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SUMMARY:Graduate Research Seminar: Appropriation in Music and Poetry - Jam
 es Gabrillo\, MPhil Music and Michael Skansgaard\, PhD English
DTSTART:20150130T180000Z
DTEND:20150130T190000Z
UID:TALK57268@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:20337
DESCRIPTION:_*Assessing appropriated pop songs and performances*_\n*by Jam
 es Gabrillo\, MPhil Music*\n\nThere is a methodological gap in assessing p
 opular songs and performances that were a result of appropriation and reco
 ntextualisation\, such as covers. How do we research and analyse appropria
 ted text as a text\, taking into account its interactivity\, intertextuali
 ty\, layering and reconfiguring of existing narratives to produce a new na
 rrative? For this discussion I examine the American rock band Kings of Leo
 n’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.\nMost published reviews and online commentary from view
 ers 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 approac
 hes to assessing appropriations? Do covers disrupt the illusion of sincere
  artistic expression? Is it possible to produce criticism that is benefici
 al to the original author\, the current performer and the listener?\n\n\n_
 *St. Louis Blues: the Answer Song of W.C. Handy and Sterling Allen Brown*_
 \n*by Michael Skansgaard\, PhD English*\n\nPoets of the Harlem Renaissance
  have been called “Modernist” in the revolutionary sense\, rebels agai
 nst “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. Th
 is problematic nomenclature is ubiquitous in blues scholarship: poets Jame
 s 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 incompatib
 le critical apparatus. Other scholars\, such as Sidney Finkelstein and Ami
 ri 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 utili
 ze a European vocabulary to analyze a blues form that is essentially “bl
 ack.”\n\nThis paper will ask whether it makes sense to analyze the stanz
 as of the “St. Louis Blues” as “literary” units of Modernist poetr
 y 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 mus
 ic with European musical notation\, “using the dominant seventh as the o
 pening chord of the verse.”  I will contextualize the collaborative effo
 rts of post-WWI blues musicians and poets who wrote “answer songs” to 
 the “St. Louis Blues\,” a form of intertextuality which does not alway
 s lend itself to the poetic signaling of literary “allusion.” I will s
 uggest that the “St. Louis Blues” enters the literary canon through St
 erling Allen Brown as both a cultural and metrical hybrid form\, laden wit
 h “echoes” and “answers” many have stopped listening for.
LOCATION:Alison Shrubsole Room\, Homerton College
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