as unified and homogeneous. Her findings reveal both a particular racial
dimension to sexuality as well as a more general picture. The situated knowledge
of Black people—and Black women especially—offers an indispensable optic
on power, struggle, and resistance in our time. But precisely because private pain
and public policies are connected, the testimonies that Rose elicits from Black
women contain enormous significance for people from all backgrounds. With
minimal commentary of her own, Rose divides the stories her respondents tell into
categories that emphasize the three modalities that emerge again and again in their
narratives. “Through the Fire” recounts the complicated, difficult, and often hurtful
processes through which Black women negotiate their sexual identities. “Guarded
Heart” reflects a heightened need to be self-protective, often as a result of betrayal,
disappointment, abuse, and even assault. Yet “Always Something Left To Love”
refers to the sense of possibility that remains, what Rose identifies as “a marked
hopeful commitment to loving and being loved, no matter what has gone before.”12
Rose’s book is neither a prescriptive self-help manual nor the manifesto of a
new Black feminist formation. Like previous landmark books built around oral
interviews with ordinary African Americans, it offers precise, profound, and timely
ways of knowing and ways of being.13 Just as Sojourner Truth told nineteenth-
century listeners that “I am sittin’ among you to watch; and every once in a while I
will come out and tell you what time of night it is,” Black women seeking what Rose
terms “justice in intimacy” in Longing to Tell have stepped forward to let us know
what time it is.14
Their testimonies are remarkable in many respects, but perhaps most important
as exemplars of contemporary political and intellectual thinking shaped equally by
what they reject and what they accept. No single story encompasses these diverse
perspectives completely, but many of them cohere around common refusals:
refusals of normative femininity and normative families, of normative sexuality and
normative socialities, of normative sentimentality and normative cynicism. At the
same time, they go beyond mere refusals, fashioning a faith in the future out of a
collective and affirmative identification as Black women, and a love of and loyalty
to Black people as a continuing collectivity despite all their disappointments with
simple, essentialized, and even misogynist constructions of Blackness.
12 Tricia Rose, Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 5.
13 Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic
Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); John Gwaltney, Drylongso:
A Self Portrait of Black America (New York: Random House, 1980); Elizabeth Clark-
Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Michael Keith Honey, Black Workers
Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
14 Sojourner Truth, “Speech at New York City Convention,” in Paul Lauter, et al. (eds.),
The Heath Anthology of American Literature (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1994), p. 1962.
Because they cannot invest their hopes in any un-problematized identity, the
women in Longing To Tell display sophisticated critical faculties. They discern
problems in what others present as solutions. “Rhonda,” for example, finds fault
with what she is expected to think about both the family and social movements. “I
didn’t buy the family line that your friends will go away, but your family will always
be with you; it just didn’t ring true for me,” she offers, understandably enough
after describing being sexually abused by her brother and finding that her parents
denied that the abuse even happened. Yet her self-active choices to participate in
social movements and be “out” as a lesbian expose her to relationships with their
own contradictions and corruptions. “People are very uncomfortable with my out
lesbianism when I’m in a position of organizing,” she explains, adding “When
I’m doing something and I’ll say something that so clearly makes me a dyke,
everybody’s uncomfortable because that has no place in a political context.”15 With
no safe “home,” Rhonda asks questions and critiques social formations that others
take for granted.
Yet as Rose reminds us, these refusals come in a context that allows no easy
answers. Because Black women have so often been associated with sexual deviance,
their frank discussion of sexual desires might be used to reinforce demeaning and
dehumanizing stereotypes. At the same time, however, the strategy of uplift that
has historically encouraged Black women to perform “purity” and deny their own
sexuality has taken a terrible toll over the years, not just through self-denial but
also through its attendant proscriptions against lesbianism and other forms of non-
normative erotic, romantic, or otherwise intimate connections.
Because the women in Longing To Tell cannot afford the luxury of simple
solutions, because they cannot contain or resolve contradictions, they have to work
through them. They have learned that their problems cannot be solved by an ideal
partner, an ideal relationship, or an ideal sexual technique, and as a result, the
interviewees in Longing To Tell recognize that real problems are almost never solved
once and for all, but rather are worked through, reconfigured, and re-encountered in
slightly different forms and different ways throughout our lives. As Rose concludes,
“Intimate justice comes from working through not around these histories.”16
In The Twilight of Equality, Duggan reminds us that genuinely working through
our histories requires public projects and progressive politics. The lives that Black
women lead, like the lives of members of other subordinate groups, will not remain
static in the years ahead: they are likely to get worse. The neo-conservatives and neo-
liberals of our time stay in power by mobilizing counter-subversive coalitions among
antagonistic social groups based in a perpetual moral panic about the misbehaviors
of others. Duggan shows, for example, how advocates of inequality harp on the
alleged moral shortcomings of women on welfare because such punitive language
effectively obscures how welfare “reform” entails shifting the burdens of caring for
newborns, children and the elderly away from the state and its well-to-do taxpayers
onto poorly paid and already overworked women of color.
15 Rose, pp. 267, 282.

16 Ibid., p. 400.
Similarly, arguments that attribute the weaknesses of contemporary families to
the “selfish” desires for independence by individual women hide how structural
problems like low wages and inadequate municipal services hurt families. These
discourses can also be used as a justification for legislation that makes it hard for
women to leave abusive and exploitative relationships. Opponents of public schools,
public housing, and public libraries seek opportunities to associate those institutions
with non-normativity, with people of color, non-normative sexualities, disease, dirt,
and drug use.
The ideas and arguments advanced by Rose and Duggan make us long for mass-
based democratic social movements capable of enacting some of the social relations
they envision. Social movements have the potential to serve as important mechanisms
for connecting desires for intimacy and pleasure with struggles for social justice.
Yet progressive social movements have often been politically radical, yet culturally
conservative. Uninterrogated attitudes toward sexual and familial normativity have
been especially destructive to otherwise democratic struggles. Michael Miller Topp,
in his work on Italian American anarchists in the early twentieth century, shows
how the successful strategy of “gendering” solidarity around a shared understanding
of masculinity ultimately made that group unable to address the valid concerns of
women workers. Male workers who might otherwise have felt ashamed of opposing
the state and the church could embrace radical anarchism for masculinist reasons,
because it enabled them to stand up to the bosses as “men.” Yet that same investment
in normative gender roles exacted a large cost. When they encountered a workforce
that was largely female during the Lawrence strike of 1912, anarchist groups had not
developed the women leaders or even the forms of address necessary for winning
women workers to their side. Worse, during and after the First World War, Italian
fascists found they could win even self-professed internationalists back to the
cause of Italian nationalism by invoking the familiar codes of masculinity for new
purposes.17
During the great upsurge of labor radicalism in the 1930s, Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO) organizers made the trade union movement more legitimate
in the eyes of many potential recruits by stressing a family orientation. Women’s
auxiliaries actively supported male workers when they went on strike, and the
unions presented the interests of male breadwinners as the interests of their entire
families. These tactics succeeded in the short run, but in the long run they led the
CIO to neglect women for roles as organizers and union leaders, even in industries
dominated by women workers. Lizabeth Cohen shows that this family orientation
suppressed the growth and squandered the talents of perhaps an entire generation of
women leaders in the labor movement. Even worse, it led the CIO to settle for private
health plans and pensions rather than universal programs. It led them to endorse the
subsidies for suburbanization by the federal government contained in the Federal
Housing Administration loan program and Federal Highway programs rather than
17 Michael Miller Topp, Those Without A Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2001), pp. 135–173.
advocating reinvestment in the inner city urban working-class neighborhoods that
provided so much of the base of support for the labor movement in the first place.18
As an official for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) in the 1950s, Ella Baker devoted extensive attention to the civil rights
movement’s failure to deal adequately with issues about gender and normativity.
She noted the pernicious effects of the culture of uplift on that organization’s local
chapters. It upset Baker that local officers of the NAACP were so reluctant to address
the needs of Black people in their towns who did not conform to the dominant
culture’s ideas of social respectability. Baker thought the NAACP should be as
zealous in defending the rights of the town drunk as it was in defending the rights of
the town doctor because both of them confronted white supremacy, albeit in different
ways.19 As Barbara Ransby notes in her indispensable new biography of Baker, this
critique turned out to be prophetic. The mass popular movement for Black freedom
won as much as it did in the 1960s precisely because it drew upon the commitment
and courage of Black working class men and women who had long been ignored
by top-down uplift oriented organizations.20 Yet the greatest beneficiaries of the
movement’s successes have been Black professionals who are encouraged by the
dominant society to see themselves as unconnected to the fate of the Black working
class, to be praiseworthy precisely because they are different from other Blacks, to
seek individual advancement and escape from racism rather than becoming part of
fashioning collective and communal solutions.21
Duggan argues that a new “homo-normativity” threatens to repeat within gay
and lesbian organizations the very hierarchies that Baker fought so hard to oppose
within the civil rights movement. Attempts to win legal sanction for gay and lesbian
marriages properly fight against systematic legal discrimination, but they also divide
the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered community by advancing the interests of
normative respectability, by amending the definition of legitimate and properly
gendered family roles rather than contesting them.
This legacy of social movements is particularly relevant to the concerns voiced
in Longing to Tell and The Twilight of Equality because social movements, along
with popular culture, serve as some of the very few sites in society where alternative
socialities and non-normative identities can be constructed, negotiated, and
sustained. The family, the church, the school, and the media work together (although
not always seamlessly so) to instantiate and legitimate normative identities. When
social movements or practices within expressive popular culture merely replicate the
relations that reinforce these identities (as in the gendering of solidarity in the Italian
American anarchist movement, the family orientation of the trade union movement,
and the dis-identification with non-normativity that Ella Baker protested within the
18 Lizabeth Cohen, Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939

(New York: Cambridge, 1990), pp. 358–359.
Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 120.
20 Ibid.
21 See Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the
Mississippi Delta (London and New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 220–245.
civil rights movement), they undermine in the realms of culture the egalitarianism
and creative conflict they seek to provoke in politics.
When social movements produce new identities and new social relations,
however, when their affinity groups, workshops, house meetings, consciousness-
raising sessions, residential clusters, picket lines, and planning discussions produce
new kinds of people, they help create and sustain the kinds of consciousness
necessary for social change. Perhaps most important, they provide a meaningful
alternative to the family as the center of the social world, to its gendered identities,
and intergenerational allegiances and obligations. As Ernie Cortes of the grassroots
San Antonio group COPS explains, one of the key virtues of social movements is
that they are not like families. He explains diplomatically, “We are not a substitute
family. While we can never do for each other in our organizations what a family
ought to do for its members, we can teach each other how to develop trust in a
relationship with people who are not part of our families.”22 Cortes might have added
that while social movements can never do for people what families do, they also
have an advantage in that neither can they do to people some of the negative things
that families do.
The legacy of the civil rights movement that haunts the testimonies in Longing
to Tell (positively and negatively) contains some important precedents for working
through rather than working around contradictions. Women who played vital roles
in the Black Freedom movement had to contest normative family and gender
expectations as they challenged the ruling racial regime. Few people who knew Ella
Baker as a tireless traveler and organizer for civil rights knew anything about her
personal life. She fashioned an unusual and innovative form of marriage to Bob
Roberts, refusing to take her husband’s last name, leaving him behind in New York
as she traveled around the country (even to take care of their adopted daughter),
and rarely mentioning Roberts in correspondence with close friends. She was so
successful in this strategy that although the FBI conducted extensive surveillance
of Baker’s activity—tapping her phone, following her around, and interviewing
her associates—the Bureau’s agents did not know that she was married. Moreover,
Baker also created a rich affective and emotional life outside of marriage with
other women, maintaining extraordinarily close associations with Lucille Black
(membership secretary of the NAACP, who never married), Rosetta Gardner of the
YWCA, and Shreveport activist Dorothy Simpkins.23 An extraordinary group of non-
Black married women active in the movement fashioned similar unusual and non-
normative extra-familial bonds, most notably Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama,
and Anne Braden.24
22 Francesca Polletta, Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social

Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 184.
Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
24 Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998). Diane Fujino, “Heartbeat of Struggle,” forthcoming, Catherine Fosl,
Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War
South (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2002).
The Black freedom struggle has also benefited from the situated knowledge
of people with non-normative sexualities. It is not just that Claude McKay, James
Baldwin, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Bayard Rustin and other prominent artists,
intellectuals, and activists have been gay or lesbian individuals, and that their
commitments to struggle have helped combat homophobia within the movement
itself. Even more important, the presence in the struggle of people with these
complex identities and allegiances encouraged the development of better-theorized
critiques of exploitation and oppression, critiques that reflect the multiple ways in
which power actually works—as a dynamic and mobile series of interconnected
hierarchies—rather than viewing racism, sexism, misogyny, and homophobia
as one-at-a-time aberrations from an otherwise just world. Josh Kun reminds us
that James Baldwin drew sustenance from Bessie Smith’s music not only because
her identity as a working-class bisexual Black woman activated the memories
and feelings the author shared with her as a working-class gay Black male, but
also because Baldwin heard in her singing the kinds of defiance and flagrant non-
normativity that he felt he needed to face a hostile world. As a woman who defiantly
had romantic and erotic relations with other women, Smith’s self-assertion and self-
acceptance spoke to Baldwin’s experiences and desires in ways that could not be
reduced to simple affinities based on separate experiences with race, class, and
sexuality.
On some occasions, non-normative sexuality has turned out to be a great practical
resource for the movement. Civil rights worker Curtis Hayes (later Curtis Muhammad)
found that his most important supporter in conducting voter registration drives in
Washington County in Mississippi was a bisexual operator of a house of prostitution
(and grandmaster of the Masons). At a time when the few Black professionals in the
County were too frightened to associate their names with civil rights work, a Black
man who had survived as a bisexual and as an operator of an illicit sex business had
little to fear from whites, having already experienced as much abuse and ostracism
as they could possibly heap upon him.25
The refusals of normative femininity and normative families, of normative
psychology and normative sexuality in Longing to Tell might also help remind us
that Dr King did more than simply get shot: he had ideas, opinions, and strategies
for liberation. King’s thinking about love and its seemingly unlikely relationship
to power is particularly worth remembering. Drawing on the theological writings
of Paul Tillich, King argued that love without power led to sentimentality, but that
power without love led to cynicism. Combining love and power, however, required
an expansive definition of what love means.
King noted that the Greek language had distinct words for different kinds of love.
“Eros” refers to romantic, erotic, and aesthetic love—a love experienced as pleasure.
“Philia” encompasses the reciprocal love and affection within families and among
friends. “Agape” references a non-selfish love for others, a creative and redemptive
love for all. Genuine love required agape as far as Dr King was concerned. Loving
one’s enemies would be impossible if one thought of love as eros or philia because
one does not draw pleasure from one’s enemies, nor would it make sense to like
25 Polletta, p. 61.
them. But it was possible to love them in the sense of agape, to hold out hope and
a sense of possibility for the world by not adding to its hatreds, hurts, and fears.
Because eros is dependent on one’s own pleasure it can become selfish, aggressive,
manipulative, and instrumentalized unless tempered with philia and agape. Because
philia is dependent upon family and friendship, it can become exclusionary and hard-
hearted, giving love to some at the expense of concern for others, unless tempered
with eros and agape. Because agape asks us to look beyond self, pleasure, familiarity,
and comfort it can become cold, instrumental, and even fanatical unless tempered
with philia and eros.
Like the women whose powerful testimonies make up Longing to Tell, Dr King
drew upon a rich tradition of linking love and politics, the public and the private,
intimacy and justice. Like Lisa Duggan and Tricia Rose, he did not leave us with
definitive answers, but rather with the ability to ask better questions. Surely one of
those questions is the one raised by the Black Eyed Peas in “Where is the Love?”
Susan McClary notes that one of the extraordinary qualities of rap music has
been its ability to incorporate actual moments from the past into the present through
the use of sampling and citation.26 The Black Eyed Peas accomplished this by
making Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack contemporaries of Justin Timberlake
and Fergie, by critiquing the war in Iraq and the politics of the present through
the language of a love song from the past. Yet unlocking the seventh door requires
one additional step, one that McClary’s scholarship has been indispensable in
helping us see. She argues that musical repertories have social premises, that works
of expressive culture come from and speak to the hurts of history as well as the
aesthetic pleasures of performance.27 “Where is the Love?” by the Black Eyed Peas
has a place in music history, both as historical artifact in its own right and as a work
of historical recovery. Yet it also belongs to the history of Black radicalism and the
future of Black feminism, to the shared social task of preserving and promoting the
freedom dreams of suffering but not yet defeated people.
26 McClary, Conventional Wisdom, p. 160.

27 Ibid, p. 1.
Taylor & Francis
Chapter Four
“Waltz Me Around Again Willie”:

Gender, Ideology, and Dance in the
Gilded Age
Steven Baur
She grows more bold … and the waltz becomes one long, sweet and purely sensual
pleasure …. She is filled with the rapture of sin in its intensity; her spirit is inflamed with
passion and lust is gratified in thought. With a last low wail the music ceases, and the
dance for the night is ended, but not the evil work of the night.
T. A. Faulkner, From the Ballroom to Hell (1892)
The venue is packed. Loud, percussive music fills the room with powerful, unrelenting
rhythms. Sweating, undulating bodies crowd the dance floor, colliding frequently as
young people from varied social backgrounds come together in a dizzying mélange of
sound and motion. Ecstatic participants revel in the freedom and pleasure of moving
together in time. Meanwhile, civic, social, and religious authorities condemn the
event and its permissive atmosphere, warning that the current craze endangers the
moral and physical well-being of its young victims, causing delinquency, depravity,
illness, and—in some cases—instant death.
This was the scene in the United States roughly one hundred and forty years ago,
and the dance at the center of this vital, matter-of-life-and-death controversy was
the waltz, which captivated America’s youth from the 1860s through the turn of the
century. Their passion for the waltz elicited an equally passionate reaction, a highly
mobilized dance reform movement that pursued extensive policing of public spaces
and promoted an ideology of severe physical self-regulation. Social critics targeted
specifically the young women who danced the waltz, warning that their vigorous
bodily exertion and their modes of self-presentation at public dances could damage
their health and destroy their social prospects.
While the waltz controversy in nineteenth-century America has been well
documented, there has been little attempt to assess how the controversy relates to
broader debates concerning gender roles and identities in an emergent industrial
capitalist patriarchy. Even less attention has been given to the question of how
the music and dance of the waltz—the specific musical and physical gestures it
involves—relate to gender politics in the Gilded Age, a period during which gender
roles were redefined to accommodate the industrial economy. My concern here is to
demonstrate how the waltz controversy in late nineteenth-century America played
into period debates concerning the role of women in an urban industrial society and
how the waltz became a central arena in a heated struggle over women’s bodies and
female sexuality.
***
While the body at issue in the industrial workplace was predominantly male,
industrialization also required women to assume new and demanding roles. In
contrast to the pre-industrial homestead, where both men and women tended to both
economic and domestic necessities, industrialization imposed a separation of labor
along gender lines, a process chronicled by social historians and feminist theorists.
This involved the construction of a new social category—the housewife—whose
unwaged labor made it possible for men to dedicate themselves entirely to work in the
public sector. Confined to the house, women were responsible for maintaining clean,
orderly homes and keeping working men healthy, sober, and content. Naturalizing
an ideal of domestic femininity became an urgent social priority during these years;
thus the proliferation of periodicals marketed to young women and designed to teach
them to become ideal housewives. Magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Companion
(established 1873), the Ladies’ Home Journal and Practical Housekeeper (1883),
and Good Housekeeping (1885) glorified domesticity and embraced servility as a
“natural” aspect of “true womanhood.” Beyond their domestic duties, women were
expected to uphold rigid moral standards and to serve as models of virtue for the
entire community.
At the same time, the American medical profession made the female body its
primary project, expending extraordinary efforts to bring the female body under
scientific control. The notion of “ovarian determinism”—given its “classic”
formulation in 1873 by Dr Edward Clarke, professor at Harvard Medical School—
provided “scientific” justification for imposing severe constraints upon the female
body. Clarke and numerous other medical professionals insisted that the ovaries
alone determine a woman’s development, health, and behavior. They promoted an
understanding of the female body that reduced it to a frail, erratic reproductive entity,
capable of little else. “Woman’s reproductive organs are pre-eminent,” wrote Dr
John Wiltbank at mid-century. “They exercise a controlling influence upon her entire
system, and entail upon her many painful and dangerous diseases.” “What she is in
health, in character, in her charms, alike of body, mind and soul [is] because of her
See for instance Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London
and New York: Zed Books, 1986), S. J. Kleinberg, Women in the United States, 1830–1945
(New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1999), and Sheila M. Rothman,
Woman’s Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present
(New York: Basic Books, 1978).
See Mary Ellen Zuckerman, A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United
States, 1792–1995 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998). Etiquette manuals targeting young
women also proliferated, including such titles as Miss Leslie’s Behavior Book: A Guide and
Manual for Ladies as Regards their Conversation, Manners, and Dress (1859), The Young
Lady at Home and in Society (1869), and The Bazaar Book of Decorum (1873).
Quoted in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in
Victorian America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 183–184.
“Waltz Me Around Again Willie” 49
womb alone,” agreed gynecologist and social reformer Dr Horatio Storer. As late
as 1901, physicians could blame “uterine ailments contracted in girlhood through
improper dress or injudicious conduct” for the death of many young women. The
same journals that instructed young women how to maintain orderly homes, keep men
contented, and raise healthy children also taught them to fear and mistrust their own
bodies, which they were told could malfunction without warning, causing intense
physical pain, debilitating mental and emotional disorders, and public humiliation.
Writing for Harper’s Monthly in opposition to women’s suffrage in 1870,
Susan Fenimore Cooper used this construction of the female body to argue
for the social and political confinement of women. She claimed that women are
physically and intellectually unfit to assume the “burden of suffrage” or any other
public responsibilities and insisted that—in accordance with their physical nature
and divine intention—they restrict the scope of their social activity to the home.
Cooper identified dancing as one of the greatest barriers to “true womanly action”
and warned that “scores of women are falling every day … [as] vanity leads them
to wear the extravagant, the flashy, the immodest, the unhealthy dress, to adopt the
alluring manner, to dance the immodest dance.”
Without question, no dance was considered more “immodest” in America during
the latter half of the nineteenth century than the waltz. While public balls and social
dancing were not new to nineteenth-century America, “every dance was formal until
the waltz, with daring suddenness, revolutionized the whole system.” The most
palpably revolutionary aspect of the waltz was the intimate coupling of dancers,
which distinguished it from the cotillions, quadrilles, and other so-called square
dances popular at mid-century. Differentiating between traditional square dances
and increasingly popular round dances, the New Englander explained that “in the
former, the sexes meet with perfect propriety; in the latter, they publicly embrace.
The former are modest—the latter immodest …. There can be no doubt that the
round dances now in practice in society are essentially wrong. The waltzes … and
all that variety are a moral abomination.” The author adds that should “any man
dance [in] that fashion with his wife or daughters,” he would “horsewhip him on the
spot.”
As such a comment suggests, girls in nineteenth-century America were considered
the property of their fathers until marriage, at which time they became the property
of their husbands. Should a young woman dance the waltz, she was in danger of
becoming “ruined” property. In 1880, the New York City Chief of Police claimed
Quoted in John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of

Sexuality in America, 2nd edn (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997),
p. 146.
5
Mary Wood-Allen, Ideal Married Life (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1901), p. 118,
as quoted in Rothman, p. 24.
Susan F. Cooper, “Female Suffrage: A Letter to the Christian Women of America,”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 41 (1870): 596–597.
George D. Budd, “The German Cotillion,” The Galaxy 4 (1867): 145.
8 “Amusements,” The New Englander 26 (1867): 408–409, 412.
As Constance A. Nathanson notes, “boundaries between the girl who was ‘pure’ and
the girl who had ‘fallen’ were defined in absolute terms. A girl was either chaste or she was not
that “three-fourths of the abandoned girls in New York were ruined by dancing,”
reinforcing Ambrose Bierce’s characterization of the dance hall as “the training
ship of prostitution.”10 Beyond precipitating young women’s downfall, the waltz
was blamed for subverting their responsibility to uphold public morality. The New
Englander went so far as to assert that the increased incidence of crime in American
cities was the direct result of parents allowing the “the purity of their [daughters’]
maiden instincts to be rudely shocked in the waltz.”11
With individual vices, such as “immoral” dancing, identified as the major causes
of criminality and social decay, social reformers focused on individual morality
instead of addressing the pressing issue of economic injustice. But, as I have argued
elsewhere, moral codes are not so easily separated from material concerns, and
Protestant morality was largely compatible with Gilded Age materialism.12 Leaders
of the anti-dance movement may have been genuinely interested in the moral welfare
of the young women they admonished, but their efforts to contain female sexuality in
the name of morality had significant social and economic ramifications as well.
***
The “housewifization” of women’s labor, to use Maria Mies’s term, and the imposition
of unwaged domestic labor on American women were essential to the expansion of
industrial capitalism. Not only did housewives provide for their working husbands’
domestic needs, but they were also expected to soothe and entertain them, keeping
them contented no matter what their labor conditions or living standards. Housewives
were also indispensable to industrial expansion as consumers who sustained markets
for household commodities, and as producers who raised future generations of laborers
and consumers. Because waltzing could reduce a woman to an unmarriageable state,
it struck at one of the very pillars of the emerging urban industrial social order.
If the waltz was “revolutionary,” then, it was not solely because of the physical
proximity of male and female dancers and the questionable morals such proximity
suggested. Rather, the dance challenged the emergent ideology of domestic femininity
so critical to industrial expansion. Valued only in the domestic sphere, young women
were instructed to “do nothing that will attract the least notice” in public. In the
waltz, however, they became the center of public attention, and reformers focused
their critique of public dances almost exclusively on the behavior and dress of the
young women who attended them. Recognizing it as a genre that appealed especially
to young women, music publishers marketed their waltzes directly to this target
… Furthermore, although the ‘pure’ might fall, the ‘fallen’ could never again become pure;
a girl who compromised her virtue was, in the rhetoric of the time, ‘ruined.’” (Dangerous
Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women’s Adolescence [Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1991], p. 80).
10 Both quoted in Ann Wagner, Adversaries of the Dance (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 202, 203. As Wagner notes, at least twelve period anti-
dance tracts cite the statistic given by the unnamed police chief.
11 “Amusements,” p. 409.
12 See Steven Baur, “Music, Morals, and Social Management: Mendelssohn in Post-
Civil War America,” American Music 19 (2001): 64–130.
audience, issuing hundreds of waltzes named for girls, such as the “Anna Waltz”
(1871), the “Rebecca Waltz” (1874), the “Lizzie Waltz” (1877), the “Veronica Waltz”
(1879), the “Amanda Waltz” (1879), the “Roberta Waltz” (1882), and numerous
others. Louis Jullien’s “Prima Donna Waltz” (1853), among the first waltz “hits” of
the nineteenth century, invited young women to consider that they, too, could aspire
to the kind of public spectacle associated with contemporary leading ladies.
Introduced by the flamboyant French conductor and composer during his
landmark tour of the United States in 1853–1854, the “Prima Donna Waltz” gained
immediate and widespread popularity. At the time of Jullien’s tour, the quadrille
was the most popular form of urban social dance, soon to be displaced by the waltz.
Although widely popular, the quadrille never aroused the kind of public controversy
in the United States that the waltz would. Unlike the waltz, the quadrille is an “open”
dance with male and female partners situated at a safe distance from each other. The
dance itself features rigidly controlled steps, which more closely resemble walking
than dancing. Indeed, the dance is an exercise in physical restraint with nothing
inelegant or undignified permitted to upset the polite walking figures. Maribeth
Clark describes the quadrille as a performance of bourgeois civility, demonstrative
of the social control conditioned by genteel cultural norms. According to Clark,
the relationship between male and female dancers during a quadrille is decidedly
paternalistic, as the woman “became the possession of the man with whom she
danced.” Although the dance was subject to abuses, such as athletic embellishments
involving leaps, kicks, or other excessive displays of physicality, Clark concludes
“the commentary surrounding the quadrille suggests that the genre … limited those
who participated in the dance to cogs in a machine beyond their control.”13
Clark places the quadrille at the center of struggles over social and political
power in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. As she explains, when properly danced in
the polite walking figures, the quadrille enacted a stable paternalistic social order, but
when danced with greater improvisation and physicality, it “signified the potential
for revolution and social chaos.”14 Jullien certainly understood that the performance
of paternalism associated with the proper quadrille could be undermined, and how
this might appeal to women. Indeed, Jullien was known for catering specifically to
his female patrons. Prior to touring the United States he composed the “Bloomer
Quadrille” in a show of support for the matriarchs of the women’s movement in
London, who had been targeted by a dress reform movement aiming to regulate
women’s clothing in that city.15 At his concerts he would often present a signed
copy of an original composition to every lady seated in the boxes. Punch describes
how, before taking the podium, “Monsieur Jullien … seats himself in a conspicuous
situation, to indulge the ladies with the most favourable view of his most elegant
person, and the splendid gold-chainery which is spread all over his magnificent
waistcoat.” Thus, he was “a favourite with the men and doubly so with the ladies.”16
13 Maribeth Clark, “The Quadrille as Embodied Musical Experience in Nineteenth-

Century Paris,” Journal of Musicology 19 (2002): 510, 513.
14 Ibid., p. 514.
15 Adam Carse, The Life of Jullien (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1951), p. 70.
16 Punch (5 September 1841) as quoted in Carse, p. 113.
In Paris, Jullien transformed the quadrille from a conservative, polite dance piece
into a rousing, spectacular showpiece—one that inspired spectacular, showy dancing
outside of the concert hall. As he had done in Paris and England, Jullien played both
concert halls and dance halls during his American tour, using many of the same
pieces in both venues. New York’s Daily Times observed that Americans attending
Jullien’s grand public balls were “unaccustomed to the abandon necessary for such
an amusement.”17 Soon, however, social critics found Americans dancing with far
too much abandon, and one of Jullien’s compositions helped spur the craze that
would draw their ire.
No work by Jullien had a greater impact in America than his Prima Donna Waltz.
At least twenty-four editions, arrangements, or adaptations of the celebrated waltz
were published in the United States by the end of 1853, issued by at least thirteen
different publishers in six different cities. The Prima Donna Waltz also made its way
into band journals and remained a staple for American dance bands and orchestras
decades after its publication. Outside of concert halls and ballrooms, Jullien’s waltz
could be heard performed by street musicians well after his American tour.18 As
late as 1871 novelists could reasonably assume that American readers were familiar
enough with the Prima Donna Waltz to imagine a fictional character sing newly
fashioned lyrics to Jullien’s melody.19
Originally composed in 1851 for a Grand State Ball given in London by Queen
Victoria, Jullien’s title was intended to honor the Queen, the most powerful woman
in the nineteenth-century Anglophone world. It would also have evoked the leading
ladies of the musical theater, by then already stereotyped as self-important and badly
behaved. The title itself, then, has associations that counter the ideology behind female
domestic confinement taking hold at the time of Jullien’s visit. The Prima Donna
Waltz assumes countercultural overtones in an anonymous short story published
in Putnam’s in 1856. “Mrs. Professor Kramps” tells the story of “mischievous”
Sally Norton as she is transformed from a girl who “could not be proper” into the
model wife of serious Professor Kramps. Raised in a disorderly home—an “abbey
of misrule”—Sally’s “incessant misdemeanors” continue well into her married life.
Only after a severe scolding by an uncle does Sally develop the “discipline” and
“self-possession” necessary to become a respectable wife and woman. Early in the
story, Sally’s girlish defiance is displayed in the music room, where she has used her
copy of the Prima Donna Waltz to fashion a dunce cap, which mockingly adorns the
Beethoven bust that overlooks the room.20
Jullien’s composition features conspicuous musical signifiers of willful
disobedience. For example, pervasive chromatic inflections and restive rhythmic
deflections betray the apparent conventionality of the form and harmonies of the
17 Daily Times (3 June 1854).

18 For instance, a comical poem urges street musicians to stop disturbing the peace
with the “waltz profane call’d Prima Donna.” (“A Sermon to Organ Grinders,” Vanity Fair 2
[1860]: 53.)
19 Fanny Bristow, “Possle Poll,” The Galaxy 12 (1871): 700.
20 “Mrs. Professor Kramps,” Putnam’s 8 (1856): 76–85.
first of the five waltzes (4.1).21 Jullien interposes a brazen dissonance in the very
first measure, where he pits a melodic F against a C major tonic triad. Related to
the harmonic root by tritone—the so-called “devil in music”—this pitch is in direct
conflict with the operative harmony, yet it is the second note of Jullien’s melody. The
initial pitch does belong to the accompanying chord, but Jullien has adorned it with
an ornament that deflects it off of the downbeat, making the volatile F the first full
quarter note heard in the melody. This gives Jullien’s tune a teasing, elusive quality
from the outset, as it dances around the initial downbeat only to land on the least
compliant pitch available. The evasive ornamentation that destabilizes the downbeat
of the first measure permeates the entire A section of the opening waltz, as do the
wanton chromatic inflections outside of well-defined tonal boundaries. By the end of
the first strain, chromaticism encroaches on the downbeat itself: the opening phrase
returns at the end of the strain (mm. 13–14), but now slides chromatically to an A
downbeat, willfully standing a distant and dissonant minor ninth from the harmonic
root.
The chromatic excess of the opening waltz pervades subsequent sections of the
“Prima Donna Waltz” as well. The second waltz opens with slinking chromatic
melodic turns that slide conspicuously outside of the governing key, consistently
evading scalar or harmonic control (4.2). The third waltz is rife with cross relations
that directly pit melodic tones against pitches in the regulating harmony,22 several
of which directly follow titillating trills—“loose” ornaments that resist containment
to a single pitch (4.3). In the finale, the melodic voice scurries up and down the
chromatic scale, teetering erratically on successive downbeats between the root of
the pedal harmony and its inimical tritone antipode. Concluding with a trill—no
longer scored as an ornament but as independent notes—this passage sets up a return
to the tune of the first waltz, but not until Jullien has teased it out to the fullest. The
final chromatic slide—culminating with the errant F (now clashing unapologetically
against a dominant seventh chord on G)—is laced with tantalizing fermatas that
sustain the chromatic indulgence and delay the return to the first waltz and its home
key (4.4).
Susan McClary has shown how effusive chromaticism and ornamentation such
as characterize the “Prima Donna Waltz” have served as culturally cast markers
of femininity. She draws on extensive evidence—much from opera, wherein the
musical typecasting of gender (and race and class, among other things) is crucial—
to demonstrate that musical depictions of femininity have historically relied on
such “insinuating inflections.”23 Jullien, a composer of opera himself, certainly

22 These clashes include a melodic G (enharmonically A) against the A of the
supporting harmony (mm. 1, 5, 9), the melodic B against the B of a seventh chord on C
(and mm.2, 3, 6, 10, 11), and the D (enharmonically E) against the E of the same harmony
(m. 7).
23 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 16, 57–63, 81–2, 100–101. Chromatic and
ornamental elements in music align easily with stereotyped representations of femininity in
understood the gendering of musical discourse, and the specific musical devices
McClary identifies consistently saturate his waltzes—a genre the extraordinary
conductor, composer, and dance hall king explicitly associated with femininity. As
my discussion of the “Prima Donna Waltz” suggests, I consider that Jullien’s use
of chromaticism and ornamentation here evokes a kind of feminine irrepressibility.
Of course, Jullien’s waltzes ultimately submit to the demands of tonal closure, with
all destabilizing elements brought under control. In fact, one could dismiss all of
the chromaticism and ornamentation in Jullien’s waltzes as insignificant surface
deviations that have no long-term structural ramifications. But it is precisely because
they exist in a world where closure is a foregone conclusion that deviations on the
surface become so vitally important. I suggest that the surface inflections pervading
Jullien’s waltzes, albeit transient, provided the girls who played them important
lessons in negotiating the constraints of rigidly enforced codes of behavior.24
These lessons were ingrained through physical experience. Consider, for
instance, the girls who bought and played the numerous piano editions of Jullien’s
waltzes published in America. As several writers have established, the association
of the piano with bourgeois girlhood was ubiquitous throughout the second half
of the nineteenth century—in period literature, iconography, etiquette manuals,
advertisements, and in the diaries of the girls themselves.25 Ruth Solie surveys
all of these sources to give a compelling account of the significant social roles
performed by the “piano girl” in Victorian cultures. From mollifying frustrated,
work-wearied fathers to demonstrating a family’s social refinement, from preventing
impressionable brothers from seeking debasing entertainments outside of the house
to demonstrating the value of maintaining a strict disciplinary regimen, the piano
girl participated actively in constructing the moral and emotional groundwork of
the nuclear family, which emerged as the dominant social formation with the rise
of industrial capitalism. Following Judith Butler, Solie adopts the term “girling” to
refer to a “two-way process that marks girls’ lived experience of the culture’s values.
On the one hand, girling is the social process that forms girls appropriate to the needs
of the society they live in; on the other, it is their own enactment—or, in Butlerian
Western culture; both are erratic, unstable, irrational, or uncontainable. Representations of

transgressive female sexuality—the dangerous seductress—also rely on chromaticism and
ornamentation, as McClary demonstrates in her discussions of Carmen and Salome, two
prima donnas who exploit their sexuality as a means for personal advancement, but who pay
the ultimate price for violating proper female decorum. As McClary also makes clear, this is
not to suggest that chromaticism and ornamentation always have essential associations with
femininity.
24 The longstanding tendency to focus musical analysis on large-scale structural processes
while minimizing local surface details ignores the fact that many listeners respond primarily
to surface details—a melodic phrase, a local harmonic progression, a rhythmic figure, or a
timbral effect, for instance—while barely aware of long-term structural events.
25 See Ruth Solie, Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004), especially pp. 85–117, and Judith
Tick, “’Passed Away is the Piano Girl’: Changes in American Musical Life, 1870–1900,”
in Jane Bowers and Judith Tick (eds.), Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition,
1150–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 325–348.
terms, their performance—of girlhood, both to satisfy familial and social demands
on them and … to satisfy needs of their own either to resist those demands or to
reassure themselves about their own capacity to fulfill them.”26 The “Prima Donna
Waltz” provided an effective vehicle through which girls of the Gilded Age could
perform the more resistant form of girling that Butler and Solie identify.
As with much piano music, the melodic and harmonic parts are assigned
separately to the right and left hands, respectively. Thus, girls playing through
Jullien’s waltzes would have physically performed the numerous transgressions of
the right-hand melody against the tonal and rhythmic expectations set out in the
left-hand part. Philosopher Mark Johnson argues that such physical experiences
are the epistemological foundation for the abstract concepts we use to shape our
understanding of the world.27 In the case of a Jullien waltz, girls of the generation
who would become suffragettes physically performed strategies for circumventing
established expectations, as Jullien invited them to play with destabilizing ornaments
and explore the chromatic cracks in the tonal surface. In line with Johnson, I would
suggest that this physical knowledge that the left hand need not always dictate what
the right hand does could provide the basis for understanding strategies of resistance
applicable outside of the music room.
The most physically engaging element of the waltz, whether performed by a
dance band or a by a girl at her piano, was the ever-present oom-pah-pah rhythmic
accompaniment. The percussive broken-chord pattern in the left-hand establishes
a groove that amounts to a piano transcription of the repetitive, undulating waltz
drumbeat typical of waltz band arrangements of the period, inviting a different
kind of physical engagement than piano music that eschews dance rhythms. Period
sources confirm that Gilded Age piano girls often did play with an unsettling
percussive force and are rife with complaints about girls “crashing,” “pounding,”
“drumming,” and “thumping” on the instrument. Godey’s Ladies Book blamed the
increasing incidence of bachelorhood on girls “beating the piano” and decried the
“idiot” who “commences to drum, interfering with conversation, giving no pleasure,
and simply inspiring disgust.”28
If playing dance music in the parlor offered piano girls a physical experience at
variance with the disciplined modes of physical comportment demanded of girls in
the Gilded Age, then dancing the waltz in public constituted a collective celebration of
this deviant kind of bodily knowledge. In the cotillions and quadrilles it superceded,
dancers moved in orderly lines or square figures and followed pre-ordained steps,
often reinforced aurally by a male authority calling out the figures. By contrast,
round dances such as the waltz were “unfettered by … rules and fixed boundaries,”
as individual couples twirled independently in “godless glee.”29 Spinning rapidly
26 Solie, p. 86.
27 Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and
Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
28 “Godey’s Arm-Chair,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 67 (1863): 487, and “Godey’s Arm-
Chair,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 83 (1871): 478.
29 Budd, “The German Cotillion,” p. 146; “Concerning ‘Round Dances’,” Harper’s New
Monthly Magazine 32 (1866): 614.
in tight spirals while gliding around the floor in larger circles, lifting and lilting at
regular intervals, young couples experienced the dizzying, “intoxicating” effect of
the dance’s “wanton whirl.” Social reformer William Cleaver Wilkinson denounced
the waltz as a “delicious and unconscious intoxication” that “stirs … motion in the
blood,” luring even the “purest minds” into the “insinuating sensual tendency of this
inherently voluptuous amusement.”30
While both male and female dancers relished the liberating physical experience
the waltz offered, it was particularly important for young women, who had few
outlets for recreational physical activity and whose bodies were subject to near
constant scrutiny and constraint. The vigorous physical effort involved in dancing
the waltz and the apparent enjoyment with which young women undertook this effort
subverted the period construction of the female body as a feeble, erratic reproductive
apparatus and challenged the notion of anatomically determined female domesticity.
Furthermore, at a time when young women were being alienated from their own
bodies, the waltz provided them the rare opportunity to experience the body as a
site of pleasure. Angela McRobbie, writing on dance trends in the 1980s, argues that
“[dance] articulates adolescence and girlhood with femininity and female sexuality
and it does this by and through the body. This is especially important because it is
the one pleasurable arena where women have some control and know what is going
on in relation to physical sensuality and to their own bodies.”31 This observation is
eminently relevant to post-Civil War America, a period that undertook a thoroughgoing
reconstruction of the female body and placed it under unprecedented regulation.
Beyond the pleasurable and liberating physical experience it offered, the
waltz provided one of the few outlets for female self-fashioning and gave girls
rare opportunities for exploring social fantasies beyond the confines of domestic
obligation. As McRobbie argues, for girls “continually bombarded with images and
with information about how they should be and how they should feel, dance offers
an escape, a positive and vibrant sexual expressiveness and a point of connection
with the other pleasures of femininity like getting dressed up or putting on make–
up.”32 The following excerpt from Mrs. Jerningham’s Journal, a rhymed account
of a discontented young housewife published in 1870, provides evidence that
such pleasures were meaningful to young women contending with the burdens of
compulsory domesticity in late nineteenth-century America:
Married six weary weeks to-day

How sad is life that was so gay!
30 William Cleaver Wilkinson, The Dance of Modern Society (New York: Oakley, Mason
& Company, 1870), pp. 67, 73.
31 Angela McRobbie, “Dance and Social Fantasy,” in Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava
(eds.), Gender and Generation (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 145. Linda J. Tomko makes
a similar point concerning working girls’ dance practices in the progressive era, arguing
that dancing “mobilized” a “representation of the body’s public exertion” that was “self-
authored and pleasurable” in contrast to the bodily exertion demanded in the workplace.
(Linda J. Tomko, Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance,
1890–1920 [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999], p. 151.)
32 McRobbie, p. 145.
How desolate the house appears
Alas that I must live in it
I see the streets through my tears,
And do not like the sight one bit! ….
O lovely earth! O lovely sky!

I was in love with nature, I;
And nature was in love with me;
O, lovely life when I was free!
And then I’d spread my shining wings,

And fly away without a care
To those bewitching balls and things
Where I discovered I was fair.
And when I found how fair I am,

I felt a new delight in life.
Nor guessed that Mr. Jerningham
Had asked me from Papa as wife.
How vexed I was when I was told

I hardly could my patience keep;
And then Papa began to scold,
And then poor I began to weep….
John Jerningham’s a horrid name!

Alas! My cards must bear the same! ….
To-night we’re going to a ball;

John says I must not dance too much
John says I must not dance the waltz at all
He thinks men murder with their touch!
At least I have a lovely dress,

And when my hair is frizzled dry,
Done up in a fashionable mess,
It’s quite the thing—and so am I!33
Although the young housewife’s experience is circumscribed by her husband’s

prohibitions, she values attending a public dance for the opportunity it affords to “re-
make” herself for the occasion. As Mrs Jerningham attests, public dances invite modes
of self-presentation not considered appropriate in the day-to-day world, allowing
girls and women to experiment with alternatives to the only identities available to
33 [Fanny Hart], Mrs. Jerningham’s Journal (New York; Charles Scribner & Company,
1870), pp. 5, 10–11, 14, 17.
them—daughter, wife, mother, and housekeeper. As one commentator noted in 1868,
for American women—“accustomed to certain restraint, and reared in certain notions
of propriety”—indulging in “the whirling and voluptuous windings of a waltz”
would suggest “feelings and associations unworthy [of] the dignity and purity of a
delicate female.”34 Similarly, the Ladies Repository recognized the waltz as a source
of “freedom” for young women, but considered such freedom “a dissipation, and
injury to health, and a sacrifice of feminine propriety and delicacy.”35 Thus, while the
waltz challenged the period construction of domestic femininity, young women who
indulged in its freedoms did so at the risk of social and economic marginalization.
That transgressing traditional female roles was a factor in the attraction of the waltz
is suggested by the numerous waltz titles that make reference to non-traditional
female roles or values, such as the “Scarlet Letter Waltz” (1874), the “Sirens Waltz”
(1881), the “Gypsy Waltz” (1881), or the “Witches Waltzes” (1881). Of course such
titles don’t necessarily suggest attractive alternatives to the domestic ideal and point
up the price women have had to pay in negotiating the constructions of femininity
offered by the culture industries. While the “Sirens Waltz” or the “Witches Waltz”
might evoke empowering images of transgressive autonomy, they simultaneously
demonize femininity as dangerous and destructive.
***
Inevitably the waltz attracted the interest of culture industries seeking to capitalize
on its popularity. In fact, it was the waltz that launched the modern popular music
industry in 1892 when the unprecedented success of Charles K. Harris’s waltz mega-
hit, “After the Ball,” prompted a group of New York City songwriters and publishers
to focus exclusively on popular music. Monroe Rosenfeld, the top-selling songwriter
who coined the term “Tin Pan Alley,” used the waltz as a vehicle for several hits,
including “Those Wedding Bells Shall Not Ring Out” (1896), a song that explicitly
associates the waltz with depraved femininity. The lyrics narrate the story of an ill-
fated wedding—as the couple approaches the altar, another man enters the church
and demands that the ceremony be halted, claiming that the bride is already married
to him. Rosenfeld depicts the unfaithful woman with an impetuous waltz, which
stands in stark contrast to the music associated with the wronged husband—a
reverent, hymn-style chorale.
The song opens with a brief maestoso introduction featuring homorhythmic
part-writing characteristic of the sacred chorale idiom, which establishes the church
setting (4.5). A frivolous gesture, ornamented with obtrusive trills, interrupts this
dignified introduction (mm. 3–4), signaling the entrance of the sinful bride, marked
by a conspicuous and problematic A, a chromatic pitch at odds with the operative
key, but emphasized in the second measure of each verse phrase (mm. 6, 14, 22). The
bridal verses, set to a lively waltz with a repetitive, percussive piano accompaniment,
contrast sharply with the choruses, which express the sentiments of the wronged
34 William I. Paulding, ed., A Book of Vagaries; Comprising the New Mirror for Travelers
and Other Whim-Whams (New York: Charles Scribner & Company, 1868), p. 45.
35 R. A. West, “Letters to My Daughter,” The Ladies’ Repository 22 (1862): 274.
husband, returning to the righteous chorale style. The chorus melody assumes the
contour of the bridal verses, but the problematic A is “corrected” by the male, who
routinely sings the proper A in its stead (4.6).
The song concludes with the death of the promiscuous bride—the estranged
husband stabs her to death before turning the knife on himself. This violent act
notwithstanding, the song maintains the moral authority of the homicidal husband
over the wayward wife. His moral authority is suggested not only by the references
to sacred music that accompany his utterances, but also by the image on the sheet
music cover depicting an angel from on-high intervening on his behalf to prevent
the illicit union (4.7). A note printed on the sheet music cover connects the song to
“real life” events and insists on its social value: “The incidents in this song are based
upon a tragedy which occurred in a western city. The author does not seek to glorify
the event. He has simply tried to portray the tragedy in a simple tale, which in its
truth to nature may serve a useful moral and an interesting dramatic episode.” Thus,
the song serves to warn girls and young women of the severe punishment in store
for those who transgress the bounds of feminine propriety, and it associates such
transgressions with the “uncivilized” frontier communities of the western United
States and the “vulgar” music of the waltz.
While all classes continued dancing the waltz into the twentieth century, its
unabashed invitation to indulge in bodily pleasure increasingly connoted its low
status, as is explicit in the top Tin Pan Alley hit from 1906, “Waltz Me Around
Again Willie,” composed by Will D. Cobb and Ren Shields. The song lyrics narrate
the story of Madeline Mooney, “who’d rather be dancing than eat.” She goes
through successive boyfriends—both named Willie—neither of whom can match
her physical endurance on the dance floor. In the chorus, Madeline celebrates the
physical pleasures she experiences in the controversial round dance and urges her
male counterparts to keep up:
Waltz me around again Willie, around, around, around;

The music is dreamy, it’s peaches and creamy,
Oh! Don’t let my feet touch the ground.
I feel like a ship on an ocean of joy,
I just want to holler out loud, “Ship Ahoy!”
Oh! Waltz me around again Willie, around, around, around.
All three characters in the song are identified by surname—and by trade as well for
the men—as coming from immigrant, working-class stock.36 Thus, while the song’s
female protagonist openly enjoys the physical pleasures of dancing the waltz, and
while the dance allows her to demonstrate physical abilities that supercede her male
partners, such bodily engagement and physical prowess define her as common and
unworthy of more respectable men.
In “Yip–I–Addy–I Ay” (John H. Flynn, 1908), the female protagonist is at a loss
for words to describe the sensual pleasures of the waltz:
36 In addition to Madeline Mooney there is Willie Fitzgibbons (“who used to sell

ribbons”) and Willie de Vere (“a dry goods cashier”).
E Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay, I-Ay!
E Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay!
I don’t care what becomes of me,
When you play me that sweet melody.
E Yip-I-Addy-I-Ay, I-Ay!
My heart wants to holler “hurray!”
Sing of joy, sing of bliss,
Home was never like this.
The protagonist’s willingness to abandon her future for the momentary joy of the
waltz and the disparaging reference to home stand in direct opposition to the ideal of
domestic femininity constructed during the period. As in “Waltz Me Around Again
Willie,” however, her attachment to the waltz defines her (or, in this case, redefines
her) as low. In the final verses, she leaves her home in a respectable New York suburb
to take up with a working-class immigrant musician in the city. Thus, both songs
provide representations of women performing public, self-conscious, pleasurable
exertions of their bodies through the waltz, yet both also serve to stigmatize that
performance by defining it as the behavior of lower classes.37
The popular music industry was not the only culture industry to pursue this kind
of co-option and containment of the waltz. Dancing schools, public ballrooms and
publishers of etiquette manuals all participated in a broad effort to reform public
dancing. Mixed-class dance halls became the subject of constant harassment by
police and civic authorities, and many were forced out of business in the wake of
increased regulation and official oversight. Historian Lewis Erenberg notes that
reforms targeting existing dance halls coincided with the rise to prominence of a new
kind of public ballroom specifically designed to provide respectable outlets for social
dancing. Erenberg identifies New York’s Delmonico’s as the leading example of the
new kind of establishment, where elegance and order were vigilantly maintained and
physical display was regulated by strict codes demanding constant formality and self-
restraint.38 Etiquette handbooks, dancing schools, and dance manuals proliferated in
the closing decades of the century, instructing young people in the bodily discipline
required for proper dancing and the thoroughgoing physical self-regulation necessary
for admission to respectable society. Typical of period dance manuals, William B.
DeGarmo’s The Dance of Society of 1875 reaffirms patriarchal hegemony on the
dance floor as it urges more orderly, restrained dancing. “The gentleman is at all
times, responsible for the guidance of his partner,” advises DeGarmo. “He should
regulate the proper distance to be maintained between himself and his partner,” he
37 As Jane Desmond notes, there has historically been a “rhetorical association of

bodily expressivity with nondominant groups …, a rhetorical linkage of nondominant races,
classes, gender, and nationalities with ‘the body,’ to physicality instead of mentality…” Jane
C. Desmond, “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies” in Jane C.
Desmond (ed.), Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1997), p. 30.
38 Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American
Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 10–20.
adds, demanding “the lady should allow herself to be entirely guided by her partner,
without in any case endeavoring to follow her own impulse of action.”39
As the waltz became increasingly absorbed by the cultural mainstream during
the closing decades of the nineteenth century, it became less of an outlet for self-
authored physical expression and more of an exercise in thoroughgoing self-restraint.
This gradual containment of the waltz notwithstanding, the dance had by this time
done much to loosen the restrictive constraints of the domestic ideal, providing for
women a vital avenue into the public sphere, where they could influence debates
and struggles over the female body. As Jane Desmond argues, while the absorption
of subversive dance practices into the cultural mainstream involves “a containment
and subduing of the difference or particularity of the originating group, there is also
a shift in the bodily lexicon of the dominant group.”40 In late nineteenth-century
America, the waltz produced such a shift and participated in a redefinition of the
female body that granted it greater autonomy in its public presentation and exertion.
By the turn of the century women had made their way into a number of additional
public sectors from which they had previously been excluded, including athletics,
academics, business, and cultural leadership. It is difficult to imagine the emergence
of this so-called New Woman during the 1880s and 1890s had she not taken a crucial
first step out of the domestic sphere by dancing the waltz in the preceding decades.
39 William B. DeGarmo, The Dance of Society (New York: W. A. Pond & Company,
1875), p. 66.
40 Desmond, pp. 37–38.
Taylor & Francis
Chapter Five
“And the Colored Girls Sing …”:

Backup Singers and the Case of the
Blossoms
Jacqueline Warwick
In what is certainly his best-known song, 1972’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” Lou
Reed reports from the demimonde of New York City, relating the experiences of
drag queens, junkies, and prostitutes navigating the decadent urban underworld.
Accompanied by a distinctive glissando bass hook and a jazz-inflected sax solo,
Reed’s gravelly voice narrates events dispassionately, and—in the song’s most
famous moment—he prepares the listener for the entrance of a chorus of female
voices with the phrase “and the colored girls sing ‘doo de doo de doo.’” Reed
invokes the cliché of young African American women singing nonsense vocables
in the background of a song; in this context, the “colored girls” can only be a trio of
backup singers.
Well established by 1972, therefore, the trio of non-white, female backing
vocalists remains a standard feature of contemporary music, whether the “girls” are
backing rock bands such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers or jazz/pop crooner Norah
Jones. These unnamed and usually undifferentiated women provide support to famous
performers, in a relationship that can be understood to symbolize the unacknowledged
female drudgery behind male success that is critiqued by Marxist feminist writers,
and that depends on knee-jerk assumptions about race in order to make sense. This
essay examines the experiences of a particular group of backup singers whose work
ranged from recordings, television appearances, and international concert tours over
a period of several decades. The case of the Blossoms affords us many insights into
the function, both practical and symbolic, of background vocalists in rock’n’roll and
other forms of popular music.
For all that many readers will not recognize their name, the Blossoms are among
the most-heard vocal groups of the late twentieth century. They are nearly ubiquitous
in recordings made in Los Angeles during the 1960s, when they were teenagers
and young women; indeed, they were known in the industry as “the LA sound.”
Along with session musicians such as drummer Hal Blaine, guitarist Glen Campbell,
and bassist Carol Kaye, the Blossoms contributed to many recordings still in heavy
rotation today on “oldies” radio stations, and they worked with producers such as
See, for example, Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power: Toward a Feminist
Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983).
Lou Adler, Herb Alpert, and Phil Spector. As well as participating in records by
Spector-produced girl groups such as the Crystals and the Ronettes, the Blossoms
also sang on songs performed by artists as diverse as Duane Eddy, Dionne Warwick,
Buck Owens, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, Nancy Sinatra, the Righteous Brothers,
the Mamas and the Papas, the Beach Boys, Jackie DeShannon, James Brown, Doris
Day, Gene Pitney, and Tom Jones. Although members of the Blossoms did not
achieve wealth and recognition on the level of the performers they worked with,
they maintained steady careers doing work that they loved over a period of several
decades. Like many backup singers, members of the Blossoms continued to be in
demand professionally when some artists they had accompanied were perceived as
has-beens. Furthermore, the trio ultimately came to be iconic within the realm of
backing vocalists, such that a group of three young black women is nowadays the
standard configuration.
Although personnel in the Blossoms changed from time to time, the group’s
most consistent members were three young African American women from various
musical and cultural backgrounds. Darlene Love, who often provided lead vocals
(though these were not always credited to her, as we shall see), was the daughter of a
preacher, a bishop in the Adventist Church of God in Jesus. Fanita James, by contrast,
was raised in a family of musicians in the Methodist church, and Jean King was
Roman Catholic. Thus, their individual experiences singing in church alone ranged
from impassioned gospel improvisation, the four-part harmony of Methodist hymns,
and Roman Catholic chant, and the legacies of these different musical upbringings
gave the group a versatility based on these distinct vocal styles. The history of the
group also includes the important influence of grammar-school music teachers, high-
school choirs, talent shows, and glee clubs, formal opera studies at the University of
Southern California (in the case of Jean King), and an appreciation for the recordings
of light pop ensembles such as the McGuire Sisters. The eclectic musical interests of
the group members confound simplistic, even racist, assumptions that black singers
are all steeped exclusively in gospel styles and traditions, and that their musical
achievements are the result of innate, “natural” talent that has nothing to do with
learned skill and artistry.
The group’s ability to sing so many different styles was, of course, a crucial
component of their professionalism and appeal. Although Fanita James reports that
not all of the trio’s members were strong sight-readers, they were nonetheless quick
to learn new parts and devise appropriate harmonies without wasting expensive time
in the recording studio. This skill was important to their reputation in the business.
James recalls that
The legendary (among industry professionals) Cissy Houston is a notable example

of this phenomenon. Although she never achieved the international stardom of her daughter
Whitney, neither did she experience her daughter’s spectacular fall from grace, and she
continues to be sought after and respected in the fifth decade of her career. In her sixties, Cissy
Houston won Grammy awards (in 1996 and 1998) for her solo work as a gospel singer.
Except where otherwise specified, my information about the Blossoms is drawn from
an interview with Fanita James on Dec. 18, 2004.
“And the Colored Girls Sing …” 65
If [the producer] had parts, we’d take them. If not, we would just figure something out
real quick. Or they would take us to the piano and say this is what we want. And we had to
learn it because they were paying for their studio time, so we had to really learn it real fast
… and after a while there was no pressure at all, it was just second nature.
Obviously, for working musicians like these, there is no possibility of luxuriously

waiting for inspiration to strike! The singers’ familiarity with one another’s voices
(through working so closely together, they came to know one another’s ranges, lung
capacities, and vocal timbres intimately) enabled the singers to devise voice parts that
would make good use of their skills. Equally, the Blossoms’ strong musicianship and
canny grasp of contemporary music styles helped them to tailor their contribution to
the recording at hand. In the studio, the Blossoms were ever mindful of being hired
hands, whose effort and expertise were being paid for in the service of someone
else’s career.
Nevertheless, the contributions of backing singers often provide a song with its
hook, the most recognizable and appealing musical phrase of the piece. For example,
Fanita James and Darlene Love created backing vocals on the original recording of
“It’s In His Kiss,” produced by Ron Barrett in 1963 and featuring Merry Clayton
as soloist; the song was re-recorded by Betty Everett the following year and earned
her a Top Ten hit. On both Clayton’s and Everett’s recordings, the “shoop shoop”
backing harmonies on the chorus were so integral to the song’s success that it was
renamed “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss).” In this case, then, the part
of the backing singers actually eclipsed the solo section of the song in popular
consciousness—the soloist herself never utters the crucial syllables at all. Susan
Fast notes that, when they are used on records made by white male rock artists black
female backup singers are most commonly heard on the chorus of a song:
In this role, back up singers sing the same small bit of music and the same lyrics repeatedly,
which both restricts their creativity and independence––this is a non-developing part of
the song––and also links them to the song as commodity, since the chorus is usually the
hook of the song, the most memorable part and also the part intended to sell it. But this
is also precisely why the chorus is an incredibly important feature. This most memorable
part usually represents a moment of repose––of coming back to something familiar,
comforting, something that is “known” by the listener.
Within the realm of pop music, where there is generally less discomfort with the idea
of commercial appeal, the tensions of creativity and sincerity vs. commodity alluded
to here are less problematic. Nevertheless, the example of “The Shoop Shoop Song”
4 Merry Clayton is best known to rock fans for her work as a backing vocalist on the
Rolling Stones’ 1969 “Gimme Shelter” and—with Clydie King—Lynrd Skynrd’s 1974 “Sweet
Home Alabama”.
Susan Fast, “The Handmaiden’s Tale: Black Women Back Up Singers in White
Rock,” paper presented at the July 2003 meeting of the International Association for the Study
of Popular Music, Montréal. My thanks to Susan for graciously sharing this paper with me
before publication.
usefully illustrates Fast’s point and makes it clear that the work of backing vocalists
is far from trivial(5.1).
In the case of the Blossoms, their work in the recording studio encompassed
many musical styles generally understood to have specific racial and generational
identity; I have already noted that they sang with country star Buck Owens, soul icon
Ray Charles, pop legend Doris Day, surf-rock group the Beach Boys, and the founder
of funk himself, James Brown. People hearing the recordings of these artists had no
idea what the backing vocalists looked like, and the Blossoms were understood—if
their identity was considered at all—as belonging to various different ethnicities
and age groups. They were shape-shifters, altering their sound and style to suit the
material at hand, and their invisibility in the recording studio allowed them to explore
musical genres that would, in other circumstances, have been considered unsuitable
for teenage girls (and later, women) of color.
Thus, the Blossoms became involved in complex representations of race and
generational identity, as young girls masquerading as sophisticated, sentimental
adults, as married women and mothers pretending to be teenage girls, and as black
women performing the roles of white singers. Fanita James reports that when the
Blossoms backed white artists,
The producers would tell us; they would say, you know, “less vibrato, and sound ‘white.’”
That’s exactly what they would say. That meant smoother … we would all breathe together.
Isn’t it pitiful to say it like this!—but this is what we thought it meant. Besides breathing
together, just a softer, and more conservative sound.
James’s analysis of what she did in order to sound white hinges largely on the notion
of control. When asked, the Blossoms tightened the vocal apparatus to produce less
vibrato and make a softer, quieter sound. They also synchronized their breathing in
ways familiar to singers of European choral music, who are accustomed to breathing
only at agreed–upon moments so as not to disrupt the shapes of long phrases. James
describes this sound as “more conservative” than what she produced in the context
of black music, where the aesthetic requires a more relaxed technique. Freer use of
vibrato and greater volume requires more breath, and so breathing is necessarily less
controlled, with singers coming in and out of the texture to take breaths according to
their comfort. These generalized comparisons are not, of course, intended to suggest
that white singing styles are difficult, while black ones are easy; anyone who has
ever heard an operatic voice try to sing the blues can attest that a great deal of
technical flexibility is required to excel at both styles.
But can we extrapolate from James’s report any basic truisms about white and
black female identity in North America? Certainly, the experience of femininity in
white, middle class culture involves a considerable degree of control; the constraints

The complexities of vocal technique in popular music of the 1960s are examined in
Laurie Stras, “Voice of the Beehive,” in She’s So Fine: Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence
and Class in 1960s Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
of respectable, lady-like decorum entail keeping one’s entire presence quiet, gentle,
and reserved. By contrast, the Othering of black women has always relied on fantasies
of relaxed earthiness and a lack of inhibition. As with any stereotypes, clichés of
white “steel magnolias” and black earth mothers are reductive and controlling, but
their imagery can sometimes be invoked for positive purposes. Part of the power
of black womanhood celebrated by feminist thinkers derives from the notion of
black women as outspoken and comfortable in their skin, thus more courageous than
white women preoccupied with politeness and thinness. The fact that the Blossoms
routinely embodied both white and black stereotypes of femininity in their vocal
performances in the recording studio draws our attention to the constructedness of
all these roles.
In fact, an early incarnation of the trio included a white singer, Gracia Nitzsche,
then-wife of the famous arranger and producer Jack Nitzsche (we will soon see the
reasons she left the group). Fanita James explains that in this lineup, she and Nitzsche
took turns singing the first soprano part, according to whether they were backing a
white or black singer. If they were accompanying a black artist in a rock’n’roll or r&b
song, James generally sang first soprano because she could produce a grittier sound
than Nitzsche, whose lighter, smoother vocal timbre was more suitable for white,
mainstream pop material. Nevertheless, all of the group members had to be adept at
altering their vocal timbre to produce white and black singing styles. For example,
Darlene Love recalls that the Blossoms provided backing for Shelley Fabares’s 1962
“Johnny Angel,” matching the girlish simper of the eighteen-year-old actress-turned-
singer with whispery, breathy vocals to create an illusion of suburban white teens
sighing and daydreaming about boys (5.2).
The Blossoms’ versatility with different musical styles, their ability to learn or
create harmonies with remarkable speed, and their consistently accurate intonation
and phrasing led some producers to use them on all vocal tracks, not just backing
ones. The most famous instance of this is their 1962 recording of “He’s a Rebel,”
produced by Phil Spector and credited to girl group the Crystals. Mark Ribowsky
relates that Spector was keen to record the song and release it before competing
versions might appear, and felt he did not have time to bring the Crystals out to Los
Angeles for a recording session.10 Thus, he called for the Blossoms and assigned lead
For an introduction to scholarship on white and black femininity, see Wini Breines,
Young, White, and Miserable: Growing up Female in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Books,
1992), Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990), and bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?
Black Women and Feminism (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1981).
Mark Ribowsky, He’s a Rebel: The Truth About Phil Spector: Rock and Roll’s
Legendary Madman (New York: EP Dutton, 1989), pp. 118–125. In an interview for
Ribowsky’s book, Fanita James disputed Darlene Love’s assertion that the Blossoms had
provided backing vocals for “Johnny Angel.” Listening to the recording again in 2007, she
was able to identify her own voice and confirm that the trio did indeed work on this session,
among hundreds of others. My thanks to Fanita James and Ron Barrett Jr for clarifying this
issue.
10 Ibid. Indeed, when Spector and then-partner Lester Sill were working on the master
recording, they overheard musicians playing “He’s a Rebel” in an adjoining studio, creating
vocals to Darlene Love. In marked contrast to her light, breathy vocals on “Johnny
Angel,” Love (and the other Blossoms) employed a gritty, soulful timbre and gospel-
styled improvisation on this song celebrating a tough, streetwise boyfriend (5.3).
This style was plausible for the Crystals, a quintet of black teenagers from New
York, and the record was immensely successful. Alas, the hit record did not lead to
fame and fortune for Love and the Blossoms, because Spector released it under the
name of the Crystals (as he was the legal owner of the group’s name, he had this
option). He repeated this process exactly with the Crystals’ next release, “He’s Sure
the Boy I Love.” The New York singers thus found themselves in the uncomfortable
position of having two hit records they had had no part in creating. Indeed, “He’s
a Rebel” was impossible for the group to perform in concert without significant
changes to their performance strategies; Barbara Alston, who had provided lead
vocals on previous Crystals’ hits such as “Uptown” (early 1962) had a distinctly
soft and sweet voice, in marked contrast to Darlene Love’s work on “He’s a Rebel.”
Alston could not imitate the recorded vocal convincingly, so lead vocals on this song
(and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love”) were assigned to another Crystal, Dolores “La
La” Brooks. Brooks subsequently became the group’s regular lead singer, heard on
records such as “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Then He Kissed Me” (both 1963).11
If the Crystals were upset by the role the Blossoms had played in their career, the
Blossoms themselves were even more indignant. Darlene Love, predictably, was the
most outraged to be denied the recognition that ought to have made her a rock’n’roll
star, and she and Spector became involved in a series of struggles over control of
recordings that continues into the twenty-first century. She recalls bitterly that
I was nineteen when I met Phil, and I was a professional singer. That probably gave me the
edge on the rest of the girls he was working with, because they were really young, about
thirteen up. He always had to pay me, because as professionals, the Blossoms and I went
through the union … The only money I made in those days was through sessions. After
“He’s a Rebel,” I wanted a contract. I wanted royalties … the next thing he wanted was
another record for the Crystals. I said, this time you’re going to pay me a royalty, not just
no $1500. But I didn’t get it.12
Love did eventually gain greater recognition than the other Blossoms, when “Today
I Met The Boy I’m Going To Marry” and several other singles were released under
her own name, including the monumental “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”
from the 1963 album A Christmas Gift to You from Phil Spector.
On the Darlene Love recordings that Love created with Spector, she is
accompanied by the other Blossoms (and sometimes additional singers as well), as is
also the case on recordings they made that were credited to other groups. If “He’s a
a record for white pop singer Vikki Carr—Carr’s record did well in Australia, but could not
outdo the Crystals’ version in North America.
11 Ibid. Ribowsky reports that Darlene Love also recorded a lead vocal for “Da Doo
Ron Ron,” which would have made it the third Crystals’ hit featuring Love on lead, but that
Spector ultimately chose to release the record with La La Brooks’s performance.
12 Cited in Charlotte Grieg, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Girl Groups from the
Fifties On (London: Virago, 1989), p. 52.
Rebel” would more accurately have been released as a record by Darlene Love than
one by the Crystals, it could equally well have been credited to the Blossoms. Indeed,
all of Love’s solo releases could have been identified as records by the Blossoms,
building up the group’s name rather than that of its lead singer alone. A string of
releases by the Blossoms would have been heard by the public alongside other girl
group records by groups such as the Ronettes, the Marvelettes, the Shirelles, and,
of course, the Crystals. In the early 1960s, girl groups were highly marketable, so
there is no reason the Blossoms could not have enjoyed a career similar to that of
the New York-based Cookies, who likewise worked as a backing trio and also as a
group in their own right (with such records as 1962’s “Chains” and 1963’s “Girls
Grow Up Faster Than Boys”). It may be that Love and the other Blossoms might all
have fared better without the split focus that resulted from songs released as Darlene
Love records. Nevertheless, our impulse as a society is to celebrate the individual
more than the group; the story of Darlene Love and “He’s a Rebel” is often used
as primary evidence of Phil Spector’s exploitative treatment of the musicians he
worked with. It has become customary to lament the solo career that might have been
without considering the ways in which the Blossoms were relegated even further to
the background than Love.
The success that the Blossoms might have had as a headlining group becomes
tantalizingly visible when we consider the other strand of their work in the Los
Angeles entertainment industry during the 1960s. They worked as the “house”
backing ensemble on the ABC television variety show Shindig! (1964–66), and this
position gave them national exposure during the early days of television. In this
capacity, they provided onscreen backing vocals for guest artists, and also performed
hit songs of the day on their own, as a trio. Their role as backing vocalists for Elvis
Presley in his televised 1968 Comeback Special must be understood as stemming
from the work they had already done on television. Their role on Shindig! was not
uncontroversial, however, and the story of how they achieved it is instructive.
When the American Broadcasting Corporation decided to present a television
variety show featuring contemporary rock’n’roll music, they hired British producer
Jack Good, based on his work as producer of the British TV variety show Oh Boy!
(1958–59). Good’s success in putting rock’n’roll on television interested ABC, but
his commitment to giving airtime to black performers was problematic in the early
1960s. Having heard rave reviews about the Blossoms when he was seeking to build
his show’s regular cast of musicians, Good attended a recording session where the
singers were backing folk-rock singer Jackie DeShannon, and determined to hire
them. He insisted on having the Blossoms in spite of the network’s reluctance to
feature non-white singers so prominently in a recurring position in prime time, and
Fanita James asserts that he told ABC executives that he would not do the show
without the Blossoms.13 Darlene Love recalls that
When we did the pilot of Shindig!, the TV people loved the show, but they did not want
the three black girls on it. As far as seeing three black faces every week on a national
13 This account is confirmed by Darlene Love in Grieg, p. 23.

