Articles
In the early 2000s, a video of Nina Simone’s 1960 performance of “Love Me Or Leave Me” on The Ed Sullivan Show resurfaced online. The song’s original piano solo, rife with references to the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach, clearly displays Simone’s training as a classical pianist. Several inaccurate claims on the solo circulate in scholarship, magazines, and social media—some describe the solo as a fugue; others incorrectly attribute it to Bach himself. This article unpacks the racial and gendered implications of the Ed Sullivan clip’s reception. The misreadings of Simone’s performance, I argue, are rooted in a possessive investment in whiteness and classical music. By exaggerating Bach’s influence on Simone, various media erase her musical agency to advance a romanticized view of classical music as a universal art form. These narratives obscure the way her stylistic heterogeneity emerged as a response to the racial and gendered structures that shaped her performing career. Through an analysis of Simone’s four renditions of “Love Me Or Leave Me,” I demonstrate how she strategically inserts textural, melodic, and harmonic allusions to Bachian counterpoint within the structure of the song. Her performances therefore showcase a form of stylistic hybridity in which she draws on her classical piano training to synthesize the conventions of fugue and popular song. By challenging narratives that incorrectly label Simone’s solos as quotations or imitations rather than original compositions, I draw attention to the inner workings of her stylistic heterogeneity at the piano.
“Analyzing Vocal Placement in Recorded Virtual Space,” Music Theory Online 28/4 (2023).
When listening to a piece of recorded music through headphones or stereo speakers, one hears various sound sources as though they were in a virtual space. This article establishes a methodology for analyzing vocal placement—the apparent location of a voice within this virtual space—in recent popular music. In contrast to existing analytical approaches to the analysis of virtual space that rely primarily on close listening, I provide an empirical method using digital sound-processing tools to precisely locate recorded sound sources in virtual space. Additionally, I offer a measurable way to visually display these parameters within the virtual space. After Ruth Dockwray and Allan Moore (2010), I depict the virtual space as an empty room in which sound sources are located. I position the voice in this empty room according to five parameters: (1) width (the perceived lateral space occupied by the voice); (2) pitch range (the range occupied by the voice); (3) prominence (the amplitude of the voice in relationship to other sound sources in the mix); (4) environment (the level of echo and reverberation applied to the voice); and (5) layering (supplementary vocal tracks added to the voice). To illustrate the methodology, I analyze and compare the vocal placements in Eminem’s and Rihanna’s four collaborations: “Love the Way You Lie” (2010), “Love the Way You Lie (Part II)” (2010), “Numb” (2012), and “The Monster” (2013).
This article posits that a pianist’s physical balance functions as a mode of structuring in some contemporary works. Drawing on Suzanne Cusick’s (1994) call for a critical engagement with the performing body and Judy Lochhead’s (2016) reconceptualization of structure in contemporary music, the present approach shifts the analytical focus from the score to a pianist’s bodily experience. To engage with this aspect of musical organization, I outline a methodology that models the way in which recent piano repertoire creates tension and resolution for the performer and listener. The methodology focuses on the sense of physical balance—understood as shifts in center of gravity—experienced by a pianist. A body experiences a sense of tension when it sits in an unbalanced state, leaning, for instance, toward one side of the keyboard. It strives toward resolution, which is attained by returning to a balanced center of gravity. I illustrate the methodology through analyses of recent compositions that foreground these issues: Dux, by Zosha Di Castri (2017); Garage, by Alice Ping Yee Ho (2005, rev. 2006); the third piece of Drei Klavierstücke, by Beat Furrer (2004); and Glass Houses No. 15, by Ann Southam (1981, rev. 2009).
Conference Proceedings
The Collaborative Song Dataset (CoSoD) is a corpus of 331 multi-artist collaborations from the 2010-2019 Billboard “Hot 100” year-end charts. The corpus is annotated with formal sections, aspects of vocal production (including reverberation, layering, panning, and gender of the performers), and relevant metadata. CoSoD complements other popular music datasets by focusing exclusively on musical collaborations between independent acts. In addition to facilitating the study of song form and vocal production, CoSoD allows for the in-depth study of gender as it relates to various timbral, pitch, and formal parameters in musical collaborations. In this paper, we detail the contents of the dataset and outline the annotation process. We also present an experiment using CoSoD that examines how the use of reverberation, layering, and panning are related to the gender of the artist. In this experiment, we find that men’s voices are on average treated with less reverberation and occupy a more narrow position in the stereo mix than women’s voices.
Michèle Duguay 