Conference Agenda

Joni Mitchell composed her eighth studio album, Hejira, in 1975–76 while on three road trips throughout North America. Fittingly for its nomadic genesis, Mitchell says of Hejira, “There is this restless feeling throughout it” (Hilburn 1996). My presentation illuminates three ways in which Hejira portrays restlessness: (1) the poetry’s shifting orientation and mode of address, (2) the music’s metrical malleability, and (3) the avoidance of the tonic in the song’s melodies.

First, the poetry of Hejira ebbs and flows between two modes of address: Mitchell’s recounting of her travels directly to the listener, and her more inward meditation on her melancholic state. Adding to Matt BaileyShea’s (2014) model for interpreting discourse in popular music, I propose a new type of second-person address, deflected reflection, wherein “you” is used as a stand-in for “I/me” in order to bring the listener into the reflective realm of the singer. Using this expanded model, I explore how Mitchell portrays restlessness by shifting the level of intimacy with the listener. Then, to show how restlessness manifests across the entire album as well as within its individual songs, I map the nine songs of Hejira on two spectrums—descriptive to reflective, and literal to metaphorical—and show the larger-scale ebbing and flowing of the poetry in aggregate.

Second, I draw on Nancy Murphy’s (2023) theory of self-expression in singer-songwriter music to show how Mitchell’s poetry forces her vocal melodies to employ malleable melodic phrasing. The misalignment between vocal phrasing and the strict metrical and hypermetrical grid established by the guitar contributes to the theme of restlessness, denying listeners consistency in phrase and verse length and conflicting more generally with the expected regularity of strophic song forms.

Third, I adapt Mark Spicer’s (2017) concepts of absent, fragile, and emergent tonic chords to reveal that the vocal melodies of the songs “Coyote” and “Hejira” have absent, fragile, and emergent tonic pitches. The obscurement of ^1 prevents these melodies from achieving resolution. Thus, in Hejira, Mitchell depicts restlessness in three domains: poetic, metrical, and melodic.

Joni Mitchell, known for her innovative and distinctive songwriting, possesses a highly recognizable singing voice that has undergone major sonic change throughout her career. Reviewers have made observations about how age and lifestyle have altered her voice, suggesting that these factors have worsened her voice. Most reviews have discussed Mitchell’s voice in reductive binaries of young-old and high-low pitch, frequently without specific sonic descriptors.

I analyze Joni Mitchell’s pitch and vocal timbre to describe her sonic change more fully. The purpose of this research is to study vocal timbre as a dynamic and evolving element of an artist’s sound, with an emphasis on aging as a natural and complex facet of the voice. I use a mixed methods approach to: 1) analyze sung pitch ranges across Mitchell’s entire studio album output, showing that Mitchell’s vocal range lowered slightly over her career, but that the size of her range remained relatively steady; 2) compare three recordings of “A Case of You,” showing how some elements of Mitchell’s sound are invariant while others are specific to each recording, relating to vocal style, creative decisions, and physiology; 3) analyze specific vowel sounds, showing how timbre semantic descriptors are validated by the audio signal through the change of formants. I relate my analysis to statements Mitchell has made about her voice and its evolution.

These results suggest that the changing features in Mitchell’s voice are not exclusively tied to age or lifestyle but indicate a decades-long process of creative decision making. These changing features need not be characterized in a negative light, and instead have valuable hermeneutic implications. Through careful examination of Mitchell’s oeuvre, this paper reveals a methodological framework for analyzing the aging voice.

This paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing Joni Mitchell’s early piano-based songs through the lens of slash harmony, a key element of her harmonic vocabulary. Building on the work of previous scholars including Whitesell, Biamonte, and Koozin, this research explores sixteen songs from her 1970-1972 albums. Our analysis addresses six main concepts: 1) a labeling system for slash chords in the selected sub-corpus; 2) the interplay between vertical and horizontal harmony; 3) stylistic features across three distinct phases of the early piano songs; 4) the corresponding expansion of expressive potential; 5) the influence of Sullivan’s 1927 portrait of Beethoven’s spiritual development; and 6) the interpretive utility of Russell’s 2001 treatise in understanding Mitchell’s trajectory.

The sub-corpus divides into three chronological phases corresponding with the three albums. Phase 1 is characterized by virtually no use of slash harmony; Phase 2 integrates slash harmonies and their resulting chord progressions; and Phase 3 marks advances in composition and expression through Mitchell’s strategic use of specific slash harmonies.

Slash chords, defined as a triad over a bass note, can be measured by the distance in semitones between the UST (upper-structure triad) and the bass note. Out of twelve possible major-triad slash harmonies available, Mitchell limited her use to five during Phase 2: T₀ (trivial), T₃, T₅, T₇ and T₁₀. The roots of these five structures correspond to the minor pentatonic collection, deployed by Mitchell in horizontal and vertical dimensions and demonstrated in our analysis of "The Arrangement."

In her Phase 3 songs, Mitchell expands her pentatonic-based palette for slash harmony. Her addition of T₂ chords, together with T₇ chords, creates what we term her "Lydian gambit," featured on "The Blonde in the Bleachers" and "Judgement of the Moon and Stars." Drawing on Russell’s Lydian-Chromatic concept, we demonstrate how Mitchell’s harmonic choices reflect aspects of her personal creative evolution, including her reading of Sullivan’s 1927 monograph tracing Beethoven’s spiritual development.