Conference Agenda

This paper examines the semiotic dimensions of gospel music's incorporation into popular music, focusing on Coldplay's 2020 NPR Tiny Desk performance featuring the For Love Choir. While gospel music has long been central to African American cultural expression, its adoption by uninitiated popular music artists introduces new meanings often divorced from its original sacred context. Drawing on semiotics (Ratner 1980; Maxile 2008; Turino 2014), this discussion explores how gospel stylization—particularly the gospel choir—functions as a topical signifier.

Described in The New York Times as "the most insufferable band of the decade," Coldplay has arguably become one of the defining acts of the 21st century, selling over 100 million albums. This paper investigates the cultural and musical implications of their collaboration with the For Love Choir, a professional Black gospel ensemble untethered from specific theological commitments. The analysis considers how gospel stylization in this performance functions conventionally and indexically, drawing on Nicholas Cook's (2013) argument that performance practices are central to musical meaning. By highlighting gospel music's role as a sonic and visual marker of transcendence and triumph, the paper interrogates how such signification shifts when gospel is recontextualized outside of its religious framework.

Positioning Coldplay's performance within a broader history of 'secularised' gospel in popular music, as exemplified by Aretha Franklin (Lordi 2019), the discussion considers how gospel has long operated as both a sacred and secular expressive form. The paper also explores Brian Eno's and Chris Martin's perspectives on gospel music, particularly their assertion that gospel signifies universal human themes rather than specific theological convictions. This perspective reflects a common pattern in popular music's engagement with gospel stylization, where African American musical traditions are reinterpreted within commercial, cross-cultural, and pluralistic spaces.

Ultimately, this presentation raises critical questions about gospel music's evolving meanings and boundaries in the global music industry. It asks whether such recontextualizations constitute appropriation or reinterpretation and how these shifts affect gospel music's cultural and spiritual significance. This paper contributes to ongoing discussions about musical exchange, topical signification, and the complexities of music's meanings in contemporary popular music.

Olivier Messiaen’s 1946 song cycle Harawi blends surrealistic poetry with shards of Quechua text and melodies drawn from Raoul and Marguerite d’Harcourt’s La Musique des Incas et ses survivances (1925). Telling a story of love and sacrifice, Messiaen invokes a Wagnerian “Liebestod,” cloaking it in the garb of an ethnographic other. Building on the work of scholars who have linked the ethnographic elements in Harawi to Messiaen’s mysticism or to Wagnerism (Sholl, Asimov, Bruhn), in this paper I attempt to define what was distinct about Messiaen’s mode of appropriation.

While musicologists have described musical exoticism as an endeavor among western composers to play with verisimilitude and normativity (Bellman; Locke), I suggest that Messiaen was a catalyst in the history of modernism because, for him, exoticism was not just an “authenticity effect” (Taruskin) but served a philosophical purpose. The paper’s first section will argue that Messiaen’s forays into ethnography, ornithology, and primitivism in Harawi bring to life his belief that Catholicism had always contained (and, in its modern forms, concealed) figures of shamanism. I then argue that Messiaen’s re-imagining of non-European myths and musics constitutes an “onto-theological” mode of appropriation, drawing from Jacques Derrida’s conviction that western metaphysics (that is, forms of reason rendered by Platonic and Abrahamic traditions) constitutes a “white mythology.” Messiaen did not just play with representations of otherness (like the typical exoticist); rather, he sought to simulate the presence of the other as a vehicle for an ever more abstract realism. The paper’s closing section broadens scope to position Messiaen’s engagements with otherness as a seminal moment in a critical history of the ontology of sound. From Debussy’s fascination with gamelan and toward Messiaen’s students—Boulez through the spectralists—Messiaen’s white mythologies still echo today.

With the highest-grossing tour of all time, over 100 million monthly listeners on Spotify, 14 Grammy awards, 13 number-one Billboard albums, and countless other accolades, Taylor Swift’s fame is unprecedented and appears boundless. Swift’s success has broken glass ceilings, set new records, and marked her as an era-defining celebrity. While her stardom is undeniable, it sparks a question: What is it about Taylor Swift that has catapulted her to the level of success she sees today? Furthermore, what can we learn about the music industry and ourselves as listeners when we start to deconstruct the systems that elevate Swift?

I am interested in interrogating the larger cultural factors that influence Taylor Swift’s clever lyricism, sparkly costumes, and relatable persona that have defined her fame. In conversation with scholars of value theory (Appadurai 1986; Graeber 2001; Lambeck 2015), Black feminism (Davis 2018), and the blossoming field of Taylor Swift studies (Arnold & Fogarty 2021; Bentley, Galloway, Harper 2025), I argue that Taylor Swift’s contemporary cultural value is sustained by white feminism that centers on victimization, rebukes criticism, and lacks accountability (Beck 2021). This ideology prevents listeners, critics, scholars, etc. from being able to fully engage with Swift’s relationship to power, privilege, and exclusion without rebuttal. To prove my argument, I discuss fan culture and costumes on the Eras Tour, examine her 2019 music video for “The Man,” and interrogate her engagement in the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections.

In this paper, I work not to discredit Taylor Swift’s fame nor minimize the hate she gets that is rooted in sexism, but rather consider A) how white femininity is central to Swift’s success and B) how we can all be more critical fans and listeners who hold artists accountable. By examining Taylor Swift through this lens, we can better identify how race and gender shape our listening.