Graduate Research Seminar: Appropriation in Music and Poetry

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• James Gabrillo, MPhil Music and Michael Skansgaard, PhD English
• Friday 30 January 2015, 18:00-19:00
• Alison Shrubsole Room, Homerton College.

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Assessing appropriated pop songs and performances by James Gabrillo, MPhil Music

There is a methodological gap in assessing popular songs and performances that were a result of appropriation and recontextualisation, such as covers. How do we research and analyse appropriated text as a text, taking into account its interactivity, intertextuality, layering and reconfiguring of existing narratives to produce a new narrative? For this discussion I examine the American rock band Kings of Leon’s cover of the Swedish pop star Robyn’s hit track Dancing on My Own. I specifically chose this cover as it features distinct switches in genre and gender codes. Most published reviews and online commentary from viewers and the media have focused on the work’s novelty element – on the act of covering. What lessons, if any, can be learned from their approaches to assessing appropriations? Do covers disrupt the illusion of sincere artistic expression? Is it possible to produce criticism that is beneficial to the original author, the current performer and the listener?

St. Louis Blues: the Answer Song of W.C. Handy and Sterling Allen Brown by Michael Skansgaard, PhD English

Poets of the Harlem Renaissance have been called “Modernist” in the revolutionary sense, rebels against “Victorian binaries and social hierarchies.” Yet such narratives already presuppose a white, European tradition as the measuring stick for a movement predicated upon various philosophies of black essentialism. This problematic nomenclature is ubiquitous in blues scholarship: poets James Merrill, Charles Bernstein, and Raymond Patterson have all cited W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” as an example of “iambic pentameter,” a dubious metrical claim which represents not only suspect scansion, but also the appropriation of African American popular song into an incompatible critical apparatus. Other scholars, such as Sidney Finkelstein and Amiri Baraka, have cautioned against such attempts to “explain one musical system in terms of another, to describe a non-diatonic music in diatonic terms.” Baraka implies that it is fundamentally anachronistic to utilize a European vocabulary to analyze a blues form that is essentially “black.”

This paper will ask whether it makes sense to analyze the stanzas of the “St. Louis Blues” as “literary” units of Modernist poetry in addition to (and, often, instead of) “musical” units of popular song. The answer is complicated. Handy himself traced the song’s lyrical origins “all the way back to Africa,” and yet composed the sheet music with European musical notation, “using the dominant seventh as the opening chord of the verse.” I will contextualize the collaborative efforts of post-WWI blues musicians and poets who wrote “answer songs” to the “St. Louis Blues,” a form of intertextuality which does not always lend itself to the poetic signaling of literary “allusion.” I will suggest that the “St. Louis Blues” enters the literary canon through Sterling Allen Brown as both a cultural and metrical hybrid form, laden with “echoes” and “answers” many have stopped listening for.

This talk is part of the Homerton Seminars series.

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• Alison Shrubsole Room, Homerton College
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