I experience the imbalance of gender representation in my work as a composer and especially as a composer-scholar. While I do not want my work to be justified, included, or programmed because I am a woman, I believe firmly that my experiences as a woman have a direct impact on what–and how–I contribute to the field of music. Advocating for underrepresented voices, ideas, bodies, and methodologies has been part of my creative and scholarly practice for over a decade now. I push for change in the male-dominated fields of composition and analysis through this line of inquiry.
PROJECT: Center for Arts and Society Hospitality Initiative Project: (In)Hospitable Bodies (2024-2026)
In January 2024 I began a three-year project in the Center for Arts and Society’s Hospitality Initiative, titled (In)Hospitable Bodies.
From the CAS website: “Embedded in the CAS ideology is the concept that as a research center we will be productive. We will engage in activities that produce work. The process of making the work, activities and speakers around the topic and the final projects will be available to the public. Since 2008 every three years CAS has reinvented itself with a new themed initiative to fund and produce new work. In each initiative, two CMU faculty coordinators, one an artist and the other a scholar, select projects that engage in a focused exploration of a selected topic.”
To read more about the project I am heading up, and the fascinating projects of my colleagues, click here.
PRESENTATION: Blowing Past Barlines: Character Development in Waitress
Society of Music Theory Annual Conference 2021
ABSTRACT: Waitress tells the story of Jenna, a pie-baking waitress at a diner who is stuck in an abusive marriage in a small town. In this lightning talk, I propose that Jenna’s own arc can be traced through the manipulation of phrasing and breath in the character’s vocal lines. Composer and lyricist Sara Bareilles matches Jenna’s insistence on baking her feelings into pies to fix—and avoid—her predicaments with a complementary barreling across section and phrase endings in the melodic writing. The performer defies expectations of closure, break, or breath at certain points in the show, providing a sonic mirror to her on-stage conundrum.
In particular, Jenna’s initial situation is established by a series of phrase extensions and elisions across formal sections in Act I’s “What Baking Can Do.” As Jenna learns to lean on her friends for support and feels seen and loved in her relationship with Dr. Pomatter, her phrases begin to regulate and even out, shown in “You Matter to Me.” At the 11 o’clock hour, Jenna’s phrasing—once anchoring her to her situation—becomes a sonic marker that triggers her commitment to persist and change her circumstances. Through a series of short vignettes across the show, supported by both score analysis and audio examples from multiple performer interpretations, I draw connections between Jenna’s lived situation and Bareilles’s treatment of the vocal lines; this link highlights audible, musical choices that enhance the character’s development cross the narrative arc of the story.
KEYNOTE: Bringing Intersectionality Into Analysis
Committee on the Status of Women Special Session, Society of Music Theory National Conference, 2022
ABSTRACT: Academic music faces a long history of calcified analytical methods and value systems that privilege a small slice of repertoire, but recent scholarship and practice has challenged us all to reconsider content and methods alike. A still-underexplored area of this shifting practice in music theory is one that situates the person–in this case, the person who is analyzing–alongside the music (analysis) itself. This keynote advocates for an additional, intentional engagement with the intersectional identities of music analysts as a crucial component for analytical work.
Intersectionality is a valuable lens through which we can consider music analysis. Introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality is a prism for seeing how different forms and categories of inequality are interconnected and often compound on one another within systems of power. Taking an intersectional approach to analysis makes room for an individual’s experience and identity in the practice: what they know, how they know it, and why it matters. In this keynote, I focus on what is possible when Crenshaw’s intersectionality is brought into music analysis. I begin by outlining the connective tissue between the concept’s original application in the legal system and current efforts to employ the framework in music theory. I then present two linked case studies: one that considers how this practice informs the analysis of a musical object, and another that centers the person who does the analytical work.
ORIGINAL WORKS which lean heavily into aspects of the (In)Hospitable Bodies:
(Never) Bright Enough (2021) for SSA voices
A Choice Informed (2019) for SATB choir unaccompanied
Ellis II (2019) for mezzo-soprano, cello, and piano
A Sense of Decency (2021) for SSAA choir and string quartet
One in Four, One in Eight (in progress) for piano quartet
To Be Titled commission (2024) for SATB choir unaccompanied
Winter: Outside, In (2023) for choir, orchestra, and bagpipes,
The Court, the Act (2022) for SSA voices
When I Rise (2018) for SSA choir and piano
PRESENTATION: Interpretive Agency: Flexibilities, Constraints, and Departure in Reena Esmail’s “Jhula Jhule”
In November 2023, I traveled to Denver CO to give a paper at the Society of Music Theory’s National (joint) Conference (with the American Musicological Society).
