Conference Agenda

“Strange Fruit” is one of the most famous songs in the modern history of the United States. It was set to music by the author of the poem, Abel Meeropol, and was first recorded in 1939 by Billie Holiday. In that and her subsequent performances, she was unparalleled at expressing the grim content of a piece that came to symbolize the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, “Strange Fruit” portrays the lynching of African Americans, and according to Meeropol, it specifically is a response to Lawrence Beitler’s widely disseminated photograph of the killings of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, in 1930 in Marion, Indiana. A much lesser-known aspect of this song is that, to call the attention to this event, Meeropol employed the ancient rhetorical technique of ekphrasis. Present, for instance, in Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles (Iliad 18.478–608), an ekphrasis is a lucid form of evoking a scene or object by means of a detailed description that excites the senses of the audience. Similar to synesthesia, the immersive impression it causes on readers and listeners is known as enargeia (vividness), a necessary condition for imprinting the subject-matter in their memory. However, ekphrasis has been traditionally associated with poetry and painting (words and images), remaining a rare word in music history, even in early music studies. Literary critics and art historians currently tend to define it as the verbal representation of a visual object, or more broadly, as a trope about artistic transmedialization, thus expanding its semantic field with intermedial perspectives. But how does an ekphrasis manifest in music? In what ways does enargeia shape our listening experience, and what is its impact on music analysis? These are the questions that I address in this presentation. To discuss ekphrasis in “Strange Fruit,” I first identify the ancient technique in its lyrics by comparing them with a specific passage from the poem by Homer. Afterwards, I examine the notion of musical ekphrasis vis à vis the recent scholarly literature on ekphrasis and then I analyze the song through the lens of that concept.

During a brief period during the late 1960s, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell worked together as one of the most successful and popular Black duet teams in the music industry. Their singles “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Precious Love” and “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” were chart toppers in 1967 and 1968. In a 1985 biography of Gaye, David Ritz quoted the singer describing an arrangement in which songwriter and producer Valerie Simpson performed a number of vocal parts under the guise of Terrell, who was gravely ill at the time. There have long been similar rumors and reports suggesting that Terrell did not actually perform some of the vocals that we now commonly attribute to her.

This paper considers primary-source audio and paper evidence from the Motown archives to further investigate the identity of the vocalists performing on the Gaye and Terrell duets. Using multi-track tape audio, track inventories and the Motown session logs, it is possible to gain a good sense of Terrell’s actual involvement in the sessions bearing her name. In addition, live performance advertisements and reviews, evidence about Terrell’s ongoing health issues and the memories of many who were there help to create a clearer picture of the vocal identities behind many of the three-dozen-or-so tracks attributed to Gaye and Terrell.

The Gaye and Terrell duets are still audible in the sonic landscape of modern culture. Detailed knowledge of these sessions informs a number of current topics of interest to scholars of musicology. In his recent book, Black Ephemera: The Crisis and the Challenge of the Musical Archive, Mark Anthony Neal writes about the ways in which a new, mostly digital archive is helping scholars to pose new questions about histories of Black music. This paper reveals a similarly nuanced environment surrounding the creation of Terrell’s duet recordings, which traversed lines of creativity and business, both in both public and private realms. An objective interrogation of the facts leads to important critical questions about attribution, the creative process and gender roles in Black popular music of the late 1960s.

A hybrid genre produced in colonial Shanghai in the 1930s–40s, shidaiqu combined Chinese opera (jingju), jazz, Hollywood film music, and Tin Pan Alley song. Musical elements of shidaiqu reflected pre-WWII Shanghai cosmopolitanism and political orientations toward globalism, as shown by scholars Andrew Jones (2001) and Szu-Wei Chen (2007); however, timbre remains unexplored as a locus of aesthetic and political change and embodied expression of hybridization. To explicate the relationship between the Chinese political landscape and popular culture, I analyze the vocal timbres of shidaiqu and later vocalists, which reveal the impacts of Westernization, modernity, and cultural erasure in twentieth-century China.

Tracking shifts in vocal timbre across three representative songs, Zhou Xuan’s 1936 recording of “Express Train” (Tebie Kuaiche) her 1946 song “Shanghai Nights” (Ye Shanghai), and Teresa Teng’s 1979 cover of “Evening Fragrance” (Yelaixiang), a 1946 shidaiqu song, my paper shows how Chinese singers gradually moved away from markedly “Chinese” inflections toward a timbral cosmopolitanism characterized by open-throated, breathy phonation. The younger Zhou Xuan exemplifies the “untrained,” jingju-influenced voice characterized by nasality, portamento motion between notes, and irregular vibrato. This vocal timbre signaled both a commitment to tradition and an openness toward foreign influence during the 1930s and the development of a hybrid genre. Unlike her 1936 sound, Xuan’s timbre in “Shanghai Nights” indicates maturity and an orientation towards a cosmopolitan audience, softening the brightness and edginess into a darker bel canto style.

Following WWII, leftists labeled shidaiqu “yellow music,” a pornographic and decadent sonic signifier of Western influence, subsequently banned in 1949 by the Communist Party. As China reopened in the late 1970s under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, Mandopop, a mix of Taiwanese and Cantonese pop music with blues and soul influences, became exceptionally popular. Considering the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, the sentimental timbre of singers like Teresa Teng provided reverb-drenched nostalgia and a smooth acoustical surface upon which to romanticize pre-Mao China. By analyzing these singers’ timbre within the context of twentieth-century China, I illustrate the influences of politics and power on musical aesthetics and vocal timbre performance in popular media.