This session has two aims: First, to consider research methodologies—how do we actually accomplish this work? Do we engage the literature and music as distinct disciplines, interrogating each of them on their own terms while bringing them into conversation with each other in a multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary manner? Or do we instead take a transdisciplinary approach where we do away with strict disciplinary boundaries altogether, finding new ways to bring words and sounds into a successful collaboration? And second, to think about pedagogical approaches to bringing music into our literary classrooms, mostly comprised of non-music majors. Engaging music history, performance studies, poetics, narratology, and visual culture, these four presentations consider the futures of the multi/inter/transdisciplinary study and teaching of literature and music.
Each of the four panelists will stick to a strict 13-minute presentation time allotment. This will allow five minutes for brief introductions by our presider, Herman Beavers. We will be sure to finish our session within 60 minutes, so we have the full 15 minutes for Q&A.
In “Reading Sonically, Listening Textually: Michael Harper and Paul Austerlitz’s Doubletake,” Herman Beavers considers how Michael Harper’s collaborations with reedist, Paul Austerlitz, on the CD’s Double Take and Our Book on Trane, raise the question as to how they can be reconciled with Harper’s quest to understand the amnestic aspects of a nation whose history begins, as William Carlos Williams points out in In the American Grain, “with murder and enslavement, not with discovery.” How, we might ask, can Harper’s commitment to image-making be furthered by making a recording of his poems? Harper and Austerlitz’s CD is composed of not one, but two readings of the same poems, with an instrumental interlude separating them in the sequence. Double Take reveals the manner in which a poet in collaboration with a musician is subject to the same conditions, whereby how the poem means is impacted by the poet’s relationship to her body, the surroundings, individuals occupying space with the musician and the poet. In this paper, Beavers explores what it means to situate the sonic event of hearing a poem, alongside musical performance which generates a hybrid text at the place where reading and improvisation intersect.
In “How to Look at Music, How to Listen to Art: The Limits of Analogy in Interdisciplinary Interpretation,” Michael Borshuk builds on his research as an interdisciplinary scholar of African American literature, American modernism, and music history to critique the ongoing persistence of analogy in attempts to articulate connections between different expressive modes. His current work considers visual and theatrical elements in a broad reconceptualization of the jazz musical aesthetic and its influence on other art forms. Drawing examples from his new scholarship, Borshuk brings attention to how often the critical orthodoxies around art, literature, and music still turn on the language of “resemblance.” In counterpoint, he suggests a reading practice based on “simultaneity,” in which we understand, say, how the jazz musician Thelonious Monk’s sartorial style complements his piano style as it also engages the visual ruptures of modern art, or how Jean-Michel Basquiat’s use of text and erasure in his painting evokes the tension between sound and silence in music, while it simultaneously participates textually in an ongoing discursive competition around understandings of the black subject.
In “Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself: Autobiographical Blues Self-Fashioning in ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’” Kimberly Mack explores the ways in which the narrator in “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones creates a self through autobiographical blues self-invention. By claiming physical proximity to, and responsibility for, catastrophic, global events across millennia, the narrator situates himself within a traditional blues culture where the devil—through Faustian barter or shadowy influence—wields considerable power. Through the analysis of “Sympathy’s” music and lyrical content, in the context of early African American folklore, literature, and blues culture, this presentation considers how the Rolling Stones—and Mick Jagger in particular—advances romantic, satanic blues mythologies while participating in autobiographical blues self-invention. Using narratological theory, Mack argues that “Sympathy for the Devil’s” unreliable satanic narrator engages in fictionalized autobiographical blues self-fashioning, effectively writing himself into the Southern American blues tradition through tall tale telling and the strong impulse to self-name.
Finally, in “Swing Low: Considering Classical Music in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” Brandy Underwood suggests that it is more than mere coincidence that the last thing Ralph Ellison’s unnamed protagonist in Invisible Man (1952) does before departing from the college environment is listen to Antonin Dvorák’s New World Symphony. For Ellison, who originally studied classical music at the Tuskegee Institute with renowned African American conductor-composer William L. Dawson, The New World Symphony by the Czech composer—which borrows heavily from the African American spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—embodied the successful juxtaposition of traditional European music with African American folk sound. Although scholars have explored Ellison’s use of jazz and blues in Invisible Man, Underwood believes the influence of Dvorák’s classical music should also be considered in our interpretation and teaching of the novel. Her paper asks: What can we learn by examining the presence of classical music in African American literature? Underwood argues that when we teach Ellison’s Invisible Man, our students would benefit from a discussion of Dvorák’s music because it highlights the narrator’s middle-class anxieties as he leaves the safety of his elite university life for the unknown in Harlem.