television show, they just couldn’t deal with it; they said the markets wouldn’t buy the
show, or whatever.14
I have already stated that personnel in the Blossoms was fluid to a certain degree;
the group’s founder Fanita James was a constant member, as was Darlene Love, but
various other singers came from a small pool of girls and young women, most of
whom had sung with James at grammar school. At the time that the Blossoms were
being considered for a position with Shindig!, the most regular third singer was
Gracia Nitzsche, making them a mixed race trio. Although ABC complied with Jack
Good’s demand to hire the Blossoms, the idea of featuring a mixed race trio of girls
was impossible, unconscionable to audiences in the Southern states, and so Jean
King, rather than Nitzsche, became the third Blossom for television work, singing
the part of first soprano. In moving to television, where they were seen as well as
heard, the Blossoms lost a degree of freedom that their invisibility in the recording
studio had afforded them.
Their work on Shindig! was more taxing than the studio work (which they
continued to do) in other ways as well. Their seen presence on the show meant
that they had to conform to acceptable standards of prettiness and youthfulness in a
culture that insisted on an ideal of female beauty based on whiteness, and so more
care had to be taken with dress, hair, and makeup than was necessary for recording
sessions. The pressures of appearing attractive and respectable were doubtless
particularly urgent, given that they were pioneering females of color experiencing
national exposure.
Also, the Blossoms were now expected to dance while they sang. What is more,
the singers could not rely on written-out lyrics, sheet music, or charts when they
were performing for the camera, and when they were singing well-known hits of
the day, they had to know their parts well enough to replicate the recorded versions.
To be sure, the television performances were generally pre-recorded and then
lip-synched, but the lip-synched performances had to match the singing heard, and
the Blossoms were often featured in close-up shots. James recalls that
Shindig! was also like a school for us because we had to learn thirty songs a week … and
we didn’t have cue cards! Although we didn’t sing the whole song, and they were top ten
songs so we were familiar with most of them. But we had to learn them by heart, and then,
since we choreographed, we had to learn to do quick changes.
The work was demanding, but it is clear that James recalls her Shindig! days with
enthusiasm. Jack Good has asserted that the presence of the Blossoms on Shindig!
was revolutionary in terms of American race politics (although we might understand
his emphasis as a celebration of his own role in hiring them), and James too takes
pride in her work in this arena.
Nevertheless, scrutiny of the Blossoms’ performances on the program reveals
that the nature of their participation changed significantly according to the race of
the performer they were backing. The program featured an eclectic range of artists
and musical styles, so that regular viewers would have seen Ray Charles performing
14 Ibid.
“What’d I Say?,” Stan Getz with his “Girl from Ipanema,” and the Kinks doing “You
Really Got Me,” as well as Sonny and Cher, the Beach Boys, the Byrds and other
regulars of the LA entertainment industry. The Blossoms appeared and were heard
whenever a performer required female backing vocals, but the conditions of their
appearance were problematic for the television network.
I turn now to two Shindig! performances with the Blossoms accompanying solo
girl singers, in order to demonstrate the ambivalence with which ABC treated them.15
The first involves them singing backup to a young Aretha Franklin on “The Shoop
Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss),” a 1964 hit for Betty Everett included that same year
in Franklin’s album Runnin’ Out of Fools.16 As I discussed above, Fanita James and
Darlene Love had actually provided the backing vocals on the original record, so in
this instance their dual careers coincided usefully; very little work was required to
prepare for this performance.
Fans of Aretha Franklin’s soulful style will find this performance disappointing;
the song is not, on the whole, a good fit for her, requiring her to simper girlishly
through a narrow vocal range and repetitive melody—bear in mind that this television
appearance took place before her breakthrough Atlantic Records sessions in 1967.
Atypically for Shindig!, Franklin is performing live, accompanied onstage by a band
and the Blossoms, who are placed prominently beside her on pedestals. For most of
the song’s duration, the Blossoms perform simple choreography, swaying from side
to side, with polite smiles on their faces as they go through the motions of a song
that does not require much from them. Judging from their lackadaisical performance
and the fact that they do not look at Franklin very much, I infer that they are not
particularly excited by the material or impressed with her rendition of the song.
Towards the end of the performance, however, Franklin departs from the script with
some gospel-styled improvisation, and the effect on the Blossoms is immediate and
striking. All three singers turn their heads sharply to look at her in amazement, and
Darlene Love gives small but audible cries as she gestures encouragingly to Franklin
in ways that would have been familiar to both of them from their shared background
in gospel singing. Here, then, the Blossoms are interacting with the guest performer,
inspiring her with their enthusiasm, and the staging of the performance gives them
a prominent position so that viewers can clearly see the nature of their relationship
with Franklin (5.4).
In their appearance with Lesley Gore performing her “Judy’s Turn To Cry,”
however, the contrast could scarcely be greater. The song was a follow-up hit for
Gore’s “It’s My Party” (both 1963). The two songs are both in the key of A, and with
15 Both are included—back to back, no less—in the Rhino Records video Shindig!
Presents Groovy Girls (RNVD 1457, 1991).
16 This album also included a performance of the Mary Wells hit “My Guy,” and it
was released toward the end of Franklin’s five-year relationship with Columbia Records.
Columbia was on the whole clumsy with Franklin’s talent, attempting to package her as a
pop singer along the lines of Mary Wells or Dionne Warwick (although the claim that all
her Columbia work is poor, in my opinion, is greatly exaggerated). The story of Franklin’s
shift to a more successful, soulful sound when she moved to Atlantic Records in 1967 is well
documented in (among other sources) Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues
and the Southern Dream of Freedom (New York: HarperCollins, 1986).
similar rhythm, tempo, and instrumentation, so that it is possible to understand the
second song as a continuation of the first. Taken together, they tell the complex tale
of an adolescent love triangle, wherein Johnny humiliates Lesley (at her birthday
party, no less) by showing up with his new girlfriend Judy. Lesley demonstrates
steely teenage resolve by flirting with another boy, until Johnny’s jealousy leads him
to punch the unfortunate object of her attentions, whereupon Lesley triumphantly
taunts Judy for failing to keep the boyfriend she had stolen.
Understandably for a song of such narrative complexity, the Shindig! performance
involves a stage set that suggests the party setting for these dramatic events, as well
as a crowd of dancers acting like party-goers. In contrast to the Aretha Franklin
performance, the singers are all lip-synching to previously recorded tracks, and
there are no instrumentalists to be seen. Instead, the stage is peopled by the Shindig!
dancers (one of whom, famously, is a young aspiring actress named Teri Garr)
organized into distinct groups arranged around the stage set, with Gore herself at
the centre. The performance of the song begins with a close shot of one dancing
group, then the camera moves over to Gore when the singing begins, and pulls back
to reveal the stage filled with fashionably dressed, white teenagers dancing. When
the Blossoms appear, they are positioned towards the back of the stage, apparently
singing the song’s refrain along with all the dancers. In other words, the Blossoms—
the only people of color on the stage—are all but hidden in the energetic activity of
the Shindig! dancers, and, furthermore, their work as singers is minimized, because
the performance suggests that all personnel on stage are singing. In the context of this
performance, the Blossoms are relegated to the role of unobtrusive participants in a
song that focuses on the adorable angst of white suburban girlhood. Any perceived
threat to white femininity as normative is contained (5.5).
These two examples make it clear that the Blossoms’ move into television was
not entirely straightforward, although it should be understood as revolutionary,
coinciding, as it did, with the momentous events of the Civil Rights struggle in the
mid-1960s. In contrast to their career in the recording studio, where they were able to
perform musical whiteness and blackness with ease because they were unseen, their
work in television, for all that it gave them national exposure and fame, paradoxically
limited the nature of their participation in music.
Just the same, their visibility on Shindig! had far-reaching significance for backup
singers, extending to this day. Although the practice of using studio singers to bolster
an artist or group’s record had long been customary, it was not until the Blossoms
began to appear on television that the phenomenon of a trio of black women as
backing vocalists became a standard trope in popular music. The Blossoms effectively
became the emblem of backup singers, to the point that a trio of black women,
dressed alike and performing simple gestures in unison, is instantly recognized today
as a backup group, even before they are heard singing. In viewed performances in
most popular music genres, backing vocalists tend to resemble the Blossoms.
When a group of female backup singers is present, audibly and visibly, there is
a marked preference for a trio of voices. Although this configuration might itself be
understood as a reference to the Blossoms, we can also understand it by considering
the practical aspects of women singing harmony. Creating harmonies for three equal
voices is certainly easier than working with four voices, because there is no need
to worry about the top and bottom voices doubling one another at the octave, or
entering into the messy business of sevenths. A trio of singers that does not have
the benefit of written-out parts can arrange pleasing harmonies fairly easily, and
this becomes increasingly simple with practice when the singers have good ears, as
in the case of the Blossoms. Fanita James confirms that the work of devising parts
for background singers was significantly more complicated if four equal vocal lines
were desired.
Gage Averill notes that female entrants in barbershop competitions of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century were usually “Gibson Girl” trios, performing
three-part arrangements of quartets.17 We see here an interesting contrast between
male quartets and female trios, and this too is doubtless related to pragmatic
concerns. A male quartet can include voices ranging from deep bass to high falsetto,
theoretically encompassing a range of more than three octaves, whereas a group of
women’s voices usually has a narrower range. Music for four equal female voices,
then, will inevitably lead to singers treading on one another’s toes, as it were, as their
vocal lines crowd together in a range of (typically) about two and a half octaves.
Forty years after the peak of their career, invocations of the Blossoms abound in
contemporary culture: they are seen in television advertisements and in children’s
entertainments like Sesame Street, which features a puppet trio called the Squirelles
and also a triptych of singing bananas in segments of Elmo’s World. Furthermore, in
the popular television series Ally McBeal (1997–2002), the protagonist, a neurotic
young lawyer, visits a psychiatrist (played by English comedienne Tracy Ullman)
who advises her to imagine she has “her own Pips” in order to bolster her self-esteem
and confidence. The reference is to the highly successful group Gladys Knight and
the Pips, responsible for such hits as “Midnight Train to Georgia” and “If I Was
Your Woman.” The advice is nonetheless perplexing, because––as many readers will
doubtless know—the real Pips are actually men! Nevertheless, in fantasy sequences
we see Ally imagining a trio of blurry, faceless women in matching red dresses.
Clearly, what her psychiatrist really means is that Ally should imagine she has
her own Blossoms. In any case, the television show proposes that a trio of backing
girl singers serves to encourage and support an individual in moments of trepidation,
along the lines of a comforting group of friends or sisters. The fact that Ally’s Pips
are out of focus and have no faces makes it impossible for the viewer to consider
them real, individual women whose feelings and experiences are as important as
Ally’s own. This role is in line with the controlling stereotype of black woman as
mammy, analyzed by Patricia Hill Collins; the mammy is self-effacing, motherly,
and entirely devoted to the individuals in her charge.18
More imaginatively, the use of the backing trio in the 1982 Broadway musical
Little Shop of Horrors (adapted into film in 1986) presents a version of the Blossoms
serving as a Greek chorus, commenting on the actions and emotions of the play’s
characters, but never interacting with them in the course of the drama. In the 1997
Disney children’s animated film Hercules, moreover, an ensemble of women singing
17 Gage Averill, Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop

Singing (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 98.
18 Collins, pp. 69–96.
with gospel aesthetics performs a similar role, recounting the story of the legendary
hero along the lines of a Greek chorus. They also sing backup for the lead female
character, Megara, in “I Won’t Say I’m in Love,” a song that explores Megara’s
conflicting feelings for Hercules. The function of the backing singers here is entirely
in line with the girl group songs recorded by the Blossoms and others; while the lead
singer insists she does not love Hercules, she is contradicted at every turn by the
backing vocalists in call and response style. There are five women in this group, and
they call themselves the Muses; this is odd, both because only three voice parts are
heard, and also because the Muses are generally understood to be a group of nine
women. Doubtless, the use of a quintet in this 1997 children’s film was intended to
evoke the five-piece girl group the Spice Girls, then at the height of their fame.
Aligning backup singers with Greek mythology is not as far-fetched as it might
seem; as both of these last examples suggest, backup singers can symbolically fulfill
a function similar to a Greek chorus, articulating a subtext that the lead singer cannot
express. When we listen to or see a song that includes backing vocalists, we know
immediately that we are not meant to allow their presence to distract us from the
“real” singer, or to consider them speakers on an equal footing with the main narrator.
Nevertheless, their utterances are often crucial to the meaning of a song, as in “I Won’t
Say I’m in Love,” where the lead singer herself denies what the backing singers and
listeners know to be true. Just as servants in a well-to-do Victorian home carried out
the work that made the household run, but were treated as invisible by residents and
their guests, backup singers should be listened to without being heard, seen without
being watched. Their role in many songs is not just to support the melodic material
of the soloist, but also to assist him or her in introspective exploration.
The puissance of a group of female voices has been acknowledged at many
points in Western history, with the Three Fates and the Sirens of Greek mythology
serving as examples. The legendary concerto delle donne or Three Ladies of Ferrara
who performed for the d’Este family at the Ferrarese court in the late sixteenth
century were famous for the beauty of their harmonies, their expressiveness, and
the sophisticated ideas expressed in their music, and they were (and are to this day)
understood as a group rather than as three distinct women. Indeed, personnel in the
trio seems to have changed during the years of their renown without disrupting an
understanding of the group as a whole.19 Similarly, the Three Ladies in Mozart’s Magic
Flute, emissaries of the Queen of the Night, sing dialogues with Tamino and other
individuals and assist them in their psychological journeys, but never demonstrate
any emotional depths themselves. Their role, in fact, is entirely compatible with the
function of backup singers like the Blossoms, and this similarity was foregrounded
in a staging of excerpts from the opera performed by singers from the UCLA Opera
Studio that I saw in 1999.
Backup singers like the Blossoms perform a supporting role, not only in terms
of the music they contribute to performances, but also in more symbolic ways. As I
19 See Anthony Newcomb, “Courtesans, Muses, or Musicians? Professional Women

Musicians in Sixteenth-Century Italy” (in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition,
1150–1950, ed. Jane Bowers and Judith Tick, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986,
pp. 90–115).
have shown, backup singers are not afforded the possibility of psychological growth
or complexity, and the example of Mozart’s Three Ladies suggests that female trios
have been used in similar ways for at least two hundred years in Western culture. We
see that the Blossoms, the Three Ladies, the concerto delle donne and other groups
of women singers are inevitably understood as entities, with few opportunities for
members to emerge as singers in their own right. Indeed, the story of Darlene Love
suggests that when a member of a backup trio tries to assert herself as a soloist, her
efforts are vigorously opposed. It is important in our society’s thinking to maintain
the unity of the backup singing group at all costs, and to avoid seeing these women
as whole, self-sufficient, and individual.
Given that the symbolic function of the backup trio generally coincides with
reductive and controlling stereotypes of black women as selfless sources of
emotional and practical sustenance for individuals whose identities are assumed
to be more psychologically complex and important, the backup trio as an emblem
warrants further examination in feminist and musicological research. Nevertheless,
this marginalized role affords surprising freedoms and the opportunity to explore
different identities—when the Blossoms routinely positioned themselves as adult
or teen, white or black, and participated in musical genres ranging from country
to funk, there is much to celebrate in the work of the backup singer. Above all,
analysis of backup groups reveals the complexity of identity as it is constructed and
negotiated in popular music.
Taylor & Francis
Chapter Six
The Universe Will Tell You What It

Needs: Being, Time, Sondheim
Paul Attinello
Time and music, music and time: though they are already bound to each other, we
usually tie them together conceptually through our perceptions of pulse, beat, or the
changing structures and shapes of musical rhetoric. These are ways that music can
outline a particular structure of, or pattern within, time. However, it is also possible
for music to refer to static views of time, apparently timeless states of being, and
various constructions of eternity. This is not limited to the obvious examples—
religious music, neo-Medievalism, or the more meditative Indian ragas; it can also
be embedded in, or at least suggested by, music that uses relatively active rhythmic
patterns, teleological antecedent-consequent phrases, and the like.
Although Sondheim’s musicals are usually embedded in what one might call
“dramatic” time, wherein change and tragic loss are always occurring and conscious
reflection has no effect on the inevitability of passing time, he has occasionally moved
into a musical technology that pictures time in a larger and, as it happens, more
forgiving context. Initially through the Buddhist influences of Pacific Overtures, but
later through Proustian or Heideggerian aspects of Sunday in the Park with George,
his works have opened up a wider awareness of a remarkable kind—one where loss
and change may be inevitable, but are no longer tragic, no longer painful: where a
virtually eternal, aware self may be inferred, one that can accept miseries and disasters
with equanimity and appreciation for the experiential richness of existence.
In Pacific Overtures (1976), horrors of invasion, murder and rape are made
endurable by being reframed in an aestheticized temporality—that perfect, pan-
temporal “awareness” which flowered in Taoism and Buddhism and became a common
element in many of the religions and philosophies that influenced southern and
eastern Asian cultures. It is evident that Sondheim and his librettist Weidman derived
such an idea of awareness from its most distinctive and well-known formulation in
Japanese Zen. The translation of such an existential concept into an ecstatic musical
minimalism allows both the characters and the audience to experience a safety and
peace that are detached from the “illusions” of loss and tragedy, and which permit
the unresolved conflict between “happy” and “sad” endings that characterizes the
work. This is most directly expressed in the complex climactic song “Someone in
a Tree,” which cannot be readily understood in reference to any Western idea, but
which represents a point where the disasters of history are subsumed and transcended
by the processes of their perception.
More unexpectedly, Sunday in the Park with George (1984) uses tropes of
artistic vision—as well as meditations on memory, intuition, and love—to link the
aesthetically eternal to the temporal and everyday, thereby showing their potential to
illuminate each other. The love duet “Color and Light,” the interface between the time
spans of the first and second acts, and ultimately the entire show suggest a kind of
Heideggerian existentialism with its promise of a pseudo-Buddhist awareness, here
called “being,” achieved through aesthetic expression. The symbolic translations of
suspended, shimmering visual abstraction into a flowing, non-teleological pastiche
of 1980s minimalism creates a symbolic theatrical space wherein “timeless”
awareness can be experienced, or at least perceived, within the limitations of time.
This helps to multiply the meanings of each theatrical event, which we perceive in
both a short-term, sad or disappointing way, but also, and even simultaneously, in
a longer-term transcendent, ecstatic one. Such a philosophical ground generates a
musical minimalism that not only confirms its roots in the spiritualities of Young
and Riley, but also completes the implied cultural loop, emphasizing the potential for
that style to open up a kind of awareness often lacking in Western traditions.
The ecstatic musical patterns and eternalized time that appear in both works
also suggest a Proustian idea of time, especially wherein a perfect, temporally fused
experience of life is created and remembered in the midst of chaos and irretrievable
loss. Ultimately, this enables the listener, at whatever remove, to experience the
essential rightness of things.
Welcome to Japan
Happiness or sorrow—
Whatever befalls you,
Walk on
Untouched, unattached.
Dhammapada
Pacific Overtures is a bizarre musical from several angles, but there are reasons
why such a generic misfit could appear when it did. Certainly, any view of musicals
in the 1970s must acknowledge the disintegration of a common idiom and the
sometimes desperate multiplication of musical/cultural contexts, many of which
were unsuccessful in both their commercial and aesthetic results. There seemed to
be no model for predictable success—even the badly named subgenre “rock opera”
engendered only a handful of successes, and the sincere-toned “soft rock” shows of
Thomas Byrom (trans.), The Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha (New York:
Vintage, 1976), p. 32.
Stephen Sondheim, John Weidman et al., Pacific Overtures [CD] (New York: RCA
Records, 1976); Pacific Overtures [piano–vocal score] (New York: Revelation Music and
Rilting Music, 1977); Pacific Overtures [libretto] (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company,
1977); Pacific Overtures [revised libretto] (New York: Theatre Communications Group,
1991).
The Universe Will Tell You What It Needs 79
the mid-1970s were too closely tied to short-lived musical trends to allow for long-
term imitation.
If the unstable generic context of the mid-1970s musical encouraged
experimentation, Sondheim’s career had already firmly established him as a
proponent of the unusual and intellectually advanced. (It is interesting to consider
Sondheim’s early career, with its numerous failures associated with relatively
traditional shows—especially if it can be seen to have some causal relation to his
mature, experimental work; an examination of his earliest shows, such as Phinney’s
Rainbow (1948), All that Glitters (1949), and the now recovered Saturday Night
(1954), suggests a fascination with playful wit similar to that of Comden and Green,
but no particular avant-gardism or overt intellectualism.) From Anyone Can Whistle
(1964), and even more from Company (1970) onwards, Sondheim’s move into an
intellectually challenging experimental idiom becomes characteristic. Which might
be why he would agree to help transform a complex Broadway failure, an exotic
political/historical drama that hadn’t worked right for two years before he was
brought in. This put him in the peculiar position of agreeing (under some duress)
to write a musical on a topic as obscure and abstract as the opening up of Japan,
employing Kabuki, Noh, and other Japanese cultural technologies and references.
The sheer difficulty of the show, in a context of normal Western theatrical
expectations, has led to frequent criticism of its apparent obscurity, or analyses
based on Western developmental psychology. I believe a different approach may
make the show appear more successful, or at least internally valid. Structural
changes between the original 1976 version, the simplified 1984 revision, and the
2004 chamber version do not affect the point I wish to make; an economy of means,
though it has gradually transformed the show from exotic spectacle into a graceful,
Stephen Sondheim, Adams Memorial Theatre, Williams College, presents The Cap
and Bells, Inc. production of All that Glitters [vocal selections] (New York: Broadcast
Music, 1949); Adams Memorial Theatre, Williams College, presents The Cap and Bells, Inc.
production of Phinney’s Rainbow [vocal selections] (New York: Broadcast Music, 1948);
Saturday Night [CD] (New York: RCA Victor/BMG, 1998); Saturday Night [vocal selections]
(Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, [1999]).
Meryle Secrest, Stephen Sondheim: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 280–281.
Thomas Adler, “The Sung and the Said: Literary Values in the Musical Dramas of
Stephen Sondheim,” in Sandor Goodhart (ed.), Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of
Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 2000), p. 41; Joanne Gordon, Art Isn’t Easy: The Theater
of Stephen Sondheim (New York: Da Capo, 1992), pp. 203–204; Stephen Citron, Sondheim
and Lloyd Webber: The New Musical (New York: Oxford, 2001), pp. 216–218.
Adler, p. 50; Leonard Fleischer, “‘More Beautiful than True’ or ‘Never Mind a
Small Disaster’: The Art of Illusion in Pacific Overtures,” in Joanne Gordon (ed.), Stephen
Sondheim: A Casebook (New York: Garland, 1997), p. 109; Secrest, pp. 42–43.
Knapp’s interpretation in this volume, and his earlier analysis (Raymond Knapp, The
American Musical and the Formation of National Identity [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005]), are among the interpretations that could include the ideas I discuss here.
Although his analysis takes much more of the show into account, I would want to include this
insight into the spiritual “heart” for the show.
transparent poem of implied meanings, has not changed the climactic song or its
impact.
Although historical narrative is foregrounded, and obviously has cultural and
interpretive significance, in Pacific Overtures, I would suggest that the core of the
piece is a statement about awareness and eternity as responses to suffering—although
that core is presented only implicitly, intermittently, obliquely. It may be plausible
to see it as, in fact, a secret revealed by creating or experiencing the work—not
only to the audience, but also to the collaborators; perhaps long reflection on these
events in the context of Japanese culture moved Sondheim, as the source of the lyrics
and music that make this point most strongly, and Weidman, as the librettist who
structured the book around this climactic point, to say something about the nature of
the universe that they may not have originally planned. Before the climax, however,
a number of songs refer to the interesting possibilities of Japanese aestheticization
and Buddhist awareness in times of trouble.
Incomplete Awareness, or False Consciousness?
Flowers bloomed yesterday,

today winds blow—
what but a dream …
Shoshun (haiku poet, ca. 1660–1672)
Pacific Overtures establishes the chaos and tragedy that forms a dark background
to the story from a fairly early point. Although Act I, scenes 1 and 3, focuses on
the social drama of the historical and political crisis created by the coming of the
Americans, scene 2 inserts a completely different mood, using a beautifully spare but
striking song. “There Is No Other Way,” a formalized response to apparent tragedy,
is meant to conceal the heartbreak of Tamate, a samurai’s wife; certain, as is her
husband, that he will not return from his meeting with the invaders, she views his
apparently impending death and her own plans for suicide with sad clarity.
Interestingly, perception is split off from expression in this song, as her “voice”
is sung by two voices independent of the visible stage character. This suggests that
perception has its own existence, separate from emotion and apparent identity. If
Tamate were played by a single actor and the movement and voices were integrated
into one figure, we would experience her predicament as typical of Sondheim’s
characters (Bobby in Company, Sally in Follies, Fredrik in A Little Night Music)—
a tragedy made of uncertainty and expressed through contradiction, where a
character’s indecision is a natural response to unpromising choices. Instead the
parts are splintered, so we can consider them independently: the obedient wife who
pretends to plan a meal, the heartbroken lover who seeks an alternative to disaster,
and the illusory figure of a man playing a woman which is identified with neither
“internal” voice. The fragmented but graceful phrases of shakuhachi, drum, harp, and
gong, though they resemble Noh gestures, emphasize the disintegrated world of the
Yoel Hoffman (ed.), Japanese Death Poems Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets
on the Verge of Death (Rutland, VT and Tokyo: Tuttle, 1986), p. 303.
song; and the ironic aftermath, when Tamate commits suicide before her husband’s
unexpectedly triumphant return, doubles the tragedy. Everything in this song is,
in fact, doubled, split, fragmented; but I would avoid a Western, Beckettian, or
Brechtian, interpretation, instead considering a possibly more appropriate Buddhist
one—that this song, and Tamate’s grief, inhabits a world of illusion—the world of
feints, phantoms, and the snares of maya.
Other songs react to the brutality of cultural collision in different but ambiguous
ways. It is clear that we are not presented with a simple tragic construction—but not
only because of the historical complexity of the events portrayed; something even
more alien to Western constructions of tragedy is going on. The song “A Bowler
Hat” interweaves the resigned discomfort felt in the face of rapid change with self-
indulgent exploitation of that change. “Pretty Lady” is a gracefully aestheticized tale
of tragedy—because although its attempted gang rape is prevented by a defensive
murder, we have time to imagine the danger the three British sailors pose for the
Japanese woman—enough time, in fact, to experience the feelings of threat and
panic suggested when the voices suddenly increase in importunate volume. Such a
delicately formal portrayal of brutal tragedy has a long history in Japanese literature
and theatre, going back to the epic cruelties of the twelfth-century Tale of the Heike,
which stands in relation to its culture where the Iliad and Aeneid stand for Western
literature.
The show’s finale, “Next,” is a more Westernized satire, expressing the alienated
bitterness of modernism. The cruel irony of the song’s disjunct text fragments is
illuminated by some of Sondheim’s statements about the show. Horowitz quoted
Sondheim back to him as having said, “There’s a lot of anger there too”; the composer
responded initially with bemusement, but then rallied:
It’s the anger of the reciter. The reciter is outraged at what happened to the country….
This is a man who is telling us without ever saying it: “We were raped.” And they were,
though it was highly controlled and ritualized…. “We will do to the West what they have
done to us.” That’s anger. And they did it. And they were right. They were wrong, but they
were right.10
Although this anger comes at the end of the show, I don’t see it as its ultimate
meaning. Many characters in the show, even those with enough Buddhist training to
have some sense of the mistakes they are making, fall from awareness to tragedy—
from the possibility of acceptance and peace of mind into fear, resistance, despair.
The result is a catalogue of flawed experiences, of spiritual errors, arranged in a wide
circle around the climactic song—which represents something different from, yet
central to, the rest.
Hiroshi Kitagawa and Bruce Tsuchida (trans), The Tale of the Heike (Tokyo: University
of Tokyo, 1975).
10 Mark Horowitz, Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions (Lanham,
MD and Oxford: Scarecrow, 2003), p. 164.
The Heart of Awareness
Now that my storehouse

has burned down, nothing
conceals the moon.
Masahide (haiku poet, 1688)11
“Someone in a Tree” is a curious piece of minimalism (really “process music,”

as it resembles the energetic works written around the same time by Glass and
Reich rather than, for instance, those by Young or Riley). Sondheim has expressed
exceptional affection for the work, regarding it as one of his best songs,12 although
its “notion of history as prisms through different time zones” was apparently
Weidman’s(which fits an interpretation of this song as derived from research into
the world of Japanese Buddhism, rather than as connected to Sondheim’s use of
fragmentation or multiplication in other shows).13
The song is not quite at the end of Act I, as it is followed by the short, wordless but
intense “Lion Dance,” which is yet another expression of hostile rage. It is, however,
climactic in a variety of ways, being elaborately constructed and quite long (about
seven minutes) without being episodic, as is the longer “Please Hello.” The context
of the song is prismatic and polytemporal; however, unlike the fragmentation of
“There Is No Other Way,” this involves several selves (an old man and a young boy
who are the same person at different ages, plus a warrior) who become fused in one
serenely ecstatic vision. It is notable that all three are portrayed as relatively naïve;
simple souls, they are more willing to simply see or hear without seeming frustrated
by, or attempting to interpret, events.
The content of the song is their retailing what happened at the crucial historical/
political negotiations—except that no one actually knows what happened, as no
records were kept by the Japanese of such a shameful event. Rather than interpreting
the things they see or hear, they present them as a series of disconnected moments,
split seconds of eternity with no narrative or causal significance. Because there is no
story line, no causation, these are merely things that happen, and do not therefore call
for emotional or cognitive engagement—arguments are transformed into abstract
choreography, argumentative voices are heard as though they are the cries of birds,
official documents seem like falling leaves. Cultural rape is thus transformed by
pure perception into an existential moment without negativity—the fragmentary, the
momentary, is real, while any story or interpretation is not; the historical lacunae and
cultural tragedy are not important, and it is only existential Being (which is available
to everyone present, though only the three “unimportant” characters seem to realize
it) that matters.
The division of seeing and hearing is not the presentation of ideas about the
fragmentary perception of coherent events, but simply a finger pointing to what
any Buddhist novice knows—that perception is always already fragmentary and
11 Hoffman, p. 240.
12 Citron, p. 216; Secrest, p. 281.
13 Horowitz, p. 67.
undependable, as it is threaded through with maya, or illusion. It is in fact the state
of being and perceiving that is important, not what or how much is perceived and
understood (let alone interpreted, as interpretation is always faulty)—“without
someone in a tree, nothing happened here.” There is, however, no vanity involved;
the state of being of these naïve participants is humble in the purest sense, not only
without egotism but without ego, something any Zen monk would aspire to: “I’m a
fragment of the day.” And they know the importance of this loss of ego for everyone,
not just themselves; they lecture us on what is real, what is important—“It’s the
fragment, not the day. / It’s the pebble, not the stream. / It’s the ripple, not the sea /
That is happening.” As in a compassionate Buddhist sermon, they tell us not in order
to proselytize, but in order to take away pain—they attempt to convince us of our
own lightness, of our own freedom, that we may suffer less (6.1).14
The ecstatic timelessness of the song also seems to be a stumbling block for
some writers, treated as it often is as a display of technical ingenuity, or even as
a mismatch between brilliant musical construction and unnecessarily abstract
meaning. Shimmering, polyrhythmic minimalist textures climax in simple phrases
that suggest a transparent, uncomplicated state of being; overlapping harmonies
made of superimposed fifths (implicitly I+V+II, especially at the end) create a kind
of shimmering, active timelessness, as they suspend the functionality of Western
tonality without draining away its drive (as happens in, for instance, most neo-
medievalism). Rhythm emphatically continues, however—as the song builds,
there are ecstatic dance rhythms with backbeats. Rising string phrases carry us into
eternity—not a pseudo-Christian eternity beyond the clouds, but one that exists here
and now. This seems in fact to be the extended, active embodiment of a moment of
pure presence.
Banfield’s analysis argues that the entire show is essentially multi-faceted; he
suggests that this multi-faceted nature has to do with an eternal temporality, even
mentioning ontology.15 However, he seems to view this song as a complex exercise
in concepts of reality and memory, rather than as a transcendent vision of awareness;
I suggest that an exercise in concepts might not be set to such ecstatic music. Owen’s
unpublished paper16 develops parallel ideas, concentrating more on the construction
of character than the music, but she also regards the result as “ambiguous” and
difficult to understand. Fleischer moves from the fragmentation of memory and
indeterminacy of truth to the word “compassion,”17 but I would go further—this is
not only an innovative idea that conveys the composer’s sympathy for the oppressed,
it is a transformation of the meaning of the situation, and thereby of the whole show.
In moving away from the cultural and historical into a knot of aesthetic, religious and

15 Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan, 1993), especially pp. 261–262, 280.
16 Heidi Owen, “‘Tell Him What I See’: Representation and Voice in Pacific Overtures”
(unpublished conference paper, 1998), p. 7. I am grateful to the author for giving me a copy.
17 Fleischer, p. 123.
spiritual implications, I am in danger of championing the mystical over the concrete;
however, I suggest that mysticism may include an interesting and highly productive
interpretation of the show.
Perhaps the function of this song, despite its length and unusual content, is
summed up in the Zen word katsu. Katsu (usually transliterated with an exclamation
point) is a shattering moment of seeing, of awareness.18 It is connected with satori,
or enlightenment; but enlightenment is almost what comes after—katsu is itself
the moment of seeing, so bright and complete that there is no thinking that needs
to, or can, take place. For the characters who cannot achieve equanimity in the
face of disaster, “Someone in a Tree” is an object lesson in how to see, a (greatly
extended but not really time-bound) moment of seeing—the lyrics, the polytemporal
splintering of the naïve narrators and their cross-referenced phrases, and especially
the shimmering ecstasy of the musical texture, all serve to fuse the elements of the
song into a nexus of transcendent perception.
Discourse on Awareness
The body is false,

And so are its fears,
Heaven and hell, freedom and bondage.
It is all invention.
What can they matter to me?
I am awareness itself.
Ashtavakra Gita19
Awareness leading to being: a familiar concept in Asian philosophies and religions,20

but one not easy to pin down, even for specialists.21 A simplified history of the idea
would go back to the Upanishads (ca. 800–500 BCE), which distinguished awareness
and being from maya (illusion; or emotion, neurosis, attachment) as a significant
aspect of their advancement beyond the ritual practices of the Vedas. For Jain and
the Taoists in the sixth century BCE, awareness and being became central to spiritual
practice; Buddha, in the fifth century BCE, refined concepts of being and awareness,
detaching them from ascetism and gods, and asserting that awareness should not
separate us from the world but should allow us to experience the world as it is (that
is, to achieve a particularly everyday kind of being). Centuries of debate and cross-
influence among Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Taoist sects, with philosophers, yogis,
18 Hoffman, p. 106.
19 Thomas Byrom (trans), The Heart of Awareness: A Translation of the Ashtavakra Gita
(Boston: Shambhala, 1990), p. 10.
20 Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India—China—Tibet—
Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1964), passim, but especially chapters 5, 8, 25, and
34.
21 I am indebted to Toby Smith at Durham University for an opportunity to discuss these
ideas as well as for his November 2004 research seminar exploring links between Heidegger
and Buddhism.
and later even Sufis, would establish various differentiated but often interrelated
practices, theologies, and philosophies of physical and mental awareness across
South and East Asian cultures.
One stage of this potted history is especially significant for this argument—in
thirteenth-century Japan, Zen Buddhism developed from imported Chinese Ch’an
Buddhism. It is plausible to claim that Zen was not merely among the more
sophisticated branches of Buddhism, it was also one of the more successful in broadly
influencing a culture. Zen’s establishment as a source of religious, philosophical
and aesthetic ideas for the Japanese aristocracy at a time when that aristocracy was
developing the conformity of shogunate culture and shutting the door to outside
influence made many of its subtler aspects central to the entire culture. Some of the
(at times conflicting) interpretations of awareness/being associated with Zen have
included: the world is in the mind; the world is transitory, is dust; perception creates
the world (compare philosophical interpretations of quantum theory); detachment
allows for awareness through bypassing the distortions of interpretation (including
not only the passions but also illusions of judgment, objectivity, or realism); suffering
appears to exist, and compassion aids the suffering of others, but the aware person
endures with detachment; detachment allows us to perceive what is; and awareness
results in the perception of eternity and perfection.
Accept misfortune as the human condition.

Tao Te Ching22
My interpretation of Pacific Overtures as related to awareness, perception, and a

resultant “being” is therefore not remarkable: after all, a work influenced by Japanese
culture would need to show the mark of Zen. My quotations of other sources, from
early Buddhism, Taoism, the Upanishads and mature Hinduism, indicate not only
the wide cultural spread of such ideas, but also their availability in various cultures
(in fact, although monotheistic religions have not incorporated ideas of awareness
and the perfection of everyday life to the same extent, it is not difficult to find similar
tropes in Sufism, and not impossible to find them in Christian mystics). However,
such an analysis can only support a work that uses Asian cultural references: is it
possible to carry the possibilities, the freedom, the transcendent resolution of tragedy,
that are offered by awareness over to a Western cultural context?
Off to the Park, with George—and Dot
And then a new light … shone suddenly within me. And I understood that all these
materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had
come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that
I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even
22 Gia-fu Feng and Jane English (trans), Lao Tsu: Tao Te Ching, a New Translation (New
York: Vintage, 1972), p. 13.
their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve
of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant.
Proust, Time Regained23
Sunday in the Park with George24 is similar to Pacific Overtures in one way—it
also has a peculiarly abstract, intellectual, historical subject, one that may seem at
first glance to be without human interest. Of course, in every other way it is different:
this is the dichotomous story of, on the one hand, the pointillist painter Georges
Seurat, his greatest painting, and his short, disastrous life and relationships; and on
the other of his (fictitious) great-grandson, a trendy 1980s light sculptor dismayed
at the inauthenticity of an investment-driven art world and his own disintegrating
belief in inspiration. Written with James Lapine, the librettist/director who dictated
the structures and parameters of several Sondheim musicals, it had its unexpectedly
successful premiere in 1983. Some of this success must be connected to aesthetic
trends on the New York stage in the mid-1980s—the music imitates the formal
structures and styles of Glass and Reich even more obviously than does “Someone
in a Tree,” and an interest in formal distancing and the edges of perception can be
linked to the popular success of Laurie Anderson’s performance works.
A critically admired London revival in 2006 did not substantially alter the piece,
but its technological innovations (digital projections, complex lighting, etc.) helped
to emphasize that the entire show is based on seeing—the sight of the painter, the
male gaze on the beloved, the woman’s self-regard in a mirror, and the transformation
of everyday experience and space into the perfection of visual art. However, I would
claim that the transformative intent of the show does not stop there: life is not only
documented and thus made eternal, it is also made perfect—all is forgiven, not through
any quasi-Catholic redemption, but instead through an aesthetic transformation that
suggests Proust or Heidegger. This can be seen as a secularized transformation of the
Buddhist ideas above—this is a show about artistic being, and how it transforms and
perfects everyday life. Unlike Pacific Overtures, Sunday in the Park does not confine
its examination of being to one, however important, song; elements are scattered
throughout, and in fact the entire arc of the show explores such ideas. However, one
particularly graceful and summative approach is “Color and Light.”
Color and Light
Mortals have not yet come into ownership of their own nature. Death withdraws into the
enigmatic. The mystery of pain remains veiled. Love has not been learned. But the mortals
23 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. VI: Time Regained, trans. Terence
Kilmartin, rev. J. D. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1999), p. 304.
24 Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Sunday in the Park with George [CD] (New
York: RCA, 1984); Sunday in the Park with George [piano–vocal score] (New York:
Revelation Music and Rilting Music, 1987); Sunday in the Park with George [libretto] (New
York: Applause, 1991); Sunday in the Park with George [DVD] (Chatsworth, California:
Image Entertainment, 1999).
are. They are in that there is language. Song still lingers over their destitute land. The
singer’s word still keeps to the trace of the holy.
Heidegger on Rilke25
“Color and Light” is a duet by the artist George and his mistress, the ironically named
Dot, that explains a great deal about each of them, as well as what they think of, and
how they communicate with, each other. In fact, it sums up not only the past, present,
and future of their relationship, but also points toward possibilities that will not
come to pass. The entire mini-drama takes place in his studio, which is symbolically
split in half—on one side is George, creating his pointillist masterpiece Sunday
Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte; on the other is Dot making herself up in
a mirror. Everything in this duet is, in fact, mirrored—there are identities between
painting and mirror, between paintbrush and powder puff, between their perceptions
of each other, between their behavior patterns, and between the ways words are used,
especially the title words. These identities are however placed in order to emphasize
the differences: we will see that, in important ways, Dot and George understand each
other, but trivialities will destroy the communion they share.
George is caught up in the timeless ecstasy of painting, which is for him, of
course, being; it is clear (as it will be throughout the show) that he has an excellent
grasp of this particular aesthetic way of simultaneously creating and experiencing
being, but is mystified by practically everything else in the world. Dot, on the other
hand, launches into a fantasy of narcissistic vanity and insecurity, picturing herself
as a showgirl at the Folies Bergére; it becomes clear that she is acquainted with
many more aspects of life and the world, but is uncertain and indecisive about them
all. George and Dot are both immature and in need of each other—but they are also
doomed to misunderstandings that will confuse, enrage and separate them. The title
words are emblematic of their differences—for George, color and light are the pure
elements of painting, but for Dot they are the noise and chaos of the theater.
Much of the core of the duet consists of them speaking not to, but instead about,
each other. What is remarkable about this is that, when they are not speaking, they
perceive each other as whole and perfect—outside of time and the everyday, they
experience both personal and transcendent love, the latter expressed in ecstatic,
glittering minimalist crescendi. At the musical climax (from m. 193), Dot paints a
verbal picture of George that is nearly as “pointillist” and beautiful as the painting
he is working on; his attention is drawn to her while he is still in his aesthetically
ecstatic state, the music becomes increasingly emotional and reflective, and they
sing simultaneously, “I could look at him/her forever” (6.2).
Unfortunately, when the ecstatic minimalist music falls silent on the dominant,
they speak to each other about the everyday—and it all disintegrates: they have
a petty, but unfortunately familiar, disagreement, and as for most couples it is
the familiarity which makes it insurmountable. Thrown into the circularity of old
annoyances and the irrationality of mutual resentments, they fall, and the timeless
experience of love and perfection collapses for both of them. As she stamps away
25 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971),
p. 96.
in a rage, he briefly experiences distraction, regret, sorrow; but he has a technology
for being, which is his painting—and can return to it. And, as he does so, the music
returns him, and us, to that ecstatic state of being which resides in his painting and
which is, for him, eternity.
We Lose Things, We Choose Things
… his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp.
… here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”26
As in Pacific Overtures, one could say that many of the non-ecstatic songs in Sunday
in the Park exemplify various failures of being—ways of falling into delusion,
unhappiness, inauthenticity. When Dot despairs of her abilities in “Color and Light”
she enacts something similar to what George will later do about her—experiencing
an always already present anguish about time, dreams, hope, and the realization that
change drags us away from what we thought we wanted. There are numerous other
aesthetic transformations, constantly sketching, as though from different angles,
a kind of being reached only through art, as can be seen in Proust, Rilke, even
Heidegger. The song “Sunday,” with its angular abstractions and everyday details
building into ecstatic fusion, and the scenes where the painting itself comes into
existence or springs to life, are evident transformations of the everyday into eternity
through a medium of art.
Most of the humor in the show is conversely associated with a collapse in being—
thus a comic revision of the eternity created by art appears in the gavotte sung by the
figures in the painting, “It’s Hot Up Here.” In this case, we see a ludicrous fantasy
of a different eternity, one of unmoving discomfort that recalls Dot’s experience
of modeling in her first song. The minor characters—that is, most of the figures in
the painting for the first act, as well as the younger George’s social milieu in the
second—are, after all, mostly people whose lives have already gone wrong, who
are disappointed by existence. Jules and his wife, the boatman, even the girls, the
nurse, the servants—these characters have lost things, and chosen things, and they
seem to feel their choices were mistakes. We get fragmentary evidence of their
failures—Jules’s superciliousness and shabby infidelity, the greedy girls against
the manipulative soldiers, the boatman’s brutish cynicism, Franz’s vain dreams, the
nurse’s resignation. These are all people who are heartbroken, not through romance,
but because they are peevishly disappointed in their lives and faded dreams. Caught
up in various kinds of non-being—desire, resentment, hostility, discontent—they
waste their beautiful Sunday in the park by imagining themselves elsewhere; only
26 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage,
1984), p. 61.
the dogs seem easily pleased, which is why George will find it worth spending time
with them.
In the second act, the audience at the unveiling—the Chromolume, although it
may be a good sculpture, is almost a parody of the visionary with its bright lights
and heavy organ vamps—is equally distracted and unhappy, though more ambitious
in their desires. “Putting It Together” is about the loss experienced by the younger
George because he must sell his sculpture to the rich and discontented, embedded as
they are in non-being; but of course they are also the source of art (that is, eternity
and being) because they have the money to back it. Although the paper figures of
George are simulacra—fakes—they refer to an original, a real George who has, or
has had, vision and a sense of being; this can therefore be seen as, not Baudrillard,
but a presentation of the problem of illusion, of maya, in relation to identity. The
illusory also makes an aural appearance outside the music—noisy bursts of near-
shouting from the minor characters represent both the emotional “noise” of the
gallery denizens and, earlier, the people in the park, and both are made to vanish by
the artist.
At the end of the second act, the younger George “returns” to the elder George’s
island (though of course he has not been there before). The chords of “Lesson #8”
also return us to a world of transparent perception and eternity, reminding us that that
world is always accessible behind the shards of everyday existence. The recitation
over these chords of the elementary sentences from Dot’s book transforms them
from reading exercises into the essence of poetry—which connects us again to
eternity, to being, as Heidegger claims that poetry should. When we are again on the
island, we experience return, and a kind of eternity: despite the changes (in the 2006
production the new island is a carefully landscaped business park) the tree is still
there—everything may change, be torn down, and vanish; but memory, perception,
and art remain eternal.
Artistic and Personal
In our perfect park

On an ordinary Sunday …
Dot and Chorus, “Sunday”
Threaded through this visionary plot is the reconciliation of George and Dot, though
it is so fragmented among different characters (George of the 1880s and George of
the 1980s, Dot and Marie, Dot’s ghost) that it is detached from the original pair,
becoming a reconciliation in eternity (also the only “place” love made sense in
“Color and Light”). Throughout the first act, Dot is smarter than George, but not
enough to resolve their conflicts—she can see their mistakes but doesn’t know how
to communicate about them, though she will offer him the simplest of solutions
(“you can tell me not to go”). We know she goes to the New World where, as we
learn from her daughter, she remembers George fondly and without rancor. Dot
and her daughter are constructed as implicitly broad in understanding, but always
realizing what to do too late; both Georges are on the other hand more focused and
singular, having a specific activity where they can dependably achieve being, but
helpless with other aspects of their lives. The Georges are in fact not “fixed, cold,”
but dazzled by artistic vision: and reconciliation is possible because Dot is able to
perceive that vision through them.
This personal reconciliation resolves the larger conflict: what is lost, what
vanishes, what dies, is always present in being, in memory. The music will lead
us to see that—the shimmering arpeggios of “Move On” achieve a circular stasis
that suggests Adams’s Phrygian Gates or Glass’s Satyagraha, as the melodic/
chordal patterns outline a tension that is balanced, alive but unchanging. One could
also compare the final scene of Adams’s Nixon in China, where the characters are
transformed by our view of their deepest selves, a scene that retroactively makes
sense out of emotional and political tawdriness by embedding it in something more
resonant. All this represents a kind of Proustian return: the return of the elder George’s
mother, of Marie, of all the mother figures, suggests the parade of Proust’s female
relatives; the modern island is transformed back into the painting, in a triumph of
art; and the people of the painting, no longer imagined as uncomfortable, bow to the
artist, grateful for their transfiguration into eternity. Although there are many aspects
to Proust, a central one is that of the transformation of loss and the pain of time
through art—Ruiz’s 1999 film27 based on the last volume of In Search of Lost Time
emphasizes that centrality by returning to it in its striking final scene.
This is not, however, a reconciliation only for artists. Dot clearly experiences
the same existential transformation towards an awareness of being, through what
she learns emotionally, as well as through what she perceives in George’s art. And
all the “painting” words, from the beginning of “Color and Light” to the final word
“harmony,” have double functions: balance, harmony, light—these are experiential
pointers, telling us, as did the narrators of “Someone in a Tree,” how we ought to
live.
Hurry Up Please, It’s Time
Time is loss. Or, at least, we experience time as loss—“we lose things, and then
we choose things”: the past is the graveyard of our hopes and expectations, and
what we are is rarely what we ever would have planned to be. However, there are
apparent answers, or perhaps makeshifts, to the problem of time. Some are spiritual,
others artistic; some we discover through living, and then recognize their similarity
to existing cultural constructions which are spiritual, or artistic.
Sondheim’s shows usually express time as tragic loss: Follies and A Little Night
Music are for the aging, those whose experiences center on ongoing loss; Company is
about regrets for mistakes that can’t be repaired; and so on, and on. But, in these two
shows, using different but parallel cultural technologies, Sondheim and his librettists
construct a universe where time is not loss: where, instead, our perception of it, and
our writing of it, saves everything we have known and imagined, and brings it all to
perfect fulfillment.
27 Raoul Ruiz (dir.), Time Regained [DVD] (London: Artificial Eye, 1999).
As the sun that upholds the world is untouched by earthly impurities, so the spirit that is
in all things is untouched by external sufferings.
Yama to Nachiketas, Katha Upanishad28
It sometimes seems strange, in light of the history of gay culture in the late
twentieth century, that a gay composer interested in loss and tragedy would not
leave a major statement on the AIDS crisis. Singing “Not While I’m Around” from
Sweeney Todd or “No One is Alone” from Into the Woods at benefits doesn’t quite
resolve this problem, as the first is ironic in its original context, and the second
supposedly about nuclear war. Perhaps Sondheim has answered the questions of
AIDS by answering much larger questions that contain them—especially, what do
we do with suffering, with failure, with loss? These questions fade into unmeaning
when we think differently—when we ask the universe what we need: and learn what
it needs from us.
28 Juan Mascaró (trans.), The Upanishads: Translations from the Sanskrit (London:
Penguin, 1965), p. 64.
Taylor & Francis
PART
PART II
Music and Temporality
Taylor & Francis
Chapter Seven
Making Time:
The Soundtrack and Narrative Time
Daniel Goldmark
Filmmakers have long looked to music to provide a sense of continuity when bringing
together images or sequences that do not logically follow one another of their own
accord. Music can provide rhythmic and structural coherence while commenting
on or enlarging details about the story, especially when popular music is used. The
famous theme song in High Noon (Zinnemann, 1952), heard in the countdown to
the noontime duel that Marshall Will Kane faces, reminds the audience (and Kane)
of how the town has abandoned him. A score of electronic dance music provides
a modern sound and intensifies the time pressure in Run Lola Run (Tykwer, 1998),
where we see three versions of the same twenty-minute span play out differently as
Lola runs around Berlin to help her boyfriend. In these and dozens of other examples,
music gives us a framework in which to decipher the sometimes elastic nature of
time in films. Sometimes the filmmaker may choose to telescope the chronology
of a story, and at other times may slow or speed its progress on screen. The score
has always played an integral part in telling the story, yet in this context the music
becomes a chronometric device—quite literally keeping time.
While the critical attention to film music has exploded in the last twenty years,
how music complicates or smoothes the manipulation of time in films has received
little analysis. This seems odd, given that visual representations of time stopping,
starting, or being broken up is almost ubiquitous in modern filmmaking and
television production (the montage sequence in particular). In this essay, I make an
initial attempt to address this lacuna in film music literature.
Since a full exegesis of this topic is beyond the scope of a single essay, a couple
of caveats are in order before I begin. In what follows I do not undertake to develop
a theory of how music keeps time in film, or why directors and writers make the
narrative bend to their whims through the use of carefully chosen pop tunes. Nor do
I try to identify patterns in the use of music that might correlate more general filmic
typologies, including the style (live-action, animation, documentary), the medium
(film, television), or genre designations (film noir, musicals, westerns, etc.). Instead,
1 For more on the countdown in High Noon, see Neil Lerner, “‘Look at that big hand
move along’: Clocks, Containment, and Music in High Noon” (South Atlantic Quarterly 104/1
[Winter 2005]: 151–173).
See Robynn J. Stilwell, “Music in Films: A Critical Review of Literature, 1980–1996”
(The Journal of Film Music 1/1 [Summer 2002]: 19–61).
I try to think in more fundamental terms about the relationship of the music to the
story: what role does the music play when time no longer seems to unfold naturally?
To answer this question I look to examples in which the music is expected to provide a
structural framework (through rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic features), or in which
the intertextual nature of the music (references made on different levels to external
concepts) gives cohesion to what are otherwise disparate ideas and images.
I will use two popular approaches to time manipulation as entrées into this
potentially sprawling topic. First, there are scenes in which time is discreetly (or
not so discreetly) sped or slowed for a particular effect, leaving the viewer to
decipher (with the music’s aid) how exactly time is passing. Second, I will consider
the montage sequence, a device so useful and effective that it long ago became an
element of the narrative itself, rather than a production tool for saving time and
money. These two approaches, selected from a wide variety of such practices, give
us some idea of how much music controls our understanding of the passage and
pacing of filmic time. The structural and stylistic differences between these two
approaches also illustrate the wide range of ways in which music is used to influence
a viewer’s sense of time passing.
Hurry Up and Slow Down
The soundtrack very often imparts an impression of regularity to a film, providing a

beat, a sense of passage, or a trajectory. Michel Chion refers to this phenomenon as
“temporal linearization,” in which a piece of music can add “a sense of time that is
linear and sequential” to images that do not necessarily present themselves as either
successive or simultaneous. Certain filmic conventions allow for the contraction or
expansion of a moment in time. Instead of omitting minutes, days, or years, the pace
of time’s passage visibly accelerates, slows down, or is suspended (at least from the
viewer’s perspective). This feeling of elasticity can be an element of the plot itself,
or an editing device primarily inserted for effect. The music in these sequences can
thus blind us to the passage of time, and even provide a soundtrack for when time
stops altogether.
Besides spawning two sequels, The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, 1999) helped
to popularize a stylistic device known as “bullet time,” in which part of an action
sequence—a kick, a punch, a bullet flying—is shown in slow motion and with the
camera moving smoothly around the actors. The effect created is of still motion, in
which the viewer gets a multi-dimensional view of a fight as the combatants are held
unmoving in mid-air for several seconds. For these brief moments in The Matrix
when time is suspended, composer Don Davis often uses a musical form of stasis
to create a feeling of tension, which he claims he drew from “the minimalist and
postmodern ideas I was trying to develop.” The first time the hero, Neo, is shown
3 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 17–18.
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, seventh edition
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004), pp. 34–35.
Don Davis, commentary track, The Matrix (Warner Home Video DVD 17737, 1999).
Making Time: The Soundtrack and Narrative Time 97
fighting in bullet time takes place near the end of the film. Neo shoots at an Agent
on a rooftop, who dodges the bullets so quickly that his upper torso appears to be
in several places at once, while high, tremolo violins slowly ascend chromatically
over a held dissonance in the woodwinds, giving a sonic dimension to the creepy
inhumanity of the Agents. When the Agent shoots back, Neo surprisingly dodges
the bullets as well (his partner Trinity observes suspiciously afterward, “You move
like they move.”). Time slows down as we see the moment from Neo’s perspective,
which allows us to watch each bullet slowly approach his body. Davis described
his approach to that moment as an experiment; he was “making time stand still by
playing two different chords at the same time in different parts of the orchestra, and
they would fight each other dynamically, and the net result was whichever chord
was loudest at the moment was the chord that you perceived.” The chords “fighting
each other” generate a great deal of tension in the soundtrack. The sense of musical
suspension comes from not knowing where the harmony will go, as each chord
struggles to dominate the moment; thus, we remain in a place where both the action
and the music are prolonged. Neither chord wins, as Neo’s being hit finally shifts the
scene back to normal time, and with it the music.
Davis has mentioned elsewhere his interest in contemporary composers,
including John Adams, John Corigliano, György Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki, and
Philip Glass. The influence of these composers can be heard throughout The Matrix.
His use of minimalist techniques, especially for the bullet time sequences and other
scenes involving “the Machines,” recalls Philip Glass’s score for Koyaanisqatsi
(Reggio, 1983). In particular, the famous sequence titled “The Grid,” which consists
of time-lapse photography of life in a modern city, demonstrates how much machines
are a part of that life—an implicit critique of modernity shared by the Matrix trilogy.
Glass underscores and intensifies the hyper-realistic speed created by the time-
lapse effect by slowly adding levels of complexity to the fundamental rhythm he
establishes through changes in instruments and textures, including the use of a choir,
so that the music and images tear along at an equally frenetic pace. The message in
Koyaanisqatsi, that machines and commerce dominate human existence, is clearest
in this scene. In the more than twenty minutes that this scene lasts, the music never
comes to a complete cadence, creating (as a student of mine once put it) an almost
insane desire for resolution; perhaps this was Glass’s and Reggio’s way of conveying
their belief that human’s dependence on technology continues unabated, with no end
in sight.
Encounters with technology and industry in films seem ripe for such treatments
of time, possibly because modern machines present constructs of regularity and
interminability—assembly lines rolling, digital clocks ticking, city highways
bustling—that just beg to be disrupted or exploited in the course of the narrative.
The score to Risky Business (Brickman, 1983) is unusual as it combines popular
music (most famously Joel’s tighty-whitey dance to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock
and Roll”) with music produced by the band Tangerine Dream, already famous for
Davis.
Chris Tilton, “Every ‘Matrix’ has a Davis,” Cinemusic.net, http://www.cinemusic.net/
composers/don_davis_interview_2003.html (accessed April 14, 2005).
their explorations of synthesizer-driven instrumental music throughout the 1970s,
and soon to be known for their dozens of other films scores, including Vision Quest
(Becker, 1985) and Legend (Scott, 1985). Many of the film’s original cues occur in
scenes in which Joel either imagines pursuing or actually pursues uncharacteristically
wild behavior while his parents are out of town.
Halfway through the film, Joel and his hired paramour, Lana, board the “L” train
because, as Joel’s voiceover tells us, “She wanted to make love on a real train—who
was I to say no?” The train ride begins not with Tangerine Dream’s music, but rather
the 1981 hit song by Phil Collins, “In the Air Tonight.” Joel and Lana are waiting
out the other passengers; the very present sound of the train informs the viewer that
the time hasn’t yet arrived for their tryst. The synthesized percussion line that sets
the somber mood for the song eventually gives way to Collins’ drumming, signaling
the point where the music takes control of the soundtrack and the sounds of the train
begin to lessen incrementally. This happens just as Joel decides to rid the subway
car of its final inhabitant—a lone vagrant nursing a bottle of liquor. As they pull to a
stop, the sounds of the train return and the music fades completely. The Collins song
was apparently the music for desire, not for consummation.
Once Joel helps the man onto a bench in the station and reboards the train, the
music shifts to the more subtle and repetitive sounds of Tangerine Dream. The scene
is simple: Joel and Lana plan to make love on the train. The camera is positioned
primarily to the side, so we get shots of Lana standing over Joel and Joel looking up
at Lana, as well as the primary POV (point of view) of the two of them in the frame
together. A synthesizer dominates the cue, with a recurring percussion theme that
sets the pace of the sequence (which lasts just over two minutes, a substantial time in
which there is no dialogue), and with melody and bass notes played on the keyboard
repeating the same basic motives. The sounds of the train slowly begin to fade in
favor of the synthesizer as the two begin to make love. As they become less self-
conscious about where they are, the film speed slows considerably, and stays slow
for the remainder of the scene. The lights on the train occasionally flicker, so that we
seem to be watching a “natural” montage of the two, where short moments in time
are invisible to us, while the soundtrack maintains the emotional tenor and rhythmic
pace of the scene. The scene ends with an actual montage sequence of exterior, slow-
motion shots of the “L” train car traversing Chicago.
This scene presents a wonderful combination of techniques: the slowed
movements on screen intensify the lovemaking, pulling against the momentum
already created by the static nature of the rhythm track. The sequence is a pointed
expression of ecstasy: the viewer perceives the loss of time, place, and even identity
for the two characters, who for the moment do not care where or when they are. Even
though the train visually cuts across time and geographical space, we do not lose a
sense of the rhetorical space in which the scene occurs, since the footage in the final
montage is still in slow motion and the music maintains the level of intensity of the
interior shots. If anything, the jumps in between the various shots, both when the
8 For more on this song in Risky Business and other films, see Robynn Stilwell, “‘In the
Air Tonight’: Text, Intertextuality, and the Creation of Meaning” (Popular Music and Society
19/3 [Autumn 1995]: 67–103).
screen goes momentarily black and in the final exterior montage, further convey the
feeling that Joel and Lana have shut their senses to all but one another.
Scenes that show an altered consciousness or that try to convey the feelings of
being under the influence of a controlled substance have much in common with
sex scenes, especially regarding the role of music. Once again, the camera work
and editing let us know that our perspective is being manipulated, while the music
provides a sense of continuity or direction while conveying a state of mind. A
complex scene involving drug use occurs in Garden State (Braff, 2004). The main
character, Andrew Largeman, returns home to New Jersey to attend his mother’s
funeral, deciding in the process to go off the cabinet full of drugs for depression,
anxiety, aggression, and bipolar disorder he has been taking since he was ten years
old, and that have kept him in a perpetual haze. The film is not a coming-of-age
story in the traditional sense; rather, Largeman constantly reawakens to different
forms of sensations, long lost in the haze of lithium, Paxil, Zoloft and other drugs he
takes. Just as throughout the film he sees people he hasn’t seen since high school, he
faces his own consciousness, something that has been subdued for years, through the
encounters he has—drinking, smoking pot, taking Ecstasy, arguing with his father,
falling in love—all of which lead to emotions and an experience of the world he has
not faced for some time. The soundtrack consists mostly of songs, and fulfills its
traditional role as emotional indicator well; all the songs have been chosen carefully,
with deliberate attention paid to the lyrics, tempo, and overall affect. Moreover, since
Largeman’s concept of the real world has been altered for two decades, many of the
scenes make reference to his new take on reality as it unfolds before his eyes.
Attending a party with some old high school friends, Largeman takes a hit of
Ecstasy with several other people. To show the effects of the drug on his system, the
photographer “ramps” the film, speeding up and slowing down the film speed while
it’s being shot, creating numerous smooth transitions between regular, slow and
fast motion. Largeman sits on the couch and watches everything move around him;
the rhythm of the song “In the Waiting Line” by Zero 7 is the only other constant
in the scene. Interestingly enough, the song is extradiegetic, not being the music
actually audible in the room (which is a hip-hop tune playing in the background), but
instead exists solely as the soundtrack to Andrew’s experience with Ecstasy. “In the
Waiting Line,” which is a medium-tempo song with a female lead singer and smooth
vocal harmonies in the chorus, seems to fit his trip perfectly, with its references to
temporal surreality (“time, ticking clock everyone stop”; “motionless wheel, nothing
is real”).
Several of the shots in the scene are made to line up with the lyrics; the line “Do
you believe in what you see” plays against a close-up shot of Largeman looking
around the room, bewildered. The song fades out as we return to reality for about
a minute, but just as quickly the music returns and the ramping begins again, this
time to even more extreme degrees. The sequence ends as Largeman spends the
entire evening sitting on the couch, practically motionless, while people make out,
do drugs, and generally party around him. That the action continues to take place
“around him” emphasizes the idea that he is finally aware of what is happening around
him, and is content to just sit and watch life pass by, something he hasn’t seen in
years. The juxtaposition of the camera work and the song’s clearly audible lyrics and
steady but relaxed beat (Zero 7 might be labeled “downtempo” or “ambient”) allows
for the manipulation of the visual action without losing or confusing the viewer. The
film thus presents the passage of time as Largeman sees it, strengthening the idea
that what the viewer sees is not just Largeman’s experiences, but his particular take
on what is happening around him, seeing the world with new eyes.
The Montage Sequence
The montage sequence (not to be confused with montage theory as discussed

extensively by Sergei Eisenstein) clearly can fulfill a wide variety of roles and
responsibilities in modern film. At its most basic it allows for the telescoping of time
in the filmic narrative, compressing a long period of time into more manageable units.
Claudia Gorbman writes that montage sequences make good use of underscoring
music “to bridge gaps of diegetic time,” and uses the breakfast-table montage from
Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) as an example of how the score can “simultaneously
bridge and demarcate the temporal discontinuities in the narrative.”
The montage sequence can be a highly nuanced and creative tool. Michel Chion
points out that the development of synchronous sound robbed films of a great deal
of “temporal flexibility,” especially in relation to the music used, as our knowledge
of how music works (chord progressions, the regularity of rhythm and beat patterns,
melodic contours) allows us to understand key elements of a scene’s dramatic
structure through active listening. He speaks of sound temporalizing the image, giving
a sense of time, direction, or linearity (possibly all three) through the information
in the soundtrack. In the case of the montage, he notes that “sound superimposed
onto the image is capable of directing our attention to a particular visual trajectory.
Sound even raises the possibility of sleight-of-hand effects: sometimes it succeeds
in making us see in the image a rapid movement that isn’t even there.”10 This is the
purpose of a well-crafted montage: convincing the viewer that the different images
make logical sense together, and thus can tell a story that involves more than simply
the passage of time.
There is often a financial benefit to using montage, as part of a larger economy
in the narrative of Hollywood films. Too much time cannot be spent on any one
subject, conversation, or scene for fear that the rest of the story or formula will
not have enough time to develop. The montage gave filmmakers the means to cut
through possibly prolonged sequences without having to commit too much time and
money. As David Bordwell puts it: “Action too expensive to shoot as a scene could
be conveyed by montage … Once the stylistic device had proven its narrational
virtues, it was rationalized economically.”11 As the montage sequence became more
commonplace, Bordwell continues, it became accepted as a “source of spectacle
Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1987), p. 26.
10 Chion, pp. 11–21.
11 David Bordwell, “Part One: The classical Hollywood style, 1917–1960” (in The
Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960, David Bordwell,
Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 84.
in its own right,” creating dramatic and rhetorical thrust in the narrative, its cost-
cutting origins now less important. The interruption to the flow of the story was not
an issue, as “any discontinuities were overridden by a unified musical passage.”12 To
be sure, few films actually have music playing throughout the entire story; even in
the period Bordwell is referring to (the mid-1930s), most films consisted of dozens
of short musical cues, often fragmentary in nature. Nevertheless, as Bordwell and
Staiger point out, the scores “still functioned as a factor in narrational continuity,”
fragmentary or not.13 And here they are talking about original orchestral scores along
the lines of Erich Korngold or Max Steiner; the utter concision and predictable
structures of modern pop song recordings were not yet a consideration.
Pop recordings would, of course, become a useful framing device for the
montage sequence. The chord progression, the arc of the lyrics, the recurrence of
the chorus: any of these standard components in a pop song could help shape the
dramatic structure of a montage, if only by determining its length in relation to the
song. The widespread use of popular songs, not simply as accompanying materials
in film soundtracks, but also as underscoring devices chosen, applied, and edited as
deliberately as any originally composed score, compels us to examine these songs
with equal thoughtfulness.
There are many famous montage sequences to choose from, especially among
those that use popular songs to provide rhythmic continuity to the editing while
the lyrics comment on the scene—much like the example from Garden State. For
instance: in The Graduate (Nichols, 1967), Benjamin’s ongoing affair with Mrs
Robinson is juxtaposed with his continuing alienation from his parents through two
songs by Simon and Garfunkel, “The Sounds of Silence” and “April Come She
Will.” Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1998) ends with an extended sequence showing all
the players involved in the story of the Tangiers Casino being silenced by the mob.
The Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun” provides a moralistic tone to the
montage, as each person meets an untimely end, while drawing together the various
images into a seamless display of the mafia’s ability to traverse time and space to
exact its revenge. As the three fugitive–heroes of O Brother, Where art Thou? (Coen,
2000) continue their cross-country trek to find a (non-existent) treasure, the audience
is given a sampling of their adventures and shenanigans with an “old-timey” folk
tune sung by the Kossoy Sisters, “I’ll Fly Away.” While the montage—and the song’s
title—might lead some to believe the song is about making an escape, it’s actually
about looking forward to “flying away” to heaven as an angel.14
12 Bordwell, “Part One,” p. 74.

