Conference Agenda

Resurgent interest in the music of Julia Perry has provoked a problem of categories. Critics frequently reach for "neoclassicism"—thereby likening Perry’s music to that of Stravinsky and Copland. Perry's experience of descriptive reduction is of a piece with critical response to other resurgent Black musicians from the 20th century. Yet Perry’s music evinces myriad techniques and a plurality of aesthetic commitments. Such assimilation of Black musicians' creative work to known categories speaks to a broader tendency among musicologists to assume that we know what modernism was. Its givenness allows us to plug any and all musicians into extant categorical schemes. In this talk I assert the contrary—that we don't yet know what modernism is but Julia Perry might help us figure it out.

To that end, I map out Perry’s work in the 1950s wherein the composer stakes out a musical poetics we might call metamodernist: a syncretic praxis to which no form of creativity was alien. Building on the work of Tammy Kernoodle and Moyo Okediji, I take metamodernism as a decolonial term that draws our attention to the ways in which so-called modernity is unequally distributed among or even denied to those essential for its processes. I argue that Perry's metamodernism takes the form of "drift"—realized as geographical displacement, cosmopolitan identification, and aesthetic plurality. Drift, as I theorize it, is distinct from Fred Moten’s concept of fugitivity—Perry worked in ambivalent tension with modernist institutions in ways that did not always take the form of resistance.

I trace three drift narratives in Perry’s life. The first tracks her movement through elite modernist institutions—moving by way of her studies with Luigi Dallapiccola and Nadia Boulanger and a discussion of my recovery of her lost Sonata for Viola and Piano. The second traces her drift through networks of African American expatriates including Dean Dixon, Ulysses Kay, and Gloria Davy. Finally, I detail her entanglement in Cold War diplomacy through her collaboration with Willam Strickland. Perry's drift—her generous syncretism demonstrated across her authorship—points to a way that we might reconstruct modernism's universality but this time from the standpoint of Blackness.

Julius Eastman (1940-1990) often resists categorization as a performer and composer: his music is described as minimalist, postminimalist, improvisatory, avant garde, experimental, and jazz. These myriad categorizations do not adequately account for all aspects of his compositions. He defines his approach to composition as “organic,” a cumulative system in which the “third part of any part […] has to contain all of the information from the first two parts, and then go on from there” (Eastman 2005). Few of Eastman’s scores remain extant, and the prevalence of graphic and nontraditional notation within those that remain—in addition to the inherent improvisatory approach to each composition—further complicates musical categorization efforts. Additionally, in musicological scholarship, Eastman is often “othered” by being described as “postminimalist,” (Gann 2015, Hanson-Dvoracek 2011, Miller 2022) a label not given to his contemporaries.

This paper presents an interdisciplinary analysis of psychological approaches to repetition, a sociocultural approach to genre formation, and an exploration of how Eastman understood his Blackness and queerness to present a holistic approach to the analysis of Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc (1979) and Gay Guerrilla (1979). This analysis foregrounds irreverence as defined in Jace Clayton’s essay, “Reverence Is a Form of Forgetting,” that accompanied the album, The Julius Eastman Memory Depot. In the essay, Clayton argues against revering Eastman by simply plugging him into a more diverse canon and instead asks listeners and performers to attend to Eastman as a problem, a “snarl of questions to be asked,” rather than a celebrated rediscovered figure (Clayton 2020). This irreverent reframing of Eastman, and of minimalism more broadly, serves as an opportunity for scholars to work against formalist and rigid understandings of memory and repetition in Eastman’s sonic phenomena and categorization.

Ultimately, this paper shows not that we need to hear Eastman through a specific genre or through a minimalist lens, but that when we re-hear minimalism through Eastman and irreverence, scholars can disrupt existing power structures to create space for more inclusive and meaningful categorization efforts in minimalism and broader musicological discourses.

At the end of Price’s “Hold Fast to Dreams,” the soprano soars to a beautiful high A and the pianist whisks through a whirlwind of chromatic notes, driving us to a dramatic final cadence. Despite its brevity, the magnitude of this ending explodes beyond the confines of its song’s few short pages. Such late, powerful climaxes are prevalent in Price’s songs, both sacred and secular, demanding new terminology and further study. In this paper, I use the word epic to describe her song endings, encapsulating such calling cards as text fragmentation, increased density of texture, resolution of complex chromaticisms, and awe-inspiring performances.

Both written and performance aspects contribute to her epic endings. For instance, in “Bewilderment,” Price once again takes the soprano up in range, repeats key lyrics, and takes the pianist through chromatic, sweeping figurations at the song’s close. In one particularly powerful performance, Karen Slack and Michelle Cann exhibit virtuosic control over dynamic and temporal pacing to the epic end. In just the last minute of the piece, the duo moves from quiet tenderness, to unsteady mysteriousness, and finally to full, beautiful beseechment.

Themes like supplication, transcendence, and faith resonate throughout Price’s songs. Even when not explicitly religious, however, many of her songs strive toward ecstatic endings, much like historical Spiritual traditions (Clark 1979). Price scholars often highlight the role of faith (Voyante 2018), “signifyin’” (Maxile 2022), and Black Nationalism (Ege 2020) in her music, suggesting that these epic endings are another way she encodes Black musical aesthetics in a predominantly white-European idiom. Through a combination of written aspects—like text and texture—and performance qualities—like vocal timbre and body language—Price and her interpreters create immensely impactful musical moments.

Recently, Price’s music has experienced a well-deserved resurgence of interest (Ege 2024, Hoag 2023, Maxile 2022), but her songs remain understudied. Price’s songs, and my use of the term epic, demonstrate how performers craft musical meaning beyond what is on the page. I argue that our work as music scholars should always center real-life music-making, because it is the performers who make her music really sing.

Little is known about Florence Price’s political views; she discussed politics rarely in her letters, and few of her works are expressly political. A recently discovered song, “Monologue for the Working Class” (published by G. Schirmer, 2020), may help shed some light on her political leanings. This song, a setting of an unpublished poem by Langston Hughes, is a rallying cry for workers to band together against the ruling class. Hughes was, for a brief time in the 1930s, an outspoken proponent of leftist political organizations, including the Communist Party USA, which he supported but never officially joined, and the theme of working-class uplift defined his works for a large part of this decade. This paper examines the compositional choices Price made and how they reflect the poem’s message of working-class solidarity. With a simple, bluesy melody that is accessible to the amateur singer, Price reinforces the text in many subtle and overt ways. For example, there is a strong differentiation between sections in which the worker stands alone versus the moment when they unite with comrades to “show ‘em what the working class can do,” which is marked by the interaction between voice and piano.

The song’s place amongst the populist works of other composers such as Aaron Copland, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Elie Siegmeister (who would set a later version of Hughes’s “Monologue”), and Roy Harris (with whom Price studied composition) will also be discussed. The general instability of the Depression era and calls for workers to unite led many composers to create music that they hoped would appeal to the masses, and although it may be impossible to know whether Price was influenced by such discourse, “Monologue for the Working Class” exhibits many traits of a true “mass song,” which Copland labeled as “a powerful weapon in the class struggle.” As a seminal figure in American music, Price wrote works which hold an important place in history, and in today’s political and economic climate, one in which the gulf between rich and poor continues to grow unabated, “Monologue for the Working Class” is especially prescient.