Conference Agenda

According to their own early publicity, the Juilliard String Quartet were ‘four young Americans who look and act and play as never a European string quartet looked and acted and played.’ Yet the Juilliard promoted, as well as American composers, contemporary and classical works from central Europe. This paper explores the way in which post-war quartets navigated questions of national identity in performance, focusing on Hungarian and American interpretations of the works of Béla Bartók, who died in New York in 1945.

Four years later, the first complete Bartók cycles were presented in New York (Juilliard) and around Europe (the Végh Quartet). The first complete recordings soon followed. Critic Olin Downes explained: ‘The thing is that they “sound” marvelously, and show incorrigibly original and racial approaches to quartet problems.’ While the Hungarian elements of Bartók’s scores have been analysed extensively (Bíro and Krebs 2014, Brown 2007), and the impact of Cold War policies have been documented by Fosler-Lussier (2007), little attention has been paid to performance strategies that emphasise or underplay their ‘original and racial approaches.’ Quartets carefully positioned themselves according to whether they were from Hungary or the USA, claiming authenticity or modernity accordingly. The Végh made much of their Hungarian heritage and direct connection with Bartók in Budapest. The Juilliard offered a self-consciously New World approach and were intent on reaching fresh audiences. Two schools of Bartók interpretation thus were established that have been perpetuated through subsequent generations.

But as always when it comes to questions of musical identity, the binary is inadequate. The majority of Bartók’s quartets had been premiered outside of Hungary (Somfai and Németh, 2022), their dedications the result of complex political and practical negotiations. As will be shown through selected examples, the sound-worlds of these early recordings may be differently grained but sometimes make similar interpretative choices. It becomes clear that the issue is less defining what the Bartók sound is than what it did: provide a way for Hungarian and American quartets to establish themselves in a post-war world where national styles were simultaneously eroded by emigration and boosted by the recording industry.

British singers do not always sound British. Indeed, it is common—and sometimes expected—for singers in a variety of styles and genres to sing with accents that do not match their speech. The specific phenomenon of British (or more precisely, English) popular musicians singing with Americanized pronunciation is so common that it was the point of departure for an entire subfield of sociolinguistics that is focused on the “singing accent” in popular music: the pronunciation patterns that singers use in their singing and how they differ from the pronunciation patterns these singers use in speech (Trudgill 1983).

Nevertheless, some English singers do sound distinctly and unapologetically English, and one example is left-wing protest singer Billy Bragg. Bragg was born in Barking, Essex and grew up in a working-class family. His spoken accent is replete with dialectal features specific to working-class speech from Southeastern England, and his singing accent is as well. Bragg’s singing accent has helped him to create a musical identity based around Englishness and solidarity with the working class. However, Billy Bragg does Americanize his singing accent to a certain extent in specific situations.

In this talk, I will discuss two tracks in which Bragg uses a partially Americanized singing accent for the purpose of character creation: “Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key” and “The Unwelcome Guest” from Mermaid Avenue (1998). The album is different from Bragg’s usual work because he did not write the lyrics; the late Woody Guthrie had written them before his death. I will begin my discussion of these two tracks by presenting phonetic analyses of Bragg’s pronunciation therein, using techniques borrowed from sociolinguistics. Then, drawing on work by Edward Cone (1974), Simon Frith (1996), and Brian Kane (2014) on the complexity of voices, I will discuss how Bragg uses pronunciation to create the characters of the two songs’ narrators. My intention in this presentation is twofold. I wish both to highlight the value of pronunciation as a lens through which to consider the music of Billy Bragg and to showcase the fruitfulness of combining pronunciation with other lines of analytical inquiry.

Fiddle players on 1920s and ‘30s hillbilly records were often celebrated for their scratchy, rough-hewn tone quality. For this first generation of Southern fiddlers of the early recording era, a raw and gritty approach to tone production was typically less a matter of aesthetic choice than sheer circumstance: many fiddlers were untrained, out-of-practice amateurs who played on inferior-quality instruments. “Scratchy” fiddling thus came to index the rustic, pre-modern lives of mountain people and their childlike folkways. In short, their unpolished tone told the truth—an aural watermark of authenticity.

In the current world of old-time and string band music in the United States, revivalists of all stripes (many Northern, urban, and educated) prize scratchy, “bad on purpose” tone over the smooth timbral ideal of their classical training. Drawing on interviews and online ethnography, in this paper I explore the cultural politics of old-time fiddle tone among modern practitioners. I point out a central paradox in this “participatory” practice (Turino, 2008), whereby the advent of recordings led to the prioritization of a specific approach to tone production marked by aural difference. Without participatory contextual clues—e.g., dancing—fiddlers (and their handlers) needed for the first time to make their “authentic” folk identity explicitly heard on a static, “presentational” medium. Scratchy timbre accomplished this aim. Some performers, such as Eck Robertson, Fiddlin’ John Carson, and Tommy Jarrell, were savvy about the public’s taste for “genuine” mountain music, calibrating their sound accordingly. Scratchy tone, then, was not always as pure a reflection of the Appalachian Other as listeners believed. Further, I argue that the fetishization of timbral scratchiness developed iconically in relation to the “scratchy” sound of pre-microphone 78-rpm records. Like fiddle tone, extraneous noise in classic 78s is viewed not as a flaw, but as a material portal to an imagined past. Modern practitioners’ attachment to the values embodied in fiddle tone thus also commonly betokens nostalgia for the bygone charms of archaic recording technology. I conclude that scratchiness in old-time is a thoroughly modern performance practice animated by a covert ideology of folk authenticity.