13 David Bordwell, “The Introduction of Sound,” The Classical Hollywood Cinema,
p. 303.
14 We might consider that the boys are escaping a harsh life for something much
better—similar to the sentiments expressed in the song. For more on the humor created by the
incongruous matching of songs and narrative in film, see Jeff Smith, “Popular Songs and Comic
Allusion in Contemporary Cinema” (in Soundtrack Available, ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik
and Arthur Knight (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001, pp. 407–430). For
more on the music in this film, see my “O Brother, Where Art Thou? A Musical Appreciation”
(Xavier Review 23/2 [Fall 2003]: 31–41).
Director Wes Anderson has used montage sequences to provide variety to a
more straightforward storytelling style, often providing extra information about the
characters that might, in another format, take up too much time. He might interrupt
the narrative abruptly to insert a concise, focused sequence of images, carefully
choreographed to a piece of music, usually a pre-existing recording. He is clearly
interested in the idea of creating interplay between the visuals and the soundtrack.
His visual montages juxtapose a variety of often humorous images with music clearly
chosen for its mood, affect, and lyrics. In fact, Anderson often has a specific song
in mind before deciding how a scene will progress. Nor does he rely on the rapid
cutting of montage only to compress narrative time; Anderson uses montage both to
cut across long time periods and to bring together disparate, even discrete narrative
elements into a new coherent order.
Such a sequence occurs early in Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore (1998), which
involves a prep-school student, Max Fischer, and his futile attempts to snare the
heart of Rushmore Academy’s first-grade teacher, Miss Cross. Max, a creative
cosmopolite, leads, takes part in, or has founded no less than 18 different extra-
curricular activities, and the demands of these have led to his abysmal grades. His
responsibilities include President of the Rushmore Beekeepers, director of the Max
Fischer Players, Fencing Team Captain, and Bombardment Society Founder (which
appears to be a fancy name for dodge-ball). All of this information is presented to us
in the form of a visual montage. We first see the cover of the Rushmore yearbook,
The Rushmore Yankee, followed by a montage of brief glimpses at each of Max’s
activities. Anderson brings to life the typically static photos of societies and teams
that fill high school yearbooks. Each of Max’s activities appears on screen for only
four to five seconds, just long enough to read the all-caps title of the club’s name and
Max’s position, before moving on to the next. The pacing is thus quite rapid.
The music chosen to accompany the montage not only comments on Max’s
predilection for outside interests, but also unifies what would seem like a diverse
sequence of images. With the little knowledge we have of Max prior to this
sequence, we might believe him to be an ambitious student by the litany of interests
we are given. However, the montage is immediately preceded by the headmaster’s
statement about Max to a Rushmore benefactor, “He’s one of the worst students
we’ve got.” Already we face a conundrum: how can an earnest student like Max
be so terrible when he pursues so many worthy activities? The song chosen for the
sequence is “Making Time,” a minor hit in the UK in 1966 by the British rock band
The Creation. Anderson picks the song not just for its sound, but also for what it
says. In this case, the song describes Max’s personality to a T, even if the audience is
not entirely aware of it: “Telling lies, closing the eyes, making more excuses, pulling
the wool, acting the fool …” The lyrics thus amplify the headmaster’s comment
and give more depth to Max’s personality than what his yearbook might otherwise
indicate. The music here also masks anything else from the soundtrack; the sounds
of gunshots, go-cart motors, arguing voices and swords crossing all go mute under
the driving guitar and drum beat of the song.
There is an unusual disconnect between the sound of “Making Time” and the
images shown that contributes to our understanding of Max. As with many garage-
band songs of the late 1960s, The Creation sound gritty, edgy, almost unpolished,
and full of emotion and energy (in the sense of something that’s waiting to explode
rather than high-energy dance music or the like). Even the quality of the recording
contributes to this feeling, as the voices and instruments are sometimes so loud as
to distort the sound, adding edginess to the music. Max, on the other hand, is shown
going about his various activities with practically no feeling or engagement at all.
Sure, he is seen arguing in the Debate Team and playing Bombardment, but the
regular pace of the images—the speed with which each one image relentlessly gives
way to the next—begins to take its toll, and we get the feeling that, for Max, all
these activities are a way in which he is avoiding … something. While the rest of
the Astronomy Club are gathered around a telescope, Max stands a few paces away,
clutching his books to his chest, looking away; he sits motionless on his go-cart
while other members of the Yankee Racers drive around a track; he smiles blithely
while listening to the inevitably asinine taped conversations one hears as a member
of the French Club; even his conducting of the Chorale is mechanical and without
feeling. What we do not yet realize is that this lack of engagement is Max’s very
problem—something he comes to terms with in his fruitless pursuit of Miss Cross.
Once more, the music does more than glue together the images; in this case “Making
Time” embodies all the intensity that Max is searching for.
An actual need for a montage sequence in the film narrative often involves
transformation, whether it’s physical (Jeffrey Anderson going from dinner theater
hack to soap star in Soapdish [Hoffman, 1991]), vocational (The Bride learning
martial arts in Kill Bill, Vol. 2 [Tarantino, 2004]) or architectural (the barn raising in
Witness [Weir, 1985]), to name a few possibilities.
The barn-raising scene in Witness may serve as the ultimate building montage, in
that we see the erecting of a barn in an Amish community in a single day, underscored
entirely with the music written by Maurice Jarre for an octet of electronic instruments
(including several synthesizers, an electric piano and an electric wind instrument.)15
Apparently, the director had used the Pachelbel Canon in D as a temp track when
editing the footage, so that Jarre was practically locked into writing a piece of a
similar flavor. Jarre’s cue (based on an original tune) slowly builds up and becomes
more complex, just as the frame of the barn goes up first, and then begins to take
on more layers as time passes. We may draw a comparison between the structure
of the barn and the cue itself, which is complex in structure and fugue-like, with
countermelodies, key changes, and numerous entrances of the theme. The music also
reflects the orderly nature in which the Amish community comes together to erect
the building; the most striking shot of the montage shows three dozen men hanging
from the skeleton of the barn, working away, just as the piece modulates to a new
key and presents its most complicated (or busy) version of the theme yet. As the
theme develops and builds, so does the barn.
Finally, music can help point to a transformation during the lapsing of a long
period of time, as when a setting shifts from the past to the present, or the future to
the past. Such a shift occurs within the first ten minutes of The Triplets of Belleville
(Chomet, 2004); in fact, it is where the story really begins. The film ostensibly starts
15 Mark Russell and James Young, Film Music: Screencraft (Boston: Focal Press, 2000),
p. 55.
with film footage of the 1930s, but almost immediately we find we’re watching this
footage several decades later, with Madame Souza and her grandson Champion, on a
television set in the latter’s home outside Paris. Champion seems like an inconsolable
little boy with no real interests (not even his dog Bruno, just a puppy at this point in
the story, can shake his funk), that is, until his grandmother discovers his passion for
cycling and especially the Tour de France.
Once Champion has a tricycle, everything changes. His tricycle begins his
journey to the Tour de France in earnest, and the setting shifts through cross-fades
to progressively more crowded, industry-strewn hills to the cold, modern world in
which the remainder of the story unfolds. The passage of time renders Madam Souza’s
once–quaint country home into a rundown suburban dwelling, simultaneously
dwarfed and engulfed by the apparatus of modern transportation. A total of four
shots of the countryside appear, with the first and last marking the extremes (pure
nostalgia on one end, pure modernity on the other). The intervening (in-between)
shots include the addition of construction cranes and smokestacks to the landscape,
and planes flying overhead to the skies. The sounds of technology discreetly mark
the changes wrought. The sequence goes by so quickly, eased along by the music,
that we might not even notice such a subtle touch in the sound editing: the first shot
has a single large plane, complete with the sound of the four propellers turning,
while the second shot has two jet airplanes. The aural transition from prop motor to
jet engine signifies not only progress, but also the profound sense of loss and longing
that pervades this film. Just as the sound of the propeller engine becomes something
lost to the past, a symbol of outdated technology, the jet engine roar signifies an
unwelcome present, where time passes too quickly. Time for these people is thus not
for quantifying, but for treasuring.
We might then consider that one of the themes of this film is the characters’
love or nostalgia for past pleasures—riding a bicycle, making music—even as the
world is changing around them, for Champion and his grandmother as well as the
eponymous Triplets. According to the director, this scene is meant to look especially
nostalgic, which makes sense as it is Champion’s first cycle (bi or tri); the entire
sequence is in sepia tone, implying a certain aged feeling.16 The sense of nostalgia,
or of an idealized time slipping away, is enhanced by the music that leads us out of
this scene. At first it seems like a slow, orchestral version of the C-minor Prelude
from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier (heard earlier in the film), but it’s actually
a different piece, although related to the Bach piece: it’s the opening measures of
Mozart’s grand C-minor Mass, left unfinished at his death.
Mozart wrote the Mass at a time when, under the influence of Baron von Swieten,
he was studying Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Several of Mozart’s works from this
time thus take inspiration from Bach, including several sections of the Mass. The
opening of the Kyrie seems clearly modeled on the C-minor prelude, not just in
the choice of key but also through the melodic motive, harmonic progression, and
overall mood. The Mass creeps in just as autumn seems to arrive in the area, but this
is no mere seasonal transition: the world around them is changing as well. Both the
16 Sylvain Chomet, commentary track, The Triplets of Belleville (Sony Pictures Classics
DVD 03231, 2004).
Prelude and the Kyrie will figure throughout the rest of the film, especially once the
story shifts to Belleville (somewhere in North America, probably the United States),
effectively tying Champion and Madame Souza back to their home, where the music
might have symbolized a simpler life, where they had all the time in the world.
Not the Conclusion …
These examples cover a wide range of genres and storytelling styles. I chose to focus
on montage sequences and the variation of time speed because these practices have
become pervasive in modern filmmaking. Yet there are many other approaches to
both these specific devices and more general uses of time that I have not addressed.
For instance: during Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), we see Malcolm X watching
television footage of race-related violence around the country—footage which is
actually a montage of images that took place over many years, all underscored with
a barrage of competing sounds: the words of Malcolm X (spoken by actor Denzel
Washington) and the voices of those listening to and responding to him; the voices
and sounds from the footage in the montage, including the screams of activists being
subdued with fire hoses and the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr, shown speaking
about non-violence; and John Coltrane’s song “Alabama,” recorded in 1963 and
clearly reflective of the social unrest sweeping the United States in the 1960s. Lee
creates parallel soundtracks for the montage, any of which we can choose to focus on.
Listening to Malcolm X’s words or hearing the sounds of the civil rights movement
make this scene powerful enough, without even realizing that the melody played
on tenor sax has its own roots and significance and is therefore related on a close
intertextual level to the other images and sounds presented.
This example alone shows how powerful the use of music (and sound) can be in
the soundtrack, and why my exploration is merely a glimpse of a potentially much
larger project. This larger project will entail, not simply explaining the mechanics
of how music is used in such scenes, but also, more generally, demonstrating the
importance of the score to the telling of stories through visual media. Perhaps Michel
Chion’s approach to film sound, breaking it down to its most essential parts, might be
applied to music’s role in film and television.17 Only then can we begin to appreciate
how much information the music gives the viewer, time and time again.
17 See Chion.
Taylor & Francis
Chapter Eight
Sleights of Time in the Music of

Cassandra Wilson
Charles Hiroshi Garrett
Encouraged to develop original voices while paying homage to their musical elders,
contemporary jazz musicians are continuously faced with the question of how to
position themselves with respect to jazz tradition. Since the mainstream appeal of jazz
has faded so dramatically over the last half-century, many current artists who wish
to survive in today’s competitive marketplace find it difficult to resist the impulse
towards musical conservation. Yet, by adopting a conservationist stance, musicians
run the risk of consigning jazz to the past, of becoming musical curators rather than
practitioners of a living music. While every jazz musician must negotiate between
the poles of preservation and replenishment, this balancing act is acutely felt by jazz
singers. This is a consequence of audience expectations, constructed over a number
of decades, that a jazz vocalist should perform songs from a time-honored repertory
of standards, especially those composed during the first half of the twentieth century.
Given a paradoxical musical climate that values conservation yet simultaneously
prizes innovation, how are today’s jazz singers to proceed? What factors should
guide their approach to repertory, technique, style, and musical growth? How should
they position themselves with respect to historical time and tradition?
Since the beginning of her recording career, now in its third decade, vocalist
and composer Cassandra Wilson has continually reached provocative answers to
these questions by remaining aware of her place in relation to jazz history and of
her position as an artist who came of age during the late twentieth century. What
makes her especially suitable for an inquiry about a jazz artist’s relationship to
time is that she has confronted this dilemma directly, to a far greater extent than
her contemporaries, by thematizing it within her own compositions, her choice of
repertory, and her musical approach.
In 1994, the New York Times dubbed Wilson “the most important singer to come
along in jazz in the last ten years,” and for the past decade she has earned a sparkling
critical reputation, collecting laudatory reviews, winning a Grammy award, and
repeatedly topping the annual Down Beat polls. In addition to releasing sixteen
I am very thankful to Gavin Chuck for his helpful suggestions on an earlier version of
this essay.
Peter Watrous, “Jazz Through the Voice of Cassandra Wilson,” New York Times, 21
March 1994, sec. C, p. 16. For a sampling of critical accolades, see: Stephen Holden, “All
Types of Music Turned Solidly Into Jazz,” New York Times, 4 July 1995, p. 19; Gene Santoro,
albums to date as a leader, Wilson has collaborated on hundreds of tracks with top
flight instrumentalists, such as Dave Holland, Jacky Terrasson, Don Byron, Henry
Threadgill, and Terence Blanchard. After growing up in the South, where she worked
as a vocalist across various genres, Wilson launched her professional jazz career in
1982, when she moved to the East Coast and linked up with the New York City
avant-garde jazz scene. Wilson began working with the M-Base Collective, a loosely
affiliated group of young, progressive jazz musicians that included saxophonist
Steve Coleman, alto saxophonist Greg Osby, bassist Kevin Harris, drummer
Marvin “Smitty” Smith, and pianist Geri Allen, among others. Recognized for their
experimental fusion of jazz, funk, electronics, and traces of hip hop, the M-Base
crowd played a crucial role in Wilson’s development as an improviser, since their
highly complex music was packed with thorny chord progressions, mixed meters,
tricky rhythms, and angular melodies, all played at extremely rapid tempos. Once
she began to record as a leader in the mid-1980s, Wilson adopted these techniques
and continued to fuse jazz with popular idioms. For instance, the title track from
her album Jump World (1989) kicks off with the sound of a turntablist scratching a
hip-hop beat, while her composition “Out Loud” (1990) finds Wilson singing over a
rhythm track that she programmed on a drum machine.
Spurred by her involvement with M-Base, Wilson adopted an expansive view of
jazz, favoring a relatively futuristic sound in comparison to the neo-bop conservatism
advanced during this period by Wynton Marsalis. Yet, as a contemporary African-
American female jazz singer whose vocal approach has elicited comparisons to
predecessors like Billie Holiday, Betty Carter, and Abbey Lincoln, Wilson has also
tried to live up to conventional expectations by periodically recording her own
renditions of jazz standards. Her first release, entitled Point of View (1985)—the
title offering an indication of Wilson’s self-conscious positioning with respect to
tradition—contains a rendition of “I Wished On the Moon,” while her second album
includes versions of Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” as well as
“Some Other Time” from the Broadway musical On the Town. Wilson devoted her
third album, Blue Skies (1988), entirely to standards, including the Berlin tune for
which it is named. Yet, despite her selection of traditional repertory and her use
during this period of a classic trio accompaniment—pianist Mulgrew Miller, bassist
Lonnie Plaxico, and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington—Wilson’s production of sly,
forward-leaning interpretations of these old chestnuts expresses a fresh sensibility.
Unsatisfied with allowing jazz to serve only as a means for recreating the past,
Wilson’s rendition of “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” one of the wittier tracks on
Blue Skies, presents a striking mixture of tradition and invention. In certain respects,
Wilson takes a tried-and-true approach to this Rodgers and Hart tune by improvising
over its harmonic outline as well as scat singing during the second verse. Rather
than proceeding in typical fashion, however, Wilson’s interpretation reveals a more
knowing stance, as she tinkers with musical time to illustrate the narrative arc of
Lorenz Hart’s lyrics. At the start of the track, Wilson conveys the bewilderment
“Sing Sing Sing,” The Nation 263, no. 7 (September 9/16, 1996), pp. 54–58; Gary Giddins,
“Singing Cool and Hot: Cassandra Wilson and Dee Dee Bridgewater Enter the Pantheon,”
The Village Voice 47, no. 9 (March 5, 2002), p. 72.
Sleights of Time in the Music of Cassandra Wilson 109
expressed by the song’s title by producing a sequence of disorienting temporal effects.
Simply put, her vocal entries arrive much later than expected, always keeping her
listeners waiting. More often than not, her voice trails far behind her backing trio,
and even at the rare moments when voice and accompaniment coincide, Wilson’s
exaggerated syncopations instantly throw things back out of sync. Paying similar
attention to pacing, she stretches phrases far past their expected durations, often
letting them dangle over the next bar line. Once she reaches the song’s denouement,
however, Wilson changes tactics, finally realizing that love stands right beside her.
Accentuating Hart’s lyrical turn, her voice arrives directly on the beat to proclaim
“I’m wise,” then pauses dramatically before finishing the phrase, “and I know
what time it is.” To cement her point, Wilson repeats this phrase five times, always
entering firmly on the downbeat to establish newfound control of the situation and
of time itself (8.1).
Wilson’s playful manipulation of time animates much of Blue Skies, including
her take on Kern and Mercer’s “I’m Old Fashioned.” In contrast to predecessors
such as Glenn Miller, Ella Fitzgerald, and John Coltrane, Wilson rejects the
common practice of presenting this tune as a ballad in favor of stamping it with
a new imprint. Her version begins at a sizzling pace, Wilson’s voice supported at
first only by Carrington’s nifty brushwork (8.2). Given this spare accompaniment
through the first chorus, Wilson’s combination of percussive accents and rhythmic
precision enables her to sustain musical interest while retaining textual clarity. She
reduces the song to its bare essentials, giving the listener a capsule summary of its
melody, rhythm, and text, before expanding upon these elements. Wilson retraces
the same harmonic ground during the second chorus, but with her band alongside,
she takes increasing rhythmic and melodic risks that bend the lyrics and display her
ability to improvise. After finishing the second chorus, Wilson’s ensemble proceeds
according to typical bebop practice, as the pianist and drummer take solos before
Wilson returns, ostensibly to round out the performance.
Unexpectedly, though, instead of hurtling to the finish, the group changes gears
midway through the last chorus of “I’m Old Fashioned.” Just as Wilson affirmatively
proclaims, “Cause that’s how I want to be,” the band responds to Carrington’s showy
drum roll of exaggerated triplets by suddenly shifting into half time. Settling into this
relaxed tempo gives the group an opportunity to stretch out, which provides Wilson
greater rhythmic flexibility for her phrasing and opens up enough space for her to
exchange lines with Mulgrew. More significantly, the group’s switch from a virtuosic
sprint to a leisurely stroll abruptly changes the affect of the performance, dispensing
with its neo-bop tendencies in favor of what might best be described as cabaret-
influenced jazz (8. 3). Transported suddenly to Broadway, or perhaps Vegas, Wilson
consciously nods to the dramatic star turns taken with this song by performers like
Judy Garland. Asking her listeners to join in this musical time traveling, Wilson belts
out the concluding lines, “As long as you agree / To stay old fashioned with me.”
At the very end of the track, however, her band seems unconvinced by this musical

transformation and resumes its lickety-split tempo. Striking on every beat of the last
four bars, pianist Mulgrew delivers sixteen consecutive chords that swoop down the
keyboard and climb back up again, but just as he readies for the grand finale, with his
bandmates ready to jump in for a last hurrah, the clock abruptly runs out. Interrupted
in midair, “I’m Old Fashioned” ends with a jolt of silence, forever suspended on the
last upbeat, never reaching a final cadence.
The surprising conclusion of “I’m Old Fashioned” offers a vivid illustration of
Wilson’s dissatisfaction with pat endings. Furthermore, the tongue-in-cheek quality
of her performance reflects Wilson’s recognition of a temporal divide that separates
today’s musician from traditional material as performed in its original context. A
typical jazz standard, according to Wilson, “often sits in a particular place in time,
lyrically it does. And a lot of the time musically it does too, so it anchors you to
that place in a sense.” As a result, she has expressed doubts about the viability of
specializing solely on this material without offering something new. “It’s irony that
makes [“I’m Old Fashioned”] work,” explains Wilson while citing a classic tenet of
the postmodern approach she sometimes employs, “because I’m not old-fashioned
but I can be old-fashioned. I mean there are certain parts of me that have been old-
fashioned. There’s a twist. It’s ironic.” Irony was not enough motivation for Wilson
to continue along this path, however, as she made clear shortly after the release
of Blue Skies: “I enjoy doing standards, and I did the album as a special project.
However, that is not my direction in fact. I think it’s important for us to develop
new standards and to recreate the music of today inside of a new context. This is a
different time and somebody’s going to do that.”
For the past fifteen years, Wilson has made a career out of doing just that. Rather
than polishing up old standards, she has become celebrated, some would say notorious,
for cultivating an eclectic songbook. For a few years following Blue Skies, Wilson
continued working in the M-Base vein, releasing several albums filled mainly with
her original songs. But she made a critical shift in musical direction during the early
1990s, when she signed with one of the famed labels in jazz, Blue Note Records,
and released Blue Light ’Til Dawn (1993), an album that signaled radical changes
in her approach to instrumentation, arranging, and repertory. Making his producing
debut, Craig Street helped Wilson to devise an alternative soundscape by discarding
the traditional piano trio and rejecting the dense textures that M-Base groups created
with horns, electric guitar, and electronic keyboards. Steering clear of electronics
in favor of a warmer acoustic sound, and stripping the keyboards, full drum kit,
4 Kate Hammett-Vaughan, “Cassandra Wilson Finds the Groove,” Coda 261 (May–June
1995), p. 9.
4 Krystian Brodacki, “Cassandra Wilson: Vocal Prophetess,” Jazz Forum 131 (1991),
p. 25; his emphasis.
4 Myoshi Smith, “Cassandra Wilson––The New Faces,” Coda 227 (August–September
1989), p. 36.
Street has since worked with a broad range of jazz, country, folk, and popular artists,
including Javon Jackson, Holly Cole, Charlie Sexton, Jimmy Scott, Me’Shell NdegéOcello,
and k.d. lang. For more information on his production techniques, see Greg Tate, “Craig
Street––Producer on the Rise,” Fi—The Magazine of Music & Sound 1, no. 6 (July–August
1996), pp. 46–47, p. 49.
and most of the horns out of the ensemble, Street surrounded Wilson with stringed
instruments, including banjo, bass, acoustic guitar, steel guitar, and violin. The
spare, guitar-centric arrangements, brightened by gentle touches of percussive and
instrumental color, produced a lighter musical texture and hollowed out more space
in which her voice could operate. Such changes in instrumentation also introduced
a shift in Wilson’s musical aesthetic. The elimination of electronic devices in favor
of acoustic instruments on the one hand implies a retro sensibility, an ostensibly
conservative gesture that abandons the path tread by jazz-rock fusion musicians.
Wilson has since suggested as much in recent interviews, indicating that she has
come to prefer the old-fashioned sound of acoustic instruments to the mechanized,
electronic timbre of synthesizers. On the other hand, this choice of instrumentation
can be read as a radical rejection of jazz tradition, for Wilson’s group makes little
attempt to recapture the sound of classic jazz ensembles. By revisiting an even
earlier moment in black musical history—what Street later described as the sound of
late-nineteenth-century black string bands—Wilson’s string-heavy ensemble evokes
the strains of country, folk, and the blues. In subsequent years, Wilson’s recordings
have continued to integrate unconventional stringed instruments, from the mandolin
to the Greek bouzouki.
Blue Light ’Til Dawn also marked the start of Wilson’s thorough reconsideration
of the jazz vocal repertory, in particular her practice of harvesting new “standards”
from unlikely sources. The album begins with a performance of “You Don’t Know
What Love Is,” a classic tune that Billie Holiday helped to popularize, but rather
than continuing with similar repertory, Wilson experiments with a wide range
of alternative material. In addition to three of her own tunes, and one penned by
percussionist Cyro Baptista, Blue Light presents interpretations of classic blues
numbers by Robert Johnson (“Come on in My Kitchen” and “Hellhound on My
Trail”), an early R&B number (“Tell Me You’ll Wait for Me”), and a diverse array
of tunes made famous in the 1970s by Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Ann Peebles,
and The Stylistics. In a broad sense, this practice places Wilson squarely within the
tradition by calling to mind Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and other jazz singers
who performed popular songs of their era. Yet, because jazz singing since has taken
on more of a retrospective and nostalgic character, her choice to record more recent
songs initially served to differentiate Wilson from many of her peers. Consequently,
as Stuart Nicholson observes, “Wilson … was ahead of her time in forcing audiences
to reconsider the role of the vocalist in contemporary jazz in terms of both musical
context and repertoire.” It is especially significant to note that Wilson’s choice of
repertoire is bounded neither by genre nor by racial lines, a choice that derives from
the diversity of musical influences in Wilson’s past and also one that would help
to propel her future career on a very different course—I will return to this idea
below. As with her unorthodox approach to instrumentation, Wilson’s selection
of material from outside the jazz canon can be understood as a sign of an open-
minded aesthetic, one unafraid to stretch the genre definitions of jazz. Viewed from
this perspective, her musical strategies propose that jazz is not to be bounded by
Stuart Nicholson, Is Jazz Dead? (Or has it moved to a new address) (New York:
Routledge, 2005), p. 92.
repertory, instrumentation, race, or historical time but rather is characterized by an
experimental and flexible attitude toward musical creation.
For an artist who often chooses to remake well-known material, Wilson’s “biggest
triumph,” according to Stephen Holden, “is her ability to reconceive familiar songs
in radical new versions” Rather than improvising over chord changes adopted
verbatim from a given song, Wilson commonly disassembles the original, moves its
parts around, and tinkers with its harmony, tempo, meter, texture, instrumentation,
and more, in the course of putting together a new arrangement. This process of
deconstruction and recombination is exemplified by the final track of Blue Light ’Til
Dawn, which takes a 1974 R&B tune, “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” and repackages it
as a classic acoustic blues number. Excerpting the chorus from what was originally
an up-tempo hit for Ann Peebles, Wilson reframes it as a deliberately paced duet
with Chris Whitley, accompanying her on a National steel guitar. Even though their
rendition does not follow a standard blues harmonic outline, both performers rely
throughout on blues gestures to illustrate the song’s melancholy lyrics, which lament
the absence of a former lover. Wilson’s emphatic cries, shouts, and sighs alight on
and then twist each flatted blue note, while the guitar’s distinctive metallic timbre
and Whitley’s aggressive attack––violently wrenching the strings and audibly sliding
up and down the guitar neck––recall Son House and fellow blues guitarists during
the Depression Era. After making their way through the chorus a few times, the duo
eases into a freewheeling improvisatory section (8.4). Becoming unglued from
the harmonic foundation, Whitley experiments with phrase lengths and substitutes
alternate chords, while Wilson engages with his chiming guitar in a wordless call-
and-response, replacing the lyrics with her own exclamations and whispers. Time
slips during this loose passage, as the duo gradually loses touch with “I Can’t
Stand the Rain” and turns their collective attention to a jazz-influenced exploration
of the acoustic blues. In one respect, Wilson’s attitude toward making jazz in this
recording implies a flattening of history, as she resituates a contemporary piece by
manipulating an older set of musical practices. Yet, this performance also presents
a convincing argument about the continuity of time, expressed by the persistence of
certain elements throughout black musical history, as if to present its musical lesson
by peeling away the layers of a modern R&B number and uncovering the blues at
its core.
As much as Blue Light ’Til Dawn is concerned with revisiting various moments
in the history of jazz and African American music, the album’s content also stems
from Wilson’s re-examination of her personal history, involving her family roots,
childhood aspirations, and early musical tastes. The daughter of a schoolteacher
and a semi-professional musician, Cassandra Maria Fowlkes was born in Jackson,
Mississippi in 1955.10 While she eventually followed in the footsteps of her father,
a guitarist and bassist who once recorded with bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson,
Wilson did not pursue a career in music at first. Originally, she took up broadcasting,
Stephen Holden, “Moonlight Reveries,” New York Times, 17 March 1996, sec. H,
p. 40.
10 Wilson gained her last name through an early marriage and retained it after the couple
divorced.
obtaining a degree in communications from Jackson State and working briefly in the
television industry, before relocating to the East Coast. Likewise, her path toward
becoming a jazz singer was somewhat indirect. Unlike many of her idols, Wilson
did not grow up singing in the Baptist church, nor did she join the choir in her
Presbyterian church. Her musical training instead included taking classical piano
lessons, performing in school musicals, and learning to play the guitar. She initially
fashioned herself as a solo folk singer, performing songs by Joni Mitchell and Judy
Collins and accompanying herself on guitar. Before turning to jazz full-time, she
also became involved with a folk group named (perhaps prophetically, in light of her
eventual musical interests) Past, Present & Future.
During the planning stages for Blue Light, Craig Street encouraged Wilson to
revisit the music she loved as a teenager growing up in the early 1970s. Taking into
account her broad musical tastes, which freely crossed racial lines from Motown to
country, show tunes to soul, Wilson proposed several cover tunes to complement
Street’s unorthodox suggestions. She later characterized the repertory on Blue Light
and her subsequent albums as constituting an artistic rediscovery: “I like to look at
those recordings as rebirth pieces. I mean, real returning to very strong memories
of adolescence and those years of learning to play the guitar, and suddenly being
attracted to this other kind of music, this folk music and this rock music. It’s going
back to that time, remembering it, and actually coming to terms with it.”11 Wilson
also took this opportunity to come to terms with the blues. Despite fronting a blues
band in her youth, Wilson had expressed prior reluctance to record such material,
“because I don’t feel that I have the maturity yet to handle it the way it should be
handled.”12 By the time she recorded Blue Light, however, Wilson decided to cover
several blues songs and colored many other tracks with a bluesy ambiance.
Like many of her covers, Wilson’s rendition of Robert Johnson’s “Come on in
My Kitchen” on Blue Light evokes the original while demonstrating a distinctly
contemporary sensibility. Her band’s performance revolves around an insistent two-
measure vamp produced by the compressed sound of a snare drum and closed hi-hat,
cross-rhythms sparingly plucked on an acoustic guitar, and deep harmonic swells on
bass that expand and contract for the duration of each measure. Initially, this rendition
remains somewhat faithful to Johnson’s conception, employing the opening motive
as the backbone for a twelve-bar blues. Wilson interacts closely with her bandmates,
weaving her voice in and out of the instrumental textures in a call-and-response,
but she is clearly the leader, her vocals positioned high in the mix. Street’s spacious
arrangement, dotted by spiky guitar accents, channels the sound of the acoustic blues,
and Wilson maintains this affect through several choruses until, halfway through
the track, a key shift occurs. During an improvisatory vocal section, the twelve-bar
structure dissolves and the band returns to the opening vamp, repeating this two-
bar pattern over and over until the tune’s conclusion. Confronted by this relentless
ostinato, Wilson gradually lets the groove assume control, first performing a bluesy
scat chorus, then exchanging individual phrases with the guitar and accordion, and
11 Martin Johnson, “Reconciliation: Cassandra Wilson,” Down Beat 66, no. 8 (August
1999), p. 29.
12 Brodacki, p. 27.
finally allowing her voice to melt entirely into the texture of the ensemble. The
track winds down without resuming the twelve-bar blues, and without reaching a
conclusive cadence, as guitar, bass, and drums fade out by repeating the oscillating
vamp. Thus, in the process of summoning the blues, Wilson and her ensemble again
end up glancing backward and leaning forward at once, subverting time-honored
blues conventions yet simultaneously celebrating the music via a stylized ending
that effectively distills the essence of the blues.
Wilson’s persuasive interpretations of an eclectic mix of R&B hits, old blues
tunes, and pop/rock songs like Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” on Blue Light ’Til Dawn
garnered critical praise and also led to tremendous commercial sales for a jazz album
of its era, selling upwards of several hundred thousand copies. Although taking such
a revisionist approach to jazz repertory, instrumentation, and arrangement is not
unique to Wilson, she has since become renowned for her continuing efforts to refresh
the jazz tradition by expanding her repertory.13 Subsequently, she has covered songs
made famous by artists as diverse as U2, The Band, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams,
Prince, The Beatles, Glen Campbell, The Monkees, Elvis Costello, Muddy Waters,
Sting, the Temptations, the Zombies, and Neil Young. “Her primary gift,” writes
Gary Giddins admiringly, “is for adapting diverse material so completely that she
makes it hers.”14 An equally telling measure of Wilson’s musical influence concerns
the gradual shift in the jazz world over the past fifteen years that has helped to make
it much more acceptable for artists such as Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran, and The
Bad Plus to release their own interpretations of contemporary popular songs.
Since her breakthrough in the early 1990s, Wilson has kept a high profile in the
jazz world, even though her work has drawn criticism from some traditionalists.
According to these purists, Wilson’s merger of jazz with popular genres and her
ensuing mainstream success represents a sellout, compromising the musical
integrity of jazz in search of monetary rewards. There is some truth to this, since
her pop-friendly repertory, enhanced by glossy publicity campaigns that have lately
marketed her as a jazz–pop diva, help Wilson appeal to a much larger audience,
including listeners more familiar with the sounds of pop, rock, soul, and country,
who are intrigued by what a jazz approach can offer. In an ironic twist, Wilson’s
crossover success also has since been credited with helping to open doors both for
new female jazz singers such as Diana Krall and Jane Monheit, who adopt more
traditional approaches, and also for the phenomenally popular Norah Jones, whose
music blends touches of country, folk, pop, rock, and jazz.
In defining her own relationship to the jazz community, Wilson occasionally
positions herself on the outside. Early in her career, she became so disenchanted with
13 Jazz guitarist Bill Frisell displays a similarly expansive attitude on his 1993 Elektra
release, Have A Little Faith, which includes interpretations of music by Stephen Foster, Aaron
Copland, Bob Dylan, Sonny Rollins, and Madonna. Frisell’s eclectic ensemble foregrounds
the sound of the electric guitar, drums, clarinet, and accordion. For an extended discussion of
Frisell’s approach, see David Ake, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002), pp. 146–176.
14 Gary Giddins, Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of its Second Century (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 496.
the term “jazz” that she proposed in its place the phrase “modern African American
improvisational music.”15 After the release of Blue Light, Wilson continued to keep
her distance: “I call myself a musician. I don’t put labels on what I do. I sing jazz
certainly. I come from that kind of a background. I was schooled in that music and
that’s part of what I do, but I don’t call myself a jazz singer.”16 Despite her unease at
being pinned down, Wilson acknowledges that jazz provides the musical foundation
for her vocal approach and her aesthetic sensibility. Indeed, her music draws from
the rich well of possibilities present in jazz, including its harmonic language, its
emphasis on improvisation, its sense of rhythmic swing, its relationship to other
forms of African American music, and its orientation toward the blues.
The influence of jazz on Wilson’s music can be heard most clearly in her vocal
style, which Stephen Holden once described as a “hybrid of Nina Simone and Joni
Mitchell, with echoes of [Betty] Carter,” three vocalists whom Wilson has cited as
influences. This characterization well captures a sense of her commitment to jazz and
the blues, her willingness to blend jazz, folk, and pop elements, and her overriding
concern with rhythmic timing and vocal timbre.17 In contrast to the virtuosic scat
singing of Ella Fitzgerald and the majestic vocal performances of Sarah Vaughan,
Wilson takes a relatively modest approach, one that values subtlety, nuance, and
timing above flashy vocal pyrotechnics. Her primary method of improvisation
typically foregrounds rhythmic and melodic invention above an attempt to negotiate
rapid-fire harmonic changes, and her tendency toward recomposing songs without
losing complete touch with the original melodic contour has prompted comparisons
to Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. Like Holiday, Wilson aspires to achieving
mastery over rhythmic timing, and she enjoys taking extreme liberties with her
phrasing, often drifting behind the beat or “draping melodies across the bar line,
playing with the time.”18 As a result of taking a leisurely pace on slower tempo
tunes, Wilson creates opportunities to build harmonic and dramatic tension, via
brief moments of suspension, as listeners try to anticipate when she will complete
a phrase, reach a cadence, or deliver a punch line. Noting that she rarely flaunts her
chops does not mean that Wilson lacks expressive range, for she constantly attempts
to bend, squeeze, stretch, and mold individual notes for expressive purposes.
Wilson generally remains within her contralto range, leaning toward the low end
and sometimes plunging even deeper for the appropriate sentiment. By altering her
diction, articulation, and delivery, she produces remarkably diverse vocal effects,
ranging from her light, buoyant declamation on “Waters of March,” a lively take
on Jobim’s “Águas de Março” (2002), to the deep bluesy growls that punctuate her
version of Son House’s “Death Letter” (1995) to the smooth, sensuous whispers
that fill her interpretation of U2’s “Love is Blindness” (1995). Likewise, Wilson
adjusts the timbre of her lush, richly textured voice to suit shifts in lyrical content
15 Brodacki, p. 25.
16 Hammett-Vaughan, p. 9.
17 Holden, p. 40.
18 “Musicians in Their Own Words: Cassandra Wilson,” National Public Radio Weekend
Edition, 6 March 2004, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1748610
(accessed 1 October 2006).
and musical affect, lending a sweet rustic warmth to her version of Van Morrison’s
“Tupelo Honey” (1993) and channeling the spare, cool sound of Miles Davis’s
trumpet on her rendition of his “Sky and Sea (Blue in Green)” (1999).
While the expressive flexibility of her vocal technique reveals a singer steeped
in the improvisatory world of jazz, the pendulum of Wilson’s career has swung back
and forth between expressing allegiance to certain aspects of the jazz tradition and
asserting her right to experiment in new directions. Similar to her strategy on Blue
Light ’Til Dawn, Wilson explores an earlier musical era and revisits her own past
on Traveling Miles (1999), an album that pays tribute to Miles Davis, whom she
repeatedly has identified as her greatest musical influence, recently stating that “Davis
informs almost every aspect of my approach.”19 The iconoclastic Davis has proven
to be an especially appropriate role model for Wilson. This is due in part to their
shared musical sensibilities, most prominently a lyrical approach to improvisation
and the exploitation of timbre as a means of expressiveness, and equally because of
Davis’s famously supportive attitude toward jazz experimentation. As a bandleader
who often switches musical gears herself, Wilson clearly appreciates Davis’s career-
long musical innovation, his pioneering efforts to fuse jazz with funk and rock, and
his interest in reinterpreting contemporary pop songs. In keeping with this spirit,
whereas a typical tribute album might focus exclusively on compositions by the
original artist, Traveling Miles includes Wilson’s arrangements of Davis’s tunes,
some with newly penned lyrics, as well as several Wilson originals meant to evoke
Davis’s style. Furthermore, instead of limiting her selections to Davis’s celebrated
work from the 1950s and 1960s, Wilson includes a fusion track from Bitches Brew,
and some of his music from the 1980s, including “Time After Time,” the Cyndi
Lauper ballad that Davis featured during his final decade.
In addition to adopting a forward-looking stance toward such retrospective
projects, Wilson has tried to carve out space for herself in the jazz world by creating
her own material. Following the lead of Abbey Lincoln and Betty Carter, Wilson
has become one of the rare female jazz vocalists to establish herself as a composer,
producing songs that comprise lyrics derived from her own experiences and music
written with her voice in mind. Wilson began to compose early on, fashioning
melodies that fit within the thick textures favored by M-Base, and since that time
her ensembles have recorded dozens of her songs. Her typical practice involves
sketching out tunes on her guitar before collaborating with an arranger and putting
together the final product with her band. She continues to compose in a jazz, or jazz-
inflected, idiom, but her recordings often reflect the influence of other musical styles,
from her early experiments with funk rhythms and hip-hop beats through her blues-
drenched mid-1990s albums to her recent fascination with African music, Afro-
Cuban percussion, and Brazilian popular music. Displaying her willingness to cross
lines of race and genre in her own compositions, Wilson has expressed particular
fondness for Joni Mitchell’s musical blend of folk, pop, and jazz. In addition to
similarities in their harmonic language and vocal delivery, Mitchell’s influence on
Wilson can be heard in the impulsive melodic twists in “I Want More” (2003) and
19 “Cassandra Wilson on Miles Davis,” Down Beat 71, no. 7 (July 2004), p. 78.
the percolating syncopations that lend “A Little Warm Death” (1995) its quality of
capriciousness.
Unlike so many of her colleagues who specialize in faithful and nostalgic
renditions of standards composed before they were born, Wilson claims that an artist
must assume the responsibility of speaking to her place and time, “to be a reflection
of what we are living in today.”20 Consequently, a number of her compositions deal
with contemporary events, such as “Justice” (2002), written in protest of the voting
controversy surrounding the 2000 US presidential election. Even more compelling,
however, are her songs written in the confessional style characteristic of Mitchell
and the singer-songwriter tradition. Echoing the first-person narratives of many
of the tunes she covers, Wilson has written numerous songs about relationships,
love, and longing in such a personalized manner that it becomes difficult at times to
separate songwriter and performer from the narrative of her lyrics. Many of these
songs envisage a timeless world of sensuality, whether drenched in the earthiness of
a jukejoint mating ritual in “Blue Light Til Dawn” (1993) or shaped into a tender
love letter, set to cool Brazilian rhythms and swept by breezy harmonica fills, in
“Heaven Knows” (2003). One of her most memorable ballads, “Until” (1995), a
gentle samba accompanied by delicate guitar accents and warmed by the Parisian
sound of a strolling accordionist, alternates between bluesy minor verses that lament
her partner’s emotional solitude and major choruses that soar optimistically in hopes
of finding “the sweetness in life with you.”
Like her early interpretations of Tin Pan Alley tunes, Wilson’s recent compositions
continue to explore multiple facets of musical time. As one absorbing example of
this practice, “Sleight of Time,” a track from Glamoured (2003), tells the story of
a thorny love affair with a younger man. Outwardly, its form is simple—a brief
introduction, four choruses that follow a sixteen-bar AABC form, and a short
coda—but Wilson complicates the issue by incorporating various lyrical and musical
sleights of time. Rather than following a single narrative from start to finish, the
lyrics of “Sleight of Time” contain disconcerting shifts in perspective, moving
freely between internal thoughts and external dialogue, which depict a set of events
that seemingly appear out of chronological order. By the end it is even difficult to
determine whether or not their love has been joined or remains unrequited. Fond of
the song title’s play on words, Wilson compared her drummer’s continuous rim shots
on this track to “playing the clock,” and her band remains especially conscious of
musical temporality throughout the entire tune.21 Composed in a lilting 6/8 meter,
“Sleight of Time” continuously rocks back and forth between its two component
triplets, stressed on each downbeat by a sustained bass note and answered on every
fourth beat by the accented snap of a snare drum joined by a plucked acoustic guitar.
For the first two phrases of each chorus (AA), the band repeats a simple pattern that
gradually wanders up and down in stepwise motion over an E pedal before returning
to its initial position, above which Wilson sings her own stepwise phrases that gently
undulate up and down. These cycles create an appropriate mood for lyrics about
20 Smith, p. 37.
21 Michael Bourne, “Becoming Cassandra,” Down Beat 71, no. 2 (February 2004),
p. 41.
internal questioning and uncertainty. Wavering like the romance, the direction of the
music seems uncertain, as if song and singer are pacing back and forth, while time
stands still (8.5).
The mood of “Sleight of Time” changes sharply in the final eight bars of the first
chorus (BC) to highlight a surprising shift to second person address (“How could you
feel emotions I could never reveal?”). Gaining some musical traction by releasing its
tonic pedal, the bass becomes much more active, leaping about in the low register,
and Wilson’s voice follows its lead by delivering a series of expressive, angular
phrases. No longer stuck in a harmonic rut, the piece begins to take full advantage
of the teleological power of tonal harmony, as the listener’s sense of swaying from
side to side is quickly replaced by the feeling of skipping forward from one bar to
the next. Establishing this brisk quality of motion, which propels the chorus through
its final eight measures, serves several key purposes. In addition to underscoring
the dramatic shift that appears at the halfway point of each chorus and introducing
alternate harmonies that support further improvisational possibilities, the increased
musical excitement also enables Wilson to accentuate the recurring hook containing
the song’s title.
Once it picks up steam, the steady harmonic rhythm of this passage in “Sleight
of Time” drives toward the climax of each chorus, which proclaims the song’s
fundamental expression of longing (“Why can’t he be mine?”). Wilson emphasizes
this moment by setting the first four words as a memorable melodic descent, outlining
a minor seventh chord, and by singing the vocal line in duple time, which establishes
a hemiola relationship with the accompanying triplets. Due to this compositional
sleight of time, the built-up rhythmic and harmonic tension begs for resolution as she
nears the end of the chorus. Wilson calms this rhythmic upheaval by pronouncing
“mine” on the down beat, dropping the hemiola and allowing the tune to resume its
triplet feel, and she provides even further grounding at this moment by cadencing on
the tonic. Since Wilson’s voice lands on the fifth scale degree each time she finishes
this line, however, the cadence never sounds fully complete, instead imparting an
appropriately inquiring tone to this blurry tale of longing. At the conclusion of the
song, Wilson milks this moment once more, singing this phrase thrice in succession
and then, the last time around, conspicuously dropping the last “mine,” as if to
register her closing doubts about the prospects of the relationship.
This sense of uncertainty about the future, in conjunction with the notion of
musical sleights of time, offers a useful metaphor to characterize the present
moment in Wilson’s career, a musician who has been so preoccupied with musical
temporality and so keenly aware of her place in time. According to critic Robert
O’Meally, Wilson shines as “the brightest star of this post-classic generation” of jazz
singers, an appropriate designation for an artist rooted enough in the jazz tradition to
be featured as a soloist in Wynton Marsalis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning oratorio, Blood
on the Fields, yet adventurous enough to collaborate with the hip-hop collective, the
Roots.22 Wilson’s innovative approach treats jazz as a living art by reshaping and
rearranging its fundamental elements in novel combinations, and by reinvigorating
22 Robert G. O’Meally, “The Jazz Singer at a Crossroads,” New York Times, 3 January
1999, Arts and Leisure sec., p. 30.
the tradition with musical resources drawn from across time and around the globe. “If
you’re not creating a new language,” she maintains, “then what’s going to happen to
the audience, to the music? You have to constantly create new languages.”23 Whether
these musical strategies will help to transform jazz, ushering the music into a new
stage of its storied history, or whether these methods will have the effect of steadily
eroding jazz as we know it and producing an alternative musical style in which only
faint traces of jazz remain, these are questions only time can answer.
23 Bourne, “Becoming Cassandra,” p. 41.

Taylor & Francis
Chapter Nine
Temporal Turntables: On Temporality

and Corporeality in Dance Culture
Stan Hawkins
Conventions dealing with time in music scholarship inscribe peculiar ways of

listening. The particularity of this is that most people talk or write about music in
ways that make little sense of how they move to it or feel for it. Commonly it is taken
for granted that a clear distinction exists between listening and responding, but, in
practice, the boundaries of such difference are blurred. Take moving to music: when
responding to music aurally and physically, we become absorbed by the gestures
we attend to. It is as if music unfolds through time and urges us on in specific ways.
Because dance music is reinforced and enhanced corporeally, it entails an immediacy
and intensity that cannot be achieved in any other manner.
To date little work considers the role of electronic dance music (from now on in
my usage, dance music) in the wider debates of music and time. Only a few scattered
studies of dance culture have addressed primarily the cultural, anthropological, and
social processes against a historical backdrop. At stake is a homological problem
that arises from the structural relationship between musical form and physical
movement. For instance, what about the temporal particulars that order dance?
And how do we account for the pleasures and desires that are shaped aesthetically
by social circumstances? That temporality in dance music involves any number
of experiences from the sensation of standing still, falling behind, or being in the
moment is significant. This is because gestural responses are predicated upon
aspects of physiological arousal that are manifested performatively. In this respect,
One of the few texts that take up this issue, in an impressive, pedagogical manner, is
Listen by Joseph Kerman and Gary Tomlinson, who treat the subject of listening to Western
music with scholarship and thoroughness. It is worth noting, however, that they do not once
broach the subject of dance music and the tendencies of listening and response that have
emanated from this area of popular music during the past thirty years. Joseph Kerman and
Gary Tomlinson, Listen (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004).
2
For a relevant and related argument that centers on how we grasp meaning in music,
see Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), especially Chapter 12, “The Meaning of Music”, pp. 249–268.
See, for example, Steve Redhead (ed.), Rave Off (Aldershot: Avebury, 1993); Sarah
Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1995); Hillegonda Rietveld, (1998), This Is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and
Technologies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); Kai Fikentscher, “You Better Work!”: Underground
Dance Music in New York City (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000).
one might say that feeling suspended in time through the discipline of the beat is a
gateway into experiencing the immediacy of music.
There are many ways to define the function of dance in music. For instance,
dance works through our physical responses to finely regulated junctures of tension
and release, which vary considerably from one style to the next. Dependent on the
temporal conditions of a given space, style is the manifestation of personal and group
activity. The sensation of being lifted higher or “loved up” (an expression often used
by DJs and clubbers), suggests a state where the body of the individual or the crowd
is immersed in sound. Or, another way to say this is that stylistic sensibility is about
feeling good, provoked, and soothed. In this sense, affiliations to style involve an
embodiment of choices that rouse participation in an affective time and space.
Temporal Situatedness on the Dance Floor
The ordering of dance takes place in countless spaces, where the perception of time
is significant for mediating style and sound. These social spaces or host environments
are all about temporal situatedness. Indeed, the type of subjectivity a specific culture
or sub-culture fosters is always determined by sets of expectations that are linked to
corporeal response. Because moving to music is implicated by personal and crowd
responses, the dance space provides access to conditions of existence. Thus, in a
club context, the “crowd” establishes specific responses to musical styles that are
mannered, and not least attitudinal. Such responses occur through complex systems
of behavior, where negotiation is based upon the norms and categories of gender,
race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. After all, trends in dancing are learnt through a
4 One of the best discussions and definitions of style, to which I have turned time and
time again, is by Steven Feld in his ethnographic study that focuses on the Kaluli people
from the tropical rainforest of the Great Papuan Plateau in the Southern Highlands province
of Papua New Guinea. Through an elaborate theoretical and ethnographical account of the
Kaluli Groove, Feld questions how the implications of style and temporality have a direct
bearing on why getting into a groove feels so good. See Steven Feld, “Aesthetics as Iconicity
of Style (uptown title); or, (downtown title) ‘Lift–up–over Sounding’: Getting into the Kaluli
Groove”, in Steven Feld and Charles Keil, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995) pp. 109–150.
I apply the same meaning of the term “crowd” as Sarah Thornton, who makes the
important distinction between “crowds” and “communities” by insisting that crowds are
transitory and fragmented and not ordered. Sarah Thornton, “Moral Panic, the Media and
British Rave Culture” in A. Ross & T. Rose, eds. Microphone Fiends: Youth Music Youth
Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
4 Maria Pini provides a useful study of the links between women and the early British
rave scene by challenging the assumption of male centrality in dance culture. By analysing
first-person accounts by young women, she demonstrates how rave became a space for new
modes of femininity and physical pleasures. Pini makes the important point that despite the
absence of women at the level of production and authorship, at other levels their presence has
signified important shifts in sexual relations, which has resulted in a general “feminization” of
youth subcultures. Maria Pini, “Women and the Early British Rave Scene” in A. McRobbie,
ed., Back to Reality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp.152–169.
On Temporality and Corporeality in Dance Culture 123
conscious imitation of those around us, and how we interact with them through time
as a structuring entity.
In the following pages I want to propose that dance music is an ideal vehicle for
discoursing on temporality and corporeality. To start with, the compulsion of the
beat in dance tracks relays an impulse that gets humans to move their bodies in time.
Clearly, this involves decision-making as to how one enters a space and transcends
the real time the music is recorded in. Music is about ebb and flow, and all sounds,
rhythms, motifs are felt along a sonic continuum. Consequently, the desire to move
one’s body comes from something in the air that makes us feel good, often uniting
us across language, cultural, ethnic borders.
Notwithstanding the force of the beat, changes in time occur on many planes
as the focus shifts from one gestural pattern to the next. Acutely aware of musical
choice and sensitive to the integration of sound happenings all the way, the DJ’s
task is to control and tease out time in long stretches of material that are continually
mobile and never ending. Regulating the dance event is about relating to music
aesthetically and physically in a way that time can be stopped and started according
to one’s state of mind. Invariably, the musicologist’s task of examining such a process
is significantly compounded by the vocabulary employed to prescribe musical
events, which is generally far from adequate. Describing how music influences us,
for example, entails technical terms and jargon that often do little for unravelling
meaning or saying much about the “musical effect itself”. For this dilemma links
into the challenges and complexities of understanding musical performance, and not
least grasping the minute discrepancies that occur through the regulation of beats.
Put simply, to get what the beat is about involves experiencing it in different contexts
and working out how it keeps music energized.
To be sure, everything to do with the beat in dance music is inextricably linked
to technology’s charge. Extraordinary spaces for aesthetic experience have arisen
through recording technology, increasing the musician’s recourse to control temporal
proportions. This brings me to a consideration of how the categories of time and
rhythm extend well beyond the structural details of beats, pulses, rhythmic riffs,
and genre, into the sound sphere. To speak of “feeling the beat” is to accept its
immediacy through time and sound. And, inasmuch as we perceive the immediacy
of the pulse, there are countless ways of sensing it through its sound design.

4 Robert Walser, in his first of ten apothegms, claims that technical analysis has not come
that far in dealing with musical experience. Walser’s salient point is that language needs to
be implemented skilfully in order to mediate our understanding of music. See Robert Walser,
“Popular Music Analysis: Ten Apothegms and Four Instances” in A. Moore, ed., Analyzing
Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp.16–38 (specifically,
pp. 22–23).
See Feld and Keil, pp. 96–108.
As I have argued in earlier studies, the pulse is only one case in point. Tightly regulated
to create a sensation of machination, its dispersion of energy shapes its appeal. While the beat
might appear to remain constant throughout a dance track, there are constant fluctuations,
cross-pulsations, and features of metric manipulation that affect the feel of the beat. Thus,
the arrangement and production of beats spell out the rhetoric of dance music and provide
the material for clubbers to lock into. See Stan Hawkins, “Feel the Beat Come Down: House
Because dance trends are predicated upon developments in technology, and in
recent times, with the introduction of hard disk recording systems, scores of users
and musicians have been able to produce dance music.10 Contingent on technological
innovation, then, dance tracks are designed and engineered in quite remarkable ways.
Starting with the turntable and moving on to the sampler, computer, mixing desk
and compressor, developments in production techniques have steered a course that
involves exciting compositional excursions into the domain of sampling, mixing, and
remixing. Ultimately it is the production of riffs, beat patterns and textural shapes
that frame the seductive sonic landscape of dance music. Into this equation enters
the act of response, which prompts us to consider why sound moves us, restricts us,
or even sublimates us in special ways. At this stage I want to suggest that reacting
to sound when moving has everything to do with how music turns the crowd, which
implies that dance is commensurate with a crowd’s recognition of sound timbre and
stylistic perception.11 For the impact of sound on the body regulates many aspects
of physical gesture—leg and arm movements, facial expressions, torso, neck and
hip sways, to the internal functions of breathing, panting, and sweating—as well as
emotional responses.
Bleeps and Mind-Bending Effects: Joey “Mentasm” Beltram
By way of unravelling the implications of these ideas so far, I will now turn to two of
my favorite hardcore dance tracks from the early 1990s, produced by the New York
DJ, Joey Beltram (9.1).12 For the generation of young Europeans making their own
records cheaply from the mid-1980s onwards, it is now well documented that Detroit
and Chicago dance records had a major impact. Similarly, in the 1990s there was a
strong migration of creative forces from the US to Europe, and vice versa. Proving
too much for house enthusiasts on his own home patch, DJ Beltram moved to Europe
at the end of the 1980s, and it was not too long before his tracks, “Energy Flash” and
“Mentasm,” became major landmarks in the pre-breakbeat, Euro-hardcore techno of
the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Music as Rhetoric” in A. Moore, ed., Analyzing Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2003), pp. 80–102.
10 It should be emphasized here that the term electronica is often used synonymously
with dance music to refer to a wide range of electronic-oriented music that encompasses not
only dance-floor-designed music, but also avant-garde or modern electronic music. The term
is uncomfortably vague and seems to have its origins in the United States.
11 For an argument that centres on “temporal fusion”, where reverberant sound is
perceived as being part of the direct sound in a given environment, see William Moylan, The
Art of Recording: The Creative Resources of Music Production and Audio (New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold, 1992).
Beltram’s style is instantly experienced as remarkably powerful.13 In redefining
techno’s direction towards a more aggressive and hard sound, his music signalled
a watershed in European hardcore. With the reissue of his track, “Mentasm,” in
1992, European techno and hardbeat fans and DJs were enthralled, turning this track
into a major club anthem. Notably, Belgium dominated the techno scene, as Simon
Reynolds explains:
Groups as geographically distant as Detroit’s Underground Resistance and Dollis Hill’s

Manix paid tribute to the mysterious Lowlands nation: UR put out the “Belgian Resistance”
single, Manix recorded the track “Never Been to Belgium.” The seeds of the new sound,
however, germinated somewhere between Belgium and Brooklyn, New York, where DJ-
producers like Lenny Dee, Mundo Muzique and Joey Beltram were pushing rave music
in a harder and faster direction.14
By DJing for countless gigs in Holland, Germany, the UK and Belgium, Beltram
would become well known on the European hardcore circuit. Having moved to
Gent in 1989, he would not disguise his enthusiasm for his new country of abode,
insisting that Belgians were the first people who could relate to him, and claiming
that Belgium was a “sophisticated” country. Significantly, Beltram’s entry into the
Belgian scene was on the cusp of the New Beat craze, a period when Belgians had
a one-off chance to break into the Anglo-American market. New Beat’s beginning,
as Reynolds claims, was marked by DJs who were spinning “gay Hi-NRG records
at 33 r.p.m. rather than the correct 45 r.p.m., creating an eerie, viscous, trance–dance
groove.”15
Tempo, therefore, had much to do with defining hardcore beat. In contrast to
house’s four-on-the-floor kick drum, the positioning of the beat in the mix was
different; a positioning that was riddled with restless rhythmic figures and micro-
breakbeats. Breaking new ground because of its production and use of brutal sound
samples, “Energy Flash” would push techno and house in a much harder and faster
direction (9.2). Thus, by increasing his tempo to a faster rate than that used by
Detroit techno DJs, Beltram’s “Energy Flash” felt like a single raw, pulsating loop-
pattern that was pinned down by a stomping beat that was robotic and tense. Looking
more closely at this track, it is clear that the resonant filter hook contributes to a
manic mood that is enhanced by a mechanical-male chant, in pitch shift modus on
the word, “ecstasy,” in a slowed-down grind. Midway through “Energy Flash,” an
eerie melodic figure enters the mix with orchestral string pads, further accentuating
13 With his roots in Chicago and New York-style house, Beltram was already recording
for Transmat, a Detroit techno label, by the age of eighteen. Following the earlier release of
“Energy Flash” on Transmat in 1988, the Belgian R&S Records picked up this track launching
Beltram’s career in Europe in 1991. Notably, in the early 1990s, techno’s development
in Europe was inspired by the industrial German sound that had inspired it originally.
Importantly, the R&S label played a major role in establishing this new direction, while in the
UK, the Sheffield label Warp contributed to other offshoots of European techno with acts like
Nightmares on Wax and LFO.
14 Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 108.
15 Ibid., p. 110.
the immediacy of the machine-beat. Comprising a short, ineffable motif, this psycho
melody floats above the drum-loop, amplifying the sensory intensity of the moment.
A little later, a second melodic motif is phased in consisting of long sustained notes
over three beats, rising up a semitone on the fourth. In the mix, the layering of
beats in “Energy Flash” is superimposed over a booming sub-bass that is charged
by strong, deep TR-808 kick drums on all fours. Crash cymbals, heavily reverbed
handclaps, and small hi-hats enter and exit the mix while a single synth pitch, one
octave above the bass line, provides a counter-rhythm in unison on the first three
beats pushing forward the fourth beat by an anticipated sixteenth note on the third
beat.16
Following “Energy Flash” by one year, Beltram”s “Mentasm,” released under
the title “Second Phase” with co-producer Mundo Muzique, became wildly popular
(9.3). Most of all, this track was recognized for its crass “mentasm” or hoover
(vacuum cleaner) sound. Produced on the Roland Juno Alpha synthesizer, this
sound seems seismic for its time—a steaming, industrial jerky rupture propelled
by a pounding kick drum and distorted, worm-like sub-bass line. All in all, it is the
sample-interchangeability alongside stripped down beat riffs that helped customize
this hardcore track, as hi-hats and noisy snares were replaced by occasional, sharp
wood-block beats on the second and fourth beats, which, through their percussive
attacks, helped extract the impact of the aggressive mentasm drone.
Edits and samples are the main characteristics of both tracks, mirroring the
significant developments in music technology in late twentieth-century dance music.
Beltram’s trailblazing production can be read as a moment in dance history when
house and techno metamorphose into hardcore techno. Beltram has admitted that
he was recreating the dark, evil mood of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Growing
up with heavy metal and inspired by the psychedelic vibes of these groups, he
attempted to optimize the sinister side of the down-tuned guitar sounds found in his
“Mentasm.” This goes some way in explaining how his brand of hardcore expressed
the values of a subcultural group of clubbers, who were infected by his monster
riffs and tumultuous sonic rawness. Not surprisingly, the erotic tow of these tracks
offered instant relief to disparate groups of Europeans who lived in urban spaces
with only one thing in mind, to party and escape from everyday life. This attitude
can tell us much about temporality and corporeality.
Often radically different from one social space to the next, dance styles
are experienced through states of minds that are conjoined to narcotics, sound
amplification, and the double-hand job of turntabling. Fuelled by raw, hard, alienating
sounds, Euro-hardcore of the 1990s meant different things according to where you
were, when you were there, and what venue you frequented. Consider loudness and
venue, and the impact this has on the crowd, bearing in mind that dance tracks are
produced for being played very loud. Varying considerably from one club to the
next, the sound systems in a club mean everything. Measured in relative values or
analogous terms, the quality of sound is commonly referred to as “extremely loud,”
16 Such was the intensity of this for its day that when it first hit the club scene it could be
likened to the sensation of being sucked into a radioactive vortex. The sensation was mind-
blowing.
“louder and harder than,” “not loud enough,” “ear-bleed,” and so on. And as sound
levels increase, the audio-functions of hearing are challenged as the ear needs more
time to measure the difference between one loud sound and the next.17 Significantly,
loudness impacts fatigue, elation, and, most of all, drug intake.
Musically, drum and bass patterns in hardcore work as a drone in an almost
uninterrupted stream of rhythmic propulsion. Coupled with other sounds one or two
octaves higher, the sub-bass frequencies drive the melodic fragments at the same
time the isochronal (equally positioned) regulation of the pulse of “Energy Flash” is
felt in variable groups. Anticipation is heightened by the dotted eighth and sixteenth
note on the third beat, producing a 3+4 stream, which forms a robotic oscillator-riff.
The tug of this rhythmic riff drives the material. As such, the stringent regularity
and warped, psychedelic sounds spin the music into a hypnotic state. It is as if the
juxtaposition of this riff and its intense four-on-the-floor pulse results in a synapse
between rhythm and temporality (9.4).
Like an eternal turntable, the passage of time in hardcore is unrelenting. Often
suspended within a cyclical, mobile soundscape, dance tracks feel circular in their
structuration.18 Indeed, the repetitive structures in Beltram’s music designate a gestural
plane that regulates the groove from one sonic level to the next. By establishing a
sense of timelessness, the groove ushers in variations of sonic fabric as its heavy
bass underpins the infamous sample voicing of the words “ecstasy, ecstasy.” At any
rate, the mesmerising effect of this is that time freezes into a myriad of patterns that
induces a trance–like state. Identifying the effect of this, Jason Toynbee has pointed
out how dance is a form of programming and a free zone. Borne out by a sense of
maximum force, “one wants to be carried away by the music—but also without
prescribing how one moves.”19
Perhaps most compelling in “Energy Flash” and “Mentasm” is the production
and matrix of beat patterns, which contribute to notions of time through a cunning
interplay. This is achieved by a patchwork of blatant sample joins and smart edits.
In both these tracks, stylistic traits are located in the sampladelic mish-mash of
stabs, breakbeats, spooky strings, and dub bass. Overall, then, the effect is one of
temporal ambivalence, where tracking the pulse is about experiencing changes in
mood and feel. Accordingly, the tempo is consistent throughout, and it is how this is
experienced that delineates spatial meaning.20
17 On this matter, Moylan has pointed out how people’s perception of loudness is
compounded by nonlinear frequencies and fatigue in audio mechanisms. In the case of sounds
with long durations and loud levels, loudness is perceived as increasing with the progression
of sound. The point being that the ear gradually becomes desensitized to loudness levels,
which can lead to the physical concealment of softer sounds and problems in evaluating
changes in loudness levels. Moylan, Art of Recording.
18 See Jason Toynbee, Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions
(London: Arnold, 2000), especially Chapter 5 “Dance Music: business as usual or heaven on
earth?” pp. 130–162.
19 Ibid., p. 144.
20 Obviously it is also the choice of samples and their edits in the mix that provide the
temporal backdrop for physical response. On the level of sample-relationships, the experience
of time varies in spite of beat’s regularity and eight-bar phrasing, which is best illustrated by the
In sum, Beltram’s brazenly awesome mentasm riffs supplanted Euro-hardcore as
a defiant alternative to techno and house. Something in the drugginess of his style
played on the here-and-now by circumventing the politeness of milder dance styles.
By 1992, Beltram’s mentasm stabs had spread far and wide and could be heard in
countless mixes alongside Italo-piano riffs and hysterical, helium-sounding vocals,
as the beat was sped up, with an intensity and exigency that was disoriented and
debased. This was a period when stylistic features were so ripped off by the sampler
that their musical origins were at times near impossible to trace. In fact, anybody
coming up with a new idea would have it stolen and mutated a thousand times. This
helps explain why Beltram’s riffs mutated into new hybrids and directions on the
dance floor in next to no time.
Taking Stock: Musicological Discourse and Conceptualizations of Time
Writings on the link between temporality and musical style inevitably reveal how
thorny this subject is.21 Few areas vex musicologists more. In the field of music
theory, analytical approaches that encapsulate time, style, gestures, and structure,
are situated in stark contrast to hermeneutic perspectives that deal with the moral,
intellectual, aesthetic, and political. Musicologically, the issue of temporality is
an epistemological one, which boils down to how temporal categorizations are
rendered valid or not. Frequently, time is employed for the purpose of categorizing
sound’s temporalization in diachronic or synchronic terms. Notwithstanding where
the emphasis of the chronic may rest, musical interpretation is unthinkable without
reference to time. However, music-theoretical models relating to time seldom come
anywhere near addressing the idea of whose time we are referring to or what the role
of the body is in all this.
So how do the temporal conditions of sonic systems translate into performative
acts based on shared beliefs? And what kind of approaches to listening do we
require as musicologists? One of the few in-depth musicological studies committed
to investigating temporalities and listening strategies is Jonathan Kramer’s book,
The Time of Music. In its detailed consideration of elements of time within musical
visual spectacle of dancing, where it becomes obvious how the crowd moves according to the
changes in musical textures and sounds. On this matter, Richard Middleton proposes a theory
of gesture where the analytical objective is to identify the performing out of somatic processes
through musical structures. Richard Middleton, “Popular Music Analysis and Musicology:
Bridging the Gap” in R. Middleton (ed.), Reading Pop (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), pp. 104–121.
21 See, for example, a spate of studies that have problematized temporality from various
perspectives: Grosvenor Cooper and Leonard B. Meyer, The Rhythmic Structure of Music
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Edward T. Cone, Musical Form and Musical
Performance (New York: Norton, 1968); J. T. Fraser and Nathaniel Lawrence, The Study of
Time, 2 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1975); Edward T. Hall, The Dance of Life: The Other
Dimension of Time (New York: Doubleday, 1984); Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music:
New Meanings New Temporalities New Listening Strategies (New York: Schirmer Books,
1988).
structure, Kramer’s study is replete with insinuations of how we in the West use time
and listen to music.22 There is a sense that Kramer’s temporal strategies skim over
the function of time and its mediation of corporeal responses. Clubbers, as Simon
Frith says, know that to dance is “not just to experience music as time, it is also to
experience time as music” in a way that transcends “real time.”23 Even by granting
Kramer his experiences of time and his attempts to establish chronologies, there is
a suspicion that his theorization of “new temporalities” in “Western music” might
really be the result of his concern with quite another issue. Burdened by the role of
subjectivity, Kramer’s theorization of temporality wavers in two obtuse directions:
one, as a justification/validation for the music that really counts—an ideological
crutch for a misconceived subjectivity; and, two, as a rejection of subjectivity, for
the fear that time could lance the shield of music theoretical practice. Analytical
precision, as one of the goals of music theory, constitutes an authoritative speech
that leaves too many questions unanswered, especially when it comes to perceiving
music as linear or non-linear.24
In pursuing this further, I would suggest that the preoccupation with temporalities
is often insulated by theories of tonality and teleology that restrict the notion of
bending time and consideration of the historical causes of temporality. Throughout
The Time of Music the style of Kramer’s prose requires close scrutiny, as it resonates
with a legitimation of temporality that is skewed to favor his musical preferences.
With Kramer’s strategies of listening there is a sense that they underpin an
ideological stance that coaxes the listener/reader into appreciating value-delayed
gratification in the forward-march of time.25 Along with the comprehension of past
22 Observe how in the following extract Kramer’s personal assertions are moulded into
a discourse that represents a political act, a calculated strategy that belies the author’s musical
background and aesthetic preference: “Most of us tend to listen teleologically—horizontally—
given the prevalence of tonal music and linear values in our culture. We listen for, and even
project onto the music, implications and progressions.” Kramer, Time of Music, pp. 55–56 (my
emphasis). Each time I read phrases like this, I cannot help but be astonished by the temerity
of such assertions. That most of us listen teleologically smacks of numerous unsustainable
preconceptions. In dance music, a genre Kramer does not address, the propensity of the
groove defies teleological habitual response.
23 Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), p. 156).
24 When it comes to addressing non-linearity, references are made to Chopin, Bach
and Schumann, where Kramer asserts that this is determined by either the surface of the
composition, which, in the case of the examples provided, does not change quite enough, or
the musical texture that does not grow or transform itself as the work unfolds. This theoretical
perspective underpins a general problem in distinguishing between linearity and non-
linearity. For a far more convincing approach to non-linearity, as well as a problematization of
teleological responses, see John Richardson’s pathbreaking study of minimal music through
the composer, Philip Glass, where many of his conclusions are in alignment with the issues of
temporality in dance music. John Richardson, Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten
(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999).
25 Susan McClary’s discussion of eighteenth-century music and how ways of listening
were based on specific habits of social thought, demonstrate that tonality taught listeners
to delay gratification by waiting patiently. Reliance upon a classical–romantic aesthetics
and contemporary forms of Western music, it is as if the music theorist’s plight is
confounded by the spatio-temporal logic of our discipline. This is borne out by the
dependency on notation, diagrams of rhythmic order, and tables of quantifiers, all
of which are organized around conceptions that substantiate time as classificatory
and taxonomic. Ostensibly, Kramer’s conceptualization of time is predicated upon
an argument of rationalization that performs a specific action that ultimately binds
power. But seldom is the body mapped against temporality, or treated as something
that discloses how temporal relations and conditions impact physical response and
erotic sensibility.
Music does not possess properties of weight, shape, and color, and its materiality
is measurable by elaborations on tempo, frequency, repetition, pitch, and gesture,
all of which are realized through time;26 all the more reason for attempting to
translate temporal properties into spatial relations. In dance music, as I have
argued with reference to Beltram’s tracks, temporality implies an inextricable
collaboration between listener, producer, performer and object. Moreover, the notion
of “performance as dance” can awaken a virtual world, where those who share a
musical moment physically and emotionally sense the multidimensionality of time
rather than its linear values or implicated progressions. Hence, moving to music is
about experiencing variable times simultaneously and recreating this through bodily
response. Undeniably, the very purpose of dance is to establish sets of emotions
that work as a declaration of community and collective intent. After all, musical
time in dance is a direct result of open-ended ideological, political, and aesthetic
positions, which, once again, begs the question: whose time are we dealing with,
and, moreover, what are the performative conditions of this?
Hearing through the Body: Performativity and Time
That temporality’s alliance to corporeality is located in specific interpretive frames

