Conference Agenda

Rebecca Saunders’s unaccompanied vocal work O (2017) features Molly Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness monologue from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Saunders’s musical setting of the monologue—with timbral effects that impede vocal projection, fluctuations in air flow, and unpitched sounds such as whispering, gasping, and screaming—renders the ambiguous source text largely unintelligible. Saunders’s score invites multiple sonic possibilities, as showcased in recorded performances by sopranos Sarah Maria Sun (for whom O was composed), Juliet Fraser, and Stephanie Lamprea. Drawing on Judith Lochhead’s (2016) analytical framework for contemporary music, this paper presents three thematic interpretations of O that emerged from my interviews with Sun, Fraser, and Lamprea, and analyses of their recordings.

One reading explores Molly’s hypnagogic and/or dream states; a second reading views O as a depiction of Molly’s oppression; and a third reading explores Molly’s vivid thoughts about sex and pleasure. Each of these interpretations is simultaneously communicated by the same sounding elements, including timbral effects, manipulation of text, control of breath/air flow, and fluctuations in pacing. Using conceptual integration networks (Zbikowski 2017, 2002; Sayrs 2003; Fauconnier and Turner 1998), I demonstrate how these musical characteristics map onto Molly’s perceived character traits and actions in each interpretation. In addition, I engage with Zachary Wallmark’s (2022) theory of timbre and meaning as a means of understanding O’s formal process and constituent gestures through performer energy and exertion. Throughout, I illustrate how Sun’s, Fraser’s, and Lamprea’s perspectives and musical choices are integral to both the formal and affective trajectories of O.

Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit—a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist—has received attention for its feminist interventions that reimagine the composers’ authority and make the labor of performance visible, often embracing a redistributive collective approach. The final movement, Cipher for soprano and violin (figure 1), includes speaking parts for the violinist and a “violin 4-hands” performance that is especially demonstrative of Soper’s collaborative, workshop-style compositional process with violinist Josh Modney. My analysis shows how Soper manipulates performance expectations and musical parameters—especially tuning and timbre—to critique her multilingual texts, inviting the audience to participate in the contingent process of meaning-making. I further argue that Soper’s compositional practice is disidentificatory because of its simultaneous identification with and reimagining of (patriarchal) modernist concepts in music like fidelity to progress and the primacy of the texted voice (especially the female vocalist) in opera and modernist chamber music.

For example, in a setting of excerpts from Wittgenstein that insists on the contingency (or multivalence) of signs, the music offers itself as an example when a standard tuned D and a conflicting D+18¢ (scordatura) fulfill multiple functions simultaneously: first, they are sustained together to produce what Soper calls a “distinctive beating timbre;” next, the soprano slides from the standard D to the raised version, reminding the listener that they are also discreet pitches. Thus, Soper’s deconstruction of the pitch material allows the music to analyze and demonstrate the text being set. With innovative uses of timbre and tuning in setting text, Cipher demonstrates the mutability of power structures through a critique and reimagining of the signs that inscribe them.

In Akrostichon-Wortspiel (1991, rev. 1993), Unsuk Chin manipulates excerpts from sources such as Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871) resulting in a text that sometimes retains a semblance of syntax, but one where most words are unrecognizable. Akrostichon-Wortspiel’s dialogue with Carroll’s nonsense tradition leads to questions regarding if and how techniques from a tradition focused primarily upon textual nonsense are reflected within a musical context. Drawing upon scholarship on the creation of literary nonsense by Susan Stewart (1978) and work by play theorists such as Caillois (1961) and Huizinga (1949), I expand on Cassidy-Heacock’s (2015) conception of Akrostichon-Wortspiel as musical games, focusing on Stewart’s delineation of “play” as an operation that shifts material from the real world to the domain of nonsense and in which a momentary relinquishing of one’s real-world identity for an alternate persona can occur. I specifically explore Chin’s manipulations of vocal identity within several of Akrostichon-Wortspiel’s movements, showing how both music and text combine into an entity reflecting Stewart’s play and nonsense operations.

Within my analysis, I explore four differing uses of vocal identity within the work’s movements including the voice’s role as a fluctuating entity, a communal participant, a transforming identity, and a determiner of instrumental process. For instance, in both the fourth and fifth movements, the soprano’s role transforms, gradually inverting to that of an equal “instrument” within the ensemble and correlating to Stewart’s nonsense operations regarding the inversion of classes and “play with infinity.” In the sixth movement, the soprano’s varying attempts at singing the alphabet in order are mirrored in the musical texture by the instruments’ efforts to reach scalar completion, illustrating an example of Stewart’s operation, “arrangement and rearrangement within a closed system,” where elements are taken from a “closed” system and arranged in combinations outside of their typical “sequence and hierarchy.” Through my analysis, I ultimately demonstrate the soprano’s role as an illusory figure within Akrostichon-Wortspiel, one which plays with categories of identity and function within the ensemble and contributes to each movement’s orientation within the imaginary world of nonsense.