Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Rachel Hottle

The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.

Doctoral Colloquium: Rachel Hottle, PhD Candidate in Music Theory, McGill University

Title: The Embodied Folk Guitar of Elizabeth Cotten

Abstract: Left-handed blues and folk guitarist Elizabeth Cotten played a right-handed guitar upside down, picking with her dominant hand and fretting with her non-dominant hand. Cotten’s unique style of playing emerged from the reversed relationship between her hands and the order of the strings on the guitar, which required her to reconfigure both the chord fingerings and the strumming and picking patterns she used. My project demonstrates specific ways that Cotten’s music-making involves active negotiations between her physical capabilities and limitations, as well as more abstract musical concerns such as rhythm, melody, and phrasing. By focusing on the embodied experience of composing with an instrument, this project contributes to the growing corpus of analytic work that emphasizes music as a dynamic, living cultural performance.

Bio: Rachel Hottle is a PhD candidate in Music Theory with a graduate concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies. Her dissertation explores the impact of embodied guitar technique on musical structure in the music of Elizabeth Cotten and Joni Mitchell. She has presented her work at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, as well as several regional chapters of these societies.