is formed by physical modalities. Jennifer Rycenga has argued along these lines for
“the ways in which music focuses on the ontologically significant dynamic qualities
of time.”27 Approaching the phenomenon of performance, Rycenga shows how this
impinges on the existence of the body in relation to touch, sound, and time. Based
brings to the fore expectations of music’s progression and passage in time. See McClary,
Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2000).
26 From an anthropological perspective, Johannes Fabian explores time as an ideologically
laden resource when he demonstrates the emergence, transformation and differentials in the
use of time. He also shows how concepts of time give rise to relations of power and inequality,
and argues how this impinges on the relationship between the Self and the Other. Johannes
Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthroplogy Makes its Object (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983).
27 Jennifer Rycenga, “Sisterhood: A Loving Lesbian Ear Listens to Progressive
Heterosexual Women’s Rock Music” in D. Schwarz, A. Kassabian, and L. Siegel, eds.,
Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1997), p. 207.
upon the premise that music is performative, Rycenga makes the claim that “all
present-ations take place in time.”28 For music integrates performance with time
and the physical properties of sound. As such, musical performance gives rise to
sound in the same sense that sound manifests time. The upshot of this is the open-
ended and nonteleogical category of musical activity, which, as Rycenga reminds
us, “is an activity, a making of time in time, and therefore its qualities are best
described adverbially.”29 How then does one go about validating time adverbially,
and, moreover, valorising listening in a space that impinges on the body?
Mindful of such bodily matters, Susan McClary has offered up some of the best
questions and answers to ponder over. Building on Teresa de Lauretis’s reworking of
the Foucaultian model of sexual technologies, McClary’s concept of “technologies
of the body” proposes a space, where music functions as a central mediator. McClary
describes a spatial site as one “where we learn how to experience socially mediated
patterns of kinetic energy, being in time, emotions, desire, pleasure and much more.”30
Yet, the details of the performative act always raise the troublesome assumptions of
conventional musicology, and the matter of how listening strategies are inscribed.
In arguing that cultural and social conditions underpin all music, McClary reveals
how these mediate communication, co-existence and self-awareness.31 Applied to its
host environment, then, dance music, as a cultural performance, intersects with the
body in ways that inscribe a politics of subjectivity that is performatively instated at
all times. This is because physical gestures are performative; they are produced and
communicated through corporeal responses. Moreover, dance is an activity of music
making that is an embodied enactment of cultural force, which gives rise to kinetic
energy. Through dance, then, the outcome of our experiences in time, as embodied
individuals, is shaped by cultural and social reactions to music. What is more,
corporeal experiences are “constituted (to a much greater extent than we usually
realize) through musical imagery,”32 which would suggest that music is dependent
on our physical experiences for its construction and effect. In her critique of cultural
reactions to corporeality, McClary cracks open the issue of musical performativity
by unearthing the discursive practices that underlie the social construction of people
through music’s temporality.
Constituted by a domain of variables that correspond to elements of repetition
in dance music, our responses to rhythm, to timbres, to textures, and sounds, are
defined on the basis of memory and commentary. To dance to music, as Frith puts
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 208.
30 Susan McClary, “Same As It Ever Was: Youth Culture and Music,” in A. Ross &
T. Rose, eds., Microphone Fiends: Youth Music, Youth Culture (London: Routledge, 1994),
pp. 29–40 (at p. 33).
31 In a most relevant reading of the condition of postmodern music at the onset of the
twenty-first century, McClary weaves into her discussion the transgressive music of Prince,
John Zorn, k.d.lang, Philip Glass. McClary contends that to disregard styles that might not
appeal to one directly, such as rap and other pop styles, is to ignore some of the most important
contemporary music of our time. See McClary, Chapter 5, “Reveling in the Rubble: The
Postmodern Condition”, Conventional Wisdom, pp. 139–169.
32 Ibid., p. 35.
it, “ is not just to move to it but to say something about it.”33 This is because dance
provides a strategy of listening that permits the body to convert thoughts into actions.
As such, the function of the imagination is to draw on sonic stimuli and conserve
them through a synthesis of time. Gilles Deleuze maintains, “the synthesis of time
constitutes the present in time.”34
One might say that synthesis constitutes time as a living present, and, as the present
passes, it is coextensive with time. According to Deleuze, “[t]ime does not escape the
present, but the present does not stop moving by leaps and bounds which encroach
upon one another.”35 The present, then, shapes time while still passing through time.
Yet, while dependent on the repetition of the pulse, groove or beat in the present,
dance music is about a lot more. It is about habit. Indeed, habit is “the foundation of
time,” where movement is controlled by the passing present. And so Deleuze’s idea
of presence returns us to Rycenga’s argument for music’s performativity (through a
present-ation in time) and McClary’s critique of the technologies of the body.
When sounds we recognize are blended with physical responses, past styles
become affirmations of present ones through the conglomerations of sounds that
are expressed through specific social and cultural contexts. In this light, repetitive
valences and rituals of performance are sedimented through citation and rehearsal.36
In the case of dance styles, conventions are sealed through the ongoing struggles
and conflicts between the audible and the visible as much as the configurations of
rhythmic articulation and accent. From this it would seem that the myriad of dance
styles to have emerged over three decades are a perfect arena for studying the diverse
arrangements of sounds, rhythms, and gestures that symbolize an embodied state.
Put differently, if the technologies of the body construct the heterogeneous forces of
deviation, resistance, and transgression in human behavior, then this is verified by
every single dance context. And the idea that dance spaces proliferate subjectivities
as an effect of performative citationality, is multiple and diverse. Indeed, the power
of dance lies in its organization of social categories where blocks of performances
consist of very different subject positions within different genres. After all, moving
our bodies in time to music is a way of saying something we are not meant to express
in words.
There can be little doubt that rapid developments in music technology have led
to an astonishing degree of mediation as sound impacts our bodies in the space of
milliseconds. Spanning large territorial expanses, new forms of hypertransit hold
important implications for temporality as music instates as well as (re)inscribes
bodies across infinite spatiotemporalities. Thus, the archiving of diverse cultures and
33 Frith, Performing Rites, p. 224.

34 Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), p. 76.
35 Ibid., p. 79.
36 In this sense, the discursivity of performance, which Judith Butler has theorized when
dealing with subversive gender, is integral to any consideration of the agency of performance
as normative and transgressive. Butler’s theorization of performativity has been a crucial
contribution to critical musicology, as it points to the convergence of embodied performance
and discursive performativity as a case of citationality. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”(London: Routledge, 1993).
different time periods can be felt in the disintegrative impact of electronic and digital
mediation. As such, the spatiotemporal dimension of programmed images and virtual
sounds blur the distinction between physical and digital bodies. And, musically, it
is the compositional techniques of editing, sampling and (re)mixing, that produce
new desires across infinite thresholds. Performatively, then, one might conclude that
distinct technologies transform our bodies on as much as off the dancefloor.
Finally, by abandoning oneself to time in space is a prime objective for getting
into the music and escaping. Being in touch with the body, then, and being connected
to it by music, is articulated by our responses to sound through time. Maria Pini
speaks of the reconstruction of the self in terms of the “mind/body/spirit/technology
assemblage” where the pleasures experienced through dance take place through the
connections between “self and others, and between mind, body and machine.”37
Equally related to this are the pleasures of dancing, which are about merging into a
“whole” where the emphasis falls on unity and inclusion. In this respect, the dance
space erodes the divisions between performer and audience as the body becomes
subjected to the musical machinery of computerized and electronic productions.
Through dance, then, music’s temporal orderings draw the individual into some
form of organized role. Further, dance’s particularity is about something deeply
pleasurable that embodies musical experience in indefinable ways. All this is because
of the communicative technologies of music that organize the body through new
forms of identification. In this respect, dance reveals much about the qualities of
public culture and how specific styles influence affective and kinetic movement; a
communicative process that is rhetorical in terms of bodily gestures, drawing on the
“instinctive” use of the body in dialogue with the private and the collective.
Ultimately, the internalization of social norms, as McClary reminds us, are always
identifiable by the crowd who “know how to detect even minor stylistic infractions
and to respond variously with delight or indignation, depending on how they identify
themselves with respect to the style at hand.”38 Yet, as McClary also insists, there
are only a few of us who come near verbally describing how music affects us, a
real musicological problem which loops back to the problematics of identifying the
temporal particulars of musical situatedness. When we learn to experience social
conditions through musical habit, to undertake this physically seems not just a
question of moving to sound, but rather of an attitude towards time as an intangible
and vital entity. If nothing else, dance music is like a temporal turntable that unites
the physical, the erotic, and the spiritual in socially determined ways, reminding us
that it is music, as much as musicology, that brings us together or tears us apart.
37 Pini, “Women,” p. 165.

38 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis:
Taylor & Francis
Chapter Ten
Resisting the Sublime:

Loose Synchronization in La Belle et la
Bête and The Dark Side of Oz
John Richardson
The acceptability of various solutions depends on our tolerance of strange collisions,

emotional mixtures we didn’t expect ever to see. Perhaps post-modernism is a good
rehearsal for this.
Brian Eno
Through the evocative notion of “reveling in the rubble,” Susan McClary has in
recent writing addressed how musical styles become imbued with historical traces,
and what new generations of musicians do with that knowledge. Tracking the recent
musical output of Philip Glass, John Zorn, Prince, k.d. lang and others, McClary
extols a revised notion of ‘com-position’ (literally, putting together) in which the
idea of music-making as dialogic activity emerges. By directing attention towards
these artists’ engagement with recognized forms, she demonstrates how they are
“both self-conscious and unapologetic about the constructedness of their music and
image.” Their use of existing codes, albeit put to new uses, facilitates access to
audiences that would have been denied exponents of avant-garde styles in the past.
Extending McClary’s line of enquiry to encompass audiovisual analysis, I will
examine the strained relationship between music and images in recent forms as
articulating positions within a historical continuum. Questions that arise in the
course of my inquiry include: What happens when contemporary sonic forms are
combined with, and thereby made to comment on, moving images that are part of
our cultural inheritance? How are these images transformed because of the new
auditory contexts in which they are apprehended, and to what ends? What is the
qualitative nature of this engagement and how does this impact on the resulting
audiovisual communication? And, in what ways is technology implicated in these
cultural negotiations?
An aleatory sensibility infuses the examples to be discussed here, with an
approach to synchronizing media that is loose and occasional rather than narratively
4 Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary (London: Faber and
Faber, 1996), p.21.
Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), p. 141.
Ibid., p. 153.
close-knit and continuous characterizing audiovisual relations. Such a sensibility
brings to mind a lineage of avant-garde performance that has long challenged the
binary opposition of art and life—what Huyssen refers to as the “Duchamp–Cage–
Warhol axis.” Of particular interest here are how unlikely artistic juxtapositions that
are temporally marked impact on questions of affect and agency, and how both of
these considerations extend into broader cultural terrain.
Countless phenomena could be listed as falling within the rubric of loosely
synchronized materials in recent audiovisual culture: everything from turntablism
and cinematic montage to the synchronization of MP3 players or “elevator music”
with the rhythms of everyday life. The scope of this article is narrower, however,
concentrating on a specific experiential field that characterizes responses to Philip
Glass’s cinematic opera La Belle et la Bête and an audiovisual phenomenon that
has become known, among other things, as The Dark Side of Oz. These examples
are linked through a mode of appreciation distinctive to recent aesthetics which
foregrounds the mediation of existing materials, in contrast to the romantic view
of creative activity which sees artistic works as unchanging from conception to
reception. The examples are linked also by their time of composition, the mid-
1990s, although both involve the transformation of materials that are several decades
older.
La Belle et la Bête: Loose Synchronization as Audiovisual Dialogue
Philip Glass spent much of his time in the mid-1990s composing a music theater
trilogy based on the films of French director Jean Cocteau: Orphée (1993), La Belle
et la Bête (1994), and Les Enfants Terribles (1996). The present discussion will
focus on La Belle, which was written for the Philip Glass ensemble with additional
singers and diverges from the other two trilogy pieces in its incorporation of the
original Cocteau film. This has led some writers to comment that the composer
treated his source materials like a silent film, which is true but only up to a point.
In La Belle, Glass took the significant first step of silencing the existing soundtrack,
comprising all the film’s diegetic sound and George Auric’s non-diegetic score. The
superimposition of live operatic voices, synchronized with the voices of actors in
the film, and a newly composed score, performed live by the Philip Glass ensemble,
defines the dramatic modus operandi of the opera in which the relationship between
“new” and “borrowed” materials is far from straightforward.
Unsettling in La Belle’s staging is the simultaneous presence of live singers
and cinematic actors, the former usurping the position of the latter insofar as their
presence points to the authentic source of the voice (10.1). Working against this
impression, however, are the physical scale of the projected actors, their movements
on the screen in contrast with the relatively static live singers, and the fact that the
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 188.
Resisting the Sublime 137
singers’ voices are mediated by a public address system, thus making the sources of
sounds difficult to ascertain in purely auditory terms. Consequently a gap opens up
between simultaneously unfolding performances: musical and cinematic, live and
recorded, contemporary and historical. This is physically indicated as well in the
way performers are situated ambiguously between the projected film and the “non-
performative” domain of the audience. The following comment seems to indicate a
Brechtian rationale for this performative doubleness:
There are moments when Beauty is on the screen and our Beauty is looking up at her, and I
could almost cry. Then there’s the scene where the Beast is dying and our Beast is singing,
and the two of them together make you realize that this is a music-theatre experience, not
just a film.
Loose Synchronization and “Counterpoint”
These comments speak against audiovisual unity, which is reflected also in the
manner in which the media are synchronized. Audiences in Northern Europe and
North America typically have low tolerance for loose synchronization. Instances that
diverge from the norm of tight synchronization are likely to be perceived either as
of unacceptably poor quality or in some way challenging the norms of mainstream
cinema. An example of the latter is the approach of spaghetti Western director Sergio
Leone, in which slightly dis-synchronous overdubbing of the actors’ voices is used as
a kind of distancing effect. The same could be said of Glass’s approach in La Belle,
although here the looseness of the synchronization points towards a transformation
of genres.
In keeping with conventional views on synchronization, writing on La Belle
has tended to regard the absence of tight synchronization as a design flaw, albeit a
tolerable one. In his New York Times review, for example, Edward Rothstein writes
that “the lip-synching never quite works and it never quite matters.” Tellingly, at
the end of the review he remarks: “For all its flaws, I hope to hear it again.” In an
otherwise perceptive scholarly discussion of the relationship between cinematic and
live bodies in La Belle, Joe similarly has little to say about the affective repercussions
of loose audiovisual synchronization, apart from to observe that ensuring “reasonable
synchronization” was a “technical problem” for the composer. This it certainly was,
as the following quotation confirms:
Glass quoted in Jonathan Cott, “A Conversation with Philip Glass on La Belle et la

Bête,” CD booklet for Philip Glass, La Belle et la Bête, Nonesuch Records, 7559–79347–2,
p. 20.
4 James Buhler, “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music (II): Analysing

Interaction of Music and Film,” in K. J. Donnelly, Film Music: Critical Approaches
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 46–47.
Edward Rothstein, “Not Quite an Opera Transforms a Film,” New York Times,
9 December 1994, p. C5.
Jeongwon Joe, “The Cinematic Body in the Operatic Theater: Philip Glass’s La Belle
et la Bête,” in Jeongwon Joe and Rose Theresa (eds.), Between Opera and Cinema (New York
and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 59.
I took the film and put a time code on it, timed every line in it, wrote down the libretto …,
I timed every word, I placed it mathematically in the score … and then when I was done,
[musical director] Michael Riesman and I recorded it and put it up against the film and
discovered it wasn’t accurate enough. So we began using computers to move the vocal
line around until it synched with the lips, and then I had to rewrite the music to achieve a
better synchronization with the film.10
And yet, to reduce the question of synchronization to a mere technical consideration

belies the central role that this aspect seems to occupy in the reception of the opera.
Like many attending a performance of La Belle at London’s Barbican theatre, I
was initially taken aback by how the voices of singers seemed to move randomly
in and out of sync with the projected images of corresponding actors, converging
“serendipitously” after extended periods of divergence. For me, this became as
significant a factor in defining the ethos of the composition as Glass’s trademark
approach to musical materials.11 La Belle, it would seem, is as much about the
relationship between the media as it is about “the music” or “subject matter” in
any conventional sense, entailing a dialogue between the composer, performers and
pre-existing source materials. Which is not tantamount to rehearsing the modernist
mantra “the medium is the message.” This assertion seems to beg the question: what
are the messages of the medium? In looking for answers to this question, it is helpful
to turn to discourse on audiovisual “counterpoint” in twentieth-century cinema.
Dis-synchronous audiovisual relations in La Belle might be considered an atypical
example of “audiovisual counterpoint,” insofar as sound and vision can be shown to
diverge. In their influential critique of “standardization” in Hollywood films, Adorno
and Eisler explain a sociological rationale for audiovisual divergence thus: “[t]he
alienation of the media from each other reflects a society alienated from itself, men
whose functions are severed from each other even within each individual. Therefore
the aesthetic divergence of the media is potentially a legitimate means of expression,
not merely a regrettable deficiency that has to be concealed as well as possible.”12
Alienation between media is homologous, therefore, with social alienation and
becomes a form of reflection on this condition.
Given these writers’ taste for counterpoint, one might expect that the principle of
“accidental synchronization,” championed notably by Cocteau,13 would be to their
liking; yet this does not appear to be the case. In Music for the Films, Adorno and
Eisler resist this notion as representing a “synaesthesic” sensibility in which the
qualities of one media are arbitrarily transferred to the other, resulting in “the magic
of moods, semi-darkness, and intoxication.”14 This is consistent with other aspects of
Adornian thought: notably, when it came to John Cage’s “aleatory” music, he could
10 Glass quoted in Cott, pp. 19–20.

11 For more on Glass’s musical language, see my Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s
Akhnaten (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), pp. 53–89 and McClary, pp. 142–145.
12 Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: Athlone Press,
1994 [1947]), p. 74.
13 Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film, trans. Ronald Duncan (New
York: Dover, 1972), p. 128.
14 Adorno and Eisler, p. 72.
not countenance a style whose “material laws … seem to preclude the subjective
intervention of the composer.”15 Centered romantic subjectivity loomed large in
Adorno’s vision of avant-garde resistance, and any relinquishment of agency—such
as that undertaken by Cocteau and arguably Glass—was likely to be viewed with the
utmost suspicion.
Some notion of counterpoint is implied in Glass’s La Belle primarily through
the looseness of the audiovisual contract. This is most striking in live performances,
where the physical presence of the musicians onstage alongside their cinematic
doubles makes constructivist “readings” almost unavoidable. On the DVD recording,
in contrast, the singers’ bodies are not visible, which makes it easier for spectators
to reconstitute an “integrated performance” by melding sounds to visual actions
utilizing what Chion calls synchretic processes (“synchresis” = synchronism +
synthesis).16 In “arthouse” filmmaking and video art there has been a tendency to
challenge audiences with unlikely audiovisual combinations, thereby exposing the
constructed nature of mainstream audiovisual forms.17 The techniques employed in
La Belle resemble such forms insofar as perceivers are not intended to believe that
the soundtrack originated in the diegesis.
Convergence
Just how the dialectic of convergence and divergence works in La Belle is best
illustrated with the help of an example. A conspicuous moment of convergence occurs
when Beast begins to win Beauty’s affections while promenading with her through
the grounds of his castle (DVD, 0:49:00; score, 0:48:11). The protagonists’ hands
lock for the first time as they descend a flight of stairs in step with each other and the
music (10.2). Close synchronization here brings to mind Steiner’s classic “mickey
mousing” technique as well as the dance sequences of Hollywood musicals. A rising
anacrusis at the beginning of the section accompanies the upward movement of the
couple’s hands, the zenith of this gesture occurring on an accented first beat. As the
melody drops in stepwise motion, an outward zoom brings into frame the couple’s
lower torsos and eventually their legs, just in time to capture footsteps falling on
accented third beats as they continue their ceremonious descent.
This theme, which becomes emblematic of the central character pairing and
their unlikely emotional bond, is repeated throughout the film, signalling the closest
interlocking of audiovisual materials in the opera and, not coincidentally, some of its
most rhythmically impelling moving images. In a passionate encounter towards the
end of the film, for example, Beauty returns in haste from her bedroom in the “real”
world to a parallel room in the castle in order to rescue a dying Beast (1:22:10). As
15 Theodor Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia, trans. Rodney Livingston (London: Verso,
1992 [1963]), p. 268.
16 Michel Chion, Audio-Visions: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 63–65.
17 See Chion, p. 63 and John Richardson, “Transforming Everyday Life: Analytical
Perspectives on Experimental Film Soundtracks,” in John Richardson and Stan Hawkins
(eds). Essays on Sound and Vision (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 2007).
the heroine speeds through the castle grounds halting in time with musical cadences
and hailing her companion in closely synched physical and musical gestures, “light-
footed” triplet figures in the upper register seem to propel her partially concealed
feet (1:23:55). Here the music temporalizes the visual action, providing a greater
sense of temporal animation as well as implying movement that is not represented
onscreen.18
The iambic rhythms of Glass’s majestic waltz, based on a musical affect familiar
to Baroque composers, combine with the couple’s stately demeanor to transform
these events into the dramatic pinnacles of the opera. Resembling the use of Waltz
No. 2 from Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite in Stanley Kubrick’s Eye’s Wide Shut (1999), or
a neo-Gothic Danny Elfman film score, a sense of Old World grandeur and gravitas
is projected onto the visuals by music that is not without humour.19 Matching up
better than the original score with the decadent splendour of the mis-en-scène, there
is nevertheless something uncanny, something not quite right about this “take” on
the subject matter. No sooner is the coding of the music recognized by the listener
than a process of defamiliarization begins to take effect. Excessive chromaticism,
synthetic sounds and a somewhat “wooden” approach to the handling of rhythm all
contribute to this impression, but the most important factor is the looseness of the
synchronization. Like a marquee tent whose pegs have been removed in a force-ten
storm, the musical edifice Glass has constructed is thus set adrift, leaving the listener
guessing what this familiar yet estranged music might be saying.
Divergence
An aesthetics of audiovisual divergence is visibly inscribed in Glass’s writing from

the voice. A striking example is found immediately following the stairway descent
(10.3). Here Beauty allows Beast to drink from her hands, a mark of the couple’s
growing intimacy. A dialogue ensues between Beauty and her captor, filmed as a
shot/reverse shot sequence in extreme close up with a softening filter on the lens.
“C’la ne vous répugne pas? De me donne à boire?” [Doesn’t it revolt you to serve
me water with your hands?], Beast asks in near-perfect synchronization; to which
Beauty responds, “Non, la Bête, c’la me plaît. Je ne voudrais jamais vous causer la
moindre peine” [No, Beast. It gives me pleasure. I would never wish to cause you
pain.] Only the initial sentence is synchronized realistically, however. In the original
film, Beauty lingers over her words, lowering her eyes demurely and pausing
for effect before the final admission of attachment. Singing Beauty, in contrast,
continues in a steady stream of eighth notes, meeting up with her cinematic double
only at the final syllable. The result is an extended period of singing during which
the corresponding actor’s lips remain resolutely sealed. Of course, it is possible to
regard this ebb and flow of close and loose synchronization as an accidental outcome
of the composer’s less than perfect approach to synchronizing the two media. But to
18 See Chion, pp. 13–16.

19 Gorbman has discussed the significance of this Old World music in Eyes Wide Shut in
her “Ears Wide Open: Kubrick’s Music,” in Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (eds.), Changing
Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 7.
do so is to disregard the teasing reciprocity of sound and vision—the disruptive force
of ventriloquist’s dummies that seem to have minds of their own.
Glass speaks of a new “authority” in his writing for the voice in La Belle.20 Part
of this authority derives from the sense of distance—spatial and temporal—that is
implied between the contemporary singers and their acting counterparts, which can
be thought of as demarcating positions in a dialogue between present-day performers
and actors in the film. This visibly and audibly indicated Bakhtinian polyglossia
(or many–voicedness), and the tensions engendered in performances between the
present day and the past (recall that the cinematic voices are silenced), might explain
why Glass calls the opera an unintentional “deconstructed version of the movie.”21
More than anything, the presence, and telling absence, of other “voices” serves to
challenge traditional ideas concerning the nature of creative activity. Seen and heard
this way, La Belle becomes an exercise in audiovisual dialogue whose constructivist
ethos spotlights the performative while drawing attention to new forms of alienation
that characterize experiences of temporality in postmodernity.
Considered in the light of Adorno and Eisler’s writing, it is possible to understand
the overt mediation of voices in La Belle as an analogue for technological mediation in
a wide range of contemporary activities and the problems and pleasures thereof. Just
as performers drop in and out of sync with the mechanically unfolding process of the
film, so spectators recognize similar points of tension in their own lives: the struggle
to keep in step with the multiple and often contradictory paces of modern life; the
creative engagement (or Oedipal struggle?) between an artist and their forebears; the
inappropriateness of melodramatic expression in ordinary life and the resulting need
to somehow “stage” everyday forms of expression by invoking something beyond
the workaday self (Eco’s famed lovers’ quotation marks; in this case, historical selves
that tower god-like above their contemporary doubles). All of these factors play a
part in the broader resonance of the opera. But an overriding sense of alienation
does not detract from an equally pervasive sense of fun, as the composer apparently
pokes fun at conventions the majority of listeners will recognize, including musical
representations of sublime grandeur and ceremonial pomp. The final word arguably
goes to the opera’s quicksilver sopranos. Throughout performances, the bearers of
these indefatigable voices negotiate the underlying musical terrain in a captivating
series of trickles and turns, all the while steadfastly resisting the temptation to fall
into line with the rhythmic imperative of the musical accompaniment; but more
importantly keeping their distance when it comes to rhythms whose origins are
further removed in time.
The Dark Side of Oz: ‘Syncing’ as Reading against the Grain
More extreme perhaps than Glass’s reworking of Cocteau’s film are instances where
two or more landmark texts of popular culture are singled out by composers and made,
by virtue of their proximity, to comment on each other. Parodic displacement of this
20 Quoted in Cott, p. 18.

21 Ibid., p. 20.
kind has been ubiquitous for some years within the hip hop culture of “scratching”
and “remix.” Some of this has carried over into the audiovisual sphere in MTV’s
Mash series, in which not only musical recordings but also the accompanying music
videos are “mashed up,” often to the greatest effect when the resulting combinations
can be recognized as unlikely or “paradoxical.” A parallel phenomenon is the
internet-mediated practice of “syncing” classic movies with “progressive rock”
albums to produce new audiovisual conglomerations. The paradigmatic instance of
this was first reported on the user-group “alt.music.pink-floyd” in the mid-1990s,
and involved the synchronization of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1976)
with the MGM children’s film classic, The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939).22
Subsequently, the phenomenon has expanded to include numerous other combinations
of popular music and film, receiving substantial coverage on radio and television,
and eliciting a significant amount of—sometimes impassioned—debate; including,
in this instance, stern and more humorous rebuttals from Dark Side producer Alan
Parsons and Pink Floyd band members, including guitarist David Gilmore:
And thirty years later you get The Wizard of Oz coming along to stun you. Someone once
showed me how that worked, or didn’t work. How did I feel? Weary.23
Subsuming “syncing” practices under the category of “urban myth,” cultural theorists
Lee Barron and Ian Inglis attempt to explain Dark Side of Oz, as it has come to be
known by some enthusiasts, by drawing on an assortment of recent theory, including
media theorist Manuel Castells’s notion of “the network society.”24 Treading carefully
so as to preserve the canonical status of the Pink Floyd album, their—for the most
part, convincing—discussion redirects attention towards practices of “misreading”
associated with “syncing” practices, which are construed above all as a strategy of fan
self-empowerment. The categories assigned to practitioners by them—the believer,
the cynic, the entertainer, and the expert—cover a range of plausible motivations
for the propagation of what they call “urban myths.” This designation nevertheless
implies some level of misguidedness on the part of the users, who are driven more
by a desire for “self-aggrandizement, group membership and socio-cultural status
… than they are by the spirit of objective enquiry.”25 While this is undoubtedly true
in some cases, particularly those regulated by the numerous dedicated websites, it is
possible to interpret the phenomenon differently by scrutinizing how the Dark Side
of Oz works in audiovisual terms, as well as by paying closer attention to reception
in specific contexts. Viewed in this way, the “mashing up” of Wizard and Dark Side
might have as much to do with “myth-busting” as myth-propagation. To back up this
assertion, it is necessary to take a brief textual diversion.
22 My first exposure to this phenomenon was in a lecture by my former colleague Jim

Westby at UCLA in spring 1996.
23 Gilmore quoted in John Harris, The Dark Side of the Moon: The Making of the Pink
Floyd Masterpiece (London: Fourth Estate, 1993), p. 7.
24 Lee Barron and Ian Inglis, “‘We’re Not in Kansas Any More’: Music, Myth and
Narrative Structure on The Dark Side of the Moon,” in Russell Reising (ed.), The Legacy of
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
25 Ibid., p. 64.
Unpacking the Dark Side
The mode of synchronization which has received most widespread endorsement

requires that Pink Floyd’s CD be started concomitantly with the third roar of the
MGM lion immediately prior to the title sequence of Wizard. If this is done correctly
with an NTSC copy of the film,26 the spectator/listener can expect to perceive a
number of striking coincidences. Some websites list more than a hundred of these
and require the album to be run three times in succession. Most accounts agree,
however, that the most convincing sync-points occur during the album’s first hearing
and are relatively small in number, if significant qualitatively.
An obvious sync-point occurs only three minutes into the film when Dorothy
falls into a pigpen after balancing on a farmyard fence (10.4). This cinematic
action coincides with Gilmore’s emotive line, “balanced on the biggest wave, you
race towards an early grave.” With Dorothy wallowing in mud, the music segues into
the techno–styled “On the Run,” which matches the frenetic pace of the visuals as a
farm hand rushes to rescue her, only to be troubled by his heart (“rac[ing] towards
an early grave”). In an uncanny transformation, the same actor appears later in the
film as the Tin Man, a character who does not possess a heart. This realization is
synchronized with the very end of the album, where Dorothy and the Scarecrow
appear to be listening to heartbeats emanating from the Tin Man’s chest.
In place of the iconic song “Over the Rainbow,” the Pink Floyd soundtrack
is characterized by strongly anempathetic audiovisual relations in the ensuing
action. The throbbing sound of a VCS3 synthesizer playing automated arpeggios at
breakneck speed, Gilmore’s Doppler-effect simulations on electric guitar, and the
concrete sounds of running footsteps and airplanes in flight all suggest a dystopic
vision of “post-industrial” life. Here we find aural confirmation of Marx’s bleak
vision of the machine as serving belligerent capitalist forces, resulting in the radical
alienation of the workforce. This sonic “vision” provides an unnerving counterpoint
to black-and-white, pre-industrial agrarian life as portrayed on the screen. While
both scenarios suggest an underlying current of discontent, the surrogate soundtrack
consistently undermines Dorothy’s utopian dreams of escape, seeming to offer
cynical commentary on such misplaced optimism. This is most evident following
Dorothy’s vertiginous tornado-borne flight, when this character descends to the
colorful world of Oz, transformed by Pink Floyd into a sneering parody of the
Adornian culture industry by the addition of sounds from cash registers that precede
the track “Money” (10.5).
Because of these affective transformations, Dorothy in Dark Side of Oz takes on
a decidedly more incredulous and world-wise persona than in the original film; a
dark understudy of sorts who could be compared with the fallible Dorothy substitute
in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Technological alienation, and the unseen forces
of capitalism that drive it, is posited as the primary agent of this transformation, in
which the terrifying power of Nature is framed by the unflagging rhythms of Floyd’s
pulsating synthesizer and an automated cash-register loop. Thus the self-contained
26 PAL copies run four percent slower due to the different frame-per-second rates of the
two conventions.
or “autopoietic” agency of the machine, as theorized by Deleuze and Gauttari, can
be seen as harnessing the limitless power of Nature in a transformation of libidinal
energy that is nothing if not sublime.27
Images of technological dystopia feature prominently in Dark Side, and can be
found in other Pink Floyd music, including, most notably, the song “Welcome to
the Machine” (1975). As Auner has observed, “these representations operate within
an essentially modernist teleology.” It is older technologies, therefore, such as the
sound of an FM radio on the song “Wish You Were Here,” that are marked, while the
transparency of contemporary recording technology goes unquestioned.28 A similar
trajectory is implied in Wizard, where pre-industrial agrarian life is depicted in black-
and-white while the tainted utopia of Oz is filmed in state-of-the-art Technicolor.
Ostensibly the unmarked (or “natural”) form, a case could nevertheless be made
that the saturated colours of Oz are, from a present-day standpoint, “hyperrealistic”
and in this way draw attention to their own artifice. In both of the source texts,
however, technology that is recognizable as such is seen fundamentally as an
instrument of deception. In the denouement of Wizard, the title character turns out to
be nothing more than an elderly man hiding behind machine-produced simulacra. He
eventually returns to the “garden” of the pre-industrial in a wind-powered balloon.
Dorothy, too, returns home at the end of the film, relieved now of the shackles of
the “false consciousness” which prompted her to run away from her (anachronous,
pre-industrial) home in first place. The underlying message of the film is therefore
potently nostalgic.
Sublime or Counter-Sublime?
As I have indicated above, the narratives of Wizard and Dark Side are both inhabited
by the romantic trope of the sublime. This is reflected in the album’s title, which
posits the moon’s dark side as a repository for human responses to the unknown, the
unexplored, the uninhabitable, death, the insane, and the unfathomably large. All of
these qualities are conventional markers of the sublime as expounded by Burke and
Kant. The tornado scene of Wizard typifies the romantic sublime in its depiction of
Nature’s awe-inspiring power. Through Clare Torry’s ecstatic vocalize on “Great Gig
in the Sky,” synced in Dark Side of Oz with this scene, the sublime power of Nature
is conventionally marked as “feminine” in a stirring of the passions that approaches
the orgasmic.29 The technocratic Wizard attempts to harness some of this power in
the film’s penultimate scene, its apparent purpose being to comment on the folly of
human pretences to divine power. A familiar theme already in the 1930s, by the 1970s
27 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), and by the same authors, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
28 Joseph Auner, “Making Old Machines Speak: Images of Technology in Recent
Music,” Echo, 2/2 (2000), paragraphs 7, 11.
29 Sheila Whitely, “Prismatic Passion: The Enigma of ‘The Great Gig in the Sky,’” in
Reising, pp. 143–157.
the idea of a technological sublime was gaining ground, as human achievements
were seen by a growing number of commentators as rivalling transcendent forces.30
This was a source of hope and anxiety, with optimistic and pessimistic discourses
proliferating.31 It is in this light that Pink Floyd’s technological dystopia might
be seen, as stemming from a convergence of discourses that view the impact of
technology on human subjectivity pessimistically and look to the past for solutions.
Resemblances between the two narratives go beyond the superficial, which
might go someway towards explaining why they sync up as well as they do. Barron
and Inglis touch on this by drawing attention to parallels between constructions of
“home” in the two forms, as well as depictions of the “alien” domains of Oz and the
moon.32 An even tighter affective bond might be suggested by the thematics of the
sublime, augmented in both instances to include technology. In this respect the two
forms evoke similar “structures of feeling,” a designation that implies more than
formal resemblance.33 Add to this Chion’s idea of synchresis, which turns temporal
coincidences into acts of semiotic exchange, and convergences between the two
forms become either less or more remarkable, depending on the point of view of the
beholder.
Neither of the two forms emerges unchanged, however, from their encounter.
The very act of syncing steals agency away from the original artists, relocating it
either in the intentions of users or in the technology itself. In Dark Side of Oz as with
La Belle, a mechanical process is initiated that once started cannot be stopped. In the
former, the exclusive use of pre-recorded materials makes the transferral of agency
to spectators more likely, since in most cases they synchronize the two media and
otherwise employ “active” strategies by searching for possible sync-points. Once the
playback has been initiated, however, very little control is exerted over the artistic
“end-product”. In a sense, control is relinquished, handed over to the reproductive
machinery, which hints at a subjective orientation that while mindful of the perils of
relinquishing control, takes a new kind of pleasure—saturated with anxiety—in the
very recognition of this condition. It is here that one might speak of a technological
counter-sublime—in the relentless unfolding of the parallel narratives, which
continues unabated even when links between the two are at their most tenuous.34
30 See Leo Marx, The Machine Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964); David Nye, American Technological Sublime,
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); and Vincent Moscoe, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power,
and Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
31 See Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma
of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
32 Barron and Inglis, p. 65.
33 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (London and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977); Fred Pfeil, “Postmodernism as a ‘Structure of Feeling,’” in Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 381–403; and McClary, Conventional Wisdom.
34 This formulation tallies with Jameson’s conception of the technological sublime in
postmodernism, which focuses on the transferal of agency to machines. See Fredric Jameson,
Postmodernism , or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press,
1991), pp. 34–35. Birringer has usefully discussed the technological sublime in postmodern
And the “miraculous” moments of convergence that punctuate performances seem
to suggest that there is purpose as well as method to this technologically mediated
madness. Precisely where this purpose lies, however, is difficult to ascertain.
The term “counter-sublime” suggests that acts of incorporation can be seen as
enfolding and neutralizing a precursor’s sublime.35 Something of this is implied in
Lyotard’s writing on the postmodern sublime, where what he calls “the unpresentable”
is encoded in rhetoric strategies of textual incorporation rather than expressive
content.36 Bloom’s formulation, although combative in its Freudian intimations of
patricide, expresses a sense of resistance that can be recognized in greater or lesser
measure in both of the instances discussed here. Both La Belle and Dark Side of
Oz can be understood as forms of “reading” (and, ultimately, writing) “against the
grain,” although Glass’s “deconstruction” of Cocteau is certainly not malicious,
while the attribution of critical intent to those who sync Dark Side with Wizard
depends largely on whose story one chooses to listen to.
“The Sun is Eclipsed by the Moon”: Subversion and the Misprism of Laughter
My personal understanding of Dark Side of Oz was conditioned in large measure

by the discursive context of my first exposure to the phenomenon when working
as a researcher in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s. Intriguingly, postings on the Pink
Floyd user-group and one of the earliest popular websites on the subject hold Los
Angeles circa 1995 to be the likely birthplace of the phenomenon.37 If this is true, it
is possible that this context left its own “imprint” on the phenomenon, which might
be recognized by later generations of users with similar cultural knowledge.38 My
interpretation rests on some notion of this, viewing the expropriation of Dark Side,
in particular, as a potentially subversive act—depending on the extent to which the
“user” is inclined to read with or against the grain.
There is a long and colorful history of “misreading” when it comes to Wizard. I
am referring to the immense popularity of the film and its iconic star, Judy Garland,
among gay, lesbian, and transgender audiences. The plot of Wizard has an obvious
appeal to such constituencies, dealing as it does with issues of escape and self-
realization. In addition, the film’s saturated Technicolor hues and effervescent cast of
theatre, and Chapman in relation to drum and bass music. See Johannes Birringer, Theater,
Theory, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), and Dale Chapman,
“Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Paranoia and the Technological Sublime in Drum and Bass
Music,” Echo 5/2 (2004).
35 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford
36 Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
p. 81.
37 See Charles Savage, “The Dark Side of the Rainbow” (1 August 1995), accessed 25
October 2006, http://members.aol.com/rbsavage/floydwizard.html.
38 See Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies
Reader (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 507–517.
characters, everything from a dancing troupe of midgets to the Wicked Witch of the
West, betrays a camp sensibility that recent research has attributed to a significant
gay presence on the MGM Freed roster of employees.39 Garland as Dorothy is,
furthermore, a character whose ability to overplay drama while at the same time
projecting a quality of amused detachment has been widely understood as signifying
camp.40 These qualities will not be recognized by all spectators, but they are by a
significant proportion of those who traditionally have valued the film most highly.41
The recognition of a subversive camp subtext in Dark Side of Oz should not,
however, be viewed as depending solely on knowledge concerning the reception
history of one of its source texts. A large subsection of “users” will inevitably take
both source texts at face value (children’s cinema meets serious rock), or indulge in
one of several conspiracy theories. Still I would argue that the unstable, potentially
volatile nature of the audiovisual contract, combined with some of the evidence
on reception, in this instance points towards a certain proclivity towards reading
against the grain, thereby transforming the intentions of the original makers. And the
motives for this are likely to be manifold, going beyond such narrow concerns as the
desire for self-aggrandizement or social approbation.
A subtext of jocular resistance is likely to be picked up on by those familiar
with existing “misreadings” of Wizard, those whose feelings towards Dark Side are
ambivalent—like “Great Gig” singer Clare Torry, who initially found the project
“pretentious”—or those who are otherwise predisposed towards parodic and
“deconstructive” strategies.42 For these spectators, the inclusion of Dorothy, the Tin
Man, and the Munchkins alongside Pink Floyd’s musical evocations of existential
angst might be seen as camping up and thereby dethroning a piece of popular culture
that is widely held to have taken itself too seriously. By intentionally misreading the
album’s serious content, these spectators are arguably complicit in an act as violently
irreverent as the cyclone that transports Dorothy to the alien and highly camped up
world of Oz. (It is possible, I should add, to partake of such subversive pleasures
while viewing Pink Floyd’s musical achievements with considerable affection.)
Resurrecting the Wizard: A Short Reflection on Motives and Mediation
A comparable strategy can be recognized in the Scissor Sisters’ mirthful treatment

of Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” in which Bee Gees-styled falsetto harmonies,
39 Matthew Tinkcom, “‘Working Like a Homosexual’: Camp Visual Codes and the
Labor of Gay Subjects in the MGM Freed Unit,” Cinema Journal 35/2 (1996): 24–42, and
Steven Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 41–87.
40 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1986), pp. 178–186, and
Cohan, pp. 25–27.
41 Cohan, pp. 287–335. For a consideration of how the camp aesthetic of musicals has
been transferred to music videos, see my “Intertextuality and Pop Camp Identity Politics in
Finland: The Crash’s Music Video ‘Still Alive,’” Popular Musicology Online 2, available
http://www.popular-musicology-online.com/issues/02/richardson-01.html.
42 Whitely, p. 150.
guitar patterning from “Another Brick in the Wall,” sinking surf-sound chords and
a relentless “four-to-the-floor” disco beat all play havoc with the lyrical content and
musical connotations of the original song, imposing on it a highly camped up and
sexually suggestive übertext (10.6).43 Wizard allusions abound in Scissor Sisters’
creative output: their debut album includes the song “Return to Oz,” while its sleeve
art shows a present-day Dorothy following a double-yellow line to a neon-lit Emerald
City. In addition, their subsequent DVD release includes re-enactments of several
Wizard scenes, including the notorious crossroads scene where the Scarecrow tells
Dorothy “people do go both ways.” Unsurprisingly, Scissor Sisters frontman Jake
Shears endorses Dark Side of Oz wholeheartedly:
Have you ever tried watching Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon playing over the
top? It’s very uncanny and strange, the movie is set up perfectly with all the songs. It’s one
of my favourite things. You really should try it out.44
And why shouldn’t he like it? Like the band in which Shears made his name, Dark
Side of Oz resists conventions. Notwithstanding the sometimes-bizarre motives of
those who have authored websites on subject, the most common reaction I have
encountered is of wry amusement. Dark Side of Oz is perceived as a deliberate
misprism of artistic intention that transforms originals—in spirit and form. As such,
the same technological apparatus that concedes the repetition of performances,
also in La Belle, becomes the primary mechanism of these artistic transformations.
Weaving a narrative web of social divergence and euphoric convergence, syncing
practices thereby subvert the teleological imperative of existing forms by binding
them to the mechanized flow of the unfolding present.
43 Stan Hawkins (2006, pp. 287–288) offers an illuminating discussion of Scissor Sisters
which places the band in the context of male queering in recent mainstream pop. See his “On
Male Queering in Mainstream Pop,” in Sheila Whitely and Jennifer Rycenga (eds.), Queering
the Popular Pitch (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 279–294.
44 “Cut From a Different Cloth,” The Age (1994), webjournal retrieved 23 October 2005,
from the World Wide Web: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/19/1084917648430.
html.
Chapter Eleven
Of Railroads, Beethoven, and

Victorian Modernity
Ruth A. Solie
This illusion of infinite capability,

bred by such sights as expresses and
such music as Beethoven’s,
is invaluable for giving men buoyancy.
Beethoven und Eisenbahn: wie paßt das zusammen?
In its issue for February 1883, Macmillan’s Magazine in London ran a curious
article, signed by Ernest Foxwell and provocatively entitled “Express Trains—A
Rhapsody.” What intrigues me about the article is the lateness of the date (Britain
had had railway service since 1825) and the remarkable fact that throughout his
“rhapsody” he compares the trains to Beethoven’s music.
Foxwell’s essay is a sort of philosophical or poetical introduction to his other,
more statistical, writings about the state of express railroad service in England. It is
devoted to an energetically celebratory listing of what he sees as the benefits of these
trains, unabashedly jingoistic (“the qualities that gave rise to railway speed are the
very essence of English character” [264]) and optimistically upbeat to a degree that
had become uncommon by 1883. His focus, perhaps surprisingly, is the railroads’
salutary effect on people, both on individual character and on the texture of society:
express speed is a “cordial,” a “tonic,” “leaven”; it “braces” the mind and intensifies
energy.
In musical metaphors he pursues his argument that railway travel breaks down
parochial ideas, class boundaries, and social conventions as riders from every
sort of life situation mingle together: people “are merged for a time in one joint
Ernest Foxwell, “Express Trains—A Rhapsody,” Macmillan’s Magazine 47 (1883):

274. See 11.1. (See http://epub.library.ucla.edu/knapp/mcclaryidentities for this and other
items referred to in the text with the symbol ; for more information, see the Explanatory
Note at the beginning of the book.)
Ulrich Schmitt, Revolution im Konzertsaal: Zur Beethoven-Rezeption im 19.
Jahrhundert (Mainz: Schott, 1990), p. 98.
In particular, see his “English Expresses in 1885,” Temple Bar 75 (1885): 76–95,
along with both previous and subsequent annual accounts published in the Pall Mall Gazette.
See also the book he later wrote (with some portions contributed by T. C. Farrer), Express
Trains English and Foreign: a Statistical Account of All the Express Trains of the World
(London: Smith, Elder, 1889).
experience, like notes in a fine chord where the combined effect enhances the value
of each constituent.” (268) Another such image carries the process all the way to
the international level: “When nations resemble a pianoforte in the ease with which
great movements of happy intercourse can traverse the entire ‘social scale,’ then
there will be a beginning of thorough ‘society,’ a disposition of units which till now
has not been possible except in a fractional part of the human instrument.” (275)
Ultimately, he argues, this process will benefit all humanity by “throwing the world
out of local tune in order that it might then be re-tuned on an ‘equal’ system.” (276)
But why Beethoven? and, more pointedly, why Beethoven in 1883? If the
railroads are truly “the epitome of modernity,” which certainly seems consonant
with what Foxwell is claiming, how can they be aligned with Beethoven rather than,
say, with Wagner, in this essay that so conspicuously appeared in the year of the
latter’s death?
Victorian Railroads
Steam-powered train travel in Britain famously began on 27 September 1825, on the

Stockton & Darlington railroad line, with the pioneering engineer George Stephenson
aboard his locomotive in a festive top hat. From then on, as Richard Altick comments,
the railroads played a principal role in the “new concept of time which had the
most profound effect upon the Victorian spirit” and worked to “infiltrate the national
consciousness with the idea of speed.” J. M. W. Turner’s painting “Rain, Steam,
and Speed” was iconic, with its intense emotional tone, portraying an experience
confusing and blurry but almost unimaginably exhilarating—an experience,
however, that was irretrievably ambivalent (11.2). As Nicholas Daly has it, “for
the Victorians [the railway] stood as both agent and icon of the acceleration of the
pace of everyday life; it annihilated an older experience of time and space, and made
new demands on the sensorium of the traveler,” as, apparently, Turner’s painting did
on the sensorium of the viewer. In 1850 Carlyle observed that “railways have set all
the Towns of Britain dancing.”
Several authors have noted, and made much of, the new tyranny of timetables
and precise schedules that began to prevail during this period, as people adjusted to
the idea of being dominated by official, public time. The first edition of Bradshaw’s
famous Railway Guide was published in 1838; it soon became a general subject of
satire—familiar to modern readers in authors from Oscar Wilde to Agatha Christie to
Monty Python—but precisely because it was so indispensable in daily life. For the first
Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester
and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001).
Richard D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973),
p. 96.
Nicholas Daly, “Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the
Senses,” English Literary History 66 (1999): 461–487.
4 Latter-Day Pamphlets (1858), p 229; quoted in Jack Simmons, “The Power of the
Railway,” in H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds.), The Victorian City, Images and Realities
(2 vols, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), vol. 1, p. 277.
Of Railroads, Beethoven, and Victorian Modernity 151
time, people’s most minute behaviors, their most intimate decisions about how their
own days would be spent, were subject to published instructions. W. M. Acworth’s
classic book, The Railways of England, first published in 1889, is typical in its minute
descriptions of busy stations, split-second schedules, and the virtually choreographic
details of timing and planning needed to make the system run. Furthermore, all the
railroad writers seem obsessed with the precise measurement of speed, noting which
railroad line (and which nation) has the fastest trains, and by precisely how many
miles per hour; Foxwell does the same in his other writings, cited above.
It is provocative to ponder what happens to the perception of music during a
transition like this, as human beings become imbricated into modern time regimes.
For the moment, an answer to such a profound question seems out of reach; let
us only continue to think fancifully about the ways in which the sound of favorite
music—Beethoven’s, maybe—must begin to change.
The Victorian century is already well-understood to have raised the stakes in the
human interaction with noise, since the Industrial Revolution produced among its
many wonders the simple capacity for louder noises than humans had ever heard
before, calling forth a new ingenuity in erecting defenses against them.10 A famous
passage in Dickens’s Dombey and Son—a novel that addresses several aspects of the
railroad—explores the mimetic ability of language to capture the sound of the train.11
Its hypnotic rhythms are partly an incantatory riff on the ride, partly a recreation of
the panoramic but always slightly blurry and disorienting view of the landscape; that
is, the passage is a representation of speed and especially of heard rhythm, but also
of visual experience, of the newly futile attempt to make a familiar kind of visual
sense of landscape and surroundings. It begs to be read aloud, and I have provided
the text in an appendix so that readers may try the experiment (11.3). (Note that
the North Western Railway later named its jumbo locomotive no. 955 “the Charles
Dickens.”)
Quotes, anecdotes, and pictures representing the astonishment—both delighted
and appalled—and disruption caused by the coming of the railroads are an absolute
commonplace in Victorian writing. Its effects on society and culture were at the
forefront of everyone’s thought, much as digital technology is today, although then
just as now not all of the predictions (whether dire or ecstatic) proved accurate. No
one seemed neutral on the subject. Americans shared the experience; as Amy Richter
has written, “many passengers boarded trains with the belief that they were entering
W. M. Actworth, The Railways of England (London: John Murray, 1889).

The classic study of this momentous process in social history is, of course, E. P.
Thompson’s “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967):
57–97.
10 For an ingenious discussion of many of these new experiences, see John M. Picker,
Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Perhaps because he is the
son of a distinguished musicologist, Picker is more sensitive than many literary scholars to the
various aspects of our relationship to sound.
11 Michael Freeman discusses, among other cultural ramifications of railroad lore, the
appearance of a repertory of sheet music designed to reproduce the sounds of the railway
journey on the parlor piano. See his Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 207 ff.
a space with the power to remake them and all of society. A sense of newness—of
modernity itself—inspired them to seek meaning and impose order, as they traveled
between one realm of experience and another.”12 A letter from Fanny Kemble, who
was taken on a demonstration ride in 1830 by George Stephenson himself, gushes
that “a common sheet of paper is enough for love, but a foolscap extra can alone
contain a railroad and my ecstasies.”13 Years later Henry Adams reminisced that
“from the moment that railways were introduced, life took on extravagance.”14
Unlike the United States, where scarce labor and abundant land invited railroad
tracks to curve comfortably around or over topographical obstacles, taking lines of
least resistance to the landscape, Britain faced the opposite economic situation—
cheap labor and very limited and expensive land—and railroad builders responded
by laying tracks as absolutely straight and as absolutely level as possible, with an
enormous investment of heavy machinery and highly dangerous construction work.
The British Victorians, then, encountered railroads not as relatively benign glosses
upon the natural landscape as Americans did (at least iconically, though perhaps not
everywhere on the eastern seaboard), but rather as an extravagant system of cuttings,
embankments, bridges, and tunnel entrances—in short, a full-blown modernist
fantasy of technological achievement that opposed itself much more dramatically to
the natural features of the land. Among the most frequent British reactions to early
railroad tracks was astonished disbelief at the appearance of more straight lines than
people had ever seen before; “the railway’s right of way,” says Ian Carter, “drove a
narrow, ultra-modern corridor through the most retired districts.”15
There were also extraordinary political ramifications, since the nationwide
laying of the permanent way represented the first time that the ownership rights
of the aristocracy and landed gentry had been successfully challenged by what we
would call eminent domain, the greater right of the public good.16 All throughout
the first thirty or forty years, the railway literature is peppered with stories of Lord
Someone or Sir So-and-So refusing some railway company the right to cross his
land; occasionally they won, creating enormous expense and difficulty for the
railway companies (all of which were private enterprises), but gradually it became
understood that the convenience of the riding public and the transport of goods
would henceforth take precedence over private property. There was upheaval at the
other end of the social scale, as well. During the 1860s and 1870s, as railway lines
made their way into city centers, tens of thousands of poor and working-class people
were displaced, similar to what happened in the United States much later during the
construction of the interstate highway system.17
12 Amy G. Richter, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public
Domesticity (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 5.
13 Quoted in Actworth, p. 76.
14 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Modern Library, 1918),
p. 239.
15 Carter, p. 61.
16 Freeman, passim. The “permanent way” is the railroad track.
17 Dickens’s Dombey and Son furnishes a bleak portrait of the railway’s destruction of
an inner-city working-class neighborhood.
It has to be said, then, that Foxwell’s essay is somewhat pollyanna-ish in its
ecstatic account of the railroad’s capacity to break down social class lines in England.
Although it is true that it brought about an extraordinary new mixing of people—“I
fear it has a dangerous tendency to equality,” remarks an aristocratic character in
Disraeli’s Sybil18—it is also the case that the railroad itself shored up the recognition
of economic difference in its own operations, offering two or three different “classes”
of service at different ticket prices.
The Sublime: Where Technology and the Aesthetic Meet
What kind of discourse about experience permitted ordinary Victorians to speak

about railroad travel and Beethoven’s music in the same vocabulary, to perceive them
in the same kind of scale? I suggest that the notion of the “technological sublime,”
coined some decades ago by Leo Marx, offers a key. 19
Marx’s term was conceived with reference to nineteenth-century American
literature, but there is no doubt that a very similar strain is clearly evident in British
writing as the Victorians confronted industrial and technological change that altered
their lives profoundly and irrevocably. Of the American version, John Kasson has
observed that “perhaps the most common vehicle of the technological sublime in
the nineteenth century was the railroad,”20 and the flavor of this literary trope is
markedly present in Foxwell’s “rhapsody” just as in so many other literary texts of
the period. Note that this trope is not the same as the eighteenth century’s romantic
and nature-based sublimity; rather, Nicholas Taylor calls it the “awful sublime,”
reminding us of the centrality of this aesthetic category in Victorian cities:
The Sublime was functionally the aesthetic of just those vast new purposes which upset the
proportions of Beauty and the prettiness of Picturesque: warehouses, factories, viaducts,
gas-works, lunatic asylums, country gaols, railway termini, dark tunnels.21
The experience of the sublime, David Nye tells us, “has a basic structure. An
object, natural or man-made, disrupts ordinary perception and astonishes the senses,
forcing the observer to grapple mentally with its immensity and power.”22 The
persistence of this structure in the many descriptions of sublime experience provides
18 Quoted in Richard Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the
Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), p. 196.
19 See his The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; orig. 1964). I am grateful to Klára Móricz for
pressing me to clarify the role of the sublime in my argument.
20 John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America
1776–1900 (New York: Grossman, 1976), p. 172.
21 Nicholas Taylor, “The Awful Sublimity of the Victorian City: Its Aesthetic and
Architectural Origins,” in Dyos and Wolff, vol. 2, p. 434.
22 David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996),
p. 15.
a meeting ground for technological and artistic masterpieces such as the express
train’s encounter with Beethoven.23
Some of the most familiar traces of the sublime appear, for instance, in writings
of Max Maria von Weber, son of the composer and a recognized railway expert. In
1880, sounding as though he has perhaps spent too much time in the Wolf’s Glen,
he too rhapsodizes:
Equipped with a well-nigh ghostly life, searing breath, and boundless strength . . . [the
steam engine] is our faithful and obedient servant, whose might and reliability often allow
us to triumph in the struggle against the forces of Nature—always, however, interceding
with a gigantic ghostly hand, it relieves man of the hardest, most soulless, ignoble
drudgery.24
It is in this spirit that the Manchester cotton mills seemed to Carlyle, not “dark”
and “satanic” as they had to Blake, but “sublime as a Niagara,”25 or again that
the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad in September of 1830 was
celebrated with a full military band—a trumpet atop each railway car—playing
“See, the Conquering Hero Comes.”26 An administrator of this same railroad effuses
that “there is sublimity in the idea of a whole nation stirred by one impulse, in every
arrangement one common signal regulating the movements of a mighty people!”27 To
the Victorians, this idea—the whole nation stirred by one impulse—was particularly
powerful, and it is tellingly mirrored in what was a favorite observation about music
(I give it here in Edmund Gurney’s version): “Music is, of course, unequalled as
the art in the simultaneous appreciation of which numbers can unite, enhancing
their enjoyment by so doing, and adding to its dignity by realization of its social
aspect.”28
Why Beethoven?
If it is unlikely that in 1883 Beethoven could have represented the sort of modernity
that railroads were still associated with, it is highly plausible that Foxwell’s readers
thought of him as an icon of sublimity. If we think about the Beethoven we know
as a central figure of Western culture, it is easy to regather the bits and pieces of his
23 Scott Burnham has discussed the sublimity of Beethoven’s heroic style, within the
context of nineteenth-century culture, in Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995), especially Chapter 5.
24 Quoted in Dolf Sternberger, Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joachim
Neugroschel (New York: Urizen Books, 1977; orig. 1955), p. 21.
25 Quoted from Carlyle’s “Chartism” in Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of
Mind 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 198.
26 “A Railer” [Richard Trevithik], “The Opening of the Liverpool and Manchester
Railroad,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 28 (1830): 824. The band played the very
familiar chorus from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus.
27 Henry Booth, quoted in Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway (New York: Thames &
Hudson, 1991), p. 346.
28 “Critics and Class-Lists,” Dublin Review, 17 (1887): 303.
familiar portrait into an impressionistic sense of what Foxwell must have meant; his
associations to the composer are consonant with the cultural meaning Beethoven
continues to have, even to this day.
Perhaps that is why the trope linking Beethoven to railroad trips turns out not to
be uncommon, nor merely a product of Ernest Foxwell’s personal fancy:
“The Nineteenth Century”

Stockton to Darlington, 1825:
Stephenson on the sparkling iron road—
Chimney-hatted and frock-coated—drives
His locomotive, while the Lydian mode
Of Opus 132 may actually be
In the course of making. At twelve miles an hour
The century rushes to futurity,
Where art will be mankind-destroying power.
How can the music fail to bear the dates
And quirks of fashion time must prove
Grotesque? Especially as it celebrates
Avuncular and bust fraternal love.
Yet somehow an anachronistic god
Has lasted beyond his final period.
Roy Fuller (1912–1991)29
Fuller’s post-First World War poem is difficult to read, except as a wry comment
on progress and the enduring nature of art. How shall we think about the curiously
jarring temporal coincidence of these two events? Perhaps, in long retrospect, they
seem somehow to occupy planes that are not even commensurable. From Fuller’s
interwar perspective, if Stephenson’s railroad ride appears more “modern” than the
Lydian mode, that is surely not to use “modern” in a congratulatory sense.
After pondering this modernist poem for a while, I was astonished to come upon
the opening vignette of Ulrich Schmitt’s 1990 book on Beethoven reception: “Ein
neues Zeitalter kam an jenem 27. September 1825 ins Rollen, als die Locomotion
mit 34 Wagen von Stockton nach Darlington fuhr.” Schmitt offers an opening gambit
that echoes Foxwell’s claim almost uncannily—“Das Erlebnis einer Eisenbahnreise
hat vieles mit dem Erlebnis der Musik Beethovens gemeinsam”—and his attempt
is to pursue the relationship in terms of actual characteristics of Beethoven’s
compositions.30
Schmitt considers Beethoven’s music as “modern” within the context of the
industrial revolution, and argues that “the modern listener” was born in the early
29 This poem is reproduced without further citation in Ludovic Kennedy, A Book of

