February 22-23, 2019

Department of Music, University of Pittsburgh

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Deborah Wong, University of California, Riverside

Performer in Residence: Anna Elder

The erotic exists at the core of our being, at the peripheries of our consciousness, and is embedded in our senses. It is experienced in the body but is often unspeakable, or exists beyond recognition and conceptualization. As gender, sexuality, and their materiality remain central to music studies today, theorizing the erotic allows us to think through the embodied experience of listening to and producing music and sound.

Abstract

Sonic Intimacy in Kate Soper’s Confessions from the Killing Jar

In her 2017 American Musicological Society endowed lecture, Susan McClary compared the conclusion of Kate Soper’s dissertation —analysis of her piece Voices from the Killing Jar (2010-2012)—to McClary’s own experience of having to “come-out” as a woman in the field of musicology. While the phrase “coming-out” is never used in Soper’s dissertation, she describes the process of acknowledging herself as a minority gender. Soper’s acknowledgement mirrors a coming-out as a moment of reclaiming selfhood and selfcare. In this paper, I argue that Voices from the Killing Jar is Soper’s reclamation and emphasis of her gendered self that she had minimized to be accepted as a serious contemporary composer in the United States.

I argue that Soper’s reclamation of selfhood is achieved through a crafted coming-out confession as a method of selfcare. Through Chloe Taylor’s interpretation of Foucauldian technologies of self, I examine movement VI. Interlude: Asta Sollilja. Interlude focuses on the reality of Asta Sollilja— a tragic character from Harold Laxness’s Independent People. Through what I call ‘sonic confessional intimacies,’ Soper’s music sonically forms Asta Sollilja away from her killing jar —nineteenth-century rural Iceland and anxiety. The techniques of ‘sonic confessional intimacies’ such as a broken ground bass, vocal failure, and phrase repetition stem from musical indexes of the western traditions of lament and mourning. In Interlude, Soper composes an expanded representation Sollilja by writing into Sollilja’s story a moment of personal care. In embodying Sollilja through performance and writing a moment of care for Sollilja, Soper performs her own selfcare. Within the argument of my paper, I add Soper’s piece as an example of music as a technology of self-formation and selfcare.

Abstract

Reparations of a Cartesian Legacy: Structures of Gender in Verbal Notation

For the Borealis 2016 experimental music festival, Jennifer Walshe wrote a manifesto-like program note “The New Discipline.” Walshe’s program note demands an art practice situated on the acknowledgement of live bodies that perform/compose music. This call for reparation between the spilt of practitioner’s minds and bodies is a call for recognition of a practitioner’s full humanity. By binding a Cartesian-based binary of performer (body/feminine) and composer (mind/masculine) into practitioner, works using verbal notation’s reparative structure answer. In this paper, I ask how the reparation of Cartesian legacies within verbally notated works causes a formation of a self without gender.

I analyze the generation and exteriorization of self-reparation as a process of dissolving mind/body binary through attention constructions in Pauline Oliveros’s Breaking Boundaries (1996) and Jennifer Walshe’s THIS IS WHY PEOPLE O.D. ON PILLS (2004). I trace a lineage of Cartesianism through my concept of interior temporality— informed by Ricœur’s triple present paradox. I examine how a reparation of a Cartesian-self produces a self without gender.

My presentation connects legacies of gender and music by applying structuralist methodologies to verbally notated works. Verbally notated works are extreme examples of practices that appear in traditional art music. Therefore, in parsing the explicit reparation of Cartesian self into self without gender, further complicates our notions of how music can erase or perpetuate gender.

I will be doing archival research at University of California, San Diego with the Pauline Oliveros Papers for my dissertation.