Event

Doctoral Colloquium (Music): Rachel Avery and Peter Schubert, McGill University

Friday, October 4, 2019 16:30
Elizabeth Wirth Music Building A832, 527 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3A 1E3, CA
Price: 
Free

The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.  Students (Music) for whom attendance is required must sign the attendance sheet at the colloquium.

 

Imperially Queer: Modes of Orientalism in Laura Nyro’s Songwriting

Rachel Avery

How does the imperial gaze shape queer expression? In music, as Philip Brett has highlighted, there is a tradition of white gay male composers appropriating Oriental themes to various ends, including representing queer sexuality. Orientalism by queer female musicians has not yet been discussed. Literary studies, however, offer insights in this domain, as scholars have illuminated how female authors have used the Orient to indirectly represent lesbian desire.

Building on these frameworks, I will address Orientalism in songs by queer songwriter-performer Laura Nyro. Interrogating sexually charged uses of chinoiserie, I suggest that the sexualisation and feminisation of the Orient in the Western imagination may appeal to white queer women artists while remaining a culturally accepted theme. Considering unequal collaboration in a song that suggests escape to a better world, I discuss the fraught nature of imagining alternatives when one’s perspective is shaped by queerness alongside a Western imperial vantage point.

 

Rachel Avery is a PhD candidate in musicology at McGill University supervised by Prof. Lloyd Whitesell, whose dissertation is focused on songwriter-performer Laura Nyro and her interaction with the music industry, complex relationship to genre, and queer aesthetics in her music.

 

 

Formal Designs in Willaert's Music

Peter Schubert

Although Willaert’s madrigals are praised for their sensitivity to formal and expressive aspects of text (Feldman 1995), they raise, with “the exception of a handful of especially tuneful chansons, madrigals and motets… perplexing questions about the aesthetic quality of his music…” (Fromson 2001). While it is true that many features of Willaert’s composition can be directly related to the text he is setting, many other features cannot. In this paper I will analyze an early madrigal, “Amor mi fa morire” (RISM 153416) to untangle which is which, and to give a better account of the music. Willaert’s careful deployment of musical repetition might be one explanation for his anecdotal reluctance to release his madrigals to the public until he had reworked them at length (Zarlino 1588).

 

Peter Schubert has taught at McGill since 1990. He was recently awarded “The Gail Boyd de Stwolinski Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Music Theory Teaching and Scholarship.”

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