Railway Journeys (New York: Rawson, Wade, 1980), p. 4; I have been unable to verify or date
it in available volumes of Fuller’s poetry.
30 Schmitt, p. 5. “A new epoch came into being on 27 September 1825 when the
Locomotion with 34 cars traveled from Stockton to Darlington.” “. . . the experience of a
railroad ride has much in common with the experience of Beethoven’s music.” I am most
grateful to Alexander Rehding for telling me about this book.
nineteenth century within the same context, as one conditioned to perceive motion
and flow rather than the detailed instant; his reiterated metaphor is the film, likened
consistently to the ever-changing landscape viewed from the train window.31 Like
the social historians who explore changes in the perception and experience of time,
Schmitt also concerns himself with the general intensification of musical tempos, at
both extremes, that confronted his “modern listeners” along with other aspects of the
newly ordered time regimes, intriguingly implicating Mälzel’s metronome among
the tools of the new order (81)—a sort of Bradshaw’s for musicians, perhaps.32
Schmitt’s argument is rich and provocative, confronting as it does that shocking
simultaneity that Roy Fuller’s poem ponders, and couching our notion of the
“modern” in terms of the rift between the high classic style of Haydn and Mozart and
what Beethoven made of it in the next generation. But from the viewpoint of Ernest
Foxwell’s bourgeois readers in Macmillan’s, not much of the effect of his simile can
be expected to have come from detailed knowledge of Beethoven’s compositional
technique as such. Rather, it relies on how they thought about Beethoven as a cultural
phenomenon, how they had been schooled to hear his music.
But what was it that Beethoven’s music signified on the larger level? Perhaps
when Foxwell was writing there was still some lingering association of Beethoven
with approved political values like democracy and freedom; as late as the continental
revolutions of 1848 such associations were very widely recognized. There was,
too, the persistent and ubiquitous experience of Beethoven in the context of the
particular style of Goethezeit humanism that Scott Burnham has detailed, as a kind
of idealized representation of a heroic, autonomous, and transcendent Self who
would seem to be the ideal passenger on Foxwell’s railroad.33 I believe, though, that
two other developments were at least equally important and would have fortified
or even trumped such resonances: first, the formation of the canon, centering on
Beethoven’s status as the Great Composer for all times and places (as Burnham
puts it, “we implicitly claim that Beethoven’s music most closely resembles the way
music ought to go” [112]), and, second, the Victorians’ association of Beethoven,
and of “good” music in general, with moral values.
The fallout from the combination of these latter two habitual ways of thinking
was the veritable canonization of Beethoven himself, because in the nineteenth-
century bourgeois imagination good music necessarily came from a good man. We
are assured of this, for instance, by the Reverend H. R. Haweis, the Victorian guru
of musical morality. Haweis tells us in limpidly clear form how to think about the
great Beethoven:
31 The landscape flying by, too swiftly to be seen in the near view but more stable in
the distance, is a central figure of railway literature; it is further generalized to the notion of
“panorama” in a larger cultural analysis by Dolf Sternberger in Panorama of the Nineteenth
Century.
32 On Mälzel, see also Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Dancer and the Impresarios of
Mechanism,” in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (eds.), Cultural Babbage: Technology,
Time and Invention (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 69 ff.
33 Burnham, especially Chapter 4.
Beethoven, born at Bonn, 1770, was equally great in his intellect and his affections.
How deep and tender was that noble heart, those know who have read his letters to his
abandoned nephew . . . There is no stain upon his life. His integrity was spotless; his purity
unblemished; his generosity boundless; his affections deep and lasting; his piety simple
and sincere.34
For Haweis, the morality of the composer guarantees the salubriousness of the
music. Foxwell himself draws the moral lesson clearly, arguing that technological
accomplishments like the railroad are always coupled with the development of moral
character:
The same kind of influence comes when we listen to the performance of a great movement
of Beethoven. Men walk in, badgered by business friction, or chafed by the fetters of legal
delay, and sit down to listen in peace, undisturbed by any earthly jar, while a masterly
inspiration makes its unimpeded flight along a permanent way of smooth musical tones to a
splendid consummation. Both music and expresses feed the disposition to be enthusiastic,
by affording public instances of what can be done when conditions are accurately grappled.
The audience go away with a leaven inside them, feeling (though perhaps unconsciously)
sure that things in general can be done and difficulties overcome. (273)
Foxwell’s invocation of the “splendid consummation” offers particularly important

evidence; note that the achievement of this goal is especially inspirational if you can
clearly hear the struggle that precedes it, and that struggle was a familiar feature of
Beethoven’s music.
Michael Musgrave sums up the Victorian Beethoven most succinctly in his recent
account of George Grove’s writing, which was contemporary with Foxwell’s essay:
Beethoven still stands as the commanding figure of the classical concert repertory, seen
as a hero in his personal life, in overcoming deafness, and a transcendental master of
musical materials, the two aspects invariably seen as connected in an effort of the will;
further he now commands an ethical dimension through the verbal message of the finale
of the Ninth Symphony, that carries an even more “religious” quality in a secular age
than do the sacred works formerly representative of this role, such as those of Handel or
Bach. This image of struggle and overcoming was reinforced for Grove by his knowledge
of the effort that Beethoven put into his works, the labour through which he clarified
his ideas, as exemplified by the huge number of sketches. Beethoven possessed all the
34 H. R. Haweis, Music and Morals (New York: Harper, n.d.; orig. 1871), p. 85. This
book appeared too early to include Haweis’s moral reading of Wagner; his discussions of great
composers end with the well-loved and revered Mendelssohn. However, his later volume, My
Musical Life (London: W. H. Allen, 1884) is besotted with Wagner, even to the point of having
a measure of the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Tannhäuser embossed in gold on its front cover.
The difference in his treatment of the two composers is highly instructive: he takes Wagner’s
work to be fundamentally religious in character and, in light of this transcendent power,
forgives utterly the entire litany of the composer’s character flaws, even after painstakingly
enumerating them—so painstakingly, in fact, as to make it clear that Haweis has not after all
managed to talk himself out of the tight linkage between musical greatness and good moral
character.
masculine characteristics by which others were judged and his artistic qualities became
normative.35
Masculinity, or manliness, was of course the Victorian critic’s highest accolade, and
not only for Grove.
Why Not Wagner?
Rose, one of the sister heroines of Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel Robert Elsmere,36 is
a talented violinist who plays Wagner, Brahms, and Rubinstein, “all those passionate
voices of the subtlest moderns, through which the heart of our own day has expressed
itself even more freely and exactly than through the voice of literature.” When Rose
played, “fragments from a wild and alien dance–music . . . rippled . . . in a warm
intoxicating stream of sound, stirring association after association, and rousing from
sleep a hundred bygone moods of feeling.” (176–177) This is absolutely standard
vocabulary for describing the experience of listening to “the music of the future,”
especially Wagner’s.37
The narrator seems not unsympathetic to this music, and even in 1888 for an
author to portray a respectable girl playing the violin required an adventurous spirit.
Even so, in the novel Rose’s musical interests are pitted against the ascetic views
of her sister Catherine, who distrusts music—and the arts in general, and indeed all
pleasure—as distracting from Christian duty. Rose is clearly portrayed as one who
keeps up-to-date with the arts and is perhaps just the tiniest bit racy; she is explicitly
presented to us as restless and a rebel against conventional values. The narrator’s
adjectives tell the story: “passionate,” “wild and alien,” “intoxicating,” “rousing.”
Such words are good clues for us. The Victorian reading public—and even
most of the smaller concertgoing public—had for the most part not heard much
or even any of Wagner’s music yet, but they knew him by his writings and they
associated him with certain popular catchphrases like “the music of the future.”
The knowledgeable among them tended to detest the intent in Wagner’s rhetoric
to co-opt Beethoven to his vision of future music as Gesamtkunstwerk, with its
entailed implication that Beethoven’s own “absolute” instrumental music was now
to be recognized as obsolete. H. H. Statham, music critic for the Edinburgh Review,
scoffed that “the adherents of Wagner are determined to persuade the world that
Wagner is a Beethoven, in pursuance of which end they use all their ingenuity to
prove that Beethoven was no more than a Wagner.”38
35 Michael Musgrave, “The Making of a Scholar: Grove’s Beethoven, Mendelssohn and

Schubert,” in Michael Musgrave (ed.), George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 105.
36 Mrs Humphrey [Mary Augusta] Ward, Robert Elsmere (London: Macmillan and
Company, 1888).
37 A number of other instances are given in Chapter 6 of my Music in Other Words:
Victorian Conversations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
38 [Henry Heathcote Statham], “Wagner and the Modern Theory of Music,” Edinburgh
Review 143 (1876): 170.
If the controversy was all about what sort of future Wagner’s music portended,
it did not help his cause that the public was particularly well aware of its reputation
for the kinds of traits identified only a few years later (1892) in Max Nordau’s
sensational Degeneration, which fretted that contemporary culture was headed
toward some kind of reverse evolution—a reversion to primitive intellectual and
emotional behaviors and beliefs—in an overwhelming atmosphere of mental illness
and “moral sea-sickness.”39 Wagner was a poster child for Nordau’s worries; he
notes that “Richard Wagner is in himself alone charged with a greater abundance of
degeneration than all the degenerates put together.” (171)
One must, of course, read this book with a certain circumspection. For the most
part, Nordau was a cranky curmudgeon who disapproved of nearly everything, and
most particularly of people enjoying themselves. But it is important to understand
that this degenerative cultural disorder—and Wagner’s role in it—was by no means
Nordau’s notion alone, but common coin of Victorian conversation. By the late
century an enthusiastic and multifaceted school of British Wagnerism had taken
firm hold in the culture, but so had a corresponding unease about its tastes and
proclivities.
From 1870 on, Londoners could read in the Daily Telegraph the fulminations
of music critic Joseph Bennett (or, in The Times, those of J. A. Fuller Maitland)
against Wagner, Wagnerism, and all the pernicious influences of the “music of the
future”—although, to be sure, they could also find in the same press progressive,
pro-Wagnerian critics like Francis Hueffer.40 Both Theresa Muir’s and Anne Sessa’s
accounts of Wagner’s reception among English music critics make clear that even
at this professional level the anxious and hyperbolic vocabulary around Wagner
and the “music of the future” insinuated its presence.41 The terms “narcosis” and
“bliss” recur, along with “profligate libertinage”42 and regular and heated objections
to incest portrayed on stage.
“Hypnotizing” and “captivating” are among those terms contributed in an
intriguing essay by Carlo Caballero on the nexus of music and morality, and many
more examples are provided by Christopher Morris, including listeners’ reports
39 Max Nordau, Degeneration, translated from the second edition; translator not named.
(New York and London: D. Appleton, 1912), p. 7. For an intriguing discussion of the anti-
modernists’ deployment of Nordau and the writers of the new sexual science to generate
concern over music’s ongoing degeneration, see Scott Messing’s Schubert in the European
Imagination, forthcoming from the University of Rochester Press.
40 See Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press 1850–1914:
Watchmen of Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
41 Theresa Muir, Wagner in England: Four Writers before Shaw (Ph.D. diss., City
University of New York, 1997); Anne Dzamba Sessa, Richard Wagner and the English
(Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979). It should be understood
throughout this discussion that there were also numerous enthusiasts for Wagner in Victorian
England. But I am arguing that the kind of discourse in which Foxwell is engaged assumes
the reputation of Wagner as a primarily controversial figure and on the extreme moral unease
that still persisted in the cultural conversation about him.
42 James W. Davison in 1855, before his conversion to Wagnerism, quoted in Muir,
p. 40.
of disorientation as though under the influence of dreams or opium, and many
descriptions of Wagner-influenced behavior as feminine or hysterical.43 Vernon Lee
herself articulated a widespread fear, that Wagner’s music provoked “violations of
our innermost secrets, revelations of the hidden possibilities of our own nature”—
which is to say, the breakdown of civilization altogether.44
The potential weaknesses of one’s own nature were already a major concern. By
the late nineteenth century the Victorians saw their lives altered by the emergence of
leisure time (previously unheard-of) and by a continually rising standard of living
that allowed for vacations, for the new activity they had dubbed “sight-seeing,”
and for the pursuit of enjoyment in general—in all of which, needless to say, the
railroad was profoundly implicated. But this happy development was also a source
of intense embarrassment. As Peter Bailey and others have noted, bourgeois culture
had fashioned itself on a model of strict morality, self-denial, and hard work that
was intended to distinguish it sharply from both the supposed fecklessness of the
aristocracy and the rowdy ritual celebrations of the rural poor.45 “What amusements
are lawful to persons who wish to live a religious life, is one of the questions by
which many good people are sorely perplexed,” a writer in Good Words noted.46
Or, as F. M. L. Thompson explains it, “holidays with a serious purpose, a purpose
often imbued with moral force, were certainly not carefree jaunts; but they were
escapes from ordinariness into exciting new worlds of well-regulated and carefully
rationalized pleasure and happiness.”47 So the pursuit of pleasure on a railway outing
was a bit awkward to justify, and it behooved a railway booster like Foxwell to
emphasize its morally heartening aspects; surely his invocation of Beethoven is
meant to stress the railway’s improving nature.
The matter of immorality was urgent where music was concerned. Foxwell would
no doubt wish to avoid any association with what Joseph Horowitz, speaking of the
American context, has called “the subversive erotic maelstrom of the Wagnerites,”48
given the risks of what Ian Carter identifies as “passenger trains’ titillating potential
to bring people from different social worlds into intimate but fleeting contact.”49
43 Carlo Caballero, “‘A Wicked Voice’: On Vernon Lee, Wagner, and the Effects of
Music,” Victorian Studies, 36 (1992): 385–408. Christopher Morris, Reading Opera between
the Lines: Orchestral Interludes and Cultural Meanings from Wagner to Berg (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 161, 187. Note, in contrast, Grove’s assurances as to
Beethoven’s “manliness.”
44 Quoted in Emma Sutton, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 81.
45 Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the
Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 63–65.
46 R. W. Dale, “Amusements,” Good Words 8 (1867): 330.
47 F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian
Britain 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 263.
48 Joseph Horowitz, “Music and the Gilded Age: Social Control and Sacralization
Revisited,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3/3, available 8/2/04 at 222.
historycooperative.org. See also his much fuller discussion in Wagner Nights: An American
History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
49 Carter, p. 172.
Even at the most professional and technical level this unsettling musical flavor could
be suspicious. Meirion Hughes quotes from a minatory letter written to the composer
Hubert Parry by his friend Hugh Montgomery, ruing “that quality in your work which
makes Wagner so unsatisfactory to me and immoral in the effect he produces on my
emotional condition. A tendency to promiscuous intercourse with all sorts of loose
keys instead of that faithful cleaving to one only . . . to which one is accustomed in
the respectable masters.”50 Appearances to the contrary, this was not a joke.
Finally, there was a more purely musical set of reasons for anxiety. To Victorian
ears Wagner’s music lacked the secure teleology of Beethoven’s, flaunting its lack
of the basic requirements for good railroad service; as a character in recent fiction
observes in 1887, “the railway suggests how it ought to be, how it could be: a smooth
ride to a terminus on evenly spaced rails and according to an agreed timetable . . .”51
Other descriptive language routinely found in the literature makes this Wagnerian
failing clear, especially an apparently de rigueur reference to invertebrate animals
that represented the perceived slipperiness and formlessness of the music.52 Edmund
Gurney engages this felicitous linguistic ritual with some gusto:
[Wagner] finds himself naturally in the variegated home of invertebrate strains, things
with no shape to be squeezed out of, no rhythmic ribs to be broken, tossed hither and
thither, as hard to grasp as jelly-fish, as nerveless as strings of seaweed.53
It is interesting how many of Gurney’s complaints echo Nordau’s, even though Gurney
nowhere evinces any anxiety about “degeneration.” Nordau denounced Wagner as
“the last mushroom on the dunghill of romanticism,”54 and Gurney seems to concur:
To the melody [of Tristan] . . . there clings a faint flavour of disease, something overripe
in its lusciousness and febrile in its passion. . . . One feels a growing sense of being
imprisoned in the fragrance of a musical hot-house, across which the memory of some
great motive of Handel’s or Beethoven’s sweeps like a whiff from breezy pine-woods by
the sea.55
Surely it’s exactly these pine-woods that Foxwell is wanting to evoke: something
bracing and utterly wholesome.
50 Hughes, p. 140.
51 Julian Barnes, Arthur and George (New York: Knopf, 2005), p. 55. By contrast,
Gurney wrote of Lohengrin that “I think that an experienced musician might hear the opera
several times and still be sorry to have to bet on the next note in the vocal parts of much of the
second act.” “On Some Disputed Points in Music,” Fortnightly Review 20 (1876): 127.
52 I have already observed this phenomenon and given several examples in Chapter 5 of
Music in Other Words.
53 Edmund Gurney, “Wagner and Wagnerism,” The Nineteenth Century 13 (1883), 441.
Gurney suffered the embarrassment of having his very negative essay in proof just at the time
of Wagner’s death; he acknowledges the sad coincidence in an added note, calling Wagner’s
“a career which, whatever criticism it may demand, at least demands from every candid critic
the homage due to rare genius and dauntless consistency” (434).
54 Nordau, p. 194.
55 Gurney, p. 444.
These somewhat creepy images seem actually to represent a certain dissatisfaction
with the formal elements of Wagner’s phrases. These listeners expected the kind of
symmetry that a classical melody or a Schubert song provided; “I missed the full
closes—I wanted the cadences,” complained a discussant in RMA Proceedings in
1882.56 Statham’s discussion of the love music for Tristan and Isolde links the formal
and moral issues directly, suggesting that it “rises to a delirious whirl in which all
form and restraint seem to be lost.”57 Haweis recognized this formal problem too:
“if we attempt, like Wagner, to make every bar—almost every note—correspond
to a word, we may almost say that such difficulties can only be surmounted by the
sacrifice of melody and the destruction of musical form.”58 Victorian listeners wanted
to be able to count on closure, balance, and regular arrival points; they wanted to feel
themselves in good hands, just as they would on a successful railroad journey—and
on all of these counts Wagner’s “endless melody” frustrated them.
Postscript: The Modern
It seems clear enough from his text what Ernest Foxwell means by “modern”: he is
invoking the idea most beloved of Victorians, progress, and the pride Englishmen
may take in their nation’s exhilarating industrial prowess. He speaks also to an
enlarging sense of community and “the world,” which he thinks remakes people on
a more cosmopolitan model, citizens of the world rather than merely of their local
habitations. (And perhaps the subsequent adoption of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” as
the anthem of the European Union confirms his prescience?) He tells us that “human
minds are growing, and they see round corners of the future by anticipation”(274)
and further, in what is perhaps his bedrock argument, that “the feeling of distance is
almost modern, and is growing up now as a result of running over immense spaces
in the limits of a day.” (269)
It is a truism of Victorian scholarship that the middle generation’s boundless
optimism and trust in “progress” gradually faded into the late century’s depression
and vague unease about the future; the young Foxwell must have been challenging
this attitude shift, his own temperament apparently proof against it. The late
Victorians feared degeneracy and decay, religious and moral corrosion, the loss of
world dominance, and social upheaval. Thus the notion of “the modern” had very
mixed resonances: an artistically exciting category, perhaps, to the aesthetes and arts
professionals (certainly to the Wagnerites), but to the ordinary bourgeois consumer
of the arts a hazy distaste and a certain sense of things “going too far” that was only
bolstered by what remained of their parents’ strong sense of art as a generator and
guarantor of morality. Add to these considerations the solidification of the canonic
musical repertory that had meanwhile occurred, and it is no surprise that Beethoven—
the classic, the moral hero, the gold standard—was often seen among the general
public in exaggerated contrast to Wagner—the risqué, the degenerate, the unmelodic.
The Victorian public knew which railroad ride it preferred.
56 Quoted in Sessa, p. 45.

57 Statham, p. 162.
58 Haweis, p. 91.
Chapter Twelve
Marking Time in Pacific Overtures:

Reconciling East, West, and History
within the Theatrical Now of a Broadway
Musical
Raymond Knapp
Beginning with Company (1970), Stephen Sondheim’s musicals have been centrally
concerned with how musical numbers in a show manage time. As a “concept
musical,” Company is deliberately unclear about the chronology of its events, even
about whether the framing birthday parties are successive parties taking place over
a span of years, the same party revisited, or alternative versions of the same party.
The characters in Follies (1971) and A Little Night Music (1973) obsess on the past,
with the former using pastiche vaudeville numbers to bring the past into the present,
and the latter evoking a stylized operetta idiom that hovers just beyond the reach of
its temporally stranded characters. In these as in later shows, Sondheim’s musical
means vary according to each show’s specific engagement with time. Company
creates its sense of temporal indefiniteness—a figure for the inability of its central
character to commit to a specific future—through the layered, pulsed repetitions
of early minimalism, creating a modern, urbanized sonic background based on
such “found objects” as the busy signal, door chimes, car horns, and mantra-like
textual reiterations, thus fostering the sense that its musical numbers all occupy the
same indeterminate temporal space. Follies projects its images of the past within a
ghostlike cloud of surreality, placing a crucial emphasis on the performing bodies and
See Hal Prince, Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the Theatre (New York:
Dodd, Mead, 1974), pp. 149–150; Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals (Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 164–170; and chapter six of my The
American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006).
Regarding A Little Night Music, see ibid., chapter one; chapter five of Steven Swayne,
“Hearing Sondheim’s Voices” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1999);
and chapter five of Joanne Gordon, Art Isn’t Easy; The Achievement of Stephen Sondheim
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990).
See chapter six of my The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity,
and Banfield, pp. 149–160. Regarding minimalism and modern urban experiences during this
time period, see chapter two of Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music
as Cultural Practice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).
venues involved, and exploiting music’s capacity to bring the past into the present
within a complicated negotiation between memory and attempted re-enactment. And
A Little Night Music cloaks its waltz idioms in a haze of bitonality, with layered
harmonies helping to evoke the requisite temporal distance.
In his later shows, Sondheim has continued to explore the potential for music
to evoke and articulate different aspects of temporality, perhaps most vigorously in
the reversed chronology of Merrily We Roll Along (1981), and in Passion (1994),
where the reading out of letters by varied combinations of their writers and recipients
collapses, in dramatic terms, the time and distance that separates them. But this
line of development reached an earlier apex in Pacific Overtures (1976), where
explorations of temporality take place on several levels, and permeate all aspects of
Sondheim’s music and lyrics.
Sondheim, in relating how he developed a special musical language for Pacific
Overtures—a show that depicts, from the Japanese perspective, the “opening up”
of Japan by American gunboat diplomacy beginning in 1853—describes his search
for a syntax that could be made to sound Japanese to Broadway audiences, but
would both avoid the clichés of Broadway’s ready-made orientalist idioms and be
sufficiently grounded in European traditions that he could convincingly project a
musical transition across the span of the show from “East” to “West.” Similarly, he
has described his manipulation of language in Pacific Overtures in terms of paring
down the vocabularies of both the Japanese and the West, the former so as to evoke a
Haiku-based poetic idiom, the latter so as to reverse the familiar dramatic convention
in which Asians speak a kind of pidgin English, simplified and grammatically
deficient (an idiom Sondheim terms “translatorese”); in Pacific Overtures, it
is the Westerners who speak inadequate English, as a form of “talking down” to
the Japanese. But more remarkable still is Sondheim’s manipulation of a shifting
sense of time along two intersecting axes. Most apparent of these is his musical
differentiation between a “Japanese” sense of time, which may be described as either
floating or circular in nature, and a more urgent and linear “Western” sense of time.
The problematic rapprochement of these two senses comes to a disastrous climax
within the poignant lyricism of “Pretty Lady,” a number that serves both to set an
unintentional rape and to lament the missed opportunities for cultural reconciliation
hinted at earlier in “Poems.” Even more basic to the workings of the show is its mix
4
For a concise account of the letters in Passion, see Sandor Goodhart, “‘The Mother’s
Part’: Love, Letters, and Reading in Sondheim’s Passion” (Reading Stephen Sondheim:
A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Sandor Goodhart, New York and London: Garland
Publishing, 2000, pp. 221–258), pp. 228–229. Passion’s exploration of the potential for
written communication to collapse time and distance, especially through singing, recalls the
governing conceit of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (“To the Distant Beloved”; 1816); see
chapter six of my The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity.
Regarding especially the “East” part of this opposition, see Paul Attinello’s essay in
this volume, “The Universe Will Tell You What It Needs: Being, Time, Sondheim.”
4 See Banfield, chapter eight, and chapter ten in my The American Musical and the

Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
4 Following conventions of the musical stage, the “rape” in this number is not
consummated, but follows the scenario of a seduction. That rape is not intended is clear from
Marking Time in Pacific Overtures 165
of collapsed timeframes (necessary for a historical drama) and the tendency for its
music—like nearly all theatrical music—to stretch time by placing a kind of fermata
over individual dramatic moments.
The particular means for managing the historical dimension of Pacific Overtures
is usefully encapsulated in Sondheim’s phrase “documentary vaudeville,” which
Stephen Banfield finds particularly applicable to the episodic narrative arch of
“Chrysanthemum Tea,” an extended number that details the gradual poisoning of
the Shogun by his mother in response to the appearance of Commodore Perry’s ships
in Act I. But the term also applies in some way to several other numbers (including
especially “Four Black Dragons,” “Welcome to Kanagawa,” “Someone in a Tree,”
“Please Hello,” “A Bowler Hat,” and “Next”) and, as Banfield notes, to the larger
narrative/presentational strategy of Pacific Overtures. Moreover, the specific
techniques Sondheim deploys in the service of documentary vaudeville serve to
reconcile, in part, the show’s conflicting temporal dimensions, allowing key numbers
to function as pivots between the larger statement and what serves, emblematically,
as the bearer of irreducible expressions of eternal truths: the Haiku. The Haiku (or,
occasionally, some other form of aphorism) serves as a touchstone in the show for
the timeless, floating circularity of pre-1853 Japan, grounding each episode and
the show itself within a (projected) Japanese sensibility and perspective, drawing
attention to the way individual episodes are as much parable as narrative, and present
themselves within their particular musical construct as but variations of neighbor
episodes. Like the Haiku, each episode thereby functions as a condensed expression
of an important dimension of the larger construct—a process that then extends to the
relationship between individual musical numbers and Pacific Overtures as a whole.
Put succinctly, the Haiku forms the smallest “doll” within a kind of matryoshka
of nested dolls, so that Pacific Overtures may be understood as a careful nesting
of hierarchically arranged elements that serve to preserve and mirror the essential
features of that inner core—the Haiku—within the show’s larger features.
Paradoxically, however, there is a disconcerting trade-off that accompanies both the
shifts between Japanese and “Western” temporal sensibilities and the use of documentary
vaudeville as the main vehicle to carry the historical narrative. Documentary vaudeville
is in abstract terms an ideal mode for Sondheim’s purpose, since it stands between
more conventional Broadway and Kabuki, the principal Japanese theatrical model for
the show. Yet, a Broadway audience’s tendency to respond more easily to the familiar,
especially in the context of a show that places extraordinarily empathic emphasis on
the unfamiliar, creates an odd disjuncture of sympathies. However much American
audiences may be “into” the Japanese dimension of the show, and whatever their
commitment to the show’s alignment with the Japanese perspective, they will tend by
the introductory dialogue, in which the three British sailors mistake a samurai’s daughter for
“one of those geisha girls” (Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, Pacific Overtures, New
York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991, p. 95).
The 1991 edition of the libretto, which is the basis for all citations in this essay, differs in
some particulars (including page numbers) from the original 1977 publication by New York:
Dodd, Mead & Company. The lyrics and dialogue I cite are the same for both editions.
Banfield, p. 256.
default to welcome incursions from a more familiar idiom and manner even though
those intrusions represent something less than sympathetic in dramatic terms.
Table 12.1 lists all the songs of Pacific Overtures arranged according to my rough
assessment of how strongly they project Japanese or Western perspectives through
situation, music, and language; as shown, three songs (in my judgment) make
particularly jarring excursions from East to West: “Chrysanthemum Tea,” “Welcome
to Kanagawa,” and “Please Hello.” In performance in front of a Broadway-oriented
audience, each of these numbers marks a point of extended relaxation into a more
familiar realm. Yet, because of the established locus of sympathy, the grateful
sense of recognition that will generally greet these numbers carries with it an odd
sense of betrayal, as well, so that an audience might either resist being drawn into
the familiar, or perhaps even resent what may appear to be a kind of pandering
on Sondheim’s part, however sophisticated its mode. Yet, arguably, “there is no
other way”: both the welcome sense of the familiar and the accompanying sense of
betrayal in these numbers derive directly from the problematic between narrative and
divergent temporalities in the show; moreover, as I will argue, it is precisely these
three numbers that establish and propel the larger trajectory of Pacific Overtures.
***
Table 12.1 Deployment of Songs in Pacific Overtures between “Japan” and

“the West”
Pre-1853 Japan “the West”
Act I
1. The Advantages of Floating in the Middle of the Sea

2. There Is No Other Way
3. Four Black Dragons
4. Chrysanthemum Tea
5. Poems
6. Welcome to Kanagawa
7. Someone in a Tree
(Lion’s Dance)
Act II
8. Please Hello
9. A Bowler Hat
10. Pretty Lady
11. Next - - - - - - (Next)
4 In my own initial experience of the show, during its first tour (which, unusually for a
touring company, retained the original Broadway cast), the audience’s sense of relief during
these “intrusions”—the numbers at the far right of Table 12.1—was palpable. But there was
also, for me and I believe others in the audience, some disappointment that the show could
be felt sliding back toward something more conventional—almost as if an actor projecting a
finely drawn character suddenly let the mask slip, devolving into mere shtick.
***
An audience’s feelings of discomfort are probably most pronounced with “Welcome

to Kanagawa,” for several reasons. First, the number is openly salacious, evoking
burlesque more than vaudeville through its bawdy humor, which marks a shocking
shift in tone from the decorum of simulated Japanese poetic and theatrical modes.
Second, by employing a decidedly low species of “Broadway,” blending crude
sexual humor with what comes across as a parody of the South Seas “Island” number
(especially in the title phrase, repeated often for broadly comic effect; (12.1),10 the
song implicitly critiques the more gratifying images of America that have just been
offered up in “Poems” by Manjiro, the sailor who has returned from America to warn
Japan of America’s plans to initiate trade relations. Third, the precise perspective
of the song, taken on its own, is not clear, either immediately or on reflection. The
use of male cross-dressing, so recently presented within the intensely sad “There Is
No Other Way”—a mini-drama that fully concludes only just before “Kanagawa,”
when Kayama discovers his wife’s suicide—is now played for laughs, complete
with awkward “slips” into and out of a deeper male vocal register, so that both visual
and audio tokens of male drag serve as analogues for the awkwardness of neophyte
geishas. And the care taken in earlier numbers to create and explore a “Japanese”
musical idiom for its Japanese characters seems to have yielded rather too easily—
not to say inexplicably—to imitation Hawaiian music.
But who is the butt of the joke, exactly? Perhaps it is the Americans, who conform
to the second of two Haikus interpolated by the Reciter: “The bird from the sea, /
Not knowing pine from bamboo, / Roosts on anything” (12.2).11 Certainly the
Americans’ projected naïveté is one target of the song’s humor; from this perspective,
the faux-Hawaiian “come-on” seems meant to play with jaded contempt to tourists
who lack the necessary discrimination to appreciate something more authentic. But
another target is the naïveté of the Japanese, seen most immediately in the Madam’s
new “recruits” but also to be understood more broadly, according to the song’s first
Haiku: “The nest-building bird, / Seeing the tree without twigs, / Looks for new
forests” (12.3).12 From this perspective, the inadequate performance of South-Seas
seduction by the newly recruited geishas underscores their naïveté as much as their
projected audience’s gullibility. The song thus points in both directions, reinforcing
its insinuating leer with mocking laughter directed at any available target—which
may finally be the biggest reason for the song’s discomfiting effect, since it would
seem impossible not to identify with at least one of its possible targets.
Yet, in important ways, the song is absolutely necessary to the larger trajectory
of the show. It is the strongest swerve to the “West” in Act I (see Table 12.1), and
sets up, in reaction, the falsely secure conclusion to the act based on a restored
Japanese perspective (“Someone in a Tree”). But its point is also both deeply

11 Pacific Overtures, pp. 51–52.
12 Ibid., p. 47.
thematic regarding the show as a whole, and of critical importance as background
to the key numbers that define the denouement of Act II. In starkly rude terms, the
number implicitly limns the “opening up” of Japan as a kind of coerced prostitution,
categorically defining the impulse toward accommodation to the West, which must
inevitably play a central part in the drama, as degrading and feminizing.13 On a more
explicit level, this point is blunted somewhat by the song’s humorous treatment of
bumbling naïveté, both as represented by the inexperienced geisha recruits and as
projected onto the Americans, which establishes a mutual failure on both sides to
apprehend and adapt to the other’s culture and mores. And most explicitly, although
only in retrospect, the two Haikus of the song point directly ahead to the final two
songs, when the British sailors in “Pretty Lady,” “not knowing pine from bamboo,”
mistake a samurai’s daughter for a geisha, and the Japanese in “Next” find their
“new forests” in Western technology and the international marketplace, while
reformulating the earlier Haiku more starkly: “The practical bird, / Having no tree of
its own, / Borrows another’s” (12.4).14
In structural terms, the three “Western” numbers perform the critical function of
establishing one side of the show’s operative boundaries, but in quite different ways.
If “Welcome to Kanagawa” contributes thematically and through specific pointers
toward the endgame, “Please Hello” establishes the show’s most overwhelming
Western presence, both in terms of its mix of Broadway-based pastiche styles and by
its visual presentation of the five admirals in grandly colorful array. This occurs at
a critical juncture of the show, giving the lie to the reasserted Japanese perspective
in “Someone in a Tree,” and providing the spur for the reactive conflict whose
resolution will provide the denouement (see Table 12.1). But the crucial preparation
for the larger narrative unfolding in Pacific Overtures occurs with “Chrysanthemum
Tea,” a number that would seem, on the surface, not to be as overtly “Western” as the
other two, and yet carries the greatest burden for defining the show’s larger trajectory
as, specifically, narrative in a conventional sense.
“Chrysanthemum Tea” is in several obvious respects as “Japanese” as the three
numbers that precede it. Like those numbers, it establishes distance between the
Japanese perspective and the Western threat, focusing like them on a mode of
displaced emphasis that is conceived as protection, however flimsy, against the
impending reality of Westernization. Thus, “The Advantages of Floating in the
Middle of the Sea”—a number seemingly inspired jointly by The Mikado’s “If You
Want to Know Who We Are” and Fiddler on the Roof’s “Tradition”—offers cyclic
rituals as a bulwark against change; “There Is No Other Way” deflects attention
to a domestic tragedy of impending shame and suicide, allegorically conceived
and presented with layers of obliqueness; and “Four Black Dragons” misidentifies
the threat—Perry’s ships—as alternately either mythological (dragons) or natural
(volcanoes). For its part, “Chrysanthemum Tea” offers palace intrigue—the slow
13 These are two features that distinguish Orientalism according to Edward Said’s
codification of the term; see Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994; originally
published New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) and chapter ten of my The American Musical
and National Identity.
14 Pacific Overtures, p. 104.
murder of the Shogun by his mother—as a distraction from impending peril, and
argues with sophistic logic that A) the Americans cannot actually exist (see the
priests’ contribution, quoted below), and B) the death of the Shogun will prevent
them from delivering their letter: (Mother) “I decided if there weren’t / Any Shogun
to receive it, / It would act as a deterrent / Since they’d have no place to leave it”
(12.5).15
Moreover, “Chrysanthemum Tea,” like the previous numbers, conforms to a
“Japanese” sense of temporal stasis by offering multiple perspectives on its given
situation. In each of the previous numbers, this strategy seems to suspend its subject
within a frozen temporality, as if to remove any possibility of change by denying the
capacity even to conceive of change. Most elaborate in this is “Advantages,” which
alternates perspectives between “here” (Japan) and an unstable “somewhere out
there”; “here” achieves its stability through described cycles of life-rituals centered
around screens, rice, and bowing, with a concluding list of other cycles that might as
easily have served as illustration, involving flowers, the moon, fishing, gifts, tea, and
weaving. As delineated, each cycle is a variation of its neighbors; that they are set to
the same music—except for the bows, which are explained and pantomimed—helps
make each seem an interchangeable facet of an essentially unchanging existence
suspended in time (thus the recurring phrase, “We float”).
The exchanges of bows, however, take place during a temporary suspension of
musical activity (and so were not included in the original cast recording), calling
attention to the fragility of the described political situation by offering a sharp contrast
to the other described rituals, with their avowed stability. Indeed, that political
situation—which constitutes the actual content of the song, in terms of the larger
plotting—will shift dramatically across the fifteen-year span of the show’s main
action, between the arrival of the American ships in 1853 and the Meiji restoration
in 1868, a particularly turbulent period in Japanese history (not to say American
history!). Thus, within the context of the show, the bows establish a stabilizing cycle
to manage a precarious mix of unruly forces, ripe for narrative development: the
one-year-old puppet Emperor (Mutsuhito, who would assume the name Meiji—
enlightened ruler—as a young adult in 1867), the seldom-seen Shogun (soon to be
poisoned by his mother, thence to be replaced by a succession of Shoguns), and
the Lords of the South (who will eventually revolt against the Shogunate’s policies
of appeasement, yet then accept the Emperor’s resolve to Westernize, to “turn our
backs on ancient ways”).16
Albeit with different means, involving various modes of theatrically grounded
indirection, “There Is No Other Way” also hedges around the show’s narrative
imperative. Tamate, the wife of Kayama (who has been given an impossible task
that will almost certainly bring disgrace to them both), is played by a male according
to Japanese traditions; as the song begins, s/he dances mute to a “mournful solo”
played by a shakuhachi (a bamboo flute), while two observers sing; “the First sings
about her, the Second sings her words and thoughts.”17 All modes of presentation
15 Ibid., p. 37.
16 Ibid., p. 102.
17 Quoted from the stage directions, Ibid., p. 13.
are thus oblique: a man plays the part of a woman; her words (sung by the second
observer) describe in normalizing terms a return she knows will bring disgrace if it
happens at all; the first observer’s poetic expressions are both evasive in meaning
and about evasion; and they forecast with poetic ambiguity her eventual suicide, the
ultimate act of evasion (quoted here are the first and final lines of the first observer):
“The eye sees, the thought flies. / The eye tells, the thought denies” (12.6).18 //
“The word stops, the heart dies. / The wind counts the lost goodbyes” (12.7).19
“Four Black Dragons” is more forthright, but insists on displacing the impending
threat into the realm of the sublime—Perry’s ships, the “dragons” in the song’s
title, become “volcanoes” with the second observer—couched in terms that are
ambiguously either exaggerated through metaphor or resulting from an incapacity
to grasp what is occurring in concrete terms. This song, too, entails a complex
process of evasion and deflection. First, the point of view is displaced from that of
either the show’s known characters or an objectifying distance—perspectives that
would conform to narrative conventions—to that of two randomly inconsequential
citizens, a fisherman and a thief. Second, the two descriptions, later intermingled and
elaborated into a more general counterpoint of rising panic, though wildly different
in some particulars, concur on others, and especially on the conclusion, endorsed by
the Reciter, that the arrival portends the “end of the world.” And third is the attempt
to manage fear by describing the people’s rising panic in a miniature set of variations
centered around the image of the gull: “And the women started screaming / Like the
gulls. / Hai! Hai!”20 (12.8) // “And they crowded into temples / And they flapped
about the square – / Hai! – / Like the gulls.”21 (12.9) // “Then the hooves clattered
/ And the warriors were there, / Driving quickly through the panic / Like the gulls.”22
(12.10) // “And the swords were things of beauty / As they glided through the air
– / Hai! / Like the gulls” (12.11).23 With this song, though it is couched within
“Japanese” modes of episodic variations that offer alternate perspectives on the same
thing, and though its perspective is also fully Japanese, the supreme vulnerability
of that perspective is suddenly evident; setting the stage for cataclysm. But, while
definitive, the cataclysm portended in and by “Chrysanthemum Tea,” which follows,
is not entirely what one might expect, for it, too, retains the established Japanese
perspective, albeit with a crucial difference.
As one might expect, given the strategy of deflection established in the opening
numbers of Pacific Overtures, the actual plot of “Chrysanthemum Tea” is only
obliquely related to the rest of the show, since the death of one in a succession
of interchangeable Shoguns (interchangeable, at least, for the purposes of Pacific
Overtures) has little bearing on the success of the American initiative. But there is,
as one might also expect, a vital and central connection, if obliquely rendered: the
slow poisoning of the Shogun against a backdrop of gradually approaching disaster
18 Ibid., p. 13.
19 Ibid., p. 15.
20 Ibid., p. 19.
21 Ibid., p. 19.
22 Ibid., p. 20.
23 Ibid., p. 20.
allegorically represents Japan’s situation and fate. In this sense, following the
matryoshka structure described above, the song both replicates an essential strand of
the show’s larger trajectory, and finds its own encapsulation in a summary aphorism
(which is not, however, a Haiku): “The blossom falls on the mountain. / The mountain
falls on the blossom. / All things fall” (12.12).24 Indeed, the aphorism is poised,
like the song, between describing a timeless, unchanging cycle and pointing to the
inevitability of change and attendant loss. But while the song consists of its own
cycles within cycles, as each day described in the song unfolds in parallel to the last,
it ultimately emphasizes the latter certainty—“all things fall”—both through its use
of documentary vaudeville and in providing the first strongly stated analogue to the
show’s larger narrative. It is not this larger resonance that registers most powerfully,
however, nor is that resonance the source for the song’s ability to relax its American
audience with a taste of the familiar. Rather, it is the construction of a strongly stated
narrative imperative—as a way of organizing time that will overtake and overwhelm
the cyclic stasis of the established Japanese element—that aligns this number with
Western sensibilities.
That the crucial dimension of “Chrysanthemum Tea” is its prevailing emphasis
on narrative temporality—a dimension implicitly allied with the West—is confirmed
by nearly every detail of the song, not excluding either its overtly Japanese profile
or its palliative effect on audiences. Allegorically, the Shogun represents Japan,
whereas his wife, his soothsayer, his priests, his samurai, and his other companions
each contributes a distinct Japanese profile that proves wanting in some respect. His
wife launches every day’s cycle with a vocalized “song” (not included in the cast
recording) that, as stipulated in the stage directions, adds “to no one’s pleasure,”25
whereas the others all offer responses to the Americans’ “pacific overtures,”26 whose
inadequacies are clear even to the increasingly comatose Shogun.
His mother, on the other hand, is at every turn and with everything she sings
and does, effectively acting as an agent of the West, even though she, like the rest
of the Japanese, desires to defeat the American initiative. Besides the most overt
way in which she opposes “Japan”—by poisoning the Shogun—everything about
her presentation is set in opposition to the established Japanese manner in a way
that directly invokes the imperative to narrative. She begins (in a part of the song
not included in the cast album) by demanding the Shogun’s attention, interrupting
his participation in important cyclic rituals (eating rice and drinking tea). When
she has his attention, she launches into a song that quickly devolves into pastiche
vaudeville, with sing-song rhythms and elaborately presented rhymes, alternating
between a seemingly endless and constantly evolving set of rhymes launched by the
key line, “There are ships in the bay,” as well as archly clever rhymes such as “If
the tea the Shogun drank will / Serve to keep the Shogun tranquil” or the “weren’t
24 Ibid., p. 36.
25 Ibid., p. 30.
26 The phrase “pacific overtures” comes from a passage in Perry’s journal read out in the
course of the show (ibid., p. 54), in which he makes clear that he means to back up America’s
“peaceful” overtures with overwhelming force, if necessary.
/ deterrent” lines quoted above.27 Particularly telling are the simple, repetitive
rhythms of her song, setting up and maintaining a clock-like regulatory beat that
does, indeed, register in literal terms as a marking of time, specifically as dictated by
the Americans. Thus, each day begins with a “countdown” that transmutes Japanese
designations (days named for animals) with a simple enumeration, a substitution
that looks ahead to the exchange of poetic idioms in earlier “Japanese” numbers for
the recitation of statistics in “Next”: “It’s the Day of the Rat, my lord, / There are
four days remaining, / And I see you’re entertaining,”28 (12.13) // “It’s the Day
of the Ox, my lord. / With but three days remaining / And today already waning,”29
(12.14) // “It’s the Day of the Tiger, my lord. / Only two days remaining, / And I’m
tired of explaining,”30 (12.15) // “It’s the Day of the Rabbit, my lord. / There’s but
one day remaining, / And beside the fact it’s raining” (12.16).31
But it is the “clock ticking” of the rhymes set off by the first mention, each day,
of the Americans’ presence (“There are ships in the bay”), each time emphasized
by an enhanced orchestral presence, that creates the requisite sense of suspense to
underscore that we are within an unfolding narrative, a context reinforced by the
daily countdown, the mother’s growing impatience, and the “ticking” off of her long-
a rhymes to a melody that reiterates the same pitch on nearly every beat (probably
not by coincidence, the reiterated pitch is A; here, Italics indicate reiterations of that
pitch): “There are ships in the bay, / They’ve been sitting there all day / With a letter
to convey / And they haven’t gone away” (12.17).32
Considerably less subtle for those attuned to such references (although it may not
even register for others) is another East-West transmutation buried within the song,
from the descending melodic sequences and near sequences heard in earlier numbers,
into the more regulated descending melodic sequence of Dies irae, a traditional
European emblem of death, the ultimate timekeeper. “Advantages” begins with such
an “unregulated” sequence and returns occasionally to similar configurations (in
Italics): “In the middle of the world we float / In the middle of the sea.”33 (12.18)
// “Things are being done / Somewhere out there, not here.”34 (12.19) // “Beyond
the screens / That glide aside / Are further screens that open wide” (12.20).35 The
mournful flute melody of “There Is No Other Way” less distinctly bears this general
melodic contour (12.21), and “Four Black Dragons” buries it within the faster
configurations of its larger melodic shapes, which tend to move upward in rising
panic (descending patterns in Italics): “I was standing on the beach … / It was early
in July / And the day was getting hot” (12.22).36
27 Ibid., p. 34.
28 Ibid., p. 31.
29 Ibid., p. 33.
30 Ibid., p. 35.
31 Ibid., p. 36.
32 Ibid., p. 31, emphasis added.
In “Chrysanthemum Tea,” part of what makes the wife’s vocalizing so annoying
is its strictly regulated melodic sequence, which reproduces the Dies irae pattern
(rising second, falling third) with the falling third filled in. But with the other
contributors, each introduced by the mother just after offering her poisoned tea to
the Shogun, the Dies irae pattern appears more exactly (Dies irae melodic allusions
in Italics): (Soothsayer) “Wood star / Water star / All celestial omens are – /
Excellent.”37 (12.23) // “Ahh – spider on the wall! / Signifies success. / Whose
success I cannot guess – / Unless.”38 (12.24) // (Priests) “Night waters do not break
the moon. / That merely is illusion. / The moon is sacred.”39 (12.25) // (Praying
Companions) “Blow, wind. / Great wind. / Great Kamikaze, / Wind of the gods”
(12.26).40
In the priests’ contribution, the final lines of each verse are sung in parallel
fourths, an effect of intoning that both underscores the connection to Western chant
(the source for the Dies irae) and recalls the parallel open fourths and fifths that
have long been part of cliché representations of Asian music, indulged by Sondheim
occasionally as a specifically “Asian” effect in Pacific Overtures. But this kind of
musical blending, which as in the priests’ concluding phrases combines strongly
profiled tokens of East and West, occurs fairly often thereafter. In “Please Hello,” for
example, fragments of the Dies irae combine once again with parallel open sonorities,
to layer an Asian cast onto an American musical emblem: the Sousa-style march in
6/8 time (12.27). This same cross-breeding also colors the contributions of the
English (a Gilbert-and-Sullivan-style patter song; 12.28), Dutch (a wooden-shoe
number; 12.29), and French (a Maurice-Chevalier-style soft shoe; 12.30).41 But
the effect is especially pronounced in the pivotal song of the denouement, “Pretty
Lady,” a song organized, musically, around two Western devices, the lamenting
figure of the descending tetrachord and imitative contrapuntal techniques (including
canon, diminution, augmentation, and stretto), but which introduces the tetrachord
within parallel open sonorities.
Especially important in “Pretty Lady” is the shift from the Dies irae to the
descending tetrachord as the representative of Western traditions. The Dies irae was
borrowed from the Catholic Requiem Mass by composers beginning with Berlioz
(Symphonie fantastique, 1830); following his use, it became a frequent symbol
referring not to the service itself, but rather to either death or the satanic, as a portent.42
This is indeed how the motive tends to function in Pacific Overtures, especially in

39 Ibid., p. 34, emphasis added. The Priests continue to intone the Dies irae as they
complete their sophistic syllogism: “No foreign ships can break our laws. / That also is
illusion. / Our laws are sacred. // It follows there can be no ships. / They must be an illusion.
/ Japan is sacred.”
41 The other contribution, from a moody Russian, has much less of this element.
42 The Dies irae is used this way, for example, in Liszt’s Totentanz (1847 and 1862) and
Dante Symphony (1856), Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre (1874), Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da
Rimini (1876), Mahler’s Second Symphony (1894), Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of
Paganini (1934) and Symphonic Dances (1940), and Dallapiccola’s Canti di prigionia (1941).
“Chrysanthemum Tea.” Laments, on the other hand, look back in sadness to mourn
a loss, and Sondheim’s use of the descending tetrachord, although not following the
traditional minor-mode shape, seems an apt extension of a practice that goes back at
least to early opera (Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna, 1608 was an influential early
example). Thus, to frame and articulate the principal narrative trajectory of Pacific
Overtures, Sondheim employs two traditional European melodic emblems of death,
one to portend, the other to mourn.
That “Pretty Lady” mourns, and that this may be its most important function
in the show, is one of the subtlest dimensions of a song whose dramatic point is
ambiguously either a rape, an attempted rape, a misguided flirtation by three British
sailors with a samurai’s daughter they mistake for a geisha, or some combination of
these, depending on one’s perspective. Clearly, the sailors do not understand they
are doing harm. Just as clearly, the samurai who then kills two of their number
is rightly enraged, and acts to protect his daughter, her honor, and the sanctity of
their home. And the allegorical roles of all five players couldn’t be plainer. Within
the number itself, Western tokens of complex beauty—the intertwined lines of the
song’s counterpoint over a ground bass—confuse and overwhelm the daughter, who
can have no defense against what she does not comprehend (12.31). Beyond the
number, the sense of “Japan” being overwhelmed by the “West” directly recalls
“Please Hello,” in which the counterpoint is decidedly less refined, and the rape,
though metaphoric, is both elaborated as an overt act of force (hence the cannons)
and fully consummated (through Lord Abe’s coerced signing of treaties with each
foreign Admiral).
But “Pretty Lady,” as a lament, more poignantly recalls two other numbers. Most
immediately, it continues the line of development described by “A Bowler Hat,” in
which Kayama records the slow death of his own Japanese identity within a sadly
rendered documentary vaudeville whose temporal cycles expand the historical purview
of “Chrysanthemum Tea” to a span of many years. The relationship is reinforced
subsequently, when Kayama’s attempts to appease the English Ambassador over the
death of the sailors result in his own death at the hand of samurai assassins, led by
Manjiro, his former friend. And this dramatic congruence underscores what else is
being mourned by the song: the possibilities of cultural rapprochement symbolized
by the friendship of Kayama and Manjiro, which is given its fullest elaboration in
“Poems,” from Act I.
One of the most vivid consequences of the unusual musical shaping of Pacific
Overtures around temporal incompatibilities is the isolation of its numbers into three
main groupings (Japan, the West, and in-between), with “Poems,” “A Bowler Hat,”
and “Pretty Lady” forming a wistful nexus of exception to the apparent necessity of
either-or.43 The latter two occur after the battle for Japan has essentially been lost,
Many film scores use it, either as a “leitmotive” or more elaborately, as in The Shining (1980);
Sondheim himself uses it pervasively in Sweeney Todd (1979).
43 I do not include “Lion’s Dance” in this summary because it is not a song, but rather
a dance used in Japanese traditions to ward off evil spirits. Here, it only naïvely marks a
moment of triumph over the Americans, since it is danced by Commodore Perry and musically
anticipates the American segment of “Please Hello.”
tracing the in-between time of transition, acceptance, and mourning. But “Poems” is
extraordinarily hopeful, as Manjiro exuberantly transforms every poetic image that
Kayama offers of his beloved Tamate into an image of America, most poignantly with
the image of the moon: “Moon, / I love her like the moon, / Washing yesterday away,
/ As my lady does, / America” (12.32).44 The image expresses Manjiro’s simple
exuberance at the prospect of bringing America to Japan, but his words also resonate
ominously with the larger context. Perhaps the moon, long a symbol of intoxicating
madness, has blinded him to the fact that the “yesterday” America has most recently
undertaken to wash away is Japan’s. Moreover, Kayama has been blinded by his
improbable success, with Manjiro’s help, in “outwitting” the Americans. That their
subterfuge was, in fact, dishonorable, and their victory hollow, will not escape him
for long, however; on their arrival to his home, he will discover that his wife Tamate
has claimed herself, in suicide, as America’s first victim.
Yet, despite the tragic undertow of “Poems,” its expressed hopefulness cannot
simply be put aside as a phantom. It is, indeed, exemplary of the capacity of a
musical number in a show to transcend its dramatic “now”—in this case fraught
with impending betrayal on both sides—to become a different kind of “now,”
capable, like the Haiku, of finding renewed resonance and application across and
within changing realities. In this way, its expressed hope becomes something like the
Haiku’s pretension to timeless truth; it is not for nothing that the entire song is based
in a Haiku-like poetic idiom.45 Beyond the show, “Poems” continues to express that
hope, of parallel cultural tracks enriching each other, even in misunderstanding.
Within the show, however, the capacity of “Poems” to extend its “now” beyond its
own moment only deepens the tragedy of the second act, when its hopefulness has
long been betrayed, and former friends have become mortal enemies. The song does
this both obliquely, through the melancholy echoes it finds in “A Bowler Hat” and
“Pretty Lady,” and more directly, by encouraging the wanton insistence of “now”
over “history” in “Someone in a Tree.”
One may well query Sondheim’s temporal differentiation between East and West.
A sense of timelessness and suspension is after all what the West has always found
in the East; it is part of the Orientalist impulse that Sondheim and his collaborators
(principally John Weidman and Hal Prince) sought to avoid in telling the story from
the perspective of the Japanese and employing, against all odds, an all-Asian, mostly
male cast on a mid-1970s Broadway stage. The sense of encountering a culture frozen
in time was an especially attractive feature to the mid-to-late nineteenth-century
West as it sought to break down long-standing resistance to “progress” in such
places as Siam and Japan. In both places, ultimately, the process of Westernizing was
directed from within, through Kings Mongkut and Chulalonghorn in Siam (who bore
little resemblance to their caricatures in The King and I) and the Meiji restoration in
Japan.46 But it was imposed, first of all, from without, and by the threat of irresistible
44 Ibid., p. 42.
45 See Banfield, pp. 266–268; see also my The American Musical and National Identity,
pp. 274–275.
46 See Ibid., chapter six, especially pp. 250–253 and 261–265.
force—not just the force of arms, but also the persuasive force of the intertwined
narratives of “progress” and “Westernization.”
If pre-1853 Japan becomes a kind of idealized Neverland in Pacific Overtures,
a “floating kingdom” where time has magically stood still, it is not wholly fantasy,
neither in its historical representation of Japan nor as an American construct. The
Japanese “facts” of Pacific Overtures—apart from the extended personal stories
of Manjiro and Kayama—are more or less as presented in the show, and its
expressed attitudes are consonant with historical documents; indeed, the privileged
Japanese perspective was itself extrapolated from historical drawings of Perry by
the Japanese, which inspired Hal Prince to try to tell the story from the Japanese
perspective.47 Moreover, Japan did “float” for an extraordinary amount of time,
during which the West became “Enlightened” and “Romantic” by turns; by any
number of measures, the West reinvented itself several times while Japan stood still.
As for the American context, Pacific Overtures provided an important opportunity—
during the Bicentennial year of 1976, when it opened—to probe the two modes of
history that have shaped the nation’s own “progress”: the relatively static history of
traditions (the home-grown resonator for Pacific Overtures’s timeless cycles) and
the history of historical change, driven by events. America’s own “tradition,” of
fostering a dynamic impulse of exploration and mastery, while remaining always
fearful of losing its moorings in traditional culture, brings the temporal conflict of
Pacific Overtures home. And not to just any home, but to a distinctly American place
that has found its own way to master the double meanings of “now” and “history”:
the Broadway stage, which wantonly exports its theatrical “now,” in the form of its
songs, to express and reinforce a sense of history that has more to do with shared
feeling than with historical events or European traditions. Pacific Overtures teaches
us that we might celebrate and mourn, and then move on with both feelings intact,
by offering us realities and fantasies with equal force and equal consequence. Thus,
the show ends with “Next,” as the “real” blend of Japan and the West (since much
of the song derives from the opening song of the show, recast against a musical
simulation of industrial progress); it feels both harshly exhilarating and deeply sad.
But “Poems” outlives its dramatic moment and historical cataclysm to remind us of
other possibilities—gentler, more human, and, if not timeless, at least temporally
resilient.
47 See Ibid., pp. 279–280.

PART III
PART
Reinventing Analysis
Taylor & Francis
Chapter Thirteen
Three Little Essays on Evanescence

Mitchell Morris
1. Identifiable Tastes
It was a dramatic but complex ascent. In mid-February of 2003, the Marvel Comics–
derived action film Daredevil premiered to mixed critical reviews, but good box
office. Ignored by film critics, but not by many adolescent moviegoers, were a host
of rock songs embedded in the soundtrack. Mostly from the larger Nu Metal and Alt
Rock generic neighborhoods, these songs carried enough potential popularity that
many of them were also featured in a related compilation album (not the soundtrack,
but more of a movie spin-off) entitled Daredevil: The Album, released little more than
a week before the film’s premiere. The artists featured (Moby, Nickelback, Finger
Eleven, Hoobastank, Seether, etc.) appeared for a single track on the release—all but
a little-known group called Evanescence, who appeared twice thanks to the already-
palpable interest of fans in their songs.
The band’s first major album, Fallen, was released the following month; one
of the songs featured in the film, “Bring Me to Life,” almost immediately sailed
into Billboard’s Top 20. By April, Fallen had already sold over one million copies,
earning the certification of Platinum from the RIAA; within a calendar year, the
album was certified Quadruple Platinum, and was still selling. At the 2004 Grammys,
Evanescence, nominated for five awards in all, won in the categories Best New Artist
and Best Hard Rock Performance. But the band experienced a slow collapse during
the year in which they had garnered so much success; guitarist Ben Moody, who had
co-founded the group with vocalist/keyboardist Amy Lee, suddenly left the band
entirely on the European leg of the first Evanescence tour. The separation between
Moody and Lee was bitter and public, and Evanescence suddenly seemed to, well,
evanesce. News of changes in membership, health problems, legal disputes, all kept
Evanescence out of view until October of 2006, when the second album, The Open
Door, was released. As of the end of that month, sales have been very strong, critical
praise predictably mixed.
On the face of it, this little narrative could have been told hundreds of times:
ambitious but untried group strives for success, and finally achieves it, but the
stresses of popularity fragment it and send it back to an occluded place from which
it may or may not return. What’s most interesting about this version of the tale is the
astonishing array of materials that circulates around the marketing and reception of
Fallen. There is no reasonable way, in a little essay, to take full stock of the ways
that the album has been contextualized, of the elaborate nexus of discourses that
has grown up around and through it. But I want to suggest a few ways of framing
this story that may be of some larger interest to scholars who care about American
popular music in the Age of the Net.
First, notice again the priority of the visual in the narrative above. Both “Bring
Me to Life” and “My Immortal” appeared first for most listeners contextualized by
the visual and dramatic preoccupations of Daredevil. A blind superhero (with toxic-
waste induced echolocation) who is a selfless lawyer by day, a vigilante by night, and a
tormented Catholic to boot, seeks a relationship with a gorgeous and equally vengeful
woman warrior who is tragically killed. The visual aspect of the film includes the
standard superhero buff styles of American comics, with a relatively muted palette
and touches of the Neo-Goth-Expressionist stylings established for the Hollywood
comicbook style in Tim Burton’s Batman films. “My Immortal” itself appears behind
a fraughtly poignant scene where the blind superhero Matt Murdock/Daredevil (Ben
Affleck) is blocked, by the elegant interposition of an umbrella, from “seeing”
his romantic interest Elektra (Jennifer Garner) as she attends her father’s funeral.
Imagine the range of personal investments that might work in such a situation: such
preoccupations as the dynamics of looking/half-looking/not-looking; the complex
thwarting of full romance; the sheer visual pleasure of a beautiful figure (however
unseen) in the rain; the aching tension between the revelations and concealments of
the self; mourning; nostalgia; the list is as endless as the spectators. And the music is
“behind” this scene—it seems to recede before the visual and dramatic spectacle, but
also offers itself as the noumenal inspiration and grounding of that action.
The use of Evanescence’s songs in Daredevil could not help but amount to more
than a clever commercial tie-in, a way of accumulating useful advance advertising.
The affective and cognitive intensity of the film (for those who found it successful)
inevitably contributed in multifarious ways to interest in the music; only the most
obvious ones are the immediate connection of Evanescence to the Goth scene and the
extra attention to theatricality as it appears in the music. But we are left with more
questions than answers. Does it matter that these songs appeared in film first rather
than on music video? What was the interpretive impact of the radically different music
videos when they appeared later in 2003? Concert appearances? Net materials? The
interpenetration of media and genre since the 1990s is widely remarked, but from a
musicological point of view there’s been little focused consideration of its critical
implications, much less the profusion of interpretive possibilities that arises when
songs occupy so many intricate relations to the realms of the visible.
A second frame, of interest chiefly because of its sheer strangeness, comes from
the sequence of “tribute albums” that followed in the wake of Fallen’s huge success.
These recordings in general are re-stylings of favorite songs from a particular artist
or a specific album. Although such cover albums existed before the 1990s, they
became more common in the middle of that decade. At first, tribute albums were
complexly articulated exercises in nostalgia and renovation, but by the beginning
of the 2000s they seem to have become fully naturalized as a kind of common
The main exception to this generalization is Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical

Multimedia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). With respect to the impact of the internet, the
most useful overview is Steve Jones, “Music and the Internet,” Popular Music, 19/2 (April
2000): 217–230.
Three Little Essays on Evanescence 181
industry response to critical or general popularity. Evanescence received the tribute
treatment at least four times between 2003 and 2005: The String Quartet Tribute to
Evanescence (2003); A Gothic Acoustic Tribute to Evanescence (2004); Eclipse:
Piano Tribute to Evanescence (2005); and The Electro Tribute to Evanescence
(2005). These spin-offs range from odd-but-somewhat-interesting to amazingly bad.
What’s more interesting than the music contained on the recordings, however, is the
question of what kind of activity this represents. On the one hand, it resembles the
elaborate changes increasingly being rung on internet materials, a kind of cyber-
signifyin’ that mixes love and rivalry in startling ways. On the other (and especially
given the chancy nature of the arrangements and performances), it seems a terrible
kind of debasement, the result of the industry’s greed and contempt for its audience.
Who knows how to choose among these? Is there even a choice?
As a third frame, consider the sequence of reviews that have appeared on the
website Epinions.com. This is a website that facilitates on-line shopping by offering
consumer reports to readers. Everyone who contributes reviews is encouraged to
aim at helpfulness and accessibility by a ratings system that rewards effective
reviewers. One of the effects of this structure is to encourage a rhetoric of condensed
commonplaces, the generalizations that are consensually the most helpful in the
practice of buying. As of late 2006 there were 96 reviews listed under the site’s main
listing for Evanescence’s Fallen, from September 7, 2003 to June 27, 2006. Even a
casual survey of the reviews will reveal a cluster of references to Goth, Nu Metal, and
comments about Evanescence’s connections to the scene of Contemporary Christian
Music. The Goth label attaches to Fallen’s anguished, spooky lyrics, the music’s
liking for the minor mode, its references to “classical” styles, and its evocative
effects-processing; in a more performance-directed aspect, from the theatrical,
neo-Romantic fashion sense of Amy Lee. Nu Metal features are the driving power
chords of the guitars combined with the “dirty” quasi-industrial effects processing,
and “Bring Me to Life,” the biggest hit from the album, a brief but effective bit of
white-boy rap.
Both generic labels seem reasonable from a mainstream point of view—but of
course, within the circles of committed Goths and Nu Metal fans, Evanescence’s
music has been a source of contention. Such boundary-disputes are less central
here than the peculiar character of the middle zone, that place where genres, styles,
and movements keep being dissolved into something more and less than simple
commerce, where the non-specific desirers, those who want something they don’t
yet recognize, but want it to be familiar all the same, come to buy. This may seem in
some ways to be close to that magical construct that used to be called “the general
public,” but the devastations that have accompanied—or, better, have constituted—
4 In the interests of specificity: Epinions.com began as an independent consumer review

website in May 1998 and was merged with Shopping.com in April 2003; Shopping.com was
acquired by eBay, Inc. in August 2005, thus creating a vast and fascinating net complex that
has an undetermined impact on the production, distribution, and experiencing of music.
4
Daredevil is mentioned infrequently, and only in passing, which might put my first
frame under some question. But then, the purpose of Epinions is to describe the object-to-be-
desired, not to dilate upon its critical frame.
the restructuring of American society, politics, and cultural life since the beginning
of the 1980s have left something much more diffuse, much more fragmented, much
more heterogeneous. There is a certain psychic fragility to this kind of space, which
is most vivid on the internet still—confusions over borders, distances, identities,
unities, conflicts over holding together and dissemblence. And perhaps it’s true that
Evanescence’s polystylistic generalizing makes the most sense in this space.
This is audible, for instance, in the first single to reach the Top 10, “Bring Me
to Life.” The song is structured in a way that would be perfectly familiar to anyone
who had listened to American and British rock from the late 1960s to the present
(13.1):
Section bars
Intro 4
Verse 1 4+4
Verse 2 4 + 3 + 1 (6 beats)
Chorus 1 4+4+1
Verse 3 4 + 4+ 1
Chorus 2 4+4+4+4
Bridge 4+4
Retransition 4+4
Chorus 3 4 + 4 + 4 +2
Outro 4+4
The mode of “Bring Me to Life” is solidly e-aeolian, with special attention paid to
the 3rd and 6th degrees. Amy Lee’s melody stays within a relatively small compass,
with no extravagant vocalism with respect to range. The guest singer/rapper, Paul
McCoy of the group 12 Stones, seems present in order to add rhythmic energy and
registral/timbral contrast to Lee’s voice. But there is a source of irregularity in this
song. It comes from texture and timbre.
The piece begins with a dreamy little piano figure draped across soft long tones
in the strings. Audially speaking, piano and strings are in a kind of middle distance
within the mix, but they carry with them an almost non-diegetic quality in retrospect.
Amy Lee’s vocal entrance at bar 5 contrasts with this; it is clouded by a dull
reverberant boom—just the sort of noise that would be generated singing a breathy
“h” hard against the microphone. Opposed to the more depersonalized strings and
piano, Lee’s voice is intimate, close enough that her very tissues seem audible. And
the music has already evoked a confusing, perhaps impossible virtual space within
which the song’s drama is to take place. But when the scratchy split channel guitar
rhythm of bar 8 leads to a repetition of that boom, the connection of that sound to
Lee’s singing body begins to slip. As the groove begins to thunder along, the music

Impossible but not unfamiliar—such spatial anomalies are a standard production
strategy in a huge amount of music from the late 1980s on, especially in Industrial and related
genres.
assumes a suprapersonal force of its own; Lee seems as if she’s riding atop it. Is this
opening sequence of twelve bars an aural metaphor of interiority gradually finding
expression? Perhaps it’s a musical establishment of the song’s principal imperative:
“bring me to life.”
To be sure, it’s the individuality of Lee’s voice that counts as the subjective
center of this song. Countless reviews and personal accounts converge on Lee’s
singing as the primary attraction of the band. That individuality is accentuated when
set against the fractured textures of “Bring Me to Life.” The end of verse 2, for
instance, ends in the two-beat extension mentioned before; the end of chorus 1 and
verse 3 likewise end with extensions. Each one of these spots is a hole in the texture.
It’s not so much a matter of disrupting the meter—that is barely noticeable. Rather,
these are places where nearly all of the music stops, and sounds that are fragile or
damaged begin to emerge. In the first case, the sudden silence allows Lee’s voice,
closing on the “m” of “home,” to sit within its glossy reverb a moment more. In the
second case, all the music shuts down except for a muffled portion of the groove that
chugs along as if driven by some compulsion. The rhythm established by the groove
in that open space also appears in the final gap after verse 3, this time in echoey
effects-processed strings.
So these are spots where the expressivity of Lee’s wonderful voice is
counterpointed with another kind of expressivity, that of noise. “Bring Me to Life,”
like all of Fallen, is very heavily produced. All of the manipulations mentioned above
owe their value to their involvement with one or another kind of noise. The balance
between “music” and “noise” (or perhaps between homogeneous and heterogeneous
sound) is especially noticeable at the song’s retransition: Paul McCoy, who has
spoken/shouted throughout the first part of the song, begins to approach singing,
but his move away from noise also marks the moment that the strings abandon their
lyrical qualities entirely, and fall into an exciting pattern of scrubby figures partially
submerged in the texture. The song ends in this fragmented state, with the return
of the piano figurations of the opening, a melancholy string melody in the middle
registers, and remnants of the groove left for bright, noisy electronica.
What’s all this about? The lyrics of “Bring Me to Life” are an impassioned plea
for rescue; it seems possible to read the ambiguous movements between clear and
occluded sounds as metaphors of personal state, in significant conflict with the direct
vocal utterance. The first-person state is “frozen,” “numb,” “asleep”—but not so
much so that she does not recognize her own need. She is in need of some form of
salvation, and the music represents her desperate plight, without however giving
any assurance of any particular outcome. Whence might this rescue come? The song
does not specify, and this is important, for it connects to the last frame of this essay.
The enormous growth of a Conservative Evangelical Protestant culture in
the United States since the 1970s is one of the most important but insufficiently
studied aspects of recent American history. Beginning in the late 1960s, this
previously marginalized group developed an intricate set of institutions, theological
and ideological stances, forms of piety, and political associations that now play
a decisive role in most aspects of American life. What matters for the moment is
that this culture was strongly shaped by contact with the counterculture of the late
1960s. It seemed that some of the enthusiasm of the hippies could be translated into
celebrations of the descending Paraclete; struggles for Civil Rights and against the
Vietnam War could be seen as lessons in political action; there were multiple ways
of refusing Establishments. One of the early lessons learned was that it was worth
paying attention to youth cultures. The creation of alternative musical institutions
lagged until the beginning 1980s, but in that decade Pentecostal-inspired “Praise and
Worship” music grew in popularity among many denominations, the Conservative
Evangelical Protestants began to expand at the expense of the mainline Protestant
denominations, and less expensive technology began to create more space for
occasional musicians. All of these features created a place for more music with
specifically Evangelical associations. Many religious leaders in these circles, too,
began to find ways of making accommodations with what would formerly have been
considered excessively secular culture. By the mid-1980s there was a full-fledged
Christian music industry in the United States. Operating largely out of sight of the
mainstream media, it developed its own outlets for publication, advertising, and
performance, and established powerful ties with Evangelical Protestantism of most
stripes.
The band members of Evanescence grew up at least in part in a scene where
Christian Contemporary Music (CCM), as it had come to be called, was a major
presence. It was their connection to this social and musical world that occasioned the
most controversy when the band broke in 2003. In the fall of 1998, before the band’s
first EP release, Moody and Lee gave an interview to Enclave, an “underground
Christian” website, that identified Evanescence as Evangelical Christian in sensibility.
According to Moody, the two
had the same dream from the beginning; to write with everything in us and totally do the
music we love while at the same time using that as a tool to share with others what Christ
has done in our lives.
And in a 2000 interview published on the now-defunct website Stranger Things

