Time Travel, Sonic Portals, and Reclaiming Black Musical Futures
Chair(s): Alisha Lola Jones Skinner (University of Cambridge)
We are looking ahead, but also listening to the echoes of the past, fully present in the current musical moment. As such, we are pushing for better, more inclusive curricula that holistically consider the voices and personhood of Black women in their musicological constructions. One of