In 1991, Nirvana released a track that would launch the rock underground decisively, unexpectedly into the mainstream. With the distorted guitars and screamed vocals of grunge juxtaposed against the catchy hooks and predictable structures of pop, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became an unlikely anthem for the angsty, disaffected teens of Generation X. Over three decades later, “Teen Spirit” remains iconic: both a metonym for the 90s alternative scene and a sonic fingerprint for Nirvana’s tragic frontman, Kurt Cobain. Yet its musical contradictions and lyrical abstruseness also seem to invite bold reinterpretations. In this paper, I combine musical analysis with archival research and digital ethnography to construct an intertextual and multimodal framework for cover analysis, comparatively analyzing Nirvana’s track with two important covers by women artists. A B-side from the 1992 album that cemented her centrality in the female alternative music scene, Tori Amos’ bare acoustic piano version also impels a contextual, polyphonographic analysis (Lacasse 2018) of the album’s other tracks as well as a consideration of the artist’s identity and branding as a confessional singer-songwriter. Referencing both Nirvana’s angst and Amos’ intimacy, Malia J’s epic orchestral cover, featured in the blockbuster movie Black Widow, moreover demands a cophonographic analysis of song meaning vis-à-vis its film context. Considering the different genres, styles, identities, and contexts of these three versions as intertexts reveals how popular music recordings create space for radical reimaginings, how artists differently respond to those invitations, and how music analysts might use multiple lenses to unpack their nuances.

“Songs to Aging Children Come,” released on Joni Mitchell’s second studio album, Clouds (1969), is unique among her early compositions. Although previous scholars have treated it as a chromatic anomaly, calling it “hallucinatory” and “helium-infused vocal warbling” (Whitesell, 2008), this song plays a central role in her emerging style. In my paper I will explore two features of Mitchell’s early harmonic language that have previously been neglected: atypical lament bass lines; and root motion by chains of major or minor thirds. Two groups of songs, some previously unreleased, will be examined. In the first group, Mitchell employs an innovative use of descending stepwise bass lines to express a sense of loss. Yet she not only revives the lamento topical tradition, which grew out of early Baroque Italian opera, she adapts it, for the melodic interval traversed by the bass is not always a perfect fourth. In the second group of songs, she introduces unorthodox harmonic progressions—root motion by continuous major or minor thirds—like “harmonies waiting unsung” (Mitchell, “Gemini Twin,” 1967). This type of progression has been thoroughly investigated as a musical form of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) based on Freud’s and Jentsch’s psychological theories (Cohn, 2004). Ultimately, the harmonic language in each of these songs reflects its corresponding poem, evoking either ambiguity, grief or irony. “Songs to Aging Children Come” serves as a culmination of crossover, portraying one moment in Mitchell’s ongoing creative evolution. It succeeds in fusing a work of art with a workshop about her art.

Is the term “tune family,” which refers to melodies which are similar but not quite the same, useful? What does it offer ethnomusicologists? In the mid-twentieth century, the concept “tune family” was developed by scholars of folk music such as Samuel Bayard, George List, and James Cowdery, evolving from an idea of “archetypal” melodies with a presumed single source toward later conjectures of polygenesis and looser concepts of tune family-membership criteria. With the infusion of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” ideas, recent analytic ethnomusicological scholarship explores relaxes criteria for “tune family membership,” but also opens the door to a lack of scholarly consensus. Scholars such as Anja Volk, Peter van Kranenburg, and Celia Pendlebury argue that, based on the Wittgensteinian paradigm, we can no longer postulate necessary and sufficient criteria for tune family membership—specific melodies can be similar without adhering to classificatory rules or having a genealogical relationship. This presentation examines ten recordings of a New Mexico Penitente alabado, “Adios acompañamiento,” as a case study of family resemblance in tune families. New Mexican alabados have been studied for over a century by scholars including Juan Rael, Thomas Steele, and J.D. Robb, but rarely transcribed. I transcribe recordings from these scholars’ collections as well as previously unanalyzed recent recordings, and conclude that the Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” paradigm is useful. We can see how these melodies are related to each other without raising questions of authenticity, parameters of similarity, originality, formulaic recomposition or memorization, or the march of time.