Magazine, Moody declared “God is Love.” By 2003, however, the band’s
identifications had shifted significantly. A great fury broke out in Christian music
circles, when, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the two denied incorporating
specifically Christian content in their songs. Lee went further: “I guarantee that if
Christian bookstore owners listened to some of these songs, they wouldn’t sell the
CD.” This distancing, combined with Moody’s occasional expletive (variations on
There is a range of scholarship on this topic. One excellent account is Larry Eskridge,
“‘One Way’: Billy Graham, the Jesus Generation, and the Idea of an Evangelical Youth
Culture,” Church History, 67/1 (March 1998): 83–106. More specific musical information
is contained in Mitchell Morris, “Kansas and the Prophetic Tone,” American Music, 18/1
(Spring 2000): 1–38.
As of late 2006, Enclave is in hiatus because of web adjustments. The interview is
available at www.notachristianband.com/enclave.shtml.
4 Moody went on in his comments to emphasize religious inclusiveness and tolerance,
explicitly opposing himself to the public demonstrations of Religious Right homophobia that
have become such a demoralizing commonplace in the American political-religious landscape.
The interview is available at www.strangerthingsmag.net/evanescence.html.
“fuck”) and a joking reference to Jesus, firmly set Evanescence out of bounds with
respect to CCM. The reaction was swift: Wind-Up Records, the band’s label, yanked
over 10,000 copies of Fallen from Christian bookstores and radio. By the end of
2003 Evanescence had decisively separated itself from its association with CCM.
And yet some of the markers are still present on Fallen. Of particular importance
is a kind of lyrical abstraction. The words and dramatic situation of “Bring Me to
Life” could easily be a plea to a person, perhaps a mentor, perhaps a lover; they
could just as easily be the prayer of an anxious evangelical. And in fact, one
song on Fallen, “Tourniquet,” mentions God and Christ explicitly. Written by the
band’s drummer Rocky Gray for Soul Embraced, a Christian death metal band he
briefly formed, “Tourniquet” questions whether a suicide-in-progress will result in
damnation. (As is typical of early 2000 America, the very representation of suicide
in the song raised alarm bells among some parents, who seem to hold to the belief
that all representations are inherently irresistable. Too much faith in advertising?) If
Goth and Nu Metal are styles that carry a range of likely but not mandatory values,
clusters of images, and styles of deportment; CCM, however, is not a style, but a
movement, and one firmly committed to specific and mandatory values, clusters of
images, and styles of deportment. If the history of Evanescence as a group shows
a departure from that world, it also shows a musical style crucially shaped by the
world it has left.
Not all stories have morals (at least not ones that come easily). But maybe this
one does. The frames may sometimes go missing in the course of events, but their
shaping influence remains. They shape the contexts of understanding; they leave
traces in the sediment of the interactions they have enabled. This makes them less
evanescent than might be expected.
2. Christian Girls Singing
The story goes like this: when Ben Moody first met Amy Lee, she was a girl playing
the piano and singing at Youth Camp. Whatever the fine points of Lee’s upbringing,
most details of her biography place her within, or at least very close to, the complicated
world of modern Evangelical Christianity. Her father, John Lee, is a well-known radio
DJ in Little Rock, Arkansas; her mother is described as a homemaker. She attended
Pulaski Academy, a highly-rated prep school in Little Rock that identifies itself as
“non-sectarian” but committed to “strong values.”10 And there’s the long-disputed
nature of her religious sensibility. One of the most interesting issues Lee’s striking
performances bring up come from the way she incarnates a group of anxieties most
pressing in the culture of Conservative Evangelical Protestantism but not restricted
to it: the precarious negotiations of adolescent girls with public self-expression.
Chris Willman, “Southern Discomfort,” Entertainment Weekly, 15 April 2003. The

interview is available at www.ew.com/report/0,6115.442363~4~0.html.
10 Among the markers of this traditional orientation may be counted Pulaski’s adherence
to a very restrained dress code, as well as its permitting a chapter of the IDEA club, a pro-
“Intelligent Design” advocacy group. It seems not to be strictly Evangelical or Fundamentalist
Protestant in character, however.
One of the first issues to become central in the development of Conservative
Christian culture at the beginning of the 1970s was child-rearing. Several books were
published in that decade that aimed to replace the child-rearing advice promulgated
earlier in the century by Dr Benjamin Spock, by then suspect to evangelical
Protestants for his political leanings as well as his attitudes on child-rearing. A list
of a mere four titles is nonetheless eloquent: James Dobson, Dare to Discipline
(1970); Beverly LaHaye, How to Develop Your Child’s Temperament (1977); James
Dobson, The Strong-Willed Child: Birth Through Adolescence (1978);11 J. Richard
Fugate, What the Bible Says About Child Training (1980). Although these books
were rarely noticed by the mainstream book press, rarely sold in secular bookstores,
and received little commentary outside Conservative Protestant circles, they sold
tremendously well, and created a substantial consensus about child-rearing in that
social world.
What these book titles suggest is borne out by more recent sociological
study: Conservative Evangelical Protestants, especially when they are Biblical
fundamentalists, have a strong investment in enforcing the obedience of children
to parents, and a horror of anything that seems rebellious, based strongly on their
commitment to reproducing Biblical strictures on children as exactly as possible.12
It’s perhaps a little simple to call this attitude authoritarian, since it makes distinctions
between authority believed to be divinely inspired and that of secular origin, but
it may fairly be said that submission to parental authority, which mirrors wifely
submission to husbands and human submission to God (according to carefully
framed literal readings of Biblical passages), is one of the central values of this
style of child-rearing. Add to this anxiety about rebelliousness a determination to
reinforce a strongly patriarchal understanding of gender roles and presentations, and
the difficulty that adolescence presents for American girls within this subculture is
particularly painful.
For in many—perhaps the most powerful—understandings of puberty and young
adulthood, this is a time of necessary rebellion. From a teenage point of view, as well
as that of sympathetic outsiders, this may be a matter of self-assertion. Teenagers
want to differentiate themselves from their parents. They want, they need, to be
able to say no—and in more ways than Nancy Reagan’s foolish anti-drug campaign
intended. But what looks like self-assertion can, with the slightest shift of vision,
look like the dread specter of rebellion. And in an “Almost Persuaded” world, where
death cuts off all chances, even a moment’s rebellion may seem like too great a risk
from the point of view of loving (if domineering) parents. With boys it’s bad enough,
11 Yes, this is the same Dobson who is the politically powerful boss of the viciously
homophobic and sexist Focus on the Family.
12 See, for instance, Christopher G. Ellison and Darren E. Sherkat, “Obedience and
Authority: Religion and Parental Values Reconsidered,” Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion, 32/4 (December 1993): 313–329, and Henry Danso, Bruce Hunsberger, and Michael
Pratt, “The Role of Parental Religious Fundamentalism and Right-Wing Authoritarianism
in Child-Rearing Goals and Practices,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 36/4
(December 1997): 496–511. One of the richest recent studies of this milieu is Eithne Johnson,
“Dr. Dobson’s Advice to Christian Women: The Story of Strategic Motherhood,” Social Text,
57 (Winter 1998): 55–82.
but with girls, who must submit, submit, submit, the line between self-assertion
and rebellion is even harder to find and maintain. The problem remains insoluble
because simple submission is not for most American kids a viable option, and there
are reasons to think that rebellion may be a very good thing indeed.
Let’s invoke some traditional enemies of Conservative Evangelical Protestants—
the psychoanalysts. Writing eloquently of the experimentation with identities, styles,
habits, manners, and relationships of teenagers, Adam Phillips suggests that hostility
and the chance of damage is in fact morally necessary to growth. Central to his
argument is a vision of the value of risky behavior:
Risks are taken as part of the mastery of noncompliance. One way the adolescent
differentiates himself, discovers his capacity for solitude—for a self-reliance that is not
merely a triumph over his need for the object—is by taking and making risks. He needs,
unconsciously, to endanger his body, to experiment with the representations of it...13
This testing of the borders, this invaluable stupidity is what makes teenagers into
self-sufficient adults, in part by prying them at last out of their full dependence on
the families of their birth.14 But there’s something at stake larger than traditional
family values and strong apron strings:
We create risk when we endanger something we value, whenever we test the relationship
between thrills and virtues. So to understand, to make conscious, what constitutes a risk
for us—our own personal repertoire of risks—is an important clue about what it is that we
do value; and it also enjoins us to consider the pleasures of carelessness.15
If this kind of risky behavior is de rigeur, but faces a culture overinvested in

obedience and conformity, then it is easy to see how moral panics can flare up. (Is
this part of the explanation for the increasing obsessions with teen suicide, drug use,
violence, and anomie, and the carceral hostility with which teenagers have been
treated since the early 1990s?)
Of course, risk for girls is almost certain to be connected with matters of sexual
propriety. This is, moreover, an area where some Conservative Evangelical Protestants
have made common cause with some strains of feminism—both have a substantial
interest in managing sexualized representations of women, for instance, and both
are interested in punishing sexual misdeeds against women. But where feminists
of any stripe would be likely to emphasize female personal autonomy (including
sexuality) as a desirable goal, Conservative Evangelical Protestants would favor
what Andrea Dworkin once rightly called a “separate but equal” policy that allowed
13 Adam Phillips, “On Risk and Solitude,” (On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored:
Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993),
p. 31.
14 To be sure, this is a psychological imperative almost surely restricted to post-
Reformation Western cultures. Useful correctives include Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World:
The Psycho-Analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1982); and Stanley N. Kurtz, All of the Mothers are One: Hindu India and the Cultural
Reshaping of Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
15 Phillips, p. 33.
women certain rights within the home when properly integrated into the structures
of patriarchal family life.
There is a tightrope to be walked here for girls in this cultural milieu, and in fact,
Amy Lee is well-known for having done so. To begin with, she occupies one of the
few places in Conservative Evangelical Protestant Culture where female expression
is relatively untrammeled—she performs music. The acceptability of what were
known as “lady preachers” in my Southern childhood is a matter of debate among
denominations that would fall in this religious sphere. To this day, questions of
women working outside the home, matters of dress (trousers, short hair, makeup),
and any speech at all in church can bring about flaring tempers and condemnation
among some classes and religious groups. But women are allowed to sing. Probably
every high school in the American South and Midwest has a few Christian girls who
sing, many of whom write their own songs. The frame of religious performance
sequesters them from doubts about whether they occupy a woman’s proper sphere.
The emotive basis of Evangelical religion, which prizes the rush of feeling as proof
of salvation, finds ready representation in singing and playing. And yet the act of
performing, of composing, offers scope for genuine creative work that can reach
beyond the limits normally considered appropriate for women.
It’s not hard to take Lee’s voice as assertive—she has a tremendous alto voice,
and uses it skillfully. She also shows an obvious command of songwriting skills,
and appears everywhere the presiding (if not controlling) figure of her band. But she
has also famously disapproved of gratuitous breast-baring and use of sexual display
as part of her performance. Given American nervousness over the relation between
representations and behaviors, such restraint has won her approval from various
sources. And her assertiveness is uncompromised.
Such a skillful management of her self-presentation as a woman is important,
because one of the main attractions of the band is surely its depressive Stimmung.
Evanescence plays “dark” rock—the lyrics rarely stray from themes of death, isolation,
despair, shame, guilt, rage, and confusion. And the musical textures, as discussed
in the essay above, construct such affects as surely as do the lyrics. That is to say,
Evanescence’s music carries violence, and the threat of violence, in nearly every song.
And that’s why it matters. For violence, like risk, is a defining act in teenage years. It
not only shapes individuals, but it also helps shape entire generational cohorts.
Another psychoanalyst, reflecting on the teenage years, sees this violence as a
matter of clearing space. According to Christopher Bollas,
[w]e know how each adolescence is a time of essential generational violence when the
emerging generation must “trash” parents and their objects in order to fashion a vision of
their own era … Generational violence is essential to generational identity. Indeed, only
when an emerging generation clearly violates the previous generation’s aesthetic can we
identify the emergence of a new generation.16
Every one of us enters a world that by our teens seems far too full. The violence
of definition is a risky matter, let us say, of seeing what we can do without. The
16 Christopher Bollas, “Generational Consciousness,” Being a Character: Psychoanalysis

and Self Experience (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), pp. 256, 258.
ability to perform or sustain such aesthetic violence is not equally distributed, of
course. An impoverished black teenager in rural Mississipi will have considerably
less space for this kind of violence because he carries too much material and cultural
disadvantagement to afford lots of autonomy; on the other hand, he may decide that
he has nothing to lose. By the same token, a well-behaved Mormon girl in Idaho
may be at odds with herself over how far she in fact wishes to separate from a family
she has been taught will be together for eternity. But even when we do not ourselves
have the capacity to pursue generational violence beyond a certain point or in certain
ways, it is still possible that we know of those who do. This may or may not matter
to us, but our bare knowledge of the violences and cherished objects of others is as
much a part of our senses of commonplace as the concrete interactions we have.
In the transactions by which generational identities are formed, resisted, revised,
and forgotten, music functions in ways that we as scholars have not even begun to
fathom. Maybe music can carry remarkable loads of symbolic violence and shape
it more effectively for large numbers of people than can many other cultural forms.
Maybe music is such an effective instrument of identity in teenage years because its
intricate libidinal charges give us control over the degree to which we can stand not
to misrecognize ourselves within our desires. Maybe music matters so much because
its theatricality, its ceremoniousness, its ritual and grace, allows us to shape the tacit
knowledges of the body into something that we can use instead of bear. Maybe it’s
that music can so often possess a blessed deniability.
So what value is there in a Christian girl singing? It depends, I guess, on where
you’re standing when you listen to her, and what you think you need to hear her for.
When I listen to Amy Lee, I can imagine each of the explanations I’ve just listed as
ample justification for the strength of her musical rhetoric. But then I forget to think
and just end up singing along.
3. Notes on Ephemerology
Evanesce: To fade out of sight, “melt into thin air,” disappear; chiefly fig. Also in scientific
use, To disappear, become effaced. Oxford English Dictionary
Christopher Bollas has pointed out that generational objects inevitably mutate as we
move through stages of life.17 The songs and films, the locations and interactions, the
things that stood for what it was to be a teenager are an assortment of recollections
that I began to assemble with others of my age cohort when we were in our twenties.
By my thirties, those old memories had been abstracted into a form that was rather
more true if less real, but the basic flavors of them remained. They still do, and it’s
rather tempting to believe that they’re real life, that all that was before them was
somehow not quite right yet, that all that has been after them nothing but a decline
and fall. And it’s even more tempting to believe that my memories of those precious
objects haven’t changed. But of course they have. They have died, a little. They have
diminished. Strangely, as they fade out in various ways, I find that more of myself
17 Ibid., pp. 260–261.

gets introduced in my contemplation of them as a kind of compensation. But that self
will soon go by the wayside as well. That’s history.
I wonder sometimes if our passion as musicologists for masterworks, for canon,
for the enduring work, isn’t in part a panicked waving away of our own transitoriness.
What is this permanent artwork we are admiring? It has lost the fleshy transactions
among the people who first made it and lived with it, the ones who might not have
thought too much about it because so much of what it was simply went without
saying. It has lost the character of being simply trivial, something you stumble up
against in the course of the day, and it has turned into a monument: a nice place to
visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Being a monument, which is by definition something taken out of context, isn’t
always a bad thing, of course. Often enough, that kind of isolation lets us see and hear
aspects of the thing that would have eluded us otherwise. A Medieval cathedral, when
surrounded as it usually was by houses and sheds and stores, wasn’t as structurally
impressive a sight as one might have wished. Is monumentalization another way of
acquiring a laudable sense of the estrangement that lets us experience things anew?
Does monumentalization change the object? Is Monteverdi’s Orfeo still the same
thing that it was is 1608? Never mind.
Studying recent popular music is always a risk. Not for the reason that people often
assume—that maybe you’ll get your taste wrong and future generations will make
fun of your lame aesthetic. Being anxious over whether you’re cool means you’re
doomed, anyway. Nor is it simply a matter of economics, of wondering whether
you’ve invested in something that will eventually bring you a profit (in the form of a
better reputation and all that attends such a fugacious condition). Rather, the risk of
studying very recent popular music is that it is only just now beginning to die, and
might well be infectious. Here it is, still swaddled in dense layers of commentary,
parasitism, and repetition, still bruised by taste and expediency. And the texts that
respond to this will begin to die almost immediately, too. Maybe studying the recent
is so uncomfortable because it’s so much closer to death than the certifiably ancient.
But how else do we get to be history in our turn?
Chapter Fourteen
Gender Sonics: The Voice of Patsy Cline

Richard Leppert
The basic facts about the life and career are well established and can be quickly
rehearsed. Patsy Cline, née Virginia Patterson Hensley, was born on September 8,
1932; she died on March 5, 1963, in the crash of a private plane piloted by her manager
Randy Hughes, returning from a benefit concert in Kansas City, together with two
musician friends, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas. She was thirty years old.
Patsy learned to play the piano by ear from the time she was eight. She never learned
to read music. Her father abandoned the family (Patsy had two siblings) when she
was fifteen, after which she gave up schooling to work in a drug store in Winchester,
Virginia, where her family was then living, in order to help provide support. She
was first heard on local radio in 1948, at age sixteen. Following a number of gigs on
national radio hookups beginning in 1953, she signed a record contract with Four
Star Records in the fall of 1954, to terms strikingly not in her favor, as regards
either compensation or control of material. The first fifty-one of her 100-odd total
recorded tracks were for Four Star; at the expiration of the Four Star contract in
1960 she signed with Decca, which had already provided recording facilities and
distribution for the songs assigned to her by Four Star to record. Patsy first sang on
The most comprehensive survey of the history of female country singers is by

Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice: Women in Country Music,
1800–2000 (Nashville: The Country Music Foundation, and Vanderbilt University Press,
2003), incorporating an extensive and well-designed bibliography on individual artists; for
a capsule account of Cline’s life and career, see pp. 215–222. There are several biographies
available. The most detailed is by Ellis Nassour, Patsy Cline (New York: Leisure Books,
1981); see also by the same author a briefer account, Honky Tonk Angel: The Intimate Story
of Patsy Cline (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), based on the 1981 volume; Margaret Jones,
Patsy: The Life and Times of Patsy Cline (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); Mark Bego, I Fall
to Pieces: The Music and the Life of Patsy Cline (Holbrook, MA: Adams Publishing, 1995);
and Doug Hall, The Real Patsy Cline (Kingston, ONT: Quarry Music Books, 1998). Each of
these volumes provides a discography; the most detailed are those in the volumes by Jones
and Bego.
Several DVD releases are available concerning Cline’s life and career: The Real Patsy
Cline (White Star D1744), 48 minutes; Patsy Cline: Remembering Patsy (The Authorized
Video Biography) (White Star D3084), 60 minutes; and Patsy Cline: Sweet Dreams Still:
The Anthology (MPI DVD7738), 55 minutes. Although each of these DVDs incorporates a
variety of clips of Cline’s performances, virtually all from television broadcasts, the most
comprehensive is the last, which includes seventeen songs, performed in whole or part.
The contract details are spelled out by Nassour, Patsy Cline, pp. 68, 73–74.
the Grand Ole Opry, a lifelong goal, in 1955, the same year her first recordings were
released. She became an Opry regular only in 1960. Her first major success was the
1957 release of “Walkin’ After Midnight,” produced by Owen Bradley, with whom
she worked throughout her recording career, and a man largely credited with what
came to be known as the Nashville Sound. Patsy recorded only four LPs: Patsy
Cline, 1957; Showcase (With the Jordanaires), 1961; Sentimentally Yours, 1962; and
The Patsy Cline Story, 1963, released after her death.
Bufwack and Oermann, Finding Her Voice, p. 218: The so-named Nashville Sound,
characterizing Patsy’s later recordings (especially those from 1961 and thereafter), is largely
credited to Decca’s A & R man and Patsy’s producer, Owen Bradley, as well as Don Law
(Columbia), Chet Atkins (RCA), and the freelance arranger/singer Anita Kerr. See further Joli
Jensen, The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music (Nashville:
The Country Music Foundation Press, and Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), which
includes a chapter on Patsy Cline, pp. 89–117; and by the same author, “Patsy Cline, Musical
Negotiation, and the Nashville Sound,” in All That Glitters: Country Music in America, ed.
George H. Lewis (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993),
pp. 38–50; and Paul Hemphill, The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). Jones, Patsy, p. 268: The Nashville Sound aimed to broaden
the audience for country music by introducing into its sonorics the sounds of mainstream pop,
in response to the economic challenges of emerging rock’n’roll, amplified not least by the
success of Elvis. The effort worked. In 1961 only 80 stations were devoted to country music
playlists; by 1967 there were 328, and by the decade’s end 500. Notwithstanding Patsy’s role
in the success of the Nashville Sound, throughout her career she insisted that her music was
country, not pop; indeed, she quite consistently resisted the moves to turn her into a crossover
artist—which she unquestionably became, and which largely defined her late-career success.
On Cline’s resistance to pop, see Nassour, Patsy Cline, p. 133; and p. 116, remarks by
songwriter Don Hecht, who wrote Walkin’ After Midnight: “Patsy was stubborn in that any
material performed by her under any circumstances had to be pure Country, ‘or else,’ she said,
‘I would feel like a whore’.” See also Joli Jensen, “Patsy Cline: The Search for a Sound,”
Journal of Country Music 9 no. 2 (1982), pp. 33–46. Jones, Patsy, p. 194: The Nashville
Sound “eschewed the corn, the twang, the nasal singing, the yodeling [which Patsy loved but
was consistently steered away from], the weepy sound of the steel guitar and the whine of the
fiddle—in other words, just about everything that made country country.” See further Hall,
The Real Patsy Cline, p. 143.
The Nashville Sound downplayed, or outright abandoned steel guitar and fiddle in favor
of a small string section and back-up vocals provided, variously, by the Anita Kerr Singers and
the Jordanaires; both groups accompanied Patsy’s late recordings. (The Jordanaires are well
known for their background vocals on numerous recordings by Elvis Presley.) Cline’s early
work (1955–1960), by contrast, employed a then-standard ensemble as accompaniment: piano,
drums, steel guitar, bass (acoustic or electric), fiddle, and guitar (acoustic and/or electric).
Overdubbing of the lead vocal was common to the Nashville Sound; the obvious benefit was
voice-matched harmony. The technique was occasionally used for recordings by Cline. See,
for example, The Patsy Cline Collection, 4 CDs (MCA MCAD4–10421), released in 1991:
“Yes, I’ll Understand” (1959); “How Can I Face Tomorrow” (1960); “Crazy Dreams” (1960);
and “Who Can I Count On” (1961). This now shopworn technique, while hardly initiated for
Patsy (Patti Page, for example, had already used double tracking), stands out from most of
her recordings, which, whether taped in mono or, later, in both mono and stereo, were single-
takes.
Gender Sonics: The Voice of Patsy Cline 193
Her life was troubled. She grew up poor and poorly educated. She was twice
married and had two children by her second husband, Charlie Dick. Her marriage to
Dick was complicated, rife with arguing and sometimes worse, apparently in large
part due to his heavy drinking. Earlier in her career she had an abortion. During
her marriage to Dick (and earlier) she had affairs and some one night stands with
fellow musicians, most commonly the result of long weeks on the road without
her family, experiencing extreme loneliness. Like many musicians at the time, she
used amphetamines; uppers helped get her through the rigors of endless nights of
performing followed by car rides to the next gig. In 1961 she was nearly killed in a
car accident, which left her face badly scarred; she disguised the scars with wigs and
makeup. But whatever the trials and tribulations, she never long left off performing,
even when her two children came along; the same is true of her recording sessions,
thirty in all.
For most of her brief professional career she had very little money to show for
her efforts, due in part to the Four Star contract. Indeed, her frenetic performance
schedule, taking her for weeks on end from the East Coast to the West, from the
deep South to Canada, including Carnegie Hall (one group Opry gig in 1961), the
Hollywood Bowl (1962), and Las Vegas (five weeks around Christmas, 1962 at the
Mint Casino Lounge), sometimes performing in as many as four shows per night,
left her exhausted but not a lot better off economically until near the end of her life.
According to Charlie Dick, the highest single-date fee she ever earned was $1,200.
Though Patsy Cline was for all intents and purposes a professional singer for
ully half of her short life (including work on the honky-tonk bar circuit early on), her
recording career was brief. From June 1 1955, to her last sessions on February 4–7,
1963, it was less than eight years in all. Still, the mark she made on country music,
and also on pop, is undisputed. She has long been credited with opening doors for
many female singers who followed her, Loretta Lynn perhaps the most prominent
among a distinguished list. Patsy Cline marked the moment when women country
singers began to break free from a long-held role as little more than window dressing
for country music and its institutional performance venues that were dominated by
See Jones, Patsy, p. 185.

4 Brian Mansfield, Remembering Patsy (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 2002), p. 18.
Concerning Cline’s perennial money shortage, see her letters to her young fan and the de
facto “manager” of Cline’s fan club, Treva Miller, in Cindy Hazen and Mike Freeman, eds.,
Love Always, Patsy: Patsy Cline’s Letters to a Friend (New York: Berkley Books, 1999),
unpaginated: postcard dated January 17, 1957; undated letter immediately following a postcard
dated July 31, 1957; July 31, 1957; letter dated June 15, 1958 (“I’ve got $1050.00 that’s got to
be paid before the end of the month or I’ll lose every-thing [sic]); letter dated April 18, 1958
(“I’m down to my last $10.00 and I owe every body [sic] including you.”; and October 22,
1958. On what seems to be a fairly regular basis, Cline sent Miller small amounts of money
to defray the costs of maintaining the fan club, typically $10 a month. Cline seems to have
managed her own financial affairs, evident for example in a letter to Treva dated March 7,
1957, when she discusses her compensation and complains of mistreatment; she states what
her salary demands will be for agreeing to perform on a weekly television program on CBS:
$700 per week for Monday through Friday morning shows, plus $200 for Saturday nights
(still below union scale, she notes). See further Jones, Patsy, p. 208, 272.
men. Beyond that, and at least as important, she introduced new ways of singing
songs, even (perhaps especially) when the songs themselves continued all too often
to reflect tired clichés about women and their relationships to the men they putatively
loved.
In this essay, I will be particularly interested in Patsy Cline’s voice and what she
did with it. What I am after is an exploration of the gender in her voice; specifically,
I hope to suggest ways that Patsy’s singing effectively repositioned some of the
well-established conventions of country music and pop alike used to define women’s
identities. Her singing brushed across the grain of the voice then sanctioned for female
performers, and did so smartly and invariably musically. Her voice, considered as a
cultural phenomenon, was saturated in personal experience, just as it was invested
in the larger history of 1950s America and the South in particular. That history, to
be sure, is manifested indirectly in her performances; the results, on the other hand,
were very direct indeed. Her voice struck listeners’ ears with force, conviction, and
authority. The question is: how, by what means?
Kitty and Patsy
Kitty Wells’s signature hit “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” (1952),
an answer-song responding to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life” and
perhaps the most famous answer-song in country music, provides an apt means of
distinguishing between the gender-reflexive work of Wells, a long-distinguished and
slightly earlier (b. 1919) contemporary of Patsy, and Cline’s take on men–women
relations, and all of it determined by the difference in their vocal delivery. The
song’s lyric throws the charge back at men: honky-tonk (i.e., loose) women were
made not born, and made (degraded) by men (14.1). Mary Bufwack has aptly
encapsulated what is historically at stake:
The popularity of Wells’s lament about male victimization of women indicates a conscious
knowledge of women’s discontent in post-war America and an interest within the country
audience in a dialogue about male–female behavior. . . . The men cried of their loneliness
and of their betrayal by women, but they also celebrated a freer lifestyle. Although men
also expressed guilt and regret about their rowdy ways and often blamed their losses on
themselves, their real anger was reserved for the woman who chose “Dim Lights, Thick
Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music)” over a husband and children. Non-traditional women
were a convenient scapegoat for men’s post-war depression. . . . Women’s frustrations
received no mass legitimacy.
4 For a brief summary of her career, see Bufwack and Oermann, Finding Her Voice,
pp. 150–154. For a longer account, see A. C. Dunkleburger, Queen of Country Music: The Life
Story of Kitty Wells (Nashville: Ambrose Printing, 1977).
4 Mary Bufwack, “The Feminist Sensibility in Post-War Country Music,” Southern
Quarterly 22 no. 3 (Spring 1984): 138–139. See also Bufwack and Oermann, Finding Her
Voice, pp. 141–144, for a brief history of the gap between post-war happy-couples/domestic-
All this is to the well and good, but there is a serious disjunction between the
song’s text, on the one hand, and both the tune and Wells’s performance, on the
other. Wells’s lament complains more than it protests. Vocally, she does not so
much stand up to an injustice as she simply marks it, and with more than a hint of
emotional fatigue. Her singing underscores the lack of agency inscribed in the tune
itself, fundamentally a simple, folk-like minor-mode ballad, principally defined by
falling melodic lines that collapse at phrase endings, all of it governed by four-square
rhythms that work to keep the complaint firmly in its place. The melody itself is old,
possibly rising from British–American folk tradition; moreover, it had been used
for earlier country songs: by the Carter Family’s “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue
Eyes,” recorded in 1929, and by Roy Acuff’s “The Great Speckled Bird,” recorded
in 1936. A listener’s recognition of the previous usage can diminish the impact of
the otherwise more or less newly insistent insight delivered by the text. That is,
the tune’s familiarity, as well as its style, pushes back hard against the lyrics, and
not least because the pre-used tune does not quite fit the narrative. Kitty makes the
best of it and follows along; Patsy, as I will later suggest, tries a different approach.
(To be sure, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” does not give Wells
much to work with, though the same holds true for many of the songs Patsy Cline
was handed by Four Star Records.) In any event, on balance there is little distance
between the song’s fundamental conservatism and Wells’s delivery. The result, so
far as concerns a successful assertion of one’s identity in the face of a demonstrable
wrong, is to project resignation. The performance lacks even a hint of the kinetic
energy embedded in the lyrics, however absent any forcefulness is apparent in the
melody itself.10 (Nonetheless, Wells’s protest was new to country music. Despite
the song’s commercial success—it went #1 on the Billboard charts—it was initially
considered so controversial that the Opry refused to permit Wells to perform the
song, in perfect reflection of the extreme conservatism marking what was thought
appropriate to women country singers. The recording established Wells’s country
music stardom.)
Robert Oermann describes the differences between Kitty and Patsy as follows:
On the one hand there is Wells, the wife and mother who faced modern problems in her
songs with tight-lipped intensity. On the other is Cline, the beer-drinking, good-time gal
who bared her soul with open-throated fervor. Wells wore gingham, Cline wore lamé.
[Cline once showed up at the Opry to perform in a pants suit; she was made to change the
outfit before being permitted to go on stage.] Wells modernized traditional country music
bliss suburban imagery and the realities of fundamental cultural and social upheaval taking
place—the toll charged against human relationships.
Robert K. Oermann, “Honky-Tonk Angels: Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline,” in Country:
The Music and the Musicians, Paul Kingsbury and Alan Axelrod, eds. (Nashville: The Country
Music Foundation, and New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), p. 328.
10 Concerning the cash benefits of answer-song responses to previous hits, a potential
not lost on the recording industry, see Paul Kingsbury and Alan Axelrod, eds., Country:
The Music and the Musicians (Nashville: The Country Music Foundation, and New York:
Abbeville Press, 1988), p. 326.
and women’s place in the country music world. Cline broke with country’s musical and
cultural traditions, and created new ones.11
Wells marks tradition and convention with her distinctive nasal twang, an
effect that has little place in Patsy’s singing. Indeed, her vocal sound, quite apart
from her phrasing and other elements of her delivery, clearly responded to a sonic
and historical barrier that she was insistent to cross, acknowledging thereby both
an awareness of a tradition and the desire to move beyond it. That is, the sound
of Cline’s voice reclaims the very agency that many of the songs she sang, still
duty-bound to “traditional” values, eschew. In particular, Patsy’s tendency, if not
to leave the gender straitjacket outright in the dust of her performance, was to push
hard against the established boundaries that so many of the songs she was handed
otherwise so commonly observed (14.2).
Whereas Wells’s singing is anchored in gospel tradition, Cline’s musical
experiences were distinctly secular and underscore an adolescence of considerable
privation, street learning, and road life in the honky-tonks while she was very
much still a kid. A good deal of the difference between the two singers is evident
from Patsy’s cover of the Wells hit preserved in a recording thought to date from
around August, 1954.12 The debt to Wells is evident in the legato phrasing and,
early on, the more or less plaintive hint this phrasing delivers. But the differences
are what matters most. The performance is rough around the edges, aesthetically
unfinished (Cline, just shy of her twenty-second birthday, was far less experienced
than Wells), but on balance, Patsy’s performance is considerably more insightful,
despite its inconsistencies—or perhaps on account of them. Her singing suggests
someone willing to talk back, refusing to be confined to a dispirited lament. There is
both uncertainty and inconsistency in her unpolished performance, qualities that—
however inadvertently—lend the result its distinctive energy. Particularly evident
in this very early recording is Cline’s sense of herself: not precisely confident but
clearly unapologetic—and so far as performance style is concerned by no means
aping her forbear in this cover. Indeed, when Patsy sang covers, and she sang them
often, she fearlessly made them her own, including—and maybe even especially—
the best-established hits.13 She was in no sense deferential to any “authorized” or
“authentic” original.
In “Honky Tonk Merry Go Round” (1955), one of four songs taped during her
very first recording session, the honky tonk in Patsy herself comes out proudly: the
singer enjoys the life—and she’s no angel. Her singing is rhythmically punctuated.
At times she flings out words, even growling on some of them (her justly famous
11 Oermann, “Honky-Tonk Angels,” p. 315. On the down-home virtuous, simple-

housewife image that defined the official Wells publicity, see pp. 328, 330. For a photograph
of the sun-bonnet outfit, see p. 322.
12 The Patsy Cline Collection, CD 1, track 2.
13 For example, her cover of Hank Williams’s “Lovesick Blues” (1960), or the
extraordinary cover of Bing Crosby’s signature hit, “True Love” (1961), in The Patsy Cline
Collection.
growl).14 In “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” she projects not one
emotion, as was the case with Wells’s original, but several and in quick succession.
Like Wells, she laments, but she feels more, including frustration and even anger.
Above all, she is unresigned. Wells’s performance borders on prettiness; vocally, it is
skilled. But by comparison with Patsy, her performance is predictable to the edge of
being dull, and not least on account of its incipient sweetness. Cline’s performance,
if less obviously “skilled,” is musically considerably more imaginative. At times as
“pretty” as Wells, Cline’s delivery constantly alternates mood, duly expressive of
her untenable position within the gender dyad that the narrative describes. Patsy, in
brief, is not sitting still for history perpetually to wash over her. Her man, so says the
text, has put her on the merry go round of ill repute and she wonders if she’ll ever
get off. The text suggests “no”; the voice suggests something else. Avoiding any hint
of the strident (the anger of the wronged woman), Patsy’s voice projects the sense of
her own identity. Two vocal qualities suggest as much; first, the degree to which she
plays with the four-square rhythms of the tune. Simply stated, she is not bound by the
beat, but moves to its flow in something approaching her own time. Put differently,
unlike the rhythmic lockstep of Kitty’s version, Patsy rhythmically implies that she
is someone quite able to strike out on her own. Still more, the rather lugubrious tone
of Wells’s delivery is almost entirely absent. Indeed, it is quite apparent that Patsy is
enjoying herself. That is, the very pleasure she takes in singing trumps the cultural
rules organized to make her into an angel of whatever sort. In Patsy’s world, honky
tonks are sites of more than occasions for domestic turmoil; they are a terrain for
liberation. She has not forgotten how to have fun on this merry go round.
The difference in vocal delivery between these two artists carried over to the look
each adopted (14.3). Early on, Wells’s costume included a Little-Bo-Peep-like
sunbonnet; Patsy would have none of this, remarking that in a girlie (“ruffles and
crinolines”) outfit foisted upon her, she looked like a “damn butterfly.”15 Cline’s first
outfits (her mother was her seamstress) were strictly cowgirl, replete with long fringe
and rhinestones, and completed with boots. This changed, reflecting the profoundly
different pop dynamic driving the Nashville Sound. She worked hard, if ultimately
unsuccessfully, to hold to the cowgirl look, something her producers and employers
long discouraged and sometimes simply rejected out of hand.16 By the end of her
career, she characteristically wore high-style cocktail and lounge dresses, knee length
to floor length, and high heels: not standard country. Whatever the outfit, she wore it
tight, accentuating the curves of her body and attracting notice. Indeed, she looked
good—sexy good—in anything she wore. And she never looked like the dutiful farm
wife projected by the costumes worn by Kitty Wells early in her career.
14 The Patsy Cline Collection: Cline’s growl is best heard on her earlier recordings like
“Honky Tonk Merry Go Round” (1955); the rhythm and blues flavored “Don’t Ever Leave Me
Again” (1957); “Hungry for Love” (1957); and “Got a Lot of Rhythm in My Soul” (1959).
15 Jones, Patsy, p. 103.
16 On her fashion interests, see ibid., p. 256.
Hank and Patsy (and Elvis)
Kitty Wells, like Hank Williams before her, by the early 1950s was an established
icon of country music. It is worthwhile noting the correspondences and, especially,
the differences between Hank Williams’s songs of failed love and those of Patsy
Cline—considering some of her early efforts, recorded between 1955 and 1959, hence
recorded only a few years after Williams’s death on January 1, 1953.17 The semiotic
impact, apparent in many of Hank’s songs about failed love, is often overdetermined.
Lyrics, tune, and delivery work in tandem to produce an uncharacteristically honest
admission of male shortcomings, while accepting blame without excuse. Patsy, as
a woman and therefore commonly assigned blame in country music culture, takes
a different tack, while still recognizing the realities of both loss and culpability.
Her slow-moving “If I Could Only Stay Asleep” (1958) underscores the sense of
loss inscribed by a vocal line repeatedly leaping to high notes only to slide back as
if in defeat—echoing what is characteristic of so many of Williams’s songs about
disastrous relationships. In a similar vein, “I’m Blue Again” (1959) registers the
vocal “tear”—perfected by Williams—to help mark a text entirely about loss, though
this affect acts in tension with the song’s upbeat tempo, and to Cline’s overall vocal
delivery that breathes an air of confidence seriously undercutting the text’s projection
of defeat. Indeed, time and again in Patsy’s work, discrepancies occur between the
putative subjects of the lyrics and her delivery of them. Among the reasons she is
such an exciting singer is that, like Hank Williams, she stepped over the margins of
musical convention, stretching affective possibilities by introducing contradictions
and unexpected tensions. Thus the loss of a man may be getting her down, so her
words go, but she won’t be down for long, so her voice insists. She subscribes to the
potential joys of men and women relating to each other but she refuses (not textually
but vocally) to be overwhelmed by the absence or failure of the experience. It is
very difficult to listen to “I’ve Loved and Lost Again” (1956) and really believe that
the pain will be permanent. She will be up and dancing soon, playing a profoundly
(vocally) liberated role of the sort apparent from the vocal-guttural growls that spice
her recording of the upbeat “Got a Lot of Rhythm (In My Soul)” (1959), which
echoes the celebratory affects heard commonly in early rock’n’roll.
There is concordance between Patsy’s performing look and that of both Hank
Williams and Elvis Presley (14.4). Patsy projected confidence not least by how
freely she moved about the stage during performances, freely—like a man, one might
say, owning the space. How she looked and moved worked closely in tandem with
the emotional force with which she sang, and which was reflected in her physical
presence and, indeed, physicality—something little evident in the archived television
performances, where active movement could not be accommodated; in this surviving
footage she comes off as less forceful in this respect than was typical.
Whereas Patsy (at about 5’6” and 135 lbs or more) was full figured, and her
body tucked into formfitting attire, Hank Williams (at 6’—seemed taller given the
ubiquitous hat he wore to cover his thinning hair about which he was self-conscious,
17 The songs discussed in this section are from Patsy Cline: Today, Tomorrow & Forever,
LP (MCA–1463), a 1985 reissue of a disk originally released in 1964.
and 140 lbs) by contrast was rail thin—and, towards the end of his life, haggard,
gaunt and essentially wrecked—the opposite to prevailing imagery of male heroics
and cultural dominance mirrored by physical appearance. Neither the Superman of
contemporaneous comic books, nor the Charles Atlas of comic book advertising, his
clothes hung loosely on him; there was little underneath to fill them out. However
different, the two “looks” coincided in their effects. Hank’s impact on audiences
was as electric and sexy as Patsy’s. In the words of Minnie Pearl, “He had a real
animal magnetism. He destroyed the women in the audience.”18 Knowing well
how to use his body,19 he displayed a sexuality that was exciting precisely because
of the contradictions it contained—Minnie Pearl suggests that Williams appealed
to women’s maternal instincts; others suggest a far more sensual dimension. The
apparent contradictions evident in the performance styles as well as the messy
personal lives of these singers engender an ambiguity of a simultaneously exciting
and culturally provocative sort. At the least, the contradictions constitute a partially
masked refusal to adhere to standards of propriety established for a post-war culture
of re-domestication, a culture built on self-contradictory and increasingly complex
erotic economies of controlled role-playing. Patsy and Hank—like Elvis—spoke a
language of difference and demand running counter to expectations of decorum and
practice.20
Voicing Difference
Patsy liked good jokes, dirty ones especially, and she was good at telling them.
By all accounts she had a boisterous laugh.21 In this regard and in numerous other
18 Roger M. Williams, Sing a Sad Song: The Life of Hank Williams, 2nd edn (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press), p. 144.
19 Ibid., p. 74, Frank Page: “He was just electrifying on stage. . . . He had the people in
the palm of his hands from the moment he walked out there.” See also George W. Koon, Hank
Williams: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), p. 28.
20 Concerning Patsy’s love of Elvis, see Jones, Patsy, p. 101; and Nassour, Patsy Cline,
p. 322. For more on gender issues in America in relation to country music, see Rebecca
Thomas, “The Cow That’s Ugly Has the Sweetest Milk,” in The Women of Country Music:
A Reader, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University of Kentucky
Press, 2003), pp. 131–147; Oermann, “Honk-Tonk Angels,” pp. 314–341; and Andrew C.
Hager, The American Songbook: Women of Country (New York: Friedman/Fairfax, and
Liberty Express, 1998). Regarding Hank Williams, see Richard Leppert and George Lipsitz,
“‘Everybody’s Lonesome for Somebody’: Age, the Body and Experience in the Music of
Hank Williams,” Popular Music 9 no. 3 (October 1990), pp. 259–274; regarding Patsy Cline’s
attraction to Elvis, see Jones, Patsy, p. 101; and Nassour, Patsy Cline, p. 322. Regarding Elvis,
see Sue Wiseman, “Sexing Elvis,” in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. Simon
Frith (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 390–398.
21 Friend Jan Howard: “I loved her laugh. Her laugh came from deep. She had a deep
laugh. When she laughed, she really laughed. She didn’t just smile or giggle. That giggle
was not Patsy. She laughed, and it was a hearty laugh.” And Bill Anderson: “I remember
Patsy riding in the back seat of my car from Nashville to North Carolina. . . . I remember her
getting so tickled she would slide off of the seat and into the floorboard of the car. When she
ways, she easily fit in with musicians of both sexes. She was supportive of other
women, and she was entirely comfortable as one of the boys,22 who—the buddy-ness
notwithstanding—have many times remarked on her sexiness. She was plainspoken,
and much concerned with daily minutiae—life at home, shopping, decorating—all
of which she liked talking about. She had a way with homespun vernacular, the
language of rural metaphor (of the sort: “busier than a cow’s tail in fly season”).23 The
humor and the sexiness alike are evident in two recordings of “Bill Bailey, Won’t You
Please Come Home” (1961, 1963). The first is an essentially conventional reading,
upbeat and fast tempo throughout, and marked by the energized delivery typical of
the fast numbers she performed (14.5). The second is distinctly different (14.6).
Here she divides the song into two distinct parts. The first half is transformed into a
slow moving torch ballad, sorrowful and pleading for Bill’s return. The second half,
in sharp contrast, is fast and highly energized, just as one expects for this tune; it is
also distinctly sexy, which one does not expect. What Patsy seems to encode after the
break is less a plea and more a promise backed by confidence in her allure: “Come
back; I’ll make it well worth your while.” But the delivery is more complex than this
suggests to the extent that, despite the apparent confidence, she likewise voices a
sexual hunger bordering on desperate frustration.
In the slow first half, she lingers over each word of the song’s opening line, the
seemingly “important” and unimportant words alike. She alters rhythm slightly so
that barely perceptive delays are evident at the start of each beat, while her voice
gives a slight crescendo, followed by fast decay, to each note. The result is a slow
sexualized pulse that takes control of each word. What matters is less what little the
words say and more what drives her to speak them in the first place: unquenched
desire. In the second half, Patsy tries a different appeal, pleading and asserting at
one and the same time. What she shows Bill Bailey here, while acknowledging again
that it is her fault that he’s gone, is the sort of energy that likely attracted him to her
in the first place.
This performance aptly represents the two sides to Patsy’s voicing of gender:
a kind of A-side/B-side. But what matters most is the skill with which so many of
her performances represent both sides simultaneously: pain, uncertainty, and loss,
on the one side, and, on the other, confidence, absence of self-pity, and refusal of
sentimentality—even, maybe even especially, in the most sentimental of the many
ballads she recorded. Even early in her career, when she was so commonly faced with
inferior material, she possessed an uncommon ability to articulate the contradictions
of late modern life. Patsy Cline had a quite beautiful voice; she made it “do” many
things, only some of which came off as conventionally beautiful. But whatever
laughed, she laughed from the top of her head to the tip of her toes.” Quoted in Mansfield,
Remembering Patsy, pp. 54 and 66, respectively. Buddy Killen: “If you were in a room just
loaded with people, you would hear her laughter above the whole thing. She laughed real loud
and laughed a lot.” Quoted in Jones, Patsy, p. 184.
22 Bill Anderson: “She was one of the boys. She was just one of the guys. You didn’t
have to watch anything you said or did around her, because chances are she said or did it first.”
Quoted in Mansfield, Remembering Patsy, p. 38.
23 Jones, Patsy, p. 98.
the sound she produced, the grain of her voice was as impressively sensitive to
the various demands of her songs as was the consistent intelligence and nuanced
musicality evident in her best work.
Lighting the Torch
She was at her best singing torch songs: typically slow to moderate-tempo, ballad-
like tunes about failed relationships, lost lovers. The sentimentality common to the
genre—conducive to saccharine lyrics and melodies alike—was rarely an impediment
to her ability to sing something memorable.24 “I Fall to Pieces” (1960), one of Patsy’s
most commercially successful songs, is typical (14.7). The instrumental ensemble,
standard country, is augmented by the Jordanaires gospel quartet. The entire song
is sung within a narrow dynamic range, never rising above mezzo-forte and most
of it falling within gradations of piano. Spanning over an octave and a major third,
most melodic movement is stepwise, though the tune dramatically exploits Cline’s
extraordinary legato on slowly executed octave leaps, of which she was a master.
The expressive effects are principally accomplished through extremely skilled
phrasing heavily dependent on playing with the beat via nuanced rubatos, all of it
without deviating from what seems to be an effortless floating quality, achieved in
part by extremely subtle variation in dynamics on single words and notes—slight
crescendos, slight decrescendos.25 None of her delivery forces the words, exactly what
is appropriate to a song whose sentiment is so muted. The impact of her performance
comes from understatement. The emotional affect projects vulnerability—one
contributing factor being Patsy’s tendency, here and in many other torch songs, to
hum at phrase endings when the lyric permits (on words like “again,” “someone,”
“win,” etc.—but without self-pity. The impact of her singing always seems direct;
its effect hinges on what seems to be the artlessness of her unquestionably artful
delivery. And this is the case whether she is singing torch songs, at one extreme, or
honky tonk tunes, delivered fast paced and loud (within the conventional necessity
of singing above the bar noise), on the other extreme.
Patsy Cline had a special way with lyrics. Harlan Howard, who co-wrote “I Fall
to Pieces,” explains: “She understood that certain lines in a song are just there to be
sung. They’re not emotional lines. Patsy had a knack of being able to hold back on
those lines, then when she got to the really juicy part of the song she would give it
24 See, for example, The Patsy Cline Collection: “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray”
(1957); “I Fall to Pieces” (1960, one of Cline’s greatest hits); “Crazy” (1961, another of her
major hits); “I Love You So Much It Hurts” (1961); “She’s Got You” (1961); “That’s My
Desire” (1962); “You’re Stronger Than Me” (1962); “So Wrong” (1962); “Why Can’t He Be
You” (1962); “When You Need a Laugh” (1962); “Faded Love” (1963); and “He Called Me
Baby” (1963).
25 For other examples demonstrating these techniques with particular effectiveness, see
The Patsy Cline Collection: “Why Can’t He Be You” (1962), and, especially, “Sweet Dreams
(of You)” (1963).
everything she had.”26 For the opening line of “I Love You So Much It Hurts” (1961),27
what really matters is neither the love nor the hurt, but the degree governing both.
It is the word “so” that receives its due from her. The other words are like passing
notes. “So” is lingered over, vocally caressed, variously attacked and swooned upon,
hit square, the pitch slid from and then regained, and all the while via an extended
rubato. Just that one word defines the song. Everything else she does is subsidiary.
Indeed, “so” is the song’s last word; she breaks off the final phrase completely after
the penultimate note, takes a short breath, and one last time gives out the word and
the deep feelings it holds.
In the apt insight of Aaron A. Fox, “Subtle shifts in vocal articulation encode
knowledge about and intervention in every dimension of ‘ordinary’ life.”28 Patty
Griffin, in sync with this comment, draws attention to the history (personal and
beyond) sedimented in the voice: “Since I know a little bit about growing up
poor, I think [that Patsy’s voice has] an incredible beauty. It’s like a really elegant
wildflower.” Trisha Yearwood links this to her delivery: “Patsy’s voice . . . is very
emotional. You hear the breath. It’s like she’s standing in the room with you, singing.
You hear her voice catch, the little lick that she does.”29
Patsy’s singing betrays no break between her low chest voice and her high head
voice. The low and middle range is richly colorful, the high range crystalline. But
always what matters is how she puts her voice to use, and that varies tremendously
between the extremes of the songs she performed and recorded. Thus whatever the
similarities between torch songs and her slow moving gospel numbers, differences
are notable. In particular, the gospel songs are sometimes sung at extremely slow
tempos,30 which provides Patsy with the opportunity to lavish attention on individual
words and phrases, drawing them out with a kind of reverence that gives these
performances their notable power. The songs of worship seem to require the need
to show by her performance a care for the Lord that is best demonstrated by the
employment of her most accomplished musical skills: nothing else will suffice, and
particularly on key words (“Jesus,” “Thee”).
At the other end of life, turning from the spirit and toward the flesh, lies the life-
sustaining sexuality that Patsy adeptly projected. Repeatedly, this is the case with the
torch songs. Occasionally, and by quite different means and to a different effect, the
26 Nassour, Patsy Cline, p. 241.

27 The Patsy Cline Collection.
28 Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004), p. 317. Fox’s remark is made with regard to people living in
and around Lockhart, Texas, whose lives and musical culture are the subject of his book.
He continues, “‘Ordinary’ categories of self, person, identity, place, space, time, memory,
knowledge, gender, and feeling are emergent from the close attention these Texans pay to
the speaking/singing voice, and critical elaborations of these categories can be discerned in
the smallest details of speaking and singing. The interpenetrated tropes of country songs and
beer-joint talk open onto a world of social and individual experience.”
29 Mansfield, Remembering Patsy, pp. 20, 24, respectively.
30 See, for example, The Patsy Cline Collection: “Life’s Railway to Heaven” (1959); and
“Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (1959), CD 2, and, in particular, another performance of this
song (undated), on CD 4.
same is true of upbeat and even rockabilly-flavored tunes, like “Don’t Ever Leave
Me Again” (1957), recorded at a public performance (14.8). Patsy delivers the
tune with an urgency that growls, pleads, half-sings/half-speaks, and near the end
incorporates what can best be described as Sprechstimme. Some of it has a Mae
West character, lending a tinge of humor alongside the pain described by the lyrics.
The beat, and even more the percussive backbeat, is on the edge of burlesque-house
pulsing, in a word, almost “dirty.” What we hear on balance is a song expressing a
degree of acute horniness that almost takes itself seriously. The fun of it results from
the foot-tapping energy of what is not quite what it claims to be, a lament.
“Don’t Ever Leave Me Again” stands as an apt metaphor for the work of a rare
singer who through her voice articulated the late-modern experience that life is what
it seems: that is, that life is anything but what we are so commonly told it is. Patsy
Cline had the courage to state a truth that many people, whether in her own time or
in ours, are made to wait too long to hear. Consistently, she gave voice to her own
humanity, and to a shared humanity, through sounds that project optimism about life,
despite the odds. In sum, the voice of Patsy Cline is defined by the good faith of art
that defines, and results from, her use of it, as well as by her self-reflexive awareness
of art’s necessity: the acute need to do it.
Taylor & Francis
Chapter Fifteen
Shoddy Equipment for Living?

Deconstructing the Tin Pan Alley Song
For my father, David Eli Rosengard, who didn’t die with his music still in him
It’s still not quite on the right side of the tracks. Yes, scholars are now producing
biographies, “readers,” and collected lyrics of its major figures (15.1). Musical
theorists have begun subjecting the song to formal analysis (15.2). In the wake of
Richard Crawford’s study of Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” good studies of individual
songs are emerging. At least one scholar has declared Tin Pan Alley’s attainment
of “cultural legitimacy” a “mission accomplished.” Another notes that over the past
twenty years, the recording industry, to widen the market for jazz, has assigned a
“new cultural value [to] Tin Pan Alley.” Nevertheless, in most scholarly writing
about music, Tin Pan Alley, even in its so-called Golden Age, remains a somewhat
uncomfortable address.
Among Americans born since the end of the Second World War, the reasons
are not hard to find. Even today, young people are strongly drawn, as were their
parents (and, now, grandparents), to “personal confession, ‘honesty,’ and one-to-one
communication between the singer and whoever is listening.” Several years ago,
on National Public Radio, Mary Chapin Carpenter described how she composed
the song “Grand Central Station,” which is about September 11, 2001: songwriting,

the beginning of the book. Many amplifications in this essay, including citations, appear only
in the website’s notes, which also includes a list of sources.
See Richard Crawford, “George Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm’ (1930),” The American
Musical Landscape: The Business of Musicianship from Billings to Gershwin, updated edn
(Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000 [1993]), pp. 213–236. See also
15.3.
Ulf Lindberg, “Popular modernism? The ‘urban’ style of interwar Tin Pan Alley,”
Popular Music, 22/3 (2003): 283–284.
Dana Gooley, “The Changing Standard of Jazz” (unpublished paper, annual meeting
of the Society for American Music, 2004), p. 4. See 15.4 for recordings and cabaret.
Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’n’Roll Music, 4th rev. edn
(New York: Plume, 1997 [1975]), p. 104. See also 15.5.
she remarked, in the manner of one passing on a truism, “is therapy; it is cathartic.”
This truism was not typically true for the songwriters of Tin Pan Alley. By and
large, Tin Pan Alley was not an art of self-expression. Tin Pan Alley songs were
“transitive,” not “intransitive”; their authors wrote letters, not diaries. The few who
sang—notably Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Arlen, and Johnny Mercer—claimed no
special relationship with their own songs (15.7). Nor would it have occurred to
them to characterize their songs as “authentic.” By the standards that have emerged
for popular music since the advent of rock and roll, Tin Pan Alley songs have become
at best irrelevant to three generations of young people (15.8).
Of course, earlier generations of young people loved Tin Pan Alley songs. The
essayist Joseph Epstein has memorably encapsulated the difference:
Before Rock and After Rock, is one of the great, perhaps uncrossable, divisions of
humankind. Those of us who came before cannot hope—and, let us speak candidly, do
not all that much wish—to understand the musical tastes of those who came after.
One might suppose that pre-rock young people who grew up to be scholars must
have accorded Tin Pan Alley some deference. Yet among scholars of all ages who
have made any mention in the past sixty years of the Tin Pan Alley song, the case
against it has often seemed so self-evident that they have voiced disdain almost
automatically. Eminent popular music scholars, such as Charles Hamm and Simon
Frith, have made observations that are unflattering to the Tin Pan Alley song, even in
its Golden Age.10 And it is scholars of a clearly pre-rock vintage who established two
main lines of criticism that have branded this repertory with a longstanding stigma.
On Morning Edition, National Public Radio, 6 May 2004. The song appears on the
album Between Here and Gone (released 27 April 2004).
Luc Sante, “Disco Dreams,” review of Nick Hornby, Songbook (New York: Riverhead
Books, 2003) and Geoffrey O’Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music: Memory, and the
Imagined Life (New York: Counterpoint Press, 2004) (New York Review of Books, 51/8 [13
May 2004]: 22–24), p. 22. Nor did its composers amass thousands of unpublished songs in
what amount to private musical diaries. Dolly Parton’s website, www.dollymania.net, reported
in January 2007 that Parton (b. 1946) has written more than 3000 songs. Compare that figure
with Irving Berlin’s estimated 1250+ lyrics (Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet, The Complete
Lyrics of Irving Berlin (New York: A.A. Knopf, 2001), p. xx) see also 15.6.
[Joseph Epstein] Aristides, “I Like a Gershwin Tune” (The American Scholar, 64/2
[Spring 1995]: 173).
Notable is the index to Tyler Cowen’s In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), which contains no entries for Tin Pan Alley
or its composers except one for Jerome Kern’s song “Bill.” See also 15.9.
10 See, e.g., Charles Hamm, “Rock and the Facts of Life” (Putting Popular Music in its
Place, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 46–48 (a partially racial argument
that cites Bob Dylan on Rudy Vallee) and 45 (which includes songs of the 1920s and 1930s);
and Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1998), p. 177 (where he allows a characterization of Cole Porter’s lyrics as
“slick and insincere”). See also 15.10.
Shoddy Equipment for Living? 207
It is this formative critique that I wish to address here; but first, I should clarify
my use of the term “Tin Pan Alley.”11 Supposedly coined in 1909 to denote an area
of Manhattan around West 28th Street, where composers churned out songs by the
dozens, the term today connotes thousands of popular songs turned out, mostly
in New York, between the late 1880s and the early 1950s. During that period the
genre underwent numerous transformations involving style, function, and media of
dissemination. Its best-known era, the 1920s and 1930s, sometimes called the Golden
Age, was dominated by such famous songwriters as Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, the
Gershwin brothers, Cole Porter, and Rodgers and Hart. Some commentators limit
the term to songs that were conceived as independent entities rather than as parts of
a show or movie.12 I will use the term to include published songs of either type that
appeared at any point within the seventy-year period and took on a life of their own
in the United States, whether through sheet music, recordings, live bands, or radio
transmission.
***
A principal reason for the widespread dismissal of Tin Pan Alley is its failure to
meet existing standards of genre. Critics of the song tend to derive their values
from one of two domains—vernacular culture or high art—and Tin Pan Alley songs
belong to neither. For critics, Tin Pan Alley is neither fish nor fowl. The academic
who more than any other established the ground rules for a vernacular critique of
Tin Pan Alley was the language scholar S. I. Hayakawa. Although musicologists
seldom mention it, the essay he published in 1955, called “Popular Songs vs. the
Facts of Life,”13 is surely the most famous critique of Tin Pan Alley by a scholar. It
is also, arguably, among the most successful attacks ever launched by a scholar on
any musical repertory. Starting with an a priori assumption of the Tin Pan Alley song
as musically inadequate, Hayakawa sets up the main thrust of his argument, which
concerns Tin Pan Alley lyrics, in a paragraph that culminates in the most widely
quoted sentence of his article:
[T]he contrast between the musical sincerity of jazz and the musical slop of much of
popular music is interestingly paralleled in the contrast between the literary sincerity in
the words of blues songs … and the literary slop in the majority of popular songs. ...
The words of popular songs ... [which are] largely (but not altogether) the product of
white song-writers for predominantly white audiences, tend towards wishful thinking,
dreamy and ineffectual nostalgia, unrealistic fantasy, self-pity, and sentimental clichés
masquerading as emotion.”14
11 On the form of the Tin Pan Alley song, see 15.11.

12 See 15.12 on theater song in the Golden Age.
13 Reprinted in Hayakawa, Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard
Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 393–403.
See also 15.13.
14 Ibid., p. 393. See 15.14 for more, including racial and anti-Semitic issues.
The gist of Hayakawa’s argument is an indictment of Tin Pan Alley lyrics both
for their content and for their social effect. Hayakawa defines the Tin Pan Alley song
as a genre focused on an unrealistic, idealized concept of romantic love as a kind of
magic that comes out of nowhere and attaches to a perfect and irreplaceable beloved.15
Idealized as a kind of higher feeling that transcends depictions of sexual physicality,
love promises to solve all problems; its failure leads to overwhelming pain and a
sense that life has lost all meaning.16 Hayakawa contends that this idealized concept
of love causes serious injury to young people, pressuring them to develop unrealistic
expectations and encouraging them to wallow in sentimentalized self-pity. Declaring
that songs should offer “equipment for living,” a term he borrows from Kenneth
Burke’s characterization of poetry, Hayakawa concludes that popular songs interfere
actively with “the attainment of emotional maturity.”17
The actual songs Hayakawa cites, which range in dates from 1915 (“Paper Doll”)
through 1953 (“I Need You Now”), come mainly from the Golden Age and include
work by Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, and Rodgers and Hart.18 But one need not
look to the songs of these iconic figures to find evidence of excessive narrowness
in Hayakawa’s processes of evaluation. In his very first citation, a 1930 song called
“My Ideal” (words by Leo Robin, music by Richard Whiting with Newell Chase),
he mocks the clichéd content of the text while making no mention of the unusual
characteristics of melody and harmony that have made this song a favorite of
musically oriented critics (15.16).19
Likewise, to exemplify an overblown self-pity typical of Tin Pan Alley, Hayakawa
adduces the lyrics of a 1939 song popularized by Tommy Dorsey and a young Frank
Sinatra, “I’ll Never Smile Again.”20 Since the song did not promote its unusual real-
life origins, Hayakawa was probably unaware that a tragic death, not a failed love-
affair, prompted Ruth Lowe to write the words and music of this song (15.18).21
Twenty-odd years later in his 1977 book Black Culture and Black Consciousness,
the social historian Lawrence Levine renewed hostilities against Tin Pan Alley.22
Drawing explicitly on Hayakawa, Levine pushes his predecessor’s line of argument
on two levels. He supports a characterization of “the American ethos” as dominated
by “denial of death, ... resistance to the tragic experience, ... deep repression of
sexuality, ... overriding pieties, and ... frantic emphasis on the rationalistic, the
inconsequential, and the optimistic.”23 And he points at a particular susceptibility
of American popular song—as distinct from, say, the blues—to a “process of
15 Ibid., pp. 394–395.

16 Ibid., pp. 394–396 and 398.
17 Ibid., pp. 395–396 and 400–401.
18 See list, Ibid., p. 402; and 15.15.
19 Ibid., p. 394. See also 15.17.
20 Ibid., p. 396.
21 Thomas S. Hischak, The Tin Pan Alley Song Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2002), pp. 171–172. See 15.19 on this song and on Adorno.
22 See Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 190–297,
especially pp. 270–297. See also 15.20.
23 Ibid., p. 270. The quotations come from the ballad scholar Stanley Edgar Hyman.
denial, dilution, repression, sentimentalization, and trivialization.”24 Levine’s actual
criticisms of Tin Pan Alley songs are largely the same as Hayakawa’s: concentrating
on “ideal” as opposed to “physical” aspects of relationships and refusing to “portray
[love] realistically as a multidimensional experience,” they set up impossible
dreams and lay the groundwork for despair.25 Notwithstanding Richard Rodgers’s
admiration for Lorenz Hart’s view that “love was not especially devised for boy and
girl idiots of fourteen,” Levine accused Tin Pan Alley songs of freezing adults into
“a permanent state” of “adolescence and naïveté.”26 The Tin Pan Alley world of love
offered no “ethos resembling life,” and one could learn next to nothing from it.27 It
passed along no group knowledge, no aphoristic folk wisdom, no capacity for self-
determination, and no corrective sense of “humor [or] proportion.”28 In brief, Levine
finds “independence and confidence largely missing from the Tin Pan Alley song.”29
In support of these claims, Levine offers two types of data: song titles and excerpts
from lyrics—data which he claims to have collected from a “careful reading” of stage,
film, and independent songs from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.30 From the start,
however, he exposes the unreliability of his scholarship by asserting that titles tell
us all we need to know about the contents or effect of a song.31 Acting on this belief,
Levine makes some embarrassing mistakes in his lists of titles. No song, for example,
does less to project an “idealistic, dreamlike, magical love” than George Gershwin’s
“I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” (1922), an energetic song about dancing (15.25).
Likewise, “You Took Advantage of Me” is a poor choice for illustrating “[f]rustration
and disillusionment.”32 This musically bouncy, verbally clever Rodgers and Hart song,
isn’t about unrequited love at all; it’s a graceful bow to a persistent lover (15.26).
Levine makes similar miscalculations in his extrapolations from lyrics. In “That Old
Black Magic,” the combination of Harold Arlen’s music and Johnny Mercer’s lyrics
conveys nothing like the morose condition of bondage alleged by Levine (15.27).33
And Levine’s use of two excerpts from the lyrics of “Out of This World” to show that
this song, also by Arlen and Mercer, encourages passivity and arrested development,
ignores the unusual power this song has had on musicians, not to mention the overtly
farcical character of its origins, a film about an ordinary guy who becomes a pop
crooner with a very familiar voice (15.29).34
Where Levine, like Hayakawa, criticized the Tin Pan Alley song as a vernacular
genre, Adorno came at these songs from the perspective of Western art music and
24 Ibid., p. 270. See 15.21 on race.

