Conference Agenda

When Steve Reich appropriated the speech of a teenage boy—linked to the Harlem Six who had been harshly beaten by the police—to compose the phase tape piece Come Out (1966), he not only established a new compositional technique, but also granted those events a permanence in time. The analysis of Reich’s early pieces generally focuses on compositional processes and addresses minimalist music’s opposition to or development of modernism, with its parallels to the minimalist visual arts. (cf. Reich, Brown, McClary, Mertens, Schwarz). Martin Scherzinger, on the other hand, questions the visual arts associations and stresses the African musical ideas in It’s Gonna Rain (1965). It is time, however, for the narrative content, which is directly linked to issues related to the civil rights movement and racial identity, to be examined.

In this paper I argue that Come Out alludes to the historical 1960s events in two levels: the life of the subjugated boy and the cultural memory of African American struggles. I propose that Reich gives those moments a sense of permanence in time. In crafting the piece, Reich made a slightly shorter copy of the original recording (the musical object) and played both back simultaneously; because of the different durations, the recordings get progressively out of phase, to a point where speech becomes pure sound. Using Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of history, I suggest that Reich’s controlled elimination of the text’s semantics reveals the musical subject, the suppression of the African American man’s identity (voice). Come Out literally deconstructs Daniel Hamm’s identity, but the piece carries a deeper message that reconstructs a distant past every time the work is performed, and that past should be remembered and understood (cf. Assmann and Czaplicka). In essence, Reich makes the struggles of the past a living presence through his music.

Recognized within music scholarship for her artistic prowess, Nina Simone is now a key figure in an ongoing effort to construct a counternarrative around women whose contributions to the Civil Rights movement have been ignored or excised from the era’s grand narrative. Scholars such as Daphne A. Brooks (2021, 2011, 2007), Malik Gaines (2013), and Emily J. Lordi (2020, 2016) engage with Simone’s activism through descriptions of her performance practice, her stage presence, and her use of comedy, maintaining that Simone asserted a form of Black agency and sexuality that was later overwhelmed by a pervasive heteronormative masculinity now associated with Civil Rights era leadership. This paper seeks to extend developing discourse by centering the biomechanism through which Simone’s political messages were mediated: her voice.

Scholars and critics often described her voice as soulful, smokey, raspy, and dark, and some assigned her the contralto fach, but these terms encompass her appeal as a performer and situate her within the Western art tradition rather than address the particularities of her voice and its subversive qualities. Applying techniques for analyzing vocal timbre developed by Kristal Spreadborough (2022), Victoria Malawey (2020), and Kate Heidemann (2016), this project reveals a unique timbral androgyneity—a singing register hovering between ranges stereotypically masculine and feminine—that permitted Simone to simultaneously embody several identities, thereby allowing her activism to resonate with those outside of the heteronormative masculinity projected by Civil Rights respectability politics. Without obvious markers of gender, race, and class, the vocal fluidity demonstrated in songs such as “Mississippi Goddam” (1964), and “Four Women” (1966) successfully amplified voices of those located at the movement’s periphery. Isolating her voice as its own political-semiotic zone deepens contemporary understanding of Simone’s artistry and the reception of her activism while challenging the agist and misogynistic criticism she received toward the end of the movement. Rather than attributing moments of vocal failure to her age and deteriorating mental state, or rasp as a sign of an exhausted voice, I argue that Simone used her androgynous vocality and intentional manipulation of timbre to navigate the movement and its conflicting Black nationalist and integrationist ideologies.

In December 1971, in protest against food shortages during the government of Salvador Allende—and in protest against Fidel Castro’s visit to Chile—thousands of women marched the streets of Santiago de Chile, sounding their empty pots and pans. The march provoked violent altercations, and the leftist government, in turn, called for a state of emergency, and temporarily suspended right-wing radio stations that called for these protests. Left-wing supporters of the government attempted to overpower the sounds of the protesting women by turning radio speakers on and increasing the volume. In the next few days, in collaboration with the Nueva canción ensemble Quilapayún, the Chilean composer Sergio Ortega (1938-2003) composed, arranged, rehearsed, recorded, and released the song “Las Ollitas” (“Little Pots”) (1971), which was based on rhythms derived from Caribbean styles of popular dance music. The song was immediately broadcast over national radio stations and used to overpower the sounds of the opposition’s pots and pans.

While Nueva canción has been the subject of much scholarly attention (McSherry 2015; Mularski 2014; Guerrero 2013; Taffet 1997), this paper instead centers confrontations between radio, popular song, and counter-revolutionary protest sound to demonstrate how Chileans conjured sound communities in order to engage in political struggle. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s reading of the radio in A Dying Colonialism (1959), as well as on archival materials housed at the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile and the Archivo de Música Popular de la Universidad Católica in Santiago, I demonstrate how government-supporting Chileans employed the radio not as an instrument, but as a technique. I argue that by choosing to turn on and amplify the radio and Ortega and Quilapayún’s song, Chileans fabricated collectivities and entered into a new form of engagement with the government’s democratic path to socialism. My paper therefore reveals how the radio was used by Latin American Cold-War left beyond its role in armed revolutionary guerrilla movements. Furthermore, my paper brings recent scholarship on contemporary protest sound (Deaville 2018; Tausig 2019; Lentjes 2021) into dialogue with historical precedents in Cold War-era Latin America.

Drawing on selected recordings from “Viva La Causa! Songs and Sounds from the Delano Strike!”, this paper examines the musical and sonic practices of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and how huelga songs and sound became the site of identity formation, solidarity building, and political mobilization. Based on my archival work in California and interviews with former UFW volunteers, I aim to analyze and theorize how music and sound intersected with race, politics, labor, and protest at the height of California's '60s civil rights movements.

Released in August 1966 by Thunderbird Records, a label founded by Luis Valdez and Agustin Lira of El Teatro Campesino, "Viva La Causa" features songs written and performed during the March to Sacramento—a 340-mile pilgrimage from Delano, CA, to the state capital. Songs like "Huelga en General" and "La Peregrinación" draw musical inspiration from corridos and boleros, tapping into the collective memory of the Mexican diaspora and Chicano/a communities. How did these huelga songs foster solidarity among diverse ethnic and racial groups? How can we move beyond a protest song's lyrics to analyze its structure, chords, and timbre? Finally, how can we better understand the UFW through its soundscape? This paper explores the musical and sonic elements of "Viva La Causa" and how the UFW conveyed its ideological beliefs.