Conference Agenda

The lyrics of Rachel Platten and Dave Bassett’s “Fight Song” (2015) deal in some familiar tropes: a female protagonist reflects on her individual power in a bigger world and decides to seek and find empowerment, through the singing of her own fight song. Its quality of overt positivity, however, is consistently vague enough to have been adopted by such diverse populations as hockey teams, patients battling chronic illnesses, and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. In this paper, I show how Clinton’s version of the song at the 2016 Democratic National Convention truncates the original song’s narrative. I start by tracing the narrative of growth, overcoming, and self-empowerment expressed in the two large phases of Platten’s/Bassett’s 2015 release. Although I attend to instrumentation, harmony, and production, I follow Malawey (2020) and Hamm (2018) in identifying the voice as the key driver of expressive meaning in recorded music. After demonstrating the narrative path of the original release and Clinton's cut, I ultimately argue that by leaving out Platten’s most dramatic portrayal of her own vulnerability, it obscures the female protagonist’s path toward self-realization in favor of repeatedly invoking the woman already empowered. I conclude by considering how function dictates form in this example, i.e., how the campaign’s choices of political messaging informed their transformation and uses of this song.

Reaction to Anna Indiana’s debut single, “Betrayed by this Town” (2023), was decidedly hostile. While many have pointed out that the “track’s biggest sin is its utter mediocrity” (Parker 2023), the song’s critical reception was notably shaped by Anna Indiana being a system of computational algorithms that could purportedly create whole musical content with very little intentional human input (Indiana 2023).

Though the creator(s) behind Anna Indiana remain unknown, I argue that listeners are still able to participate in a meaning-making process which can be outlined through a deconstruction of Indiana’s musical persona. In addition to discussing notable parasocial interactions, particular attention will be given to Indiana’s vocality. Discussion of Indiana’s voice will be filtered through Victoria Malawey’s (2020) framework for analyzing technologically mediated voices, further supplemented by connections to previous work on similarly treated voices in music (Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen 2016; Palfy 2016; Auner 2003; Weheliye 2002) and related issues of gender, race, and labor (Eidsheim 2019; Provenzano 2019; Burton 2017). As such, I posit that Indiana is an example of what Despina Kakodaki (2014) calls an artificial person; and while Kakodaki developed the term to describe fictional characters, Indiana represents make-believe become material-reality: digital technology has now made it possible for artifice to become so obscured that parasocial interactions with the outputs of a computational system become the source of meaning-making.

However, I further argue that this artificiality is not novel to computationally generated music. Philip Auslander’s (2021) work on musical personas is especially helpful in making this comparison with human performers and the artificial nature of performance personas. Auslander points out that listeners do not have “direct access” to the real person behind a performer, with some being “quite adept at creating the impression that their fans have direct access to them as real people” (2021). This occlusion presents opportunities for abuse, and so I conclude by outlining a critique of Indiana as a system and the ethical implications of its use, highlighting the tension of it operating as a corporate AI vs. co-operative AI (Bridle 2023, 2022).

Cavalli scholars have not yet engaged in a detailed study of the tonalities expressed in his operas. While the musical material within phrases can frequently be understood in terms of common-practice tonality, the tonal relationships between phrases don’t always abide with common-practice norms. Larger tonal organization is typically explained as simply “pre-tonal” or as dependent upon text (Glover 1978). Yet knowledge of a given tonality’s conventional expression is a necessary precondition to identifying possible tonal deviations prompted by the text and dramatic situation.

This paper presents a corpus study of tonally closed forms in Cavalli’s 1649 Il Giasone. Considering cadences as this repertoire’s primary means of expression of tonalities, I pursue two aims: identifying the most important cadence pitches within each tonality and investigating the cadential relationships between adjacent phrases. I thereby enable comparisons of individual closed forms against a given tonality’s norms, and between Cavalli and his contemporaries.

Banchieri’s (1605, 1614) pioneering discussion of a standard set of 17^th-century tonalities, known as the church keys, provides a hierarchy of important pitches for each tonality. Grouping closed forms by system and final (i.e., key signature and final chord), I determine each tonality’s three most important cadence pitches based on their frequency of occurrence, privileging first cadences and cadences that occur in shorter closed forms. I show that Cavalli’s tonalities are more modern versions of Banchieri’s by revealing distinctions between Ut (major) and Re (minor) tonalities, and between individual tonalities within each of these two groups.

I investigate the tonal relationships between phrases by focusing on the progressions of phrases closing with “weak” cadences to phrases closing with authentic cadences. I show that Cavalli’s weak cadences tend to be followed by authentic cadences to the fifth below or to the same pitch. While these phrase relationships can often be understood through a common-practice perspective, they sometimes defy such explanation. I argue that they are best understood according to contemporary practice of distinguishing hierarchies of cadential pitch and type. I show that Long’s (2020) “action-reaction trajectories” occur in unrhymed versi senari and versi sciolti, outside her original context of rhythming couplets.