25 See ibid., pp. 282 and 279; 15.22; and note 69.
26 Richard Rodgers, Introduction to The Rodgers and Hart Song Book (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1951), p. 2; Levine, p. 273.
27 Ibid., pp. 276 and 273. Some criticisms in this and the next note are inferred from
virtues Levine ascribes to the blues.
28 Ibid., pp. 278, 273, 275 and 276. See 15.23 on Levine and Bernard Gendron.
29 Ibid., p. 279.
30 Ibid., pp. 271–273. See 15.24.
31 Ibid., p. 271.
32 Ibid., p. 271. (Song from 1928.)
33 Ibid., p. 271. (Song from 1942.) See 15.28.
34 (Song and film both from 1945.) The voice is Bing Crosby’s. See 15.30.
substantially different priorities. In particular, Adorno’s profound commitment to the
freedom of the artwork—to its duty to serve no interests but its own—was inseparable
from his quasi-Kantian conception of the artwork as an end in itself rather than as a
means. One cannot imagine him admiring any composition for its effectiveness as
“equipment for living.” Indeed, “[w]here art tries . . . to be lighthearted,” he once
asserted. “it is reduced to the level of a human need,” and thereby, “its truth content is
betrayed.”35 But whether or not one agrees with his evaluations of the Tin Pan Alley
repertory, Adorno deserves credit for taking it seriously. For most of the twentieth
century, scholars of the Western art canon simply ignored these songs. Apart from a
scholar such as Charles Hamm, who shifted his entire focus to American vernacular
music, Adorno stands almost alone among canonic musical scholars in the degree of
attention he devoted to popular music. Best known, of course, are his essays on jazz.
To gain a fresh perspective on Adorno and Tin Pan Alley, I would like to look
briefly at short analyses that Adorno made of four specific songs. Three are addressed
in the 1929 article “Schlageranalysen” (“Analysis of Hits”).36 The fourth, probably
written in 1939, constitutes a section of the article “Commodity Music Analyzed.”37
Adorno names no songwriters, although he does provide copyright dates for the first
three.
None of the four songs originated in Tin Pan Alley, or even in the United States.
Of the first three, the earliest, “Ich weiss auf der Wieden ein kleines Hotel” (1915),
came from Vienna (15.33); “Valencia” (1925), introduced to the American public in
a 1926 Broadway revue, came from France (15.34); “I Kiss Your Hand, Madame”
(1928), came from Germany (15.35). The fourth, “Penny Serenade” (1938), was
originally British (15.36).
Furthermore, all four contained elements that might have seemed either foreign or
old-fashioned to a contemporaneous American audience. “Ich weiss auf der Wieden”
was a waltz in a year, 1915, when waltzes were losing ground in American popular
music to faster duple dance rhythms (15.37). “Valencia,” which romanticized
an old Spanish city with Moorish roots, was known for an “irresistibly rhythmic”
quality, which was almost certainly perceived as exotic (15.38). “I Kiss Your Hand,
Madame,” which conveyed a distinctly old-world European image in its text, had a
flowing rhythmic and melodic quality reminiscent of European operetta. The version
Adorno knew, recorded by “Whispering” Jack Smith, a popular American singer of
the 1920s, presents the song in both English and German;38 an old-world quality is
accentuated by the use of the violin in a version by Bing Crosby (15.39). “Penny
Serenade” offers a lyrical melody with major–minor alternations compatible with
35 Theodor W. Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?” (Notes to Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992
[1974]), p. 250. See 15.31.
36 In Theodor W. Adorno, Musicalische Schriften V, Gesammelte Schriften, Band
18 (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 1984), pp. 778–787. On Adorno and popular song analysis see
15.32.
37 Theodor W. Adorno, “Commodity Music Analysed,” (Quasi una fantasia: Essays on
Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London: Verso, 1994 [1963]), pp. 37–52. Section
on “Penny Serenade,” pp. 47–49.
38 Adorno, “Schlageranalysen,” p. 786.
its Hispanic image of a lover serenading a woman outside her window (15.40).
Nevertheless, at least three of these songs fall within an extended definition of Tin
Pan Alley in one crucial sense: all but the Viennese song became very popular among
Americans.39
With all four songs, Adorno’s strategy of analysis is more or less the same. Most
of his energy is devoted to extracting a line of cultural analysis from the lyrics of
the song. Secondarily, he looks at aspects of the musical style or form, typically
fastening on one or two details, and suggests some sort of relationship between the
music and the text as he has analyzed it.
The insights Adorno derives from the lyrics of these songs are consistently
illuminating. The Viennese song depicts a scene at a hotel in which a young man’s
private love letter drops over the balcony onto the main floor, where it is found and
becomes a hit song. Adorno sees here a quest, amidst the shattering of society by
war, to draw private lives into a rekindled sense of collectivity. The musical analogue
of this effort is a reliance on the long-time standard bearer of Empire, the Viennese
waltz. But the waltz, like the Empire, is a ghost of what it was (15.42); it is kitsch.
The very use of this music, along with its poor handling, inscribes the falseness of
the quest. As specific evidence, Adorno points to the awkward use of a diminished-
seventh chord in the verse (under “blondes”). The composer does not have the skill
to resolve this chord with proper voice-leading; so instead he leaves the next few
melody notes almost bereft of harmony (15.43).40
“Valencia,” in the specificity of its name, promises its listeners a post-war society
that values individuality and allows escape to other, better places. These promises,
however, are illusory. Valencia could be replaced by any other foreign locale. This
pseudo-individuality is echoed by the initial distinctive rhythmic pattern of the
music, which Adorno concedes is attractive.41 But the music does not sustain this
effect of individuality; everything else about the setting is banal and unmemorable
(15.45).42
“I Kiss Your Hand, Madame,” is about the return of old conventions in a post-war
world that seems to have regained its stability. Kissing the hand connotes an earlier
order of aristocratic protocols; but the man using them is a cad, seeking a one-night
stand. Adorno characterizes the music, in a non-specific way, as correspondingly
false. A hint of tango excitement is in fact wholly tame. The layout allows a bit
of vocal improvisation; and the harmonic progressions show some craft. But the
musical smoothness is hollow and deceptive. The only redeeming element of this
song is that it has not succumbed entirely to bourgeois respectability (15.47).43
39 The statistical methods for 1890–1940 in Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories 1890–1954
(Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 1986) have been questioned. See Tim Brooks’s
review, ARSC Journal [Association for Recorded Sound Collections], 21/1 (Spring, 1990):
134–141; and 15.41.
40 Adorno, “Schlageranalysen,” pp. 778–781, especially p. 780.
41 Ibid., pp. 783–784. See 15.44.
42 Ibid., pp. 781–784. See 15.46.
43 Ibid., pp. 785–787; see 15.48.
Adorno’s interpretation of “Penny Serenade” is particularly clever. In offering the
distant lady his song for only a penny, the narrator is in effect turning the commercial
ethos of Tin Pan Alley on its head; he is removing himself from the commodity system
and offering something truer, something still outside the system. In reality, the song
is precisely the sort of lucrative commodity it seems to spurn.44 And the emptiness
of the narrator’s promise of liberation is echoed in the poverty of his song. Except
for one or two interesting chords near the start, the sections of the song are unusually
short, offering thin musical satisfactions even by popular standards. Musically, the
song “is a nothing which obsessively points to its nothingness” (15.49).45
It is probably not sheer accident that two of the four songs Adorno has fastened
on offer the trope of a song within a song: the Viennese song is the hit that drops from
the hotel balcony in its lyrics; the refrain of “Penny Serenade” is the serenade offered
to the lady on the balcony. This trope is useful for Adorno’s purposes. No actual song
can live up to the mythic promises of a fictional one, and a central tactic of Adorno’s
analysis in these songs is to demonstrate the inadequacy of their music. To show
that inadequacy, Adorno typically tries to locate the musical “hook” of the song, the
single detail that promises an individuality that the rest of the music belies (15.51).
Yet even for Adorno, proving a negative is difficult: showing one distinctive feature
(or none) is not the same as showing that a piece has only one (or none).
All four of Adorno’s analyses reach the same conclusion. In each case, the
textual images of the musically impoverished song turn out to confirm the cultural
impoverishment of post-war Europe and to concede the futility of trying to build a
humane society in a morally devastated environment (15.52).
Adorno arrives at this negative conclusion via a cultural starting point and
framework that are markedly different from Hayakawa’s and Levine’s. Clearly his
methods were different. Where the Americans lumped their songs into undifferentiated
lists, as befitted a mass-produced commodity, Adorno, who could not be bothered
to identify the songwriters, nevertheless devoted attention to the specifics of each
song he analyzed. Hayakawa’s way of thinking found the Tin Pan Alley variant
unacceptably commercialized and sentimental, wanting in a gritty authenticity and
social relevance. Adorno found it wanting in musical individualization and social
resistance. In the end, however, both lines of argument converge, sometimes using
common terms, on a rejection of Tin Pan Alley. Each in its own way rejected such
songs for being commercial, pretentious, self-indulgent, bourgeois, and, above all,
politically damaging in their stifling effect upon the individual’s capacity for agency
within a commodified society. In the face of such unified disapproval, how can one
defend such a genre?
***
I propose here a few lines of defense. To answer Adorno, one could begin by
contrasting the exhaustion of European empires with the vitality of an American
44 “It is a hit song which simply invokes itself” (Adorno, “Commodity Music Analysed,”
p. 47).
45 “Ibid., p. 47. See 15.50 for detailed analysis.
culture that spilled over into Europe during the 1920s and remained vital throughout
the Depression. To answer Hayakawa and Levine, one would need to start by
confronting the racial nature of the binary oppositions embedded in their critiques. In
particular, one would want to question the necessity of a zero-sum analysis that pits a
white-dominated genre, the Tin Pan Alley song, against black-dominated or -derived
genres such as blues, jazz, and rock.46 The African American cultural critic Gerald
Early, for example, has analyzed the middle-class aspirations of Tin Pan Alley and
the acknowledgment of pain in the blues as American values that are complementary
rather than mutually exclusive.47
Both responses would involve acknowledging a strong association, between
the two world wars, of American popular song and the vitality of youth, embodied
particularly by George Gershwin (15.55). This vitality had cultural implications
well beyond the momentary energizing effect that Adorno scorned in what he
called rhythmic, as opposed to emotional, songs—songs that spouted lyrics about
“bananas,” or “cheese at the train station,” or “Aunt Paula who eats tomatoes.”48 It
was a vitality that acknowledged sexuality, albeit in a manner more understated and
more satisfying than Adorno was willing to acknowledge (15.57). Ulf Lindberg
captures this quality brilliantly in his evocation of the 1920s as initiating “a decisive
break with Victorianism,” in which “[t]he Victorian relationship between sexuality
and emotion . . . was virtually reversed.”49 By this he means that whereas Victorian
culture prized emotional intensity and sexual restraint, the culture of the 1920s
encouraged sexual intensity and emotional restraint. But most important, this vitality
had a real impact on people. The one form of praise that writers in general have
heaped on the Tin Pan Alley song is testament to its pervasive and forceful presence
in everyday life, by which they clearly mean, in everyday life for many people.50
To understand the significance of this pervasiveness, it may help to invert a
common criticism. Instead of dismissing the Tin Pan Alley song as a half-breed
genre, defective in both its vernacular and artistic lines, we could envision it as
a hybrid genre that combines the strengths of both. Like Western art music since
the Renaissance, Tin Pan Alley songs were given a fixed form through publishing.
But unlike Western music as it evolved in the nineteenth century, such songs did
not demand faithfulness in performance to their written form: they did not, for
example, prohibit the separation of melody from accompaniment, rearranging, or
improvisation. Thus, in its parts or in its whole, the Tin Pan Alley song could be
performed at any moment in any place by anyone, amateur or professional.51 In a
sense it constituted what Richard Crawford means by the term “performers’ music,”
as opposed to “composers’ music”—and yet a printed score remained essential to
46 See 15.53 on race and authenticity.

47 Gerald Early, “Devil in a Blues Dress” (Books & Culture, 5/5 [September/October,
1999]: 11–13). See 15.54.
48 Adorno, “On Jazz,” (Quasi una fantasia, pp. 470–495), p. 486. See 15.56.
49 Lindberg, p. 287. See 15.58 on irony.
50 See 15.59 for diverse views of Tin Pan Alley and reality.
51 See especially O’Brien, p. 71; see also 15.60.
the conception of Tin Pan Alley music.52 The advantages of this hybrid generic
character are worth examining. I contend that both sides of this character contributed
to a quality that constituted a valuable American resource for living: an attitude of
optimism.
Take first its conception as a genre that requires publication. Each Tin Pan Alley
song was more or less fixed in its configuration through publication,53 and governed
by a formal paradigm that required brevity and clear boundaries. The stability of
its printed form made it by definition bigger and more durable than any particular
performance; it gave conceptual priority to the song over the performer. At the
same time, its goal of mass reproducibility precluded its writers from designing it
as self-therapy. Bob Dylan, who rightly associated his own songs with a shift in
musical paradigms, advocated trying to compose in an “unconscious frame of mind”
that, as Luc Sante puts it, could “bypass literal thinking” or “outsmart front-brain
thinking.”54 The results of such a process appealed to a “confessional” culture55—a
kind of culture for which Tin Pan Alley had no use. On the contrary, Tin Pan Alley
songs were openly mediated and fictitious. As compositions they made no pretense
of being an immediate expression of anything. They were subject to standards of
length and intelligibility, which were taken for granted as requirements of their
craft; they acceded to the Aristotelian demand for a beginning, middle, and end.
At bottom, Tin Pan Alley prized artifice over authenticity, and that is not altogether
a bad thing. Craftsmanship has its advantages over expressiveness. When a singer
presented a Tin Pan Alley song, the effect, as Clive James elegantly puts it, was
not ordinarily “the barely articulated words of a personal anguish ... [but rather] a
skillful interpretation of a national literature.”56 Expressiveness builds performing
careers, but craftsmanship builds repertories. And while Tin Pan Alley was not, as
Charles Hamm reminds us, “the music of all Americans,”57 it was probably the last
American musical genre to have anything like a plausible claim to a nationwide
constituency.58
Advocates for Tin Pan Alley like to argue that its songs achieved broad circulation
without sinking to a lowest common denominator in either their written content or
their social effect (15.64). The people who wrote Tin Pan Alley songs did not try
52 Crawford, p. 65; see 15.61.

53 Still, the published form of a Tin Pan Alley song was not meant to be fixed with the
absoluteness that became the ideal in art music. See 15.62.
54 Luc Sante, “‘I Is Someone Else’” (New York Review of Books, 52, no. 4 [10 March
2005]: 35–38), p. 37.
55 Ibid., p. 38.
56 Clive James, “Just a Nice Man Speaking: The Hidden Bravura of Bing Crosby and
the Balladeers,” review of “Bing, The Greatest of Them All, (BBC) Radio 2” (Times Literary
Supplement, 2 May 2003, p. 18). See 15.63 on James, T.S. Eliot, Hornby, et al.
57 See, e.g., his [Charles Hamm]Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York:
Norton, 1983 [1979]), p. 379, and Liner Notes for Brother, Can You Spare a Dime: American
Song During the Great Depression (New York: New World Records, 2001 [1977]), p. 8.
58 I mean a constituency that crossed generational as well as geographical and many
ethnic lines. Furthermore, the currency of Tin Pan Alley song among jazz players allowed it
to cross some racial lines.
to outsmart their front-brain thinking; they used it. Fashioning music and words
into a viable song required focusing. And this focused quality had an effect on
performance, which brings us to the other side of the song’s hybrid status: its broad
performability.59
A critic writing in 1934 noted that
[T]o a large percentage of the population the popular song ... supplies a convenient
substitute for conversation. Things ... the soda clerk wouldn’t dare say ... ripple from his
lips … when they are ... quotations of the hit of the moment, particularly if accompanied
by its music.60
This critic could not foresee the July day in 1969 when Frank Sinatra’s recording
of “Fly Me to the Moon,” would establish a connection between two Americans
stepping onto the moon and people all over the globe (15.66). But he might have
foreseen how bits of Tin Pan Alley tunes and lyrics, by white and black songwriters,
would get stuck in the soundtrack of people’s minds, to be triggered forever after in
situations expected and unexpected: “Cuddle Up a Little Closer, Lovey Mine” (1908);
“After You’ve Gone” (1918); “Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh?” (1926); “I’ll Get
By” (1928); “Button Up Your Overcoat” (1928); “Mean to Me” (1929); “Just Me
and My Radio” (1929); “Blue Again” (1930); and “Lazybones” (1933).61 The access
of ordinary people to an active appropriation of a song did not impress Adorno as a
basis for social power. On the contrary, in a passage I find almost prurient, he asserts
that “when [people] whistle or hum tunes they know [and] add tiny up-beat notes
which sound as though they whipped or teased the melody,” they are asserting a
pathetically deluded, even childish claim to the ownership of music.62 This assertion
in effect dovetails with Hayakawa’s characterization of Tin Pan Alley music as poor
“equipment for living”; and here I would like to turn briefly to Hayakawa’s reading
of the 1929 song “Am I Blue?” (15.69)
Taking its lyrics at face value, Hayakawa sees this song as a vehicle for self-
pity.63 But the music tells a different tale. Consider the vital affect of its most famous
recording, by Ethel Waters (1929), and the bouncy recurring syncopated riff in the
accompaniment, notated with small notes in the sheet music (15.71).64 Most of
those who bought this sheet music were amateurs; I heard my father, who was 19
in 1929, sing and play it at the piano many times. He always took the riff. I suspect
that for a number of its earliest performers, the primary experience of “Am I Blue?”
59 “Performability,” in this sense, should not be confused with Judith Butler’s

“performativity.” See 15.65.
60 Sigmund Spaeth, Preface to The Facts of Life in Popular Song (New York and London:
Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1934), p. vi.
61 See 15.67 for attributions.
62 Adorno, “On Popular Music,” p. 456; see 15.68 on “Fetish-Character” and whistling.
63 Hayakawa, p. 396. See 15.70.
64 See 15.72 on recordings. For the accompanimental figure, see, e.g., 100 Best Songs
of the 20’s and 30’s, introduction by Richard Rodgers (New York: Harmony Books, 1973),
pp. 160–162. The tempo is “Moderato”; the piano introduces the verse with an open repeat of
two rhythmic measures marked “Vamp.”
involved the resilient rhythmic quality of the music, which rose above the literal
lament in the lyrics and made it fun to sing.
Yet, performing that riff required some effort. And although one seldom needed
special expertise to sing such songs, part of the pleasure in performing them must
have lain in the sense of skill that anyone could derive from refashioning, or just
reproducing, their well-crafted, professionally focused components. Writing
about Broadway, Andrea Most has ingeniously proposed musical performance
as a metaphor for American empowerment: by her account, anyone could join
the American community simply by learning the steps.65 The hybrid genre of Tin
Pan Alley supports her argument. In both its writing and its performance, the Tin
Pan Alley song projected discipline. The prospect of mastering a discipline, pace
Lawrence Levine, produces confidence. 66 And confidence breeds optimism.
Levine is correct in claiming that Tin Pan Alley songs avoided delivering sermons
or lessons; plying their craft in a marketplace that was not based in any substantive
sense on ethnic, religious, or communal roots, Tin Pan Alley writers had neither the
background nor the inclination to pass along “group knowledge” based on “folk
experience.”67 Nevertheless, I believe that the Tin Pan Alley song, especially as it
began to shake off European waltz-time for American dance rhythms, exemplified,
promoted, or celebrated, in both its performative and written aspects, an optimistic
belief in the efficacy of action. Thus, far from stifling an individual’s power to stake
out a meaningful life in a depersonalizing society, such songs, in my judgment,
offered an important source of empowerment to ordinary people.
In terms of performance, the livelier songs said, “Get out there and keep rolling.”
Laugh and be clever. Don’t whine; but if you do whine, said the ballads, whine
with style. Compete (15.76); but also cooperate—fit the music with the words;
and relate—sing to and about others who matter to you. Indeed, I would argue that
Tin Pan Alley songs could establish and nurture all sorts of emotional bonds over
the course of their listeners’ lifetimes. Songs such as Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do”
(1924) or Harry Warren’s “Jeepers Creepers” (1938; 15.77) could at different times
be directed at one’s lover or one’s child; they could be associated with performances
by Nat King Cole or Louis Armstrong, or with the youth of the parent, now gone,
who first sang the song to you (complete with all his whistles and trilling).68 In this
65 This is the central thesis of Most’s book Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway
Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). See, e.g., p. 200; and p. 197,
where she links this metaphor explicitly to notions of a meritocracy (which is what she means
by “selective” inclusion); see also Early, and text at note 47. For qualifications and dissents
see 15.73.
66 See text at notes 29 and 71, and 15.74.
67 See 15.75.
68 Jeffrey Magee’s final anecdote in “Irving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’: Ethnic Affiliations
and Musical Transformations” (Musical Quarterly, 84/4 [Winter, 2000]: 573), about singing
“Blue Skies” to his daughter, recalls my own decision to end a version of this paper, read on
April 23, 2004 at University of California, Berkeley, by dedicating the song “Rhode Island
is Famous for You” to my son, Joseph (who was in the audience). The similarity seems less
accidental than a response to some vital quality of this repertory. See 15.78.
way, Tin Pan Alley songs produced exactly what Lawrence Levine failed to find in
them: an experience of love as “multidimensional.”69
In terms of written form, the Tin Pan Alley song—like much Western art
music—typically sets up and resolved musical obstacles.70 One might have heard in
this formal pattern an exhortation to stay in the game whatever its difficulties; such
an attitude could fortify people of my mother’s generation, in their youth during
the Depression, and today, as the last survivors bravely approach death. Again,
lyrics that deemphasized the physicality of sex encouraged a capacity for delayed
gratification. So did the conciseness of the song, its honoring of familiar restraints
and protocols, indeed, all the qualities that led snobs to sneer at its standardization:
learn your skills, said the song; control your narcissism; make your songs objects that
everyone can use (15.81). Which brings us back to the open-ended availability of
the Tin Pan Alley song: in making a modern, finite, standardized format available to
performance in a postmodern infinity of styles and contexts, such songs encouraged
people to make order out of chaos (15.82).
Disparaging American optimism, Levine finds in Tin Pan Alley songs a lack
of humor and confidence that discourages people from the search for “alternative
possibilities.”71 I think the cardinal virtue of these songs is an invigorating sort of
optimism. By this I mean partly a mindset that will not let epistemological theories
undermine a readiness to take moral action, say by mistaking the impossibility
of objectivity for the impossibility of fairness (15.84). But chiefly I mean the
strength that the pleasure, humor, and sweetness of the Tin Pan Alley song lent to
people of all ages in the ordinary moments of their lives72—the moments idealized
by Wordsworth as the
best portion of a good man’s life,––

His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.73
A reviewer of a memoir written a few years ago by a child of Holocaust survivors

admired the author’s “profoundly wise concluding questions on the quotidian value
. . . memory has for life”:
How to find richness, authenticity, depth in the temperate zones of ordinary life? How to
find sources of significance that do not derive from extremity and to endow with value not
only great losses but [also] modest gains?74
69 Levine, p. 279. See text at note 25, and 15.79.

70 See Hamm, Yesterdays, pp. 371–372, on the climax–release pattern; and 15.80.
71 Levine, p. 275. See 15.83.
72 See 15.85, on Mitchell Morris’s musical “quotidien.”
73 William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”
74 From Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the
Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); quoted by James E. Young, in “A Prisoner of
Memory” (New York Times Book Review, 18 January 2004), p. 13.
The kinds of music that accompany us in our moments offstage almost surely affect
our sense of capacity and responsibility, both public and private. Adorno gives the
Tin Pan Alley song one out: some songs can rise to the level of “Good bad music”;
his example is “Tea for Two” (1925).75 I might accept Adorno’s consolation prize
if it allowed me to argue that some such songs offer promise as “equipment for
living.” To test the possibility of identifying such a quality, I recommend, in closing,
a comparison between two songs. The first is “Who Am I?” (2003), an existentially
weighty song by a much-revered post-Tin-Pan-Alley singer-songwriter, Lou Reed
(15.87).76 The second is “Crazy Rhythm” (1928), a throwaway song by Irving
Caesar, Joseph Meyer, and Roger Wolfe Kahn (15.89).
This is admittedly a loaded comparison. The former presents the singer-
songwriter’s confessional mode at its worst: it is long, meandering, repetitive.
Its words are trite; its music, amorphous. Forced to listen to the whole song, my
audiences invariably squirm. The latter, written by professional songwriters now
largely forgotten, presents standardization at its crisp best. It is short, snappy, and
clever. Its lyrics compare the addictions of music and alcohol with brilliant concision.
Though it too is repetitive, my audiences can’t get enough of it. Still, extremes can
instruct. “Crazy Rhythm” appeared a year before the Great Depression. “Who Am
I” was released less than two months before the American invasion of Iraq.77 How
might each of these songs have fortified its listeners for the trials ahead?
75 Adorno, “Kitsch,” (1932), trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on

Music (ed. Richard Leppert, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002),
p. 502. See 15.86.
76 From Reed’s album The Raven [2003]. See 15.88.
77 Reed’s CD The Raven, which contains “Who Am I?,” was issued on January 28, 2003.
President George W. Bush announced the start of the Iraq invasion on March 19, 2003.
Chapter Sixteen
Musicology Beyond the Score ... and the

Performance: Making Sense of the Creak
on Miles Davis’s “Old Folks”
David Ake
Miles Davis’s 1961 album Someday My Prince Will Come has never attracted the
attention or accolades accorded to many of the trumpeter’s other records. How could
it, really, considering that the two Davis releases that preceded it—Kind of Blue and
Sketches of Spain—rank among the most revered recordings in all of jazz, while
E.S.P., which marked the studio-recording debut of Davis’s “Second Great Quintet”
was still four years away? By contrast to those landmark recordings, Someday
My Prince isn’t considered much more than a blowing session. Still, the record
merits attention. Not just because it marks the last time Davis would work in the
studio with saxophonist John Coltrane, nor even for the album’s design (15.1),
which features Davis’s wife, Frances Taylor, in one of the earliest appearances of
an African-American model on a record cover. Someday May Prince also warrants
consideration because of a very brief moment on one track. Listen to “Old Folks”
(15.2). At the end of the second A-section of that cut (approximately one minute,
fifteen seconds from the beginning) you’ll hear, quietly but clearly, the squeaky
groan of a piece of furniture laboring under the weight of its occupant.
Thanks to Hillary Case, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, Daniel Goldmark, Robert Walser,
and especially Raymond Knapp for providing comments and suggestions on early versions of
this essay.
Jazz writer Ian Carr describes Someday My Prince as “uneven in quality” and “lacking in
that group identity which always characterizes the best Miles Davis albums.” Ian Carr, Miles
Davis: A Biography (New York: Quill, 1984), p. 124. Davis recorded Someday My Prince Will
Come over three sessions in March 1961. His sidemen for those dates included saxophonists
Hank Mobley and John Coltrane, pianist Wynton Kelly, drummer Jimmy Cobb, and bassist
Paul Chambers.
This assertion applies only to album-cover models; it does not include the many black
female performers who appeared on their own record covers. See Carr, Miles Davis, p. 166,
and also Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles Davis: The Autobiography (New York:
Touchstone, 1989), p. 252.
It’s uncertain whether the sound emanates from Wynton Kelly’s piano bench,
Miles Davis’s seat, or some other source altogether. Nor do we know why Davis and
record producer Teo Macero allowed that sound to remain. The musicians and studio
engineers certainly could have fixed the “problem,” either by re-recording the track
entirely or by splicing together sections of two different takes. For that reason, I
hesitate to designate this moment as “noise,” since noise, as Jacques Attali has argued
so compellingly, destabilizes and threatens order. Clearly, Davis, Macero, and the
powers-that-be at Columbia Records—one of the recording industry’s major labels
at the time—didn’t feel that the sound disturbed the otherwise clean and controlled
performance of “Old Folks” enough to redo the track. Or perhaps they liked the
effect. It’s unlikely that they could have overlooked it. But if a squeaky piece of
furniture on a jazz record isn’t “noise,” what is it? A sort of one-off, inadvertent,
musique concrète, perhaps? A “good accident?” For now, I’ll simply refer to it as
“the creak.”
One might be tempted to ask at this point why we should care about how we
designate that sound or even that it remained on the final release. In other words,
why single out a seemingly unintended moment on one selection of a not-particularly
groundbreaking album? In response, I would suggest that that instant on “Old Folks”
presents an ideal opportunity to reflect on some issues rarely explored in discourse
about jazz, or any music, for that matter. By considering the potential implications
of this sonority, we can build upon Richard Leppert’s maxim, “people do not employ
sounds arbitrarily, haphazardly, or unintentionally—though the ‘intentionally’
haphazard may itself constitute an important sort of sonoric discourse.” More
specifically, by accounting for this sound that isn’t “performed“ in the usual sense,
but which, I argue, still matters to our understandings of a performance, we might
gain an otherwise overlooked perspective on playing, listening to, and meaning in
music.
That said, it’s one thing to assert that the creak on “Old Folks” deserves attention;
deciding how we should deal with that sound is quite another. The typical “toolbox”
Although most jazz trumpeters stand while performing in concert, videos and photos
reveal that Miles Davis sometimes sat while recording. See also Nat Hentoff, The Jazz Life
(New York: Da Capo, 1975), p. 132.
According to jazz scholar and musician Carl Woideck, Davis and Macero had
experimented with multiply edited recordings as early as the middle 1950s. Carl Woideck,
“Miles Davis 1955: Performance and Production in the Recording Studio,” paper presented at
the Annual Conference of the Society of American Music, Toronto, November 2, 2000.
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1985).
The term “good accident” derives from an interview with Paul McCartney in which
McCartney suggested that “One of the ... great things about the Beatles ... was that the Beatles
recognized good accidents, where a lot of people would have thought, ‘Oh shit, there’s been an
accident.’” Danny Edelston interviews Paul McCartney as part of “The 101 Greatest Beatles
Songs,” Mojo, 152 (2006): 86.
Richard Leppert, “Paradise, Nature, and Reconciliation, or a Tentative Conversation
with Wagner, Puccini, Adorno, and The Ronettes,” Echo 4/1 (2002) http://www.echo.ucla.
edu/Volume4-Issue1/leppert/index.html.
Musicology Beyond the Score ... and the Performance 221
used by music scholars today carries a broad and sophisticated array of techniques
designed to account for harmony, melody, form, visual imagery, and other larger-
scale aspects of this or that performance or composition. Those same toolboxes,
however, as impressive as they are, don’t appear to hold anything specifically
intended to handle a single, humble sonority such as we hear here. So, faced with
this unfamiliar problem, we do what any handyperson (or jazz musician) would do
in such a situation: we improvise. Below I identify three ways in which we might
theorize some of the meanings revealed and configured by the creak on “Old Folks,”
devoting one section each to how the sound relates to listening to, valuing, and
performing jazz. There are no hard and fast answers here, and I don’t pretend to
exhaust the implications of all of these issues in this short essay, but perhaps we can
use this as a foray into (if not entirely out of) some worthwhile terrain.
Listening to Jazz: The Record Effect
As a point of departure, we should note that this essay wouldn’t make sense—
couldn’t even be conceived—without the advent of recording technology. This
is an obvious fact, of course, but it’s worth considering the repercussions of that
circumstance. We’re dealing here with reproducible sonic information. Sheet music,
the favored mode of preserving and disseminating musical detail in the world of Tin
Pan Alley-era song plugging (from which the composition “Old Folks” derives) can
neither store nor reproduce sound. But recording’s capabilities represent more than
mere differences from or additions to notation. Rather, as Susan McClary has noted,
“Because recording foregrounds .... parameters such as timbre, timing, and inflection
that had always escaped the printed text, ... its emphasis switches from the composer
of the written document to the performer, whose actual nuances we hear.” As
evidence of this trend, we need look no further than the fact that this essay concerns
Miles Davis’s version of the song “Old Folks.” It matters little to our discussion
that the tune was written in 1938 by Tin Pan Alley songsmiths Willard Robison and
D. L. Hill.10 Yet as the brief moment on Someday My Prince also shows, recording
can capture even more than what McClary has suggested. The sound engineers at
Columbia Records’ 30th Street Studio chronicled all of the sounds that occurred
during Miles Davis group’s performance of “Old Folks,” and the “actual nuances we
hear” include a sonority beyond the musicians’ intended ones, a situation that takes
us one crucial step further than the composer-to-performer shift.
Moreover, recordings not only store and reproduce sounds, they also allow us to
hear those sounds as many times as we wish. This shapes how we will understand
Susan McClary, “1999: Music at the End of the Second Millennium,” Keynote Address
for Conference, “Cross(over) Relations,” Eastman School of Music, (1996): 6.
10 Although a number of jazz musicians have covered “Old Folks,” the song has never
been considered one of the major Tin Pan Alley “standards.” It is rarely found in sheet music
compilations of that era’s music. And while chart rankings are far from perfect in assessing
sales and popularity, it’s worth noting that “Old Folks” has charted only once (Larry Clinton’s
version had a six-week run, peaking at number 4 in 1938). Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories,
1890–1954 (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, 1986), p. 561.
the material contained on a particular record. Even a devoted Miles Davis fan
checking out the Davis group every night during a weeklong stint at a nightclub
with a squeaky piano bench (or whatever it is) in 1961 wouldn’t hear that sound as
we do on Someday My Prince Will Come. Each time the group played, that sonority
would occur during a different part of the set; the musicians would play the melody,
accompaniment, and solos differently; and an ever-changing array of clatter (cash
registers, audience chatter, tinkling glasses) would also attend the performance. By
contrast, hearing this one particular recording a number of times means that we’ll
begin to take in and eventually anticipate all of the aural information presented. The
squeaking sound on “Old Folks” will become an expected part of the soundscape for
the listener, even if it wasn’t necessarily a part of the musicians’ awareness at the
time they recorded the tune.11
Because the meanings and experiences generated by the creak on “Old Folks” so
closely involve the activity of listening to a commercial recording, that sound does
share some traits with other phenomena connected to interaction with audio media.
For instance, listeners in the LP era grew accustomed to an initial pop and crackle
when the turntable needle hit the surface of the vinyl, just as they became familiar
with the scratches and skips that eventually marked their own well-worn discs. For
the few of us who admit to owning eight-track tapes in the 1970s, the abrupt “click-
click” that marked the move from one track to another —sometimes even in the
middle of a tune—became an expected part of our experience. And Thomas Porcello
has written on the “print through” audible on analog tapes where, during moments
of little or no other sonic activity, one hears a faint “pre echo” of the music to come.
Porcello describes his own listening experiences in which “[t]hat tiny audio shadow
had the power to generate a visceral inner tension. ... And because of the very fact
of foreshadowing—the building of anticipation, tension and desire attendent to the
partially-known object—the eventual impact of the events was that much more
intense.”12 Certainly, a similar sort of listener-based anticipation pertains to the “Old
Folks” example. What distinguishes that cut from these others, however, is the fact
that it occurred in the studio with the musicians, indeed, apparently as a direct result
of one of the musicians, though that player almost certainly did not intend to produce
that sound. In this way, our creak is not just “about the technology,” as LP scratches,
eight-track clicks, and analog print through are, but also in some ways, as we’ll see,
about physically playing an instrument.
One could also note that the questions raised by this rickety piece of furniture
suggest the ideals of John Cage, who so famously challenged us to hear all sounds,
“whether intended or not,” as music.13 But on closer inspection, Cage’s aesthetics
11 This is not even to mention the fact that we hear everything differently today—nearly
a half a century after this recording session—due to all the other musics we’ve heard and the
different historical and cultural contexts in which we listen. All of which is beyond the scope
of this paper.
12 Thomas Porcello, “‘Tails Out’: Social Phenomenology and the Ethnographic
Representation of Technology in Music–Making,” Ethnomusicology 42/3 (1998): 486.
13 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
don’t fit as comfortably here as one might expect. For the circumstances within
which and through which the creak occurs (jazz musicians playing a Tin Pan Alley
tune in a studio setting) and come to our attention (a commercial recording) seems
to resist Cage’s ideal of a culture-free, blank-slate awareness of ... this sound ... then
this sound ... then this sound, ad infinitum.
Instead, when we hear the Someday My Prince Will Come version of “Old Folks”
we are aware that we’re listening to a “Miles Davis record” or at least to a “jazz
record.” And not a “free jazz” record: the musicians approach this typical thirty-two-
bar standard in a straight-ahead manner. Robert Walser and others have shown that
when jazz musicians play together, their work always engages meanings beyond that
one performance. That is, Davis and his band aren’t just playing “Old Folks,” they’re
also “signifyin’” on all of the versions of that tune that they’ve heard or played in the
past, as well as all of the other so-called “ballads” they’ve heard or played. Similarly,
listeners’ understandings of the track are also grounded in their own experiences of
this tune, of other ballads, other standards, other Miles Davis recordings, other jazz
recordings, and so on.14 It is just such a shared tradition of performance and listening
practices that allows us to hear this recording as “jazz” in the first place. Whether
or not Cage would endorse such an experience, all of these various circumstances
shape listeners’ understandings of this version of “Old Folks.”15 So while the creak
almost certainly happened by chance, this is hardly “chance music.”
As one example of how the sound on “Old Folks” could work—has worked—
to shape specific meanings, we can take my own listening history with this track,
the conclusions of which I hope will point to broader implications of the effects of
recording in jazz and beyond. I realize it’s impossible to describe in words my precise
experience of the cut. “Feeling” isn’t something we’re typically trained to discuss
in musicology, and besides we’re facing Charles Seeger’s infamous “linguocentric
predicament,” or engaging in what Susan McClary has jokingly described as “effing
the ineffable.”16 Be that as it may, this track has resonated with me on a fairly
definable level, one that relates directly to the topic at hand, so I ask that you indulge
me for a moment here.
I first heard the Someday My Prince Will Come album around 1980 as an
undergraduate jazz piano major at the University of Miami. For my friends and
me at that school, Miles Davis epitomized jazz. We pored over each track of his
records, learned the tunes, and memorized the solos, all in an effort to incorporate
14 Robert Walser, “‘Out of Notes’: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles
Davis,” in Krin Gabbard (ed.), Jazz Among the Discourses (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1995), pp. 165–188. See also Krin Gabbard, “Signifyin(g) the Phallus: Mo Better
Blues and Representations of the Jazz Trumpet,” in Representing Jazz (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1995), pp. 104–130, and Alan Stanbridge, “A Question of Standards: ‘My
Funny Valentine’ and Musical Intertextuality,” Popular Music History, 1/1 (2004): 83–108.
15 For some of Cage’s take on jazz, see Michael Zwerin, “Lethal Measurement, an
interview with John Cage,” Village Voice (6 January 1966).
16 Charles Seeger, Studies in Musicology 1935–1975 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977); Susan McClary, “Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in Seventeenth-
Century French Music,” Echo 2/2 (2000). http://www.echo.ucla.edu/volume2-issue2/mcclary/
mcclary-article-part3.html
into our own playing his groups’ various approaches to phrasing, timbre, groove,
and other formalistic elements. But among all those tracks, “Old Folks” stood out; it
always represented something more to me than “great jazz” to admire and assimilate.
Specifically, the track seemed to speak to me as a sonic representation of advanced
age; put more bluntly, it sounded like “oldness.” And there’s no question that the
record’s creak contributed to my interpretation. Although that sound lasts only for
about a second, its presence made everything about the track seem somehow slower
or “tired,” just as I imagined old age would feel or be.
Now this is my own subjective experience of this recording; no one will understand
it exactly as I do. Still, as philosopher Mark Johnson writes, while “[t]here is ... no
single, god’s eye way of carving up the world, ... [i]t does not follow ... that we
can carve it up any way we wish.”17 Johnson’s research on the connections among
metaphorical language, physical activity, and human cognition reveal that what we
perceive as our own innermost thoughts and feelings are always shaped by our daily
interactions with other people and things in the world. In other words, even the
most seemingly abstract theoretical concepts are “embodied” in many ways. Picking
up on the work of Johnson and others, music theorist Joseph N. Straus has argued
that, “Like our knowledge of the world in general, our knowledge of music is also
embodied: we make sense of music, we understand it, according to patterns of bodily
perceptions, activity, and feeling.”18 For Straus, Johnson, and likeminded scholars,
then, any number of “external” factors could explain why I hear the squeak on “Old
Folks” to mean “aged,” rather than, say, “agile.”19 Perhaps the straining wood initially
reminded me of a rocking chair or a door slowly opening in a dilapidated house, both
of which have been used in films and television to signify the elderly.
To be sure, reasons beyond the squeak contribute to the rather specific way I
understand this track. And here we find ourselves on somewhat more familiar
musicological ground. For instance, the deliberate tempo of the performance
heightens the “aged” affect. Davis and his band mates play the tune at the decidedly
unhurried rate of around fifty-three beats per minute, so slow that the entire five-
minute, twenty-second performance consists of just two choruses through the thirty-
two bar form. Historical and cultural considerations pertain here, too, as composers
and listeners in the West have long equated a slow tempo with old age and its
inevitable aftermath (think “September Song,” “Taps,” Chopin’s “Funeral March,”
“Old Black Joe,” etc.). We might also consider Jimmy Cobb’s languid brushwork on
the snare drum: a methodical, shhh ... shhh ... shhh ... like the shuffling of slippered
feet across a floor.
Additionally, this track’s atmosphere would be vastly different had Miles Davis
chosen another approach to trumpet playing. On “Old Folks,” as on so many of his
17 Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and
Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 202.
18 Joseph N. Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory,”
Journal of the American Musicological Society 59/1 (2006): 122.
19 For overviews of recent theories of embodiment and cognition as they pertain to
music, see, again, Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal,” and David Borgo, Sync or Swarm:
Improvising Music in a Complex Age (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 36–58.
ballad performances, he eschews virtuosic linear passages in favor of legato phrasing,
carefully modulated dynamics, and an economical use of notes. He sets off each
phrase of the melody with extended periods when he plays nothing at all. Had Davis
(or any of the other musicians) decided to fill measures fifteen and sixteen leading up
to the bridge of the first chorus, as many less “space”-conscious players would do, we
might not even hear the squeak in question. Just as important to the ruminative affect
is Davis’s trademark use of the Harmon mute. Critics and scholars have commented
on that timbre, how it evokes a brittleness and vulnerability diametrically opposed
to the chest-pounding bravado of so many fellow trumpeters before and after Davis
(such as Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Maynard Ferguson, and Arturo Sandoval).20
And it’s true; a certain fragility—another sign of old age—does characterize that
sound.
However, the understated rhetorical style of playing by Davis and his group
demands such patience, skill, and confidence to pull off convincingly that one
shouldn’t equate or confuse the “vulnerable” or “frail” musical affect with the
musicians who evoke it. That is, unlike Billie Holiday’s 1958 swansong, Lady
in Satin, or Chet Baker’s late work, or Johnny Cash’s last recordings, or the final
performances of Judy Garland, the allure of which for many listeners seems to be the
audible deterioration of the “tragic” performers, neither Miles Davis nor his sidemen
sound old, or exhausted, or infirm here. Indeed, Davis—only thirty-five years old
and a decade removed from heroin use at the time of this recording—is in fine form,
as is the rest of his group, and his playing would only get stronger over the next few
years.
No, any “abject” quality heard in this recording derives in large measure, not
from the actual age or physical shape of the musicians themselves, but rather from
their ability to evoke such a plaintive mood. In fact, the melancholic atmosphere lifts
briefly (a reminiscence of younger days?) as the rhythm section switches to a double-
time feel at the top of the second chorus during Hank Mobley’s notier sixteen-bar
tenor solo and Wynton Kelly’s equally buoyant eight-bar solo. The final A-section
melody returns us to the “elderly” ambiance, with Davis’s delicate trumpet timbre
and the rhythm section’s original languid groove to close the track.
We might note, too, that had the same sound occurred during a performance
of a song called, say, “Baby Face” or “Too Young to go Steady” instead of “Old
Folks,” it’s almost certain that I would hear the recording differently. Still, while the
musicians’ deliberately paced performance, choice of timbres, and the song’s title
help to shape the “aged” meaning for me, the point remains that the creaking sound
on “Old Folks” also contributes to that effect.21 So rather than a mere annoyance,
such as a noisy bench or chair might prove in another setting, the presence of the
creak on this record somehow “expresses” in ways that the composition and the
musicians’ playing of it can’t or don’t do on their own. How better to appreciate the
enormity of the shift from the printed score to recording technology on our ways of
20 See Walser, “Out of Notes” and Gabbard, “Signifyin(g).”

21 An obvious source of meaning in Tin Pan Alley songs is their lyrics. However, I
hadn’t heard the words to “Old Folks” until quite recently, so they didn’t contribute to my
early interpretation of that piece.
hearing and understanding music than through this inadvertent sound, a part of our
sonic awareness that goes beyond both the lead sheet and the performance?
Mediating Jazz Aesthetics: Is it “live”?
Another angle from which we might consider this sonority is to ask what its presence
on Someday My Prince Will Come reveals about the larger domains of—and possible
contradictions between—jazz’s professed aesthetics and its general practices. No
doubt, the creak on “Old Folks” raises issues pertinent to all genres. Still, it would
seem to be especially intriguing to consider in jazz contexts, for the lore and values
surrounding that tradition are very much bound up with the notion that its lifeblood
entails live, real-time, performance, even as recordings (especially those of Miles
Davis) have become the genre’s fundamental “texts,” and “audiophile” listeners
have driven the demand for ever-cleaner sound quality from their discs and MP3s.22
Certainly, we anticipate, perhaps even desire, that albums recorded “live” in
concert will include miscellaneous sounds. The ebullient shout of “yeah!” in the
middle of Davis’s performance of “Stella by Starlight” recorded during a 1964
Lincoln Center concert (originally released on his My Funny Valentine album)
or the quiet background whispers and tinkling glasses on Bill Evans’s acclaimed
Village Vanguard sessions from 1961, allow us to imagine, or perhaps even feel in
some small way, what it must have been like to sit among those musicians and their
audiences on those nights.
But Someday My Prince derives from the studio, and listeners have come to
expect recordings made in that setting to generate a sort of pure musical field. For this
reason, producers and musicians in many other genres would consider inadvertent
studio clatter such as found on “Old Folks” as an imperfection and would almost
certainly excise it in one way or another from the final release. Yet, on the surface
at least, jazz adherents tend to extol above all else the music’s unplanned or even
“looser” moments. Consider, for instance, the pronouncements by Mark Gridley,
author of the most widely used jazz-appreciation textbook, both that “Improvisation
is essential to jazz,” and that “Improvised parts sometimes sound more casual and
22 For more on the central role of recordings in jazz musicians’ learning process, see
Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 77–78, and my essay “Learning Jazz,
Teaching Jazz” in Mervyn Cooke and David Horn (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to
Jazz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Beyond pedagogy, Evan Eisenberg
has argued that, “records not only disseminated jazz, but inseminated it,” suggesting that the
category jazz would not even exist without records’ portability, repeatability, and replicability.
Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: The Experience of Music from Aristotle to Zappa
(New York: Penguin, 1987), p. 144. Also see John Mowitt, “The Sound of Music in the Age
of Electronic Reproducibility,” in Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (eds.), Music and
Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), pp. 173–197.
less organized than the written or memorized parts.”23 Likewise, in his study of jazz,
revealingly titled The Imperfect Art, Ted Gioia claims that “improvisation, if not
restricted to jazz, is nonetheless essential to it,” while adding that “If jazz music is
to be accepted and studied with any degree of sophistication, we must develop an
aesthetic that can cope both with that music’s flaws as well as its virtues.”24 Few jazz
scholars or musicians would disagree with the basic tenets of these writers’ position.25
I would add that an informal ambiance, including even occasional blatant mistakes,
actually works to enhance the reception of some recorded performances. How else
to explain the revered status of “Lester Leaps In,” on which Lester Young continued
his tenor saxophone improvisation even when pianist Count Basie clearly expected
to take over? Or consider the moment in “Giant Steps” when John Coltrane roars
back on top of Tommy Flanagan’s notoriously insecure piano solo. Such recordings
exemplify writer Albert Murray’s portrayal of jazz and blues performers as “heroic”
individuals who venture into the musical unknown in search of artistic beauty and
truth, any mistakes or failures encountered along the way serving only to prove the
difficulty of the improvisational task and so the greatness of the successes.26
Before reflecting on how these jazz aesthetics apply in the case of “Old Folks,”
we should note that this is not the first time that Miles Davis and his producers
had allowed “non-musical” sounds to remain on a studio release. The trumpeter’s
singularly raspy speaking voice appears on occasion throughout his recorded output,
most famously perhaps on his 1956 Prestige release Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis
Quintet.27 On that disc we hear Miles blow a brief flourish on his trumpet before
admonishing bassist Paul Chambers, who himself was warming up, “when you see
the red light on, everyone’s supposed to be quiet.” Davis then verbally cues pianist
Red Garland to play an introduction to the ballad “You’re My Everything.” After
a few seconds of Garland’s single-note-line with left-hand accompaniment intro,
Davis whistles the take to a stop and directs Garland to “play some block chords,
Red.” Turning his attention to the control booth, Davis says, “Alright, Rudy [Van
Gelder],” to confirm that the session engineer is still ready to record. Then back to
Garland: “block chords, Red.” Garland obliges with a strong chordal statement, and
the track progresses without further interruptions. Elsewhere on that LP, he barks
tersely to producer Bob Weinstock, “I’ll play it and tell you what it is later,” before
launching into “If I Were a Bell.”
23 Mark Gridley, Jazz Styles, Ninth Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice
Hall, 2006), 5.
24 Ted Gioia, The Imperfect Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford Alumni Association, 1988),
pp. 53, 56.
25 Some scholars and musicians might disagree with Gridley’s position (as I do) that
jazz, by definition, must contain improvisation (and also swing feel). See, for instance, Peter
J. Martin, “Spontaneity and Organisation” in Cooke and Horn, The Cambridge Companion
to Jazz, p. 133. But again, few if any would challenge the spirit of his assertion. See Paul
Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 205–216.
26 Albert Murray, Stompin’ the Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1989).
27 See also the beginning of “Trane’s Blues” on Workin’, or the end of “Circle” from
Miles Smiles.
Bear in mind that since the recording industry’s earliest days, music executives
have routinely required their artists to relinquish control over repertoire, sound, and
style. So when we consider that the middle 1950s was a time of sanctioned racist
policies in the southern United States and a de facto white-dominated racial order
throughout the rest of the country, the fact that we hear Miles Davis, an African-
American man, giving orders in such a brusque manner to Bob Weinstock, a white
record executive, is particularly striking. In this instance and the others like it, Davis’s
voice serves to reinforce understandings of the trumpeter as not merely the recording
session’s titular leader, but, more important, its artistic visionary. Yet, while we can
interpret the “extra-musical” spoken material on Relaxin’ as a historically significant
moment of black-male authority, no such cultural work pertains in the case of “Old
Folks.” We don’t even know where the creak originates. Still, the sonic marker on
that record can tell us something about jazz values.
As I suggested above, the live-and-spontaneous jazz ideal is often more lip
service than reality. The simple existence of “alternate takes” from throughout
the music’s history reveals that every generation has resisted releasing just any
performance, no matter how “impassioned.” Sometimes a musician’s unquestioned
zeal while playing just doesn’t compensate for the resultant overall sound of the
performance. Listeners want to hear “good jazz” as do the musicians themselves.
To achieve the desired effect in a finished recording, jazz performers routinely edit
their work in the studio (though the pure-improvisation aesthetic is so powerful that
musicians will rarely boast of their efforts in this regard), their “fixes” ranging from
“punching in” small fluffs to re-recording entire solos. Given today’s non-linear
digital recording technology, even formerly untouchable domains as intonation and
rhythmic imperfections can be cleaned up with a few computer keystrokes from a
skilled recording engineer.28 Granted, the analog technology in 1961 was nowhere
nearly as sophisticated as today’s digital machines. Still, that creak could have been
excised in one way or another from “Old Folks.” So what is it doing there?
Without wanting to fall into the “intentionalist fallacy” of attempting to descry
the mental processes of the recording’s participants, we can state confidently that,
regardless of the actual thoughts of Davis, Macero, and the others in the studio that
day, no one removed that sound from the final release. And it’s fairly safe to assume
that the creak was not made intentionally during the session, and so we can say too
that it falls into the category of the “‘intentionally’ haphazard” that Richard Leppert
recognized. And in this respect that instant on “Old Folks” functions more like the
“awkward” segments on “Lester Leaps In” and “Giant Steps” than to Miles Davis’s
studio chatter on Relaxin’ and elsewhere. The presence of the apparently unrehearsed,
unintended, furniture groan confers on the recording the positive attribute that the
engineer simply “captured the moment” of that one performance in the studio,
fulfilling the jazz ideal of unedited spontaneity. In this way, what the presumably
unplanned second accomplishes in a way that the musicians’ performance alone
28 In non-linear recording, all of the captured sound is converted to digital information

and stored directly on to a computer hard drive. Because no actual tape runs (thus the “non-
linear” designation), engineers have virtually free reign over what they can adjust, remove, or
enhance on each track.
doesn’t is to validate the track as “live” and “spontaneous,” and therefore “authentic.”
Even better than Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” described above, since the creak didn’t
result from anyone’s conscious performance, there’s no “mistake.” Everyone
involved with this session reaps the benefits of participating in “real” jazz, without
having to endure any of the smirks from fellow musicians or critics, such as those
that Tommy Flanagan experienced even decades after his “Giant Steps” debacle.
With these apparently competing aesthetics—flawless sound and execution versus
enthusiastic impulsiveness—in mind, we can see how this seeming imperfection on
“Old Folks,” grants the record an aura of “spur-of-the-momentness” during a skillful
and attractive but otherwise safe jazz recording session.
Performing Jazz: The “Work of Art” and the Musical Body in Recorded
Sound
A third avenue of inquiry into this sound is to ask what it tells us about the place—
or rather absence—of performers’ bodies in recorded audio media. We’ve noted
that Miles Davis’s voice sometimes remained on a final release, his spoken words
serving as preludes or postludes to his groups’ performances. Other jazz recordings
reveal instances when instrumentalists’ voices appear as unintended, extraneous, or
otherwise “meta-musical” accompaniment during the “real” music. Keith Jarrett
may be the most well known (some might say “notorious”) jazz musician in this
regard, as it’s impossible not to notice his frequent moans, sighs, and grunts. While
some listeners deride such “singing” as aural intrusions on a pure sonic field, others
accept these voices as tolerable adjuncts to the listening experience, if not actually
part of the music itself.29
Yet though the straining furniture on “Old Folks” can also be heard as an accessory
to the music, that sound operates somewhat differently from these musicians’ voices,
in that the creak is at once less personal than the voice (we don’t know who or what
made the sound) and yet somehow more physically palpable. After years of hearing
entertainers, reporters, and politicians on radio or as voice-over on television and in
films, audiences have come to accept a disembodied voice as a natural part of their
soundscape. By contrast, the creak on “Old Folks” conjures the less-common image
of a musician shifting his weight while playing. Suddenly we’re made aware that
this track did not simply emanate from the ether, as music from radio or recordings
can seem to. Someone, literally some body, created this sound. Here, the physicality
of at least one musician, his stature and movements, is brought before us audibly
in a way that a recording without that sound could not convey. In that very brief
moment we seem to find an almost palpable sonic manifestation of a performer’s
29 Audiences are split on Keith Jarrett’s vocalizations (and physical gesticulations)

while playing. Some see his demeanor as proof of a ferocious intensity and extraordinary
concentration; others find it distracting, egotistical, even comical. For more on Jarrett’s
vocalizations, see the chapter “Body and Soul” in my Jazz Cultures. Other vocally active
jazz musicians include pianists Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson, and Herbie Hancock as well as
jazz drummers Art Blakey and Elvin Jones. In the classical world, Glenn Gould represents a
similar figure, including the attendant debates.
“body” within a commercial audio recording, and with it, a rare aural-only trace of
the physical activity of jazz musicking.
The overwhelming studio-oriented aesthetic of the popular music industry and its
listening audiences sometimes cause us to forget how and where music originates.
In his insightful musical and cultural analysis of James Brown’s recording of “Super
Bad,” David Brackett notes how, “studio recordings typically efface the signs of
production by seeking to minimize the effect of human performance.”30 Brackett’s
work highlights the degree to which the many impressive technological advances
designed to “perfect” the music product also tend to hide the very people involved
in making the music in the first place. That is, the finished recording is often so
pristine and our modes of listening so divorced from the time(s) and place(s) of
record making, that musicians can seem to disappear in the process. As a result of
this “invisibility,” we can forget that the sounds we hear result from real people
interacting with instruments and (usually) other people. Given that music helps
to orient us physically in time and space and to move us literally (through dance,
finger snapping, toe tapping, and head nodding) and figuratively (through structuring
and evoking emotions), it’s somewhat ironic that the ones to vanish from our
consciousness are those individuals called upon to create these important sounds,
which is to say, the musicians themselves.
To be sure, recorded jazz isn’t the only domain that has tended to erase the
performer. Suzanne Cusick has lamented that, among her fellow listeners and
scholars of European-derived genres,
Music, an art which self-evidently does not exist until bodies make it and/or receive it,
is thought about as if it were a mind–mind game. Thus when we think analytically about
music, what we ordinarily do is describe practices of mind (the composer’s choices) for the
sake of informing the practices of other minds (who will assign meaning to the resulting
sounds). We locate musical meaning in the audible communication of one creating mind
to a co-creator, one whose highly attentive listening is in effect a shared tenancy of the
composer’s subject position. We end by ignoring the fact that these practices of the mind
are non-practices without the bodily practices they call for—about which has become
unthinkable to think.
That is, we have changed an art that exists only when, so to speak, the Word is made
Flesh, into all art which is only the Word. Metaphorically, we have denied the very thing
that makes music music, the thing which gives it such symbolic and sensual power.31
That this situation persists in the Eurocentric world of classical music should
comes as no surprise, given the supposed mind-over-body hierarchy to which
European-oriented cultures have so long adhered. But the erasure of the performer’s
body becomes paradoxical within an African American-based genre such as jazz,
30 David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2000 [1995]), p. 125 (emphasis in the original).
31 Suzanne G. Cusick, “Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem,”
in Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic, ed. Adam Krims (Amsterdam: Gordon and
Breach Arts, 1998), pp. 45–46. For an engaging examination on how concert halls serve to
accentuate this “one-way communication,” see Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings
of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), pp. 19–29.
(where Miles Davis’s work enjoys a prominent position) given that black-music
cultures have rarely acceded to the so-called Cartesian split.32 As David Brown
pointed out in Noise Orders, his thought-provoking study of the links between jazz
and architecture in the twentieth century, “[b]ecause it developed through playing
[rather than through written notation], jazz never created ruptures between the
mind and the body or separations between composing and performing.”33 Recorded
instances, such as the groaning furniture on “Old Folks,” can help us to recognize
that paradox and, perhaps, recover some of the body in this music.
Before addressing the specific bodily aspects of playing jazz, we should also
pause to acknowledge the degree to which the way we understand this music—
think about it, talk about it, value it—is intricately intertwined in the physicality
of it, that is to say, in the presence and actions of the human body. In fact, many
body-based metaphors have become so ubiquitous throughout our discourse on jazz
that their metaphorical status can sometimes be overlooked. I’m not referring here
to how the term “jazz” itself has been adopted in non-musical realms, such as in
the widely touted “Jazz Metaphor for Business Creativity,” a model developed by
and for business professionals looking to improve efficiency and flexibility in the
workplace.34 Rather, I want to focus on how jazz musicians and listeners employ
certain terms to describe aspects of the music.
Designations such as “hot,” “sweet,” “cool,” and “hard (bop)” draw on our
physical experiences in one domain to shape how we understand certain jazz
subgenres. Or consider the terms “rushing,” “dragging,” “laying back,” or “pushing,”
as descriptions of rhythmic placement. The same goes for a number of jazz song and
album titles, including Miles Davis’s own “Move,” “Walkin’,” and Relaxin’. And
nicknames such as “Long Tall Dexter” (Gordon), “Mister Five by Five” (Jimmy
Rushing), and “Little Jazz” (Roy Eldridge) stem from the physical stature of some
of the music’s most famous personalities. Honorifics such as “monster,” “giant,” and
“heavyweight” reflect the imposing, even intimidating, presence of highly skilled
jazz performers, especially in the oftentimes fiercely competitive world of hard bop.
Using the same yardstick, less skilled players are derided as “weak,” “lame,” or
“lightweight.” As Joseph N. Straus’s work exploring perceptions of disability in
music and music theory has shown, the use of such bodily centered music metaphors
can tell us a great deal about a culture’s assumptions and values regarding both its
art and its people. And Straus is certainly correct in asserting that “disability should
take its place alongside nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation
32 See Susan McClary and Robert Walser, “Theorizing the Body in African-American
Music,” Black Music Research Journal, 14/1 (1994): 75–84.
33 David Brown, Noise Orders: Jazz, Improvisation, and Architecture (Minneapolis:
34 See, for instance, David Napoli, Ama M. Whiteley, and Kathrine S. Johansen,
Organizational Jazz: Extraordinary Performance through Extraordinary Leadership
(Queensland, Australia: eContent Management Pty Ltd, 2005), or Vadim Kotelnikov’s The
Jazz of Innovation, an online course—including “80 power-point slides and 80 executive
summaries,” that shows how “structure, as chords do in jazz, serves as a basis for improvisation,
experimentations, discoveries and innovations” in the workplace. http://www.1000ventures.
com/products/bec_mc_innovation_jazz.html
as a significant category for cultural analysis, including the analysis of music.”35
Although a thorough discussion of this intriguing topic goes beyond the scope of
this paper, it’s clear that these and other descriptors clue us into the physicality
grounding so much of jazz discourse and aesthetics, even as recordings tend to erase
the physical presence of the performers.36
As one small step toward reclaiming the centrality of the performing musician, I
want also to reclaim if only for a moment the meaning of a much-bandied term: “the
work of art.” By no means am I employing that phrase in the way that it has typically
come to be understood—as a noun denoting an autonomous object of beauty to be
observed and admired. Rather, I’m using “work” as a verb, referring to the physical
effort necessary to create the sounds we hear as music. Of course, there must be a
deeply satisfying experience to this labor or people wouldn’t spend whole lifetimes
engaged in it. Artist Piet Mondrian once observed, “jazz does not know the oppression
of work. The orchestra works as if it were at play.”37 Indeed, musicologist and cellist
Elisabeth Le Guin has even invoked the term “carnal” to convey a sense of the
pleasure derived from the intricate movements of her head, arms, legs, fingers, back,
and shoulders while playing.38 Still, make no mistake; it takes formidable corporal
strength, coordination, and agility to bring any performance to life. There’s a good
reason why Miles Davis not only has a record called Relaxin’ but also one called
Workin’! And we can easily forget this “work” aspect of “art” when listening to
recordings, except in those rare moments, like in “Old Folks,” where the performer’s
body would not be denied.
Conclusion: Musicology Beyond the Score and the Performance
Seemingly extraneous sounds such as the creak on “Old Folks” are rare on studio-
made recordings, but this instance is not wholly unique in jazz. One could hear
similarities between that sound and the occasional scratch of fingers moving across
guitar or bass strings, the whispery inhalation of horn players, or even the “singing”
that we noted from Keith Jarrett and others. Although these examples operate
somewhat differently from one another, they all warrant at least some recognition
from scholars as potentially meaningful moments.
As I noted at the outset, this short essay couldn’t possibly exhaust the potential
meanings and implications of that brief creak on “Old Folks.” I do hope at the very
35 Straus, “Normalizing the Abnormal,” p. 114. Also see Rosemarie Garland Thomson,
Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997).
36 For a further discussion of metaphorical language in jazz, see David Such, Avant-
Garde Jazz Musicians Performing “Out There” (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993).
37 Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James (eds.), The New Art—the New Life: The
Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), p. 221. Quoted in Brown,
Noise Orders, 76.
38 Elisabeth le Guin, “‘Cello-and-Bow Thinking’: Boccherini’s Cello Sonata in E Major,
‘fuori catalogo,’” Echo 1/1 (1999) http://www.echo.ucla.edu/volume1-issue1/leguin/leguin-
article.html. See also McClary, “Temporality and Ideology.”
least that we’ve opened our ears a little wider to listen for those sounds that no one
plays, but that everyone hears. Ideally, it has reminded us that such aural “intrusions,”
unassuming and inconsequential as they may seem on first hearing, bear close
attention because they can tell us something about how we experience, play, and
value music, and therefore may tell us something about the people—individuals,
local communities, and whole cultures—who have created, enjoyed, detested, and
otherwise lived among these sounds.
Taylor & Francis
Chapter Seventeen
Uninvited: Gender, Schizophrenia, and

Alanis Morissette
Robert Walser
A single note sounds loneliest when it falls from a piano—the huge machine so
underutilized, the other fingers hovering over scores of keys without touching them,
the ghostly resonance of unplayed strings, one note’s ringing promise immediately
decaying but lingering. Four such notes, from D up to A, edging to B and back,
deliberately spaced, begin Alanis Morissette’s song “Uninvited” and then repeat, at
the tempo of walking in a dream, almost continuously through the song. They are in
the piano’s midrange, not high enough to sound ornamental, nor low enough to be
a firm bassline. If this were the beginning of a movie soundtrack, we would know
that the director wanted to set the stage with mystery and melancholy, and that the
composer knew how to pull our strings accordingly. After two cycles of this hollow
fifth with that minor-sounding flat-6 hanging over it, we would never expect to hear
the bleak mood suddenly shattered by a major third (17.1).
Yet that is how Alanis Morissette enters, forming a major triad that is warm
and stable for two whole beats until the ostinato reaches flat-6 again, creating an
even more plangent suspension at the middle of the measure. The melody itself
doesn’t register this tension at first—its 3–3–4–5–3 contour and even its rhythm
recall exactly the treacly opening phrase of Debbie Boone’s 1977 hit, “You Light
Up My Life.” Morissette’s storytelling goals are far more complicated than Boone’s,
though; her very first word, “Like,” throws us into a simile before we know anything
about the reality that is being extended through comparison, signaling the ambiguity
and ambivalence to come. The second phrase ascends through a diminished fourth,
its melodic awkwardness accentuated by extraordinarily gauche text setting, the last
half of the word “flattered” syncopated across the barline. There are many more
graceful ways in which this line could have been set, but throughout the song, and in
Morissette’s work more generally, unusual scansion signals a deliberate suppression
of natural speech patterns, a pleasure in playing with language and evading normal
rhythm, balance, and orderliness, and, as here, a certain ambivalent but willful
affect.