ABSTRACT: A composer can curate musical parameters–duration, feel or style, motivic material, large-scale form–but a score also creates and restricts interpretive space. While scholars have offered extensive engagement with the musical experience of the listener (Sessions 1962, Kozak 2020) and the performer’s role in communicating musical structure (Said 1991, Cone 1968) an underexplored portion of the musical continuum from composer to listener is the flexible, interpretive space from score to performer.
Drawing on the analytical frameworks of Daphne Leong (2019), Alexandra Pierce (2007), and Pauline Oliveros (2005) which center the performer’s experience as a crucial site of interpretive analysis, this paper traces the transitions and distributions of musical ownership along a continuum from composer, through performers, to listeners, cycling and recycling along the spectrum. Using Jhula Jhule (2013) by Reena Esmail as an analytic case study, I outline the limitations and affordances of the notated score (Figure 1) as a foundation for a performer’s analytical work. Adherences, departures, and movement beyond the artifact of notation are traced aurally, through three different recordings of the piece.
This paper highlights a crucial and under-discussed aspect of analysis: the in-time artifact of a performance. The proposed analytical framework accounts for the elements Esmail seeks to control in her notational choices while also documenting the room made for a performer’s own, individual interpretation. The first portion of the paper expounds the limits and freedoms offered by notation, and highlights points where the score encourages artistic choice (Figures 2 and 3). By building a clear sonic and gestural world with more fixed notational parameters, Esmail empowers the performer to make informed, interpretive choices in the more pliable moments of the piece.
The second portion of the talk engages the interpretive freedoms taken by performers in the three cited recordings from an embodied, or body-first perspective. With Pierce’s gestural models (Figures 4.1, 4.2, and 5) as a starting point, I further disengage the common conduit of score-to-listener in service of highlighting the embodied mode of knowing present in performer-oriented analysis. I scrutinize how the artifact of the score invigorates flexible performance outcomes through the omission of historically standardized expectations.
Esmail’s score bridges her non-western source material and the typical constraints of standardized western notation. She crafts an additionally unique entry into her work by including detailed program notes and links to her external source material on her website. This extra-musical offering provides a contextual support for performers, an effort which expands and deepens the ways to inform interpretation and performance practice. By challenging perceptions and historical, composer-centered frames in western classical traditions, I shift the artistic attentions of music-making into a more equitable balance between involved parties, recognizing the ways in which a performer’s analytic work and interpretive choices shape our attention to—and beyond—the score.
PRESENTATION: What it feels like to sing:
new Latvian choral works in a globalizing musical world
National Conference: Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies
(Seattle WA 2022)
ABSTRACT: The decade 2013-2023 is proving to be one of significant contribution and advancement for Latvian music, particularly among choral repertoire. To celebrate Latvia’s centenary, conductor Māris Sirmais developed a project commissioning new works from 77 Latvian composers. The project was titled “Latvijas Komponisti Latvijas Simtgadei,” and Musica Baltica published 19 of the works in an anthology, released at the completion of the cycle in 2018. Sirmais’ project as a concept and the contributions of each composer are a unique and real-time gift to the nation’s musical life, one that reflects Latvia’s choral repertoire at the crux of the shift between the first—and next—100 years.
In this presentation I take a performer-focused look at compositional trends reflected by these recent compositions. What ties the past to the present, and to the future, in Latvia’s choral music is the inherent singability built into each work; the new pieces are meant to be performed by both professional singers and amateur choirs. By shifting the focus of analysis toward elements necessary to learn, lead, and perform a piece for unaccompanied choir, I show how living Latvian composers are employing techniques that solidify their work in the modernizing national repertoire. Through focused case studies that prioritize the embodied experience of what it feels like to sing these works, I show how the collection leans into the deeply-seated historical trends of Latvia’s choral canon while also recognizing that success depends on a recognition of global musical currents.