“…if lyrics were a priority for me last time around, they were even more so for me this
time. I had been sort of ‘schooled’ in different ways of writing songs and splitting up syllables
An instant after the melody reaches flat-6, the harmony accompanies it to G
minor, an initially consonant adjustment that ends up creating more dissonance, for
the ostinato’s problematic flat-6 becomes the minor third of the new chord but its
second and fourth beats are clashing ninths in the new context. The melody subsides
back into the diapente (the lower half of the octave, where it began), the harmony
returns to the tonic, and then the whole four-measure pattern repeats as Morissette
sets the scene with affective shards: she’s flattered, she’s hot-blooded, she craves,
and “you,” whoever you are, are fascinated.
The song’s structure is strange; not a conventional alternation of verse and
chorus, it has only one twelve-bar sequence, separated by churning interludes that
are syncopated, studded with harmonic tensions found nowhere else. There is thus no
conventional alternation of individual statement and affirming chorus; the contrasts
and tensions are all bound up in a monologue. The form is distantly related to the
blues, and this ancestry is easiest to recognize in the ninth measure, which does not
move to the dominant—the song uses no chords beyond variants of the tonic and
the subdominant—but achieves something of the same effect by turning the tonic
into a dominant seventh chord. Morissette leaps up to the seventh to give us more
information about “you,” but in terms that flatly shut down the affective excitement
of the previous text: not allowed, uninvited, unfortúnate.
But that’s not what the music is doing. The tonic seventh chord begins with
Morissette’s expansive upward gesture and then carries us to the subdominant, this
time with a major third that for one beat echoes the clear calm with which the vocal
line began. The ostinato, however, mercilessly marches through both clashing ninths
and even a minor third to smash directly against Morissette’s major third. This
section’s new direction leads to ever greater dissonance until Morissette ascends to a
searing major seventh over the tonic, syncopating the middle of a word, holding for
three counts and releasing upward on an offbeat, with a yelped fifth degree on the
very edge of the twelfth bar pointing forward to a tempestuous lack of resolution in
the two-bar interlude. The music, in other words, is embracing the contradictions of
the lyrics and refusing their literal sense: one may be uninvited but the other is still
hot-blooded, and the push of the voice into a higher register with new dissonances
limns an environment of attraction and danger.
There are many more points that could be made about how this music works. The
touches of Orientalism: tabla at the beginning, the ways in which the most Western of
ensembles, the string orchestra, is made to sound non-Western, adding to the song’s
exotic affect. The use of the bass harmonic pedal and the way the drum kit performs
a different kind of management of motion. The power and complexity of Morissette’s
singing. The affective intensity of the second verse, where Morissette overdubs a
harmony part in parallel thirds, penning this line within the diatessaron just as the
when I was younger, and it was very confining, not being able to shift things around the way
I intuitively wanted to. With the freedom I have now writing alone or with Glen [Ballard],
I realize the lyrics are a little less enunciated or a little less understandable, but it just feels
right.” Carolyn Horwitz, “Billboard Feature: Alanis Morissette: On the Front Burner Again”
http://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/miscellaneous-retail-retail-stores-not/4614596-
1.html, accessed February 15, 2008.
Uninvited: Gender, Schizophrenia, and Alanis Morissette 237
main melody is confined within the diapente plus flat-6. Between them, the two
voices stitch together the octave—except for scale degree 2, which is avoided entirely
by Morissette until the very end of the song. It is left to the strings to define that scale
degree, and they make it unstable, flipping between major and Phrygian versions
just as scale degree 5 also becomes unstable, shifting down to flat-5 and up to flat-6.
Even the tonic slides up and down a half step in the interludes, all of which makes
the major third with which Morissette begins each verse seem shocking, a stable,
consonant normality that can’t possibly be sustainable or believable. And the song
ends in Phrygian turmoil, with all the tones that should be solid melting into air.
This combination of musical signifiers creates a particular articulation of desire
and fear, of power and paranoia, and since it is a culturally successful creation, we
might learn something from it. It was very popular: many of Morissette’s millions
of female fans chose it as their favorite song, and it won her two Grammy awards
for Best Female Vocal Performance and Best Rock Song. I argue that this song
and others that exploit similar musical tactics, such as “Baba,” constitute a female
appropriation of Phrygian power and paranoia, a deployment of musical signs that
had been used by men but that enable particular depictions of intensity, dread, and
desire that resonate powerfully with contemporary problems of maintaining female
identities. And I will show how fans have understood this song as one that helps
them deal with their most fraught fantasies and violent experiences.
Violence
What inspires a female artist to deal with issues of violence, specifically the sexual
violence that undercuts desire by corrupting it with dread? In her book on battering,
Elizabeth M. Schneider reports that according to the American Medical Association,
four million women are severely assaulted each year. “Studies on prevalence suggest
that from one-fifth to one-third of all women will be physically assaulted by a partner
or ex-partner during their lifetime… . Thus on an average day in the United States,
nearly 11,000 women are severely assaulted by their male partners.”
Moreover, the violence women feel is not only physical. Martha Nussbaum points
out that the Human Development Report 1997 of the United Nations Development
Programme concluded that no country in the world treats its women as well as
its men in matters that affect life expectancy, wealth, and education. And Susan
Faludi’s book Backlash famously refuted the popular wisdom that the battle for
Some people, perhaps thinking of the film City of Angels, for which “Uninvited” served
to accompany the closing credits, might not think such a dire reading is warranted, but I would
argue that the musical signification of the song exceeds the affective boundaries of the movie.
Elizabeth M. Schneider, Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 3–4.
Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 2.
“Women in much of the world lack support for fundamental functions of a human life.
They are less well nourished than men, less healthy, more vulnerable to physical violence
and sexual abuse. They are much less likely than men to be literate, and still less likely to
gender equality is won, and the reactionary theory that women are miserable because
they have lost their traditional status.
If American women are so equal, why do they represent two-thirds of all poor adults?
Why are nearly 75 percent of full-time working women making less than $20,000 a year,
nearly double the male rate? Why are they still far more likely than men to live in poor
housing and receive no health insurance, and twice as likely to draw no pension? Why
does the average working woman’s salary still lag as far behind the average man’s as it did
twenty years ago? Why does the average female college graduate today earn less than a
man with no more than a high school diploma (just as she did in the ’50s)—and why does
the average female high school graduate today earn less than a male high school dropout?
Why do American women, in fact, face one of the worst gender-based pay gap[s] in the
developed world?
If women have “made it,” then why are nearly 80 percent of working women still
stuck in traditional “female” jobs—as secretaries, administrative “support” workers and
salesclerks? And, conversely, why are they less than 8 percent of all federal and state
judges, less than 6 percent of all law partners, and less than one half of 1 percent of top
corporate managers? ….
If women “have it all,” then why don’t they have the most basic requirements to
achieve equality in the work force? Unlike virtually all other industrialized nations, the
U.S. government still has no family-leave and child care programs—and more than 99
percent of American private employers don’t offer child care either.
Concerning physical violence, Faludi adds that in thirty states, husbands may
legally rape their wives, and “only ten states have laws mandating arrest for domestic
violence—even though battering was the leading cause of injury of women in the
late 1980s. … Federal funding for battered women’s shelters has been withheld and
one third of the 1 million battered women who seek emergency shelter each year can
find none.”
This last is a crucial point: in the current political climate, the situation for
women has been worsening, and there is no particular reason to expect that trend to
be reversed anytime soon. Worst, U.S. policy sharply contrasts with that of most of
the rest of the world. Katha Pollitt reported in 2002:
After twenty years of stalling by Jesse Helms, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
in early June held hearings on the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), an international treaty ratified by 169 nations.
(President Carter signed CEDAW in 1980, but the Senate blocked it.) George W. Bush
originally indicated that he would sign it—that was when he was sending Laura onto the
airwaves to blast the Taliban—but under the influence of Ashcroft, he’s since been hedging.
have preprofessional or technical education. … In all these ways, unequal social and political
circumstances give women unequal human capabilities.” (p. 1.)
“One might sum all this up by saying that all too often women are not treated as ends in
their own right, persons with a dignity that deserves respect from laws and institutions….”
(p. 2.)
Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York:
Doubleday, 1991), p. xiii.
Faludi, p. xiv.
… [O]n CEDAW the Bush Administration risks allying itself with Somalia, Qatar, and Syria
to promote the religious right agenda on issues of sexuality. In the same way, at the recent
UN General Assembly Special Session on the Child—where the United States opposed
providing girls with sex education beyond “just say no,” even though in much of the Third
World the typical “girl” is likely to be married with children—the Bush Administration
allied itself with Libya, Sudan, and evil axis member Iran. Some clash of civilizations.
Gender privilege keeps these trends and statistics off the minds of most men,
but many women, even if they don’t know the precise figures involved, live these
facts with immediacy. Alanis Morissette is no exception. Asked if she herself has
experienced physical violence at the hands of a man, she replied: “No, but I’ve
feared it, because I’ve spent a lot of time around men who couldn’t control their
anger. They’d repress it so long by the time they had to release it, it just came out
very destructively. So I have a lot of fears surrounding that.” Morissette appears as
an official spokesperson for the organization Equality Now, urging fans to “help stop
human rights violations against women! Men and women working together can end
violence and discrimination. Please join Equality Now.”10
Schizophrenia
And yet Morissette has also denied that such facts have much to do with her music:
“[A]t the end of the day I have to believe that most people are buying a record
because they want to listen to it, and they forget about gender as soon as they’ve put
it in the CD player.”11 The explanation for this, I think, lies in general in the cultural
demonization of feminism, and more specifically in what Susan J. Douglas calls the
“cultural schizophrenia” that the mass media inculcate in women:
In a variety of ways the mass media helped make us the cultural schizophrenics we are
today, women who rebel against yet submit to prevailing images about what a desirable,
worthwhile woman should be. Our collective history of interacting with and being shaped
by the mass media has engendered in many women a kind of cultural identity crisis. We
are ambivalent toward femininity on the one hand and feminism on the other.12
Douglas explains:
When I open Vogue, for example, I am simultaneously infuriated and seduced, grateful
to escape temporarily into a narcissistic paradise where I’m the center of the universe,
outraged that completely unattainable standards of wealth and beauty exclude me and
most women I know from the promised land. I adore the materialism; I despise the
materialism. I yearn for the self-indulgence; I think the self-indulgence is repellent. I want
4 Katha Pollitt, “Ashcroft Loves Iran,” The Nation, 8 July 2002, p. 10.
4 Brian D. Johnson, “Reinventing Alanis,” Maclean’s, 8 March 1999.
10 http://members.ebay.com/aboutme/equality_now, 24 May 2002.
11 Mina Carson, Tina Lewis, Susan M. Shaw, Girls Rock! Fifty Years of Women Making
Music (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), p. 44.
12 Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New
York: Times Books, 1994), p. 8.
to look beautiful; I think wanting to look beautiful is about the most dumb-ass goal you
could have. … On the one hand, on the other hand—that’s not just me—that’s what it
means to be a woman in America.13
Morissette herself has articulated something of the same tensions:
Being brought up—if I could generalize—in a patriarchal society, I was always denying
my femininity, seeing it as something that would make things difficult for me if I embraced
it. So I went to the other end of the spectrum, and I was very tomboyish and masculine,
and I felt that that was a way for me to survive in the kind of society that was laid in front
of me. As the years went on, I felt like I was half of a person, because there was a huge
chunk of me that I had denied, and over the past year especially I’ve just reintegrated both
sides.14
Fans
These tensions animate Morissette’s work, and online discussions among her fans
make it clear that these songs help them work through similar tensions involving
various aspects of sexual identity and violence. One young lesbian fan with a
hermeneutic bent produced a line by line interpretation of “Uninvited”’s lyrics:
Like anyone wouldn’t [sic]

I am flattered by your fascination with me
Alanis speaking to another woman.
Like any hot-blooded woman
I have simply wanted an object to crave
The woman is really hot.
But you, you’re not allowed
Simply because she is a woman … and, um, she’s gay.
You’re uninvited
Alanis can’t deal with her sexuality
An unfortunate slight
So she rejects the chick.
Must be strangely exciting
The gay girl gets turned on by Alanis trying to reject her because Alanis is afraid
of her own sexuality.
To watch the stoic squirm
Alanis insists that she is NOT gay.15
What need is served by this exercise, or by debates over meaning that think through
tensions that are no less social for feeling so personal?
13 Douglas, p. 9.
14 Johnson, “Reinventing Alanis.”
15 Anonymous, “Uninvited: An Interpretation,” http://www.musicfanclubs.org/alanis/
uninvited.html, 24 May 2002.
The most moving fan posting I have discovered tells how a fan used “Uninvited”
as a way to make sense of and deal with a horrific experience, with Morissette’s
lyrics echoing in every line:
I saw this guy as admiring me from afar, not really telling me his feelings (or his sexuality
for that matter) and while I was flattered he was uninvited “that” way. I loved him as a
friend and nothing more, yet he still did what he did for reasons unknown (and I will never
know till I die because he eventually committed suicide 9 months after he raped me). The
only line that gets me through is the very last line “I don’t think you unworthy, I need a
moment to deliberate.” For the longest time I had been battling with this (partly due to
what my so-called friends told me when I spoke of what happened). I had been battling
with the notion that maybe subconsciously I wanted him in “that way” and that I needed
a moment to deliberate his “worthiness” so to speak. I racked my brains over this because
for the longest time I thought I had put myself in that situation and that it was my fault and
etc. After about a year of this I finally realized that it wasn’t my fault and that my moment
of deliberation was over, it was a very healing and rewarding experience and it was the
reason why I chose that song to write what happened.16
That these different fan readings are drastically different doesn’t mean that
they’re arbitrary or subjective in a way that suggests that “there’s no accounting for
taste,” for such mappings and experiences of the song appear within a larger shared
context. Fredric Jameson argued that class should function as the ultimate horizon
for cultural analysis, but there seems to me no good reason to think that gender does
not also operate at such a level. That said, he’s right to insist that such analysis is not
a matter of text and context, but rather an activity that must refer to the largest levels
of human activity as well as the finest.
Conclusion
A few years ago, popular music scholar Sheila Whiteley reported on a Rocklist
online discussion of whether Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill belongs on a list of the
101 Greatest Albums of all time. The consensus seemed to be that her collaborations
as a songwriter with Glen Ballard raise doubts about her authenticity, and that her
self-centered, personal, angst-ridden persona gives her work “a commercial edge.”17
Whiteley adds: “the question arises as to why Alanis Morissette should be a big issue.
Arguably, it is because any sense of innovation in her albums remains at the level of
content and that for active consumers of popular music (and the Rocklist is certainly
that) notions of autonomy, of seriousness, of expressive truth are important.”18 So
here is someone who plays guitar and keyboards, composes, sings, and produces,
and critics still worry that she is somehow a manufactured product of the very
commercial popular culture that creates and satisfies their desire for authenticity.
16 Message signed “Jay,” logged in as “AlanisNovelist1979,” post of 7 May 2002, 08:21

PM, http://www.alanistalk.com, thread 2043.
17 Sheila Whiteley, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity
(London: Routledge, 2000), p. 5.
18 Ibid., p. 6.
Bruce Springsteen is introspective, too, but doesn’t garner such criticism, and it’s
difficult to avoid seeing Morissette’s gender, and that of her fans, as being at fault.
Even more important is that the critics are dismissing those fans’ intense, sustained
devotion to Morissette’s music, which is the result of their ability to make better sense
of their lives through it, in favor of some misty, begged notion of authenticity.
The brief but multifaceted analysis I have presented here bears directly on recently
revived debates between analysts who are concerned above all with “meaning” and
those who focus on “structure” without acknowledging that structure is a kind of
meaning, one that signals the desire to find order by using a spatial metaphor to
describe certain aspects of temporal experience. And this is often a useful thing to
do. But by denying its own social and even analytical ground, by aspiring to the
Platonic loftiness of forms, formalist work ends up deceiving itself and trivializing
its object. All musical analysis ultimately proceeds under the sign of a silent appeal
to and confirmation of the analyst’s values, which include a relationship with, and an
attitude toward, the music’s audience. Too often, a concern with structure displaces
the biggest, most ambitious and useful questions we can ask: where can this song
take you? What can you learn about the good and evil of the world from it?
One of Morissette’s fans compared “Uninvited” to “walking through someone
else’s mind.”19 It’s a striking image, not least because to walk through a mind is
to walk through a culture—one version of it, anyway. The difficulty of musical
analysis, and the reason that reductive temptations have constantly to be resisted,
is that whenever we analyze a song, we’re really analyzing everything else, too.
A song, like a mind or a culture, is a place where complex relationships of pain,
power, and desire can be given voice, as by a Phrygian second or an “un-for-tún-ate
slight.”
19 tierwelpie, post of 7 May 2002, 06:55 PM, http://www.alanistalk.com, thread 2043.

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“The Impromptu that Trod on a Loaf: How Music Tells Stories.” Narrative 5/1
(January 1997): 20–34.
“Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition,” reprinted in
Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid
Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1997, 54–74.
“Dödlig Prestige: Fallet Avantgardekomposition.” Nutida Music 1 (1997): 23–36.
Review of Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, Opera: Desire, Disease, Death.
Journal of the American Musicological Society 50/1 (Spring 1997): 175–81.
“Feminine Endings in Retrospect.” Preface for Japanese edition of Feminine Endings
(1997).
“Structures of Identity and Difference in Bizet’s Carmen,” in The Work of Opera:
Genre, Nationhood, and Sexual Difference, ed. Richard Dellamora and Daniel
Fischlin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, 115–130.
“Unruly Passions and Courtly Dances: Technologies of the Body in Baroque
Music,” in From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political
in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century France, ed. Sara Melzer and Kathryn
Norberg. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 85–112.
“Música y Cultura de Jóvenes: La Misma Historia de Siempre.” A Contratiempo 9
(1997): 12–21.
“Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture.” The
Norman and Jane Geske Lecture, 1998. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1999.
“Different Drummers: Analyzing the Music of Women Composers,” in Musics
and Feminisms, ed. Sally MacArthur and Cate Poynton. Sydney: University of
Western Sydney-Napean, 1999.
Review of Alice Echols, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin.
Women’s Review of Books 16 (September 1999): 1–4.
Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2000.
“Gender Ambiguities and Erotic Excess in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera,”
in Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, ed. Mark
Franko and Anne Richards. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000,
177–200.
“Different Drummers: Interpreting Music by Women Composers,” in Frauen- und
Männerbilder in der Musik: Festschrift für Eva Rieger, ed. Freia Hoffmann, Jane
Bowers, and Ruth Heckmann. Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationsystem
der Universität Oldenburg, 2000, 113–126.
“Women and Music on the Verge of the New Millennium.” Signs 25/4 (Summer
2000): 1283–1286.
“Seksualna Politika u Klasicnoj Muzici.” ProFemina 21–22 (Spring/Summer 2000):
172–196.
“Women and Music on the Verge of the New Millennium,” in Feminisms at a
Millennium, ed. Judith A. Howard and Carolyn Allen. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000, 272–275.
“Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in Seventeenth-Century French
Music.” ECHO 3 (November 2000). www.humnet.ucla.edu/ECHO
“Temp Work: Music and the Cultural Shaping of Time.” Musicology Australia 23
(2000): 80–95.
Entries on Madonna, Laurie Anderson, and Feminist Musicology. The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians. New York: Macmillan, 2000.
Entry on Feminist Musicology for Routledge Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories.
New York and London: Routledge, 2001: 326–338.
Review of Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. Notes 58/2
(December 2001): 326–328.
“This Is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie
Anderson,” in Women Making Art: Women in the Visual, Literary, and Performing
Arts since 1960, ed. Deborah Johnson and Wendy Oliver. Peter Lang Publishing
Inc., 2001, 161–188.
Review of Naomi Cumming, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification.
Social Semiotics 12/1 (2002): 135–137.
“A Salute to Women Composers.” Sounding Board: American Composers Forum
Newsletter (March 2002).
“The ‘Funny People’ in Bizet’s Carmen.” Essay for San Francisco Opera production
of Carmen, 2002.
“Schubert’s ‘Late’ Quartets.” Program essay for Aldeburgh Festival, 2002.
“Fetisch Stimme: Professionelle Sänger im Italien der frühen Neuzeit,” in Zwischen
Rauschen und Offenbarung: Zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Stimme.
ed. Friedrich Kittler, Thomas Macho, and Sigrid Weigel. Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2002, 199–214.
“Feminine Endings in Retrospect.” Preface to second edition of Feminine Endings.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, 2nd edn. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Review of Sally Macarthur, Feminist Aesthetics in Music. International Alliance for
Women in Music Journal (8/3 (2002): 48–49.
“On Ethics and Musicology.” Tijdschrift voor muziektheorie 7/3 (November 2002):
182–185.
Reply to Joke Dame’s “When Music(ology) signifies …” Tijdschrift voor
muziektheorie 7/3 (November 2002): 188.
“Bessie Smith: Thinking Blues,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull
and Les Back. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003, 427–434. (excerpted from
Conventional Wisdom).
Foreword to the New Historical Anthology of Music by Women, ed. James Briscoe.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004, ix–x.
Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.
“Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture,” in
Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner.
New York: Continuum/The Wire, 2004, 289–298.
“Egy anyagias lány Kékszukállú várában” and “Klasszikus zene és a szexualitás
stratégiái.” Hungarian translations of parts of Feminine Endings. Dániel Kodaj,
Replika (2005). http://www.replika.hu
Review of Bernard Gendron, From Montmartre to the Mudd Club: Popular Music
and the Avant-Garde. Twentieth-Century Music 1/1, 2005.
“The Symbiosis of Teaching and Research.” Current Musicology (2005).
“Carmen as Perennial Fusion: From Habañera to Hip-Hop,” in Carmen: From Silent
Film to MTV, ed. Chris Perriam and Ann Davies. Amsterdam and New York:
Rodopi Press, 2006, 205–216.
Review of Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music. Music & Letters
87/3(August 2006): 408–415.
“Remembering Philip Brett.” Introduction to Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected
Essays by Philip Brett, ed. George Haggerty. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006.
“Mounting Butterflies,” in A Vision of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of
Madame Butterfly, ed. Jonathan Wisenthal et al. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2006, 21–35.
“Cycles of Repetition: Chacona, Ciaccona, Chaconne, and THE Chaconne,” in
Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Institutions of Repetition, ed. Lorna Clymer.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, 21–45.
“Mediterranean Trade Routes and Music of the Early Seventeenth Century,” Inter-
American Music Review 17/1–2 (Winter 2007).
“Toward a History of Harmonic Tonality,” in Historical Theory, Performance,
and Meaning in Baroque Music. Ghent, Belgium: Orpheus Academy for Music
Theory, 2007.
Italian edition of Georges Bizet: Carmen, with new foreword by the author. Trans.
Annamaria Cecconi. Milan: Rugginenti Editore, 2007.
“Minima Romantica,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema,
ed. Richard Leppert, Lawrence Kramer, and Daniel Goldmark. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2007.
Index
ABC (American Broadcasting Corporation) Anderson, Laurie 86

69–70 Anderson, Wes 102
Acuff, Roy 195 Apl.de.Ap. (Alan Pineda) 32
Acworth, W(illiam) M(itchell) 151, 151n8 Arabs 21, 28, 29
Adams, Henry 152, 152n14 Arlen, Harold 206, 209
Adams, John 90, 97 “Out of This World” 209
Adler, Lou 64 “That Old Black Magic” 209
Adler, Thomas 79n5, 79n6 Armstrong, Louis 115, 216
adolescence 185–189 Ashtavakra Gita 84
Adorno, Theodor 12, 15, 138n12, 138n14, Atkins, Chet 192n3
138–139, 139n15, 141, 143, 208n21, Attali, Jacques 220n6
209–212, 210n35, 210n36, 210n37, Attinello, Paul 164n5
210n38, 211n40, 211n41, 211n42, Auden, W.H. 10–11, 15, 15n13
211n43, 212n44, 212n45, 213, Auner, Joseph 144, 144n28
213n48, 215n62, 218, 218n75 Auric, George 136
Adventist Church of God in Jesus 64 authoritarianism 3
Aenid 81 Averill, Gage 73, 75n17
Aerosmith 33 Axelrod, Alan 195n9, 195n10
aesthetics 3–4, 5–7 see also value
Affergan, Francis 28, 28n32 Bach, Johann Sebastian 104, 129n24
Affleck, Ben 180 background vocalists 63–75
African-Americans 35–40, 42–45, 64, 65, The Bad Plus 114
66–67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 75 Bailey, Peter 160, 160n45
music of 111, 112–113, 115, 116 see Baker, Chet 225
also blues; hip hop; jazz Baker, Ella 36, 42, 43
Aguilera, Christina 32, 33 Bakhtin, Mikhail 141
Ahlert, Fred Baldwin, James 44
“I’ll Get By” 215 Ballard, Glen 241
“Mean To Me” 215 Bambaataa, Afrika 33
Ake, David 114n13, 226n22 The Band 114
Akenson, James E. 199n20 Banfield, Stephen 83, 83n15, 163n1, 163n3,
Akst, Harry 164n6, 165, 165n8, 175n45
“Am I Blue?” 215–216 Baptista, Cyro 111
Ali, Tariq 21, 21n16 Barnes, Julian 161n51
alla turca 18 Barrett, Ron 65
Allen, Gerri 108 Barrett, Ron Jr. 67n9
Ally McBeal 73 Barron, Lee 142, 142n24, 142n25, 145,
Alpert, Herb 64 145n32
Alston, Barbara 68 Bartók, Bela 31
Al-Taee, Nasser 25n24, 27n27 Bluebeard’s Castle 31
alternative rock (musical genre) 179 Basie, Count 227
Altick, Richard 150, 150n5, 153n18 Baudrillard, Jean 89
Anderson, Bill 199n20, 200n22 Baur, Steven 50n12
Beach Boys 64, 66, 71 Blossoms 63–75, 64n3
The Beatles 114, 220n7 Blue Note Records 110
Beckett, Samuel 81 blues 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116
Beethoven, Ludwig van 149–150, 151, Boggs, Grace Lee 43, 43n24
154n23, 154–158, 155n30, 160, Bollas, Christopher 188, 188n16, 189,
160n43, 161, 162 189n17
Bego, Mark 191n1 Bonaparte, Napoleon 17
Bellman, Jonathan 18, 18n5, 18n6, 27, Bono, Sonny 71
27n29, 30, 30n41, 164n4 Boone, Debbie 235
Beltram, Joey 124–128, 125n13, 130 Bordwell, David 96n4, 100n11, 100–101,
“Energy Flash” 124, 125–126, 127 101n12, 101n13
“Mentasm” 124, 125, 126, 127 Borgo, David 224n19
Benatsky, Ralph (Rudolf Joseph Frantisek) Borodin, Alexander 27
“Ich weiss auf der Wieden ein kleines Prince Igor 27
Hotel” 210, 211 Bourne, Michael 117n21, 119n23
Bennett, Joseph 159 Bowers, Jane 54n25
Bennington, Geoff 146n36 Boyer, Lucien see Padilla, José
Berlin, Irving 108, 206n7, 207, 208, 216 Brackett, David 230, 230n30
“Blue Skies” 216n68 Braden, Ann 43
“What’ll I Do” 216 Bradley, Owen 192, 192n3
Berliner, Paul 227n25 Bradshaw, George 150, 156
Berlioz, Hector 173 Brecht, Bertolt 81, 136
Bierce, Ambrose 50 Breines, Wini 67n8
Birringer, Johannes 145n34 Bristow, Fanny 52n19
Bizet, Georges 18, 27, 29 Brodacki, Krystian 110n5, 113n12, 115n15
Carmen 18, 19, 27, 29 Brooks, Dolores “La La” 68, 68n11
characters Brooks, Tim 211n39
Carmen 17, 27n29, 27–28, 29 Brown, David 231, 231n33, 232n37
Frasquita 27 Brown, James 64, 66, 230
Mercedes 27 Budd, George D. 49n7, 55n29
Michaëla 27 Buddhism 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 84n21,
numbers 85, 86
“Gypsy Song” 27–28 Ch’an Buddhism 85
Black Eyed Peas 31–34, 36, 45 Zen Buddhism 77, 83, 84, 85
Behind the Front 32 Bufwack, Mary A. 191n1, 192n3, 194,
Bridging the Gap 32 194n6, 194n8
Elephunk 32n6 Buhler, James 137n7
“Shut Up” 32 “bullet time” 96–97
“Where is the Love?” 31–34, 36, 45 Burke, Edmund 144
Black, Johnny S. Burke, Kenneth 208
“Paper Doll” 208 Burnham, Scott 154n23, 156, 156n33
Black, Lucille 43 Burton, Tim 180
Black Sabbath 126 Bush, George W. 33, 218n77, 238–239
Blacks see African-Americans Butler, Judith 54–55, 122n36, 215n59
Blaine, Hal 63 Byrds 71
Blake, William 154 Byrom, Thomas 78n1, 84n19
Blanchard, Terence 108 Byron, Don 108
Bloods 36
Bloom, Harold 146, 146n35 Caballero, Carlos 159
Index 251
Cadi (Qadi) 17 class 56n31, 59, 60, 122
Caesar, Irving 218 Clayton, Merry 65, 65n4
“Crazy Rhythm” 218 Clear Channel 33
“Tea For Two” 218 Clément, Catherine 5, 5n2
Cage, John 136, 138, 222–223, 223n15 Cline, Patsy (Virginia Patterson Hensley)
Calendar (Qalandar) 17, 22, 25 114, 191n1, 191–203, 192n3, 193n5,
camp 147 197n14, 199n20, 199n21
Campbell, Glen (guitarist) 63 “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come
Campbell, Glen (singer) 114 Home” 200
Carlyle, Thomas 150, 150n7, 154 “Don’t Ever Leave Me Again” 203
Carmen (Mérimée) 30n42 “Got A Lot of Rhythm (In My Soul)”
Carmichael, Hoagy 206 197n14, 198
“Lazybones” 215 “Honky Tonk Merry Go Round”
Carpenter, Mary Chapin 205–206 196–197, 197n14
Carr, Ian 219n1, 219n3 “Hungry for Love” 197n14
Carr, Vicki 67n10 “I Fall to Pieces” 201
Carrington, Terri Lyne 108, 109 “I Love You So Much It Hurts” 202
Carse, Adam 51n15 “If I Could Only Stay Asleep” 198
Carson, Mina 239n11 “I’m Blue Again” 198
Carter, Betty 108, 115, 116 “I’ve Loved and Lost Again” 198
Carter Family 195 “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” 202n30
Carter, Ian 150n4, 152, 152n15, 160, “Life’s Railway to Heaven” 202n30
160n49 “Walkin’ After Midnight” 192
Case, Hillary 219n1 Clinton, Larry 221n10
Cash, Johnny 225 Cobb, Jimmy 219n1, 224
Castells, Manuel 142 Cobb, Will D. 59
Chambers, Paul 219n1, 227 Cocteau, Jean 136, 138, 138n13, 139, 141,
Chapman, Dale 145n34 146
Charles, Jacques see Padilla, José Cohan, Steven 147n39, 147n40, 147n41
Charles, Ray 64, 66, 70 Cohen, Lizabeth 41, 42n18
“What’d I Say?” 71 Cole, Holly 110n7
Chase, Newell see Robin, Leo Cole, Nat King 216
Cher 71 Coleman, Steve 108
Chesterton, G.K. 35 Collins, Patricia Hill 67n8, 73, 73n18
Chion, Michel 96, 96n3, 100, 100n10, Collins, Phil 98
105n17, 139, 139n16, 139n17, “In the Air Tonight” 98, 98n8
140n18, 145 Coltrane, John 105, 109, 219, 219n1, 227
Chomet, Sylvan 104, 104n16 “Giant Steps” 227, 228–229
Chopin, Frédéric 129n24 Comden, Betty 79
Christie, Agatha 150 Cone, Edward T. 128n21
Chuck, Gavin 107n1 Congress 36
CIA 36 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)
Citizen Kane 100 41
Citron, Stephen 79n5, 82n12 Conservative Evangelical Christianity
civil rights movement 34–35, 36, 43–44, 72 183–184, 185, 186–188
Clark, Maribeth 51, 51n13, 51n14 Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) 181,
Clarke, Edward 48 184–185
Clarke, Grant see Akst, Harry Cook, Nicholas 180n1
Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth 39n13 Cooke, Mervyn 226n22, 227n25
Cookies 69 waltz 47–48, 49, 50–51, 52–54, 56, 57,
“Chains” 69 58–61
“Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys” 69 dancing schools 60–61
Cooper, Grosvenor 128n21 Danso, Henry 186n12
Cooper, Susan Fenimore 49, 49n6 Daredevil 179–180, 181n3
Copas, Cowboy 191 The Dark Side of Oz 136, 142–148
Copland, Aaron 114n13 Davis, Angela 44
Corigliano, John 97 Davis, Don 96, 96n5, 97, 97n6
Cornelius, Peter 19 Davis, Miles 116, 219n1, 219n3, 219–220,
Der Barbier von Baghdad 19 220n4, 220n5, 222–229, 231–233
Cortes, Ernie 43 Bitches Brew 116
Costello, Elvis 114 E.S.P. 219
Cott, Jonathan 137n6, 138n10, 141n20, Kind of Blue 219
141n21 Miles Smiles 227n27
Cowen, Tyler 206n9 “Circle” 227n27
Cox, Renée 5, 5n1 My Funny Valentine 226
Crane, Mimmie “Stella By Starlight” 226
“I Need You Now” 208 Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet
Crawford, Richard 205, 205n2, 213, 214n52 227, 228, 231, 232
Creamer, Henry “If I Were a Bell” 227
“After You’ve Gone” 215 “You’re My Everything” 227
The Creation (rock band) 102–103 Sketches of Spain 219, 219n1
Crips 36 Someday My Prince Will Come 219,
Cromer, Lord (Evelyn Baring) 21, 29, 221, 222–223, 226
21n15 “Old Folks” 219–229, 221n10,
Crosby, Bing 196n13, 209n34, 210 225n21, 231–232
The Crystals 64, 68, 69 Workin’ 227n27, 232
“Da Doo Ron Ron” 68, 68n11 “Trane’s Blues” 227n27
“He’s a Rebel” 67, 67n10, 68–69 Davison, James W. 159n42
“He’s Sure the Boy I Love” 68 Day, Doris 64, 66
“Then He Kissed Me” 68 Deleuze, Gilles 132, 132n34, 132n35, 144,
“Uptown” 68 144n27
cultural studies 34 Delibes, Léo 19
“cultural turn” (in musicology) 4 Dellamora, Richard 17n3
culture industry 58, 60 De Garmo, William B. 60–61, 61n39
Cusick, Suzanne 230, 230n30 D’Emilio, John 49n4
Dervishes 17, 22–24, 26, 28, 30
Dahlhaus, Carl 17, 17n1, 17n2 “Dervish style” (music) 26–27
Daily Telegraph 159 De Shannon, Jackie 64, 69
Daily Times 52, 52n17 Desmond, Jane C. 60n37, 61, 61n40
Dale, R.W. 160n46 DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson
Dallapiccola, Luigi 173n42 (songwriting team)
Daly, Nicholas 150, 150n6 “Button Up Your Overcoat” 215
dance 47–61, 121–122, 123, 124, 126, Devine Tribal Brothers 32
127n20, 129, 130–132, 133 Dhammapada 78
cotillion 49, 55 Dick, Charlie 193
quadrille 49, 51–52, 55 Dickens, Charles 151, 152n17
round dance 49, 59 Dies irae 172, 173n42, 173–174
square dance 49 Dietz, Howard see Schwartz, Arthur
Index 253
Disraeli, Benjamin 153 Evanescence 179–181, 184–185, 188
Dixie Chicks 33 Fallen 179, 180, 181, 183, 185
DJs 122, 123, 124, 125 “Bring Me to Life” 179, 180, 181,
Dobson, James 186, 186n11 182–183
Donnelly, K.J. 137n7 “My Immortal” 180
Dorsey, Tommy 208 “Tourniquet” 185
Douglas, Susan J. 239n12, 239–240, 240n13 The Open Door 179
Down Beat 107, 113n11, 116n19, 117n21 Evans, Bill 226
drugs 126–127, 128 Everett, Betty 65, 71
Du Bois, W.E.B. 37 excess 6–7, 9, 11–12
Duchamp, Marcel 136 exoticism 17
Duggan, Lisa 36, 37, 37n11, 40, 41, 42, 45
Duncan, Ronald 138n13 Fabares, Shelley 67
Dunkleburger, A.C. 194n6 “Johnny Angel” 67, 67n9, 68
During, Simon 146n38 Fabian, Johannes 130n26
Dworkin, Andrea 187 Faludi, Susan 238, 238n6, 238n7
Dyer, Richard 147n40 families 37, 40, 41, 42–43, 44
Dylan, Bob 114n13, 206n10 Farrer, T(homas) C(ecil) 149n3
Dyos, H(arold) J(ames) 150n7, 153n21 Fast, Susan 65n5
Faulkner, T.A. 47
Early, Gerald 213, 213n47 FBI 43
Eco, Umberto 141 Federal Communications Commission
Eddy, Duane 64 (FCC) 33
Edelston, Danny 220n7 Federal Highway Program 41
Eisberg, Evan 226n22 Federal Housing Administration 41
Eisler, Hanns 138, 138n12, 138n14, 141 Feld, Steven 122n4, 123n8
Eisenstein, Sergei 100 feminism 31, 36–37, 39, 63, 67, 75, 187
Eldridge, Roy 225, 231 Feng, Gia-Fu 85n22
electronic dance music 121n1, 121n3, Fergie (Stacy Ferguson) 32, 33, 45
121–122, 122n6, 123n9, 123–128, Ferguson, Maynard 225
124n10, 125n13, 126n16, 127n18, fetish (object) 13–14
127n20, 131–133 Fiddler on the Roof 168
electronica (music genre) 124n10 Fields, Dorothy see McHugh, Jimmy
Elfman, Danny 140 Fikentscher, Kai 121n3
Ellison, Christopher G. 186n12 Finger Eleven 179
Elmo’s World 73 Fink, Robert 163n3
Enclave 184, 184n7 Fischlin, Daniel 17n2
English, Jane 85n22 Fitzgerald, Ella 109, 111, 115
Enlightenment 5, 8, 12, 15 Flack, Roberta 31, 45
Eno, Brian 135, 135n1 Flanagan, Tommy 227
Enright, J.D. 86n23 Fleischer, Leonard 79n6, 83n17, 83–84
Entertainment Weekly 184n9 Flynn, John H. 59
Epinions.com 181, 181n2, 181n3 Forte, Allen 206n7
Epstein, Joseph 206, 206n8 Fosl, Catherine 43n24
Erenberg, Lewis 60, 60n38 Foucault, Michel 15, 17, 131
Erwin, Ralph Fox, Aaron A. 202, 202n28
“I Kiss Your Hand, Madame” 210, 211 Foxwell, Ernest 149n1, 149n3, 149–150,
Eskridge, Larry 184n6 151, 153, 154–155, 156, 157,
ethnicity 122 159n41, 160, 161, 162
Franklin, Aretha 71, 71n16 Gioia, Ted 227, 227n24
Fraser, J.T. 128n21 girls 49–50, 52, 54–55, 56, 63, 66, 67,
Freedman, Estelle B. 49n4 68–69, 70, 72 185, 187–189 see also
Freeman, Michael 151n11, 152n16 women
Freeman, Mike 193n5 Gladys Knight and the Pips 73
Freud, Sigmund 14n12, 14–15 “If I Was Your Woman” 73
Frisell, Bill 114n13 “Midnight Train to Georgia” 73
Frith, Simon 121n2, 129n23, 129, 131–132, Glass, Philip 82, 86, 90, 97, 129n24,
132n33, 199n20, 206n10 131n31, 135, 136–141, 137n6,
Fugate, J. Richard 186 137n9, 138n10, 138n11, 146
Fujino, Diane 43n24 La Belle et la Bête 136–141, 137n6,
Fuller, Roy 155, 155n29, 156 137n9, 145, 146, 148
Fuller-Maitland, J(ohn) A(lexander) 159 Les Enfants Terribles 136
Orphée 136
Gabbard, Krin 223n14, 225n20 Satyagraha 90
The Galaxy 52n19 Glinka, Mikhail 27
Garden State 98, 101 Ruslan I Lyudmila 27
Gardiner, John Eliot 25n22 Gluck, Christoph Willibald Ritter von 24,
Gardiner, Rosetta 43 25n22
Garfunkel, Art 101 La recontre imprévue ou Les Pèlerins de
Garland, Judy 109, 146, 225 la Mecque 24–25
Garland, Red 227 Godey’s Ladies Book 55n28
Garner, Jennifer 180 Goldmark, Daniel 101n14, 219n1
Garr, Teri 72 Good Housekeeping 48
Garrett, Charles Hiroshi 219n1 Good, Jack 69, 70
gays and lesbians 146–147 see also Goodhart, Sandor 79n5, 164n4
homosexuality Gooley, Dana 205n4
gender 47, 48, 53, 122, 132n36, 194, 196, Gorbman, Claudia 100, 100n9, 139n16,
197, 199n20, 200, 200n22, 202n28, 140n19
231 see also women Gordon, Joanne 79n5, 79n6, 163n2
Gendron, Bernard 209n28 Gordon, Dexter 231
Gerome, Jean-Leon 21, 29n37 Gore, Lesley 71–72
Slave Market 21–22 “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To”
The Snake Charmer 29n37 71–72
The Whirling Dervishes 21, 22 “Judy’s Turn to Cry” 71–72
Gershwin, George 205, 207, 208, 209, 213 gospel 64, 68, 71
“I Got Rhythm” 205 goth (musical genre) 180, 181, 185
“I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” 209 Gould, Glenn 229n29
Gershwin, Ira 207, 208 for songs, see The Graduate 101
Gershwin, George Grand Ole Opry 192, 195
Getz, Stan 71 Gray, Macy 32
“Girl From Ipanema” 71 Green, Adolph 79
Giddins, Gary 107n2, 114, 114n14 Grey, Clifford see Padilla, José
Gilbert, William Schwenk 173 Gridley, Mark 226–227, 227n23, 227n25
Gilded Age 47, 50, 55 Grieg, Charlotte 68n12, 69n13, 70n14
Gillman, Sander 30, 30n40, 30n42 Griffin, Patty 202
Gilmore, David 142, 142n23, 143 Grossberg, Lawrence 145n33
Gillespie, Dizzy 225 Grove, George 157–158, 160n43
Gillespie, Susan H. 218n75 Guattari, Félix 144, 144n27
Index 255
Guralnick, Peter 71n16 Hill, D.L. 221
Gurney, Edmund 154, 161, 161n51, 161n53, Hinduism 84, 85
161n55 hip hop 31, 32–33, 38, 45, 108, 116, 142
Gwaltney, John 39n13 Hischak, Thomas S. 208n21
Gypsies 27–28, 29, 30 HIV/AIDS 38, 90
Hoffman, Eva 217n74
Haiku 165, 167, 168, 171, 175 Hoffman, Yoel 80n8, 82n11, 84n18
Hall, Doug 191n1, 192n3 Holden, Stephen 107n2, 111, 112n9, 115,
Hall, Edward T. 128n21 115n17
Hall, Stuart 146n38 Holiday, Billie 108, 111, 115, 225
Hallifax, Hal see Weersma, Melle Holland, Dave 108
Hamm, Charles 206, 210, 214, 206n10, Holtzman, Harry 232n37
214n57, 217n70 homosexuality 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44
Hammett-Vaughan, Kate 110n4, 115n16 Honey, Michael Keith 39n13
Hancock, Herbie 229n29 Hoobastank 179
Handel, George Friederich 154n26, 157, 161 hooks, bell 67n8
harems 18, 18n7, 20 Horn, David 226n22, 227n25
Harper’s Monthly 49 Hornby, Nick 206n7
Harris, Charles K. 58 Horowitz, Joseph 160, 160n48
“After the Ball” 58 Horowitz, Mark 81, 81n10, 81n13
Harris, John 142n23 Horwitz, Carolyn 236n2
Harris, Kevin 108 Hoschna, Karl
Harstock, Nancy 63n1 “Cuddle Up a Little Closer, Lovey
Hart, Fanny 57n33 Mine” 215
Hart, Lorenz 108–109, 207, 208, 209 for Houghton, Walter E. 154n25
songs, see Rodgers, Richard House, Son 112, 115
Hathaway, Donny 31, 45 housewives 48, 50, 56–58
Hauerbach, Otto (Otto Harbach) see Houston, Cissy 64n2
Hoschna, Karl Houston, Whitney 64n2
Haweis, H(ugh) R(eginald) 156–157, Howard, Bart
157n34, 161n54 “Fly Me to the Moon” 215
Hawkins, Hawkshaw 191 Howard, Harlan 201
Hawkins, Stan 123n9, 139n17, 148n43 Howard, Jan 199n21
Hayakawa, S[amuel] I[chiye] 207–208, Hueffer, Francis 159
207n13, 207n14, 208n15, 208n16, Hughes, Meirion 159n40, 161, 161n50
208n17, 208n18, 208n19, 208n20, Hughes, Randy 191
212, 213, 215, 215n63 Hugo, Victor 20, 20n12
Haydn, Franz Joseph 24, 156 Les Orientales 20
Hayes, Curtis (Curtis Muhammad) 44 Hunsberger, Bruce 186n12
Hazen, Cindy 193n5 Hurley, Robert 144n27
Head, Matthew 17, 17n3 Huyssen, Andreas 136, 136n4
Hecht, Don 192n3 Hyman, Stanley Edgar 208n23
Heidegger, Martin 77, 78, 86, 87, 88, 89,
84n21, 87n25 identity 32, 34, 37, 40, 42, 66
Hemphill, Paul 192n3 ideology 4–5, 6
Hentoff, Nat 220n4 Iliad 81
Hercules 73–74 Ingres, Jean-Auguste Dominique 21–22
“I Won’t Say I’m in Love” 74 Turkish Bath 21–22
High Noon 95 Inglis, Ian 142, 142n24, 142n25, 145, 145n32
Iraq War 33, 34, 45, 218 Kaye, Carol 63
Islam 19–20, 25, 26, 30 Keil, Charles 122n4, 123n8
“It’s In His Kiss” see “The Shoop Shoop Kemble, Fanny 152
Song (It’s In His Kiss)” Kelly, Wynton 219n1, 220, 225
Kennedy, Ludovic 155n29
Jackson, Javon 110n7 Kerman, Joseph 121n1
Jacobs, Al see Crane, Mimmie Kern, Jerome 109, 207, 206n9
Jainism 84 Kerr, Anita 192n3
James, Clive 214n56 Khan, Roger Wolfe 218
James, David S. 232n37 Kill Bill Vol. 2 103
James, Fanita 64n3, 64–65, 66, 67n9, 69, Kilmartin, Terence 86n23
70, 71 The King and I 175
Jameson, Frederic 145n34, 241 King, Clydie 65n4
janissary music 24 King, Jean 64, 70
Jarre, Maurice 103 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 34–35, 35n8, 35n9,
Jarrett, Keith 229, 229n29 36, 44, 45, 105
jazz 107–116, 118–119, 219–232, 219n1, Kingsbury, Paul 195n9, 195n10
220n4, 220n5, 221n10, 223n15, The Kinks 71
226n22, 227n25, 227n26, 231n34 Kitagawa, Hiroshi 81n9
Jensen, Joli 192n3 Kleinberg, S.J. 48n1
Jim Crow 35 Klytämnestra (Strauss) 6
Jobim, Antonio Carlos (Tom) 115 Knapp, Raymond 79n7, 163n1, 163n3,
Joe, Jeongwon 137, 137n9 164n4, 164n6, 175n45, 175n46,
Johansen, Katherine 231n34 176n47, 219n1
Johnson, Brian D. 239n9, 240n15 Knight, Arthur 101n14
Johnson, Eithne 186n12 Knight, Gladys see Gladys Knight and the
Johnson, Mark 55, 55n27, 224, 224n17 Pips
Johnson, Martin 113n11 Kobbé, Gustave 28, 28n33
Johnson, Robert 111, 113 Kochiyama, Yuri 43
Jones, Elvin 229n29 Koon, George W. 199n19
Jones, Margaret 191n1, 192n3, 193n4, Korngold, Erich 101
193n5, 197n15, 199n20, 200n23 Kossoy Sisters 101
Jones, Nora 114 Kotelnikov, Vadim 231n34
Jones, Steve 180n1 Koyaanisqatsi 97
Jones, Tom 64 Kraftwerk 33
Jordanaires 192, 201, 192n3 Krall, Diana 114
Jullien, Louis 51–55 Kramer, Jonathan D. 128n21, 128–130,
“Bloomer Quadrille” 51 129n22, 129n24
“Prima Donna Waltz” 51, 52–55 Kramer, Lawrence 6n3, 12n11
KRS-1 33
Kabbani, Rana 20, 20n11, 20n13, 20n14 Ku Klux Klan 36
Kabuki 79, 165 Kubrick, Stanley 140
Kahn, Roger Wolfe see Caesar, Irving Kun, Josh 44
Kakar, Sudhir 187n14 Kurtz, Stanley N. 187n14
Kant, Immanuel 144, 210
Karamustafa, Ahmet T. 23n18, 23n19 Lacan, Jacques 11–12
Kassabian, Anahid 130n27 Ladies’ Home Companion 48
Kasson, John 153, 153n20 Ladies Home Journal and Practical
Katz, Mark 226n22 Housekeeper 48
Index 257
Ladies Repository 58, 58n35 M-Base Collective 108, 110, 116
LaHaye, Beverly 186 McCartney, Paul 220n7
Lakmé 17 McClary, Susan 4, 6, 6n4, 6n5, 17, 17n3,
Lane, Helen 144n27 20n12, 27n28, 27n29, 29n38, 29n39,
lang, k.d. 110n7, 131n31, 135 31, 31n1, 31n3, 45, 45n26, 45n27,
Lapine, James 86, 86n24 53n23, 53–54, 129n25, 131n31,
Lauper, Cyndi 116 131n32, 131–132, 133, 133n38, 135,
de Lauretis, Teresa 131 135n2, 135n3, 138n11, 221, 221n9,
Lauter, Paul 39n14 223n1, 223n16, 226n22, 231n32,
Law, Don 192n3 232n38
Lawrence, Nathaniel 128n21 McCoy, Paul 182
Layton, Turner see Creamer, Henry MacDonald, Hugh 28n30
Led Zeppelin 126 Macero, Teo 220, 220n5
Le Guin, Elisabeth 232, 232n38 McHugh, Jimmy
Lee, Amy 179, 181, 182–183, 184, 185, “Blue Again” 215
188, 189 McKay, Claude 44
Lee, John 185 Macmillan’s Magazine 149, 156
Lee, Spike 105 McRobbie, Angela 56, 56n31, 56n32, 122n6
Lee, Vernon 160, 160n43 Macy, Laura 28n30
Legend 98 Madonna 114n13
Leone, Sergio 137 Magee, Jeffrey 216n68
Leppert, Richard 199n20, 218n75, 220, 228, Mahler, Gustav 173n42
Lerner, Neil 95n1 Mahling, Hellmut 25n25
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 18 Maines, Natalie 33
Levine, Lawrence 208n22, 208n23, Makdisi, Saree 27n27
208–209, 209n24–25, 209n26, Malcolm X 105
209n27–33, 209n34, 212, 213, 216, Mälzel, Johann Nepomuk 156, 156n32
217, 217n69, 217n71 Mamas and the Papas 64
Lewis, George H. 192n3 Manning, David 207n13
Lewis, Samuel M. see Erwin, Ralph Mansfield, Brian 193n5, 202n29
Lewis, Tisa 239n11 Marcus, Greil 205n5
LFO 125n13 marriage 6, 9–10, 11, 14
Ligeti, György 97 Marsalis, Wynton 108, 118
Lincoln, Abbey 108, 116 Blood on the Fields 118
Lindberg, Ulf 205n3, 213, 213n49 Martin, Peter J. 227n25
Lipsitz, George 199n20 Martin, Robert 24n21
Liszt, Franz 173n42 Marvelettes 69
Little Shop of Horrors 73 Marx, Karl 143
Livingston, Rodney 139n15, 210n37 Marx, Leo 145n30, 145n31, 153, 153n19
Locke, Ralph 17, 17n3, 18, 18n6, 19n9, 28, Masahide 82
28n31, 28n32, 28n34, 28n35, 28n36 Mascaró, Juan 91n28
Lorde, Audre 44 Massumi, Brian 144n27, 146n36
Love, Darlene 64, 65, 67n9, 68, 68n11, 69, The Matrix 96–97
69n13, 70, 71, 75 Mehldau, Brad 114
Lowe, Ruth 208 Mendelssohn, Felix 157n34
“I’ll Never Smile Again” 208 Mercer, Johnny 109, 206, 209 for songs,
Lynn, Loretta 193 see also Arlen, Harold; Carmichael,
Lynrd Skynrd 65n4 Hoagy
Lyotard, Jean François 146, 146n36 Mérimée, Prosper 30n42
Messing, Scott 159n39 The Abduction from the Seraglio (Die
Methodist Church 64 Entführung aus Dem Serail) 3, 18,
Meyer, Joseph 218 25, 25n23
Meyer, Leonard B. 128n21 The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte)
Meyerbeer, Giacomo 19, 29 3–15, 25, 74
L’Africaine 19 characters
Middleton, Richard 7n7, 127n20 Monostatos 3, 13
Mies, Maria 48n1, 50 Pamina 3, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, 10,
Mihailovic, Konstantin 22–23, 23n18 11–13, 14, 15
The Mikado 168 Papagena 3, 6, 8, 8n8, 11–12,
Miller, Glen 109 13–14, 15
Miller, Mulgrew 108, 109 Papageno 3, 6, 7, 8, 8n8, 9–10,
Miller, Treva 193n5 11–12, 13–15
minimalism 78, 83, 87, 163n3 Queen of the Night 6, 7, 12,
misogyny 3, 5, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 38–39, 14, 74
44 Sarastro 3, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14–15
Mitchell, Joni 111, 115, 116, 117 Tamino 3, 6, 7, 8, 8n8, 9–11, 12,
Mitchell, Stephen 88n26 13, 15, 74
Mobley, Hank 219n1, 225 numbers
Moby 179 “Ach, ich fuhl’s, es ist ver-
Mondrian, Piet 232 schwunden” 12–13
Monheit, Jane 114 “Bei Männern, welche Liebe
The Monkees 114 fühlen” 8–12
Monteverdi, Claudio 174, 190 “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen”
Montgomery, Hugh 161 13
Monty Python 150 “Ich werde alle Orten” 9
Moody, Ben 179, 184, 185n8 “In diesen heil’gen Hallen” 14
Moore, Allan 123n7, 123n9 “Klinget, Glöckchen, klinget”
Moran, Jason 114 13
Móricz, Klára 153n19 “Papagena, Papageno” 11–12,
Morris, Christopher 159–160, 160n43 14
Morris, Mitchell 184n6, 217n73 Moylan, William 124n11, 127n17
Morrison, Van 111, 114, 116 Mrs. Jerningham’s Journal 56–58
Morissette, Alanis 235n2, 235–237, MTV News 33, 33n7
239–242 Muddy Waters 114
“Uninvited” 235–237, 240n15, 240–242 Muir, Theresa 159, 159n41
Moscoe, Vincent 145n30 Murray, Albert 227, 227n26
Moss, Corey 33, 33n7 Musgrave, Michael 157–158, 158n35
Most, Andrea 216, 216n65 Muzique, Mundo 126
Mowitt, John 226n22
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 3, 6, 7, 9, 13, Nachiketas, Yamacho 91
14, 15, 18, 74, 75, 104, 156 Nakimura, Hajime 84n20
authoritarianism in 3 Napoli, David 231n34
Cosí fan Tutte 6, 7–8 Nashville Sound 192n3, 197
Don Giovanni 6 Nassour, Ellis 191n1, 191n2, 192n3, 199n20
marriage in 6, 9–10, 11, 14 Nathanson, Constance A. 49n9
Mass in C Minor 104–105 National Association for the Advancement
misogyny in 3, 5, 7, 8–9, 10, 11, 14, 15 of Colored People (NAACP) 42, 43
racism in 3, 7 NdegéOcello, Me’shell 110n7
Index 259
Nelson, Cary 145n33 Paris (city) 51
Neugroschel, Joachim 154n24 Paris (rap artist) 33
New Englander 49n8, 49–50 Paris International Exposition (1878) 17
New York Times 107, 107n2, 112n9, 137, Parry, Hubert 161
137n8 Parsons, Alan 142
Newman, Edward Manuel 23–4, 24n20 Parton, Dolly 206n7
Nicholsen, Shierry Weber 210n35 Past, Present & Future 113
Nicholson, Stuart 111, 111n8 Paulding, William I. 58n34
Nickelback 179 Pearl, Minnie 199
Nightmares on Wax 125n13 Peebles, Ann 111, 112
Nitzsche, Gracia 67, 70 Peirce, Leslie 18n7
Nitzsche, Jack 67 Penderecki, Krzysztof 97
Noh 79, 80 Perry, Commodore Matthew 165, 170,
Nordau, Max 159, 159n39, 161, 161n54 171n26, 176
’NSync 32 Peterson, Oscar 229n29
nu metal (musical genre) 179, 181, 185 Pfeil, Fred 145n33
Nussbaum, Felicity 19, 20n10, 27n27 piano 54–55
Nussbaum, Martha 237n5 Philips, Adam 187, 187n13, 187n15
Nye, David 145n30, 153, 153n22 Picker, John M. 151n10
Pink Floyd 142, 143–148
O’Brien, [?] 213n51 Dark Side of the Moon 142, 144
O Brother, Where Art Thou? 101, 101n14 “Great Gig in the Sky” 144, 146
Oermann, Robert K. 191n1, 192n3, 194n6, “On the Run” 143
194n8, 195n9, 195–196, 199n20, The Wall
202n26 “Another Brick in the Wall” 148
Oh Boy! 69 “Comfortably Numb” 147–148
“oldies” radio stations 63 Pinkard, Maceo
O’Meally, Robert G. 118, 118n22 “Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh?”
On The Town 108 215
Orient 17–22, 25, 28–30 Pini, Maria 122n6, 133, 133n37
European depictions of 18–19, 20–21, Pitney, Gene 64
24, 25–26, 29, 30 Plaxico, Lonnie 108
“feminization” of 18–20 Pollitt, Katha 238–239, 239n8
in opera 17, 18, 19, 24–27, 29–30 Porcello, Thomas 222, 222n12
music in 17, 18, 23, 24, 26, 29–30 Porter, Cole 207, 206n10
as violent 18, 22, 24, 27, 28, 30 Powell, Bud 229n29
women in 18, 20, 28, 29 Powrie, Phil 140n19
Orientalism 17–22, 27, 30, 168n13, 242 Pratt, Michael 186n12
Osby Greg 108 Presley, Elvis 64, 69, 192n3, 198, 199,
Otherness 18, 28, 29, 30 199n20
ovarian determinism 48–49 Prince 114, 131n31, 135
Owen, Heidi 83, 83n16 Prince, Hal 163n1, 163n2, 175, 176
Owens, Buck 64, 66 process music 82
Polletta, Frances 43n22, 44n25
Pachelbel, Johann 103 Proust, Marcel 77, 78, 86, 86n23, 88
Padilla, José Public Enemy 33
“Valencia” 210, 211 Pulaski Academy 185, 185n10
Page, Frank 199n19 Punch 51, 51n16
Page, Patti 192n3 Putnam’s 51, 52n20
Queen Victoria 52 Ross, Andrew 122n5, 131n30
Rossini, Giacomo 19
race 3, 7, 35–36, 37, 40–41, 43, 44, 63, 64, L’Italiana in Algeri 19
65, 66–67, 67n8 69, 70, 72, 75, 228, Rothman, Sheila, 48n1
230–231 Rothstein, Edward 137, 137n8
Rachmaninoff, Sergei 173n42 Rotter, Fritz see Erwin, Ralph
Racy, Ali Jihad 29n37 Ruiz, Raoul 90, 90n27
Ransby, Barbara 39n13, 42, 42n19, 42n20, Rumi, Jalal al-Din Muhammad 22
43n23 Run-DMC 32
Rawick, George 36 Run Lola Run 95
Razaf, Andy see Waller, Fats Rushing, Jimmy 231
Reagan, Nancy 186 Rushmore 102
Reconstruction 35 Russell, Mark 103n15
Red Hot Chili Peppers 63 Rustin, Bayard 44
Redhead, Steve 121n3 Rycenga, Jennifer 130n27, 130–131,
Reed, Lou 63, 218, 218n76, 218n77 131n28, 131n29, 132, 148n43
Reggio, Godrey 97
Rehding, Alexander 155n30 Said, Edward 17, 18, 18n6, 19, 19n8, 21n15,
Reich, Steve 82, 86 22, 30n43, 168n13
Reising, Russell 142n24, 142n25, 144n29 Saint-Saëns, Camille 19, 29, 173n42
Reynolds, Simon 125, 125n14, 125n15 Samson et Dalila 19, 28–29
Ribowsky, Mark 67, 67n9, 67n10, 67n11 characters
Richardson, John 129n24, 139n17, 147n41 Delilah 17, 28, 29
Richter Amy 151–152, 152n12 Philistines 28, 29
Righteous Brothers 64 Samson 28
Rietveld, Hillegonda 121n3 Sandoval, Arturo 225
Riley, Terry 78, 82 Sante, Luc 206n7, 214n54, 214n55
Rilke, Ranier Maria 87, 88, 88n26 Santoro, Gene 107n2
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai 27 Savage, Charles 146n37
Scheherezade 27 Schaffer, Simon 156n32
Risky Business 97–99, 98n8 Schikaneder, Emmanuel 3
Roberts, Bob 43 Schmitt, Ulrich 149n2, 155n30, 155–156
Robin, Leo Schneider, Elizabeth M. 237n4
“My Ideal” 208 Schumann, Robert 129n24
Robinson, J. Bradford 17n1 Schwartz, Arthur
Robison, Willard 221 “Rhode Island is Famous for You”
rock opera 78 216n68
Rodgers, Richard 108, 207, 208, 209, Schwarz, David 130n27
209n26, 215n64 Schweigger, Salomon 24
“You Took Advantage of Me” 209 Scissor Sisters 147–148, 148n43
Rolling Stones 65n4 Scott, Derek 18, 18n4, 18n6
Rollins, Sonny 114n13 Scott, Jimmy 110n7
Roman Catholic Church 64 “Second Emancipation” 35
Ronettes 64, 69 Secrest, Meryle 79n4, 82n12
The Roots 118 Seeger, Charles 223, 223n16
Rose, Tricia 34, 36, 37–40, 39n12, 40n15, Seger, Bob 97
40n16, 41, 45, 122n5, 131n30 Seem, Mark 144n27
Rosenberg, Bernard 207n13 Seether 179
Rosenfeld, Monroe 58 September 11, 2001 33
Index 261
Sesame Street 73 “No One Is Alone” 91
Sessa, Anne Dzamba 159, 159n41, 162n56 errily We Roll Along 164
M
Seurat, Georges 86 Pacific Overtures 77, 78, 78n2, 79–85,
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the 86, 88, 164–176, 167n11, 167n12,
Grand Jatte 87 168n14, 169n15–17, 170n18–23,
sexism 36, 38, 41 171n24–26, 172n27–36, 173n37–40,
Sexton, Charlie 110n7 175n44
sexuality 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 122 “A Bowler Hat” 81, 165, 174, 175
sharecropping 35 “Chrysanthemum Tea” 165, 166,
Shaw, Susan M. 239n11 168–169, 170–172, 173, 174
Shears, Jake 148 “Four Black Dragons” 165, 168,
Sherkat, Darren E. 186n12 170, 172
Shindig! 69, 70–71, 71n15, 71n16, 72 “Lion Dance” 82, 174n43
Shirelles 69 “Next” 81, 165, 172, 176
Shostakovich, Dmitri 140 “Please Hello” 82, 165, 166, 168,
Shosun 80 173, 174, 174n43
Sidgwick, John 25n22 “Poems” 164, 167, 174–175, 176
Siegel, Lawrence 130n27 “Pretty Lady” 81, 164, 168, 173,
signifyin’ 223 174, 175
silence 5, 12–13 “Someone in a Tree” 77, 82–83, 84,
Sill, Lester 67n10 86, 90, 165, 167, 168
Simon, Paul 101 “The Advantages of Floating in the
Simone, Nina 115 Middle of the Sea” 168, 169,
Simmons, Jack 150n7 172
Simpkins, Dorothy 43 “There Is No Other Way” 80–81, 82,
Sinatra, Frank 208, 215 167, 168, 169–170, 172
Sinatra, Nancy 64 “Welcome to Kanagawa” 165, 166,
Small, Christopher 230n31 167, 168
Smith, Bessie 44 Passion 164, 164n4
Smith, Jeff 101n14 Phinney’s Rainbow 79n3
Smith, Marvin “Smitty” 108 Saturday Night 79n3
Smith, Merritt Roe 145n31 Sunday in the Park with George 77, 78,
Smith, Myoshi 110n6, 110n20 86–90, 86n24
Smith, Toby 84n21 characters
Smith, “Whispering Jack” 210 for songs, George 87, 88, 89–90
see Pinkard, Maceo Dot 87, 88, 89–90
Smith-Rosenberg, Carol 48n3 songs
Soapdish 103 “Color and Light” 78, 86–88, 90
Sojourner Truth 39, 39n14 “It’s Hot Up Here” 88
Solie, Ruth 54n25, 54–55, 55n26, 161n52 “Move On” 90
Sondheim, Stephen 77, 78n2, 79–80, 82, 86, “Putting It Together” 89
86n24, 90, 91, 163–165, 164n7, 173, “Sunday” 88
173n42, 175–176 Sweeney Todd 91, 173n42
A Little Night Music 80, 90 Soul Embraced 185
All that Glitters 79, 79n3 Spaeth, Sigmund 215n60
Anyone Can Whistle 79 Spandounes, Cantacuzene Theodoros 23
Company 79, 80, 90, 163 Spector, Phil 64, 67, 67n10, 68, 68n11, 69
Follies 80, 90, 163–164 Spice Girls 74
Into the Woods 91 Spock, Dr. Benjamin 186
Springsteen, Bruce 33, 242 Thompson, E(dward) P(almer) 151n9
Spufford, Francis 156n32 Thompson, F(rancis) M(ichael) L(ongstreth)
Staiger, Janet 100n11 160, 160n47
Stanbridge, Alan 223n14 Thompson, Hank 194
Statham, Henry Heathcote 158, 158n38, Thompson, Kristin 96n4, 100n11
162n57 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland 232n35
Steiner, Max 101, 139 Thoreau, Henry David 31, 31n2
Stephenson, George 150, 152, 155 Thornton, Sarah 121n3, 122n5
Sternberger, Dolf 154n24, 156n31 Threadgill, Henry 108
Stilwell, Robynn J. 95n2, 98n8, 140n19 Tick, Judith 54n25
Sting 114 Tillich, Paul 44
Stolz, Benjamin 23n18 Tilton, Chris 97n7
Storer, Horatio 49 Timberlake, Justin 32, 33, 44
Stranger Things Magazine 184 Tin Pan Alley 58, 205–210, 206n9, 207n11,
Stras, Laurie 66n7 212–218, 221, 221n10, 223,
Straus, Joseph N. 224, 224n18, 231, 232n35 225n21
Strauss, Richard 6 Tinkcom, Matthew 147n39
Street, Craig 110n7, 110–111, 113 tolerance 4
style hongrois 18, 27 Tomko, Linda J. 56n31
The Stylistics 111 Tomlinson, Gary 121n1
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard 7n7 Topp, Michael Miller 41, 41n17
Such, David 232n36 Torry, Clare 144, 146
Sufism 22–23, 30, 85 Toynbee, Jason 127, 127n18, 127n19
Sullivan, Arthur 173 Tribal Nation 32
Sutton, Emma 160n44 tribute albums 180–181
Swayne, Steven 163n2 The Triplets of Belleville 103–105, 104n16
Trope, Quincy 219n3
Taboo (Jaime Gomez) 32 Tsuchida, Bruce 81n9
Tale of the Heike 81 Turk, Roy see Ahlert, Fred; Pinkard, Maceo
Tangerine Dream 97–98 Turks 24, 30
Tao Te Ching 85 Turner, J(oseph) M(allord) W(illiam) 150
Taoism 77, 84, 85
Taruskin, Richard 27n27 U2 114, 115
Tate, Greg 110n7 Uglow, Jenny 156n32
Taylor, Frances 219 Ullman, Tracey 73
Taylor, Nicholas 153, 153n21 University of Southern California 64
Taymor, Julie 15 Upanishads 84, 85, 91
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 173n42
techno music 124–128, 125n13 Vallee, Rudy 206n10
Detroit techno 124, 125, 125n13, 128 value 3–5, 6–7
hardcore 124–125, 126–127, 128 Van Gelder, Rudy 227
technology 123–124, 132–133, 135, 141, Vanity Fair 52n18
143–146 Vaughan, Sarah 111, 115
Temptations 114 Velt, Joachim 25n25
Terrasson, Jacky 108 Verdi, Giuseppe 19
“The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” Vick, Graham 15
65, 66, 71 Vision Quest 98
Theresa, Rose 137n9 vocal quartets 72–73
Thomas, Rebecca 199n20 vocal trios 64, 72–74
Index 263
Wagner, Ann 50n10 Williams, Raymond 145n33
Wagner, Richard 157n34, 158–162, 159n41, Williams, Roger M. 199n18, 199n19
159n42, 161n53 Williamson, Sonny Boy 112
Waller, Fats Wilson, Cassandra 107–119, 112n10,
“Just Me and My Radio” 215 115n18
Walser, Robert 123n7, 219n1, 223n14, albums
225n20, 231n32 Blue Light ‘Til Dawn 110–114, 115,
Ward, Mary Augusta (Mrs. Humphrey) 158, 116
158n36 Blue Skies 108–109, 110
Warhol, Andy 136 Glamoured 117
Warren, Harry Jump World 108
“Jeepers Creepers” 216 Point of View 108
Warwick, Dionne 64, 71n16 Traveling Miles 116
Washington, Denzel 105 songs
Waters, Ethel 215 “A Little Warm Death” 117
Waters, Maxine 36 “Blue Light Til Dawn” 117
Watrous, Peter 107n2 “Come on in My Kitchen” 111,
Webb, Gary 36, 36n10 113–114
Weber, Carl Maria von 19, 25 “Death Letter” 115
Oberon 19 “Heaven Knows” 117
Weber, Max Maria von 154 “Hellhound on My Trail” 111
Weersma, Melle “I Can’t Stand the Rain” 112
“Penny Serenade” 210n37, 210–211, 212 “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was”
Weidman, John 77, 78n2, 80, 82, 164n7, 108–109
175 “I’m Old Fashioned” 109–110
Weinstock, Bill 227, 228 “I Want More” 116
welfare reform 40 “I Wished on the Moon” 108
Wells, Kitty 194–197, 198, 196n11 “Justice” 117
“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”
Angels” 194, 195, 197 108
Wells, Mary 71n16 “Love is Blindness” 115
West, Mae 203 “Out Loud” 108
West, R.A. 58n35 “Sky and Sea (Blue in Green)” 116
Westby, James 142n22 “Sleight of Time” 117–118
Whitburn, Joel 32n5, 211n39, 221n10 “Some Other Time” 108
Whiteley, Anna M. 231n34 “Tell Me You’ll Wait For Me” 111
Whitely, Sheila 144n29, 147n42, 148n43, “Time After Time” 116
241, 241n17, 241n18 “Tupelo Honey” 114, 116
whiteness 66–67, 70, 72 see also race “Until” 117
Whiting, Richard see Robin, Leo “Waters of March” 115
Whitley, Chris 112 “You Don’t Know What Love Is”
Wild at Heart 143 111
Wild Orchid 32 Wiltbank, John 48
Wilde, Oscar 150 Wing, Betsy 5n2
Wilkinson, William Cleaver 56, 56n30 Wiseman, Sue 199n20
Will.I.Am (William Jones) 32, 33 Witness 103
William, Chris 185n9 The Wizard of Oz 142, 143, 144–145,
Williams, Hank 114, 196n13, 198–199, 146–147, 148
199n20 Woideck, Carl 220n5
Wojcik, Pamela Robertson 101n14 Wood-Allen, Mary 49n5
Wolfe, Charles K. 199n20 Woods, Clyde 42n21
Wolff, Michael 150n7, 153n21 Wood, Robin 7, 7n6
women 35, 36–37, 38–40, 41–43, 44, Wordsworth, William 217, 217n73
45, 47–53, 55–56, 57–61, 63, 64, Wranitzky, Paul 25, 25n25, 26
65, 66–67, 68, 71–74, 75, 122n6, Oberon, König der Elften 25–26, 25n25
187–188, 193–195, 237–242
behavior of 48, 49–50, 50–51, 52, Yearwood, Trisha 202
53–56, 57–61 Youmans, Vincent see Caesar, Irving
Black (African-American) women Young, James 103n15
36–37, 38–40, 42, 44, 45, 63, 64, 65, Young, James E. 217n74
66–67, 68, 75 Young, Joseph see Erwin, Ralph
bodies of 47–48, 49–50, 55–56, 59, 61 Young, La Monte 78, 82
dress of 49, 51 Young, Lester 227
hatred of see misogyny “Lester Leaps In” 227, 228
in marriage 9, 10, 14–15 Young, Neil 114
nature of 9 Young Women’s Christian Association
in opera 5, 7 (YWCA) 43
operatic writing for 5, 7
Orientalist representations of see Orient, Zero Seven 99–100
women in Zombies 114
sexuality of 48, 50 Zorn, John 131n31, 135
suffrage of 49, 55 Zuckerman, Mary Ellen 48n2
violence against 237–239 Zwerlin, Michael 223n15
voices of 5, 7, 12

Baur, S., Knapp, R., & Warwick, J. (Eds.) - (2008) - Musicological Identities Essays in Honor of Susan McClary (1st Ed.) - Routledge.

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Musicological Identities

Taylor & Francis

Published 2016 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp and Jacqueline Warwick 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 9780754663027 (hbk)

Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita.

Tribute to Susan McClary  vii

Part I: Musical Identities: Gender, Sexuality, and Race

1 Value and Meaning in The Magic Flute 3

2 Whirling Fanatics: Orientalism, Politics, and Religious Rivalry in

3 Reveling in the Rubble: Where is the Love? 31

4 “Waltz Me Around Again Willie”: Gender, Ideology and Dance in the

Part II: Music and Temporality

7 Making Time: The Soundtrack and Narrative Time 95

8 Sleights of Time in the Music of Cassandra Wilson 107

10 Resisting the Sublime: Loose Synchronization in La Belle et la Bête

11 Of Railroads, Beethoven, and Victorian Modernity 149

12 Marking Time in Pacific Overtures: Reconciling East, West, and History

Part III: Reinventing Analysis

13 Three Little Essays on Evanescence 179

14 Gender Sonics: The Voice of Patsy Cline 191

16 Musicology Beyond the Score . . . and the Performance: Making Sense

17 Uninvited: Gender, Schizophrenia, and Alanis Morissette 235

Susan McClary: Bibliography 243

Nasser Al-Taee is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of

Steven Baur is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Dalhousie

Daniel Goldmark is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Case Western

Stan Hawkins is Professor of Music at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is widely

Raymond Knapp is Professor and Chair of Musicology at the University of

Lawrence Kramer is Professor of English and Music at Fordham University

Richard Leppert is Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor in the

George Lipsitz is Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of

Mitchell Morris is Associate Professor of Musicology at UCLA, where he—along

John Richardson is Research Fellow and leader of an Academy of Finland research

Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Professor of Music at Brown University, is best known

Robert Walser is Professor of Musicology at UCLA. He earned doctorates in both

Jacqueline Warwick is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Dalhousie

Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis,

Part I: Musical Identities: Gender, Sexuality, and Race

McClary’s ground-breaking Feminine Endings drew on feminist strategies to reveal

Part II: Music and Temporality

The project of reconnecting musical works to their times is inextricably linked to

Part III: Reinventing Analysis

While conversant with traditional modes of musical analysis, McClary’s analytical

Steven Baur, Raymond Knapp, and Jacqueline Warwick, editors

Value and Meaning in The Magic Flute

See http://epub.library.ucla.edu/knapp/mcclaryidentities for this and other items

But Tamino and Pamina

10 W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 (New York: Random House,

11 On these vicissitudes of the Real, see my “Speaking Melody, Melodic Speech,” in

In Nineteen-Fifty-Six we find the Queen

13 Auden, pp. 277–278.

Whirling Fanatics: Orientalism, Politics,

According to Carl Dahlhaus, the Orient offered nineteenth-century opera librettists

Carl Dahlhaus, trans. J. Bradford Robinson, Nineteenth-Century Music (Berkeley and

The Femininization of the Orient

One of the important developments in nineteenth-century Orientalism was the distillation

In the nineteenth century, Western colonialist expansion reinforced negative images

Orientalism in the Arts

10 See Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in

Tribute to Susan McClary vii

1 Value and Meaning in The Magic Flute 3

3 Reveling in the Rubble: Where is the Love? 31

7 Making Time: The Soundtrack and Narrative Time 95

8 Sleights of Time in the Music of Cassandra Wilson 107

11 Of Railroads, Beethoven, and Victorian Modernity 149

13 Three Little Essays on Evanescence 179

14 Gender Sonics: The Voice of Patsy Cline 191

17 Uninvited: Gender, Schizophrenia, and Alanis Morissette 235

Susan McClary: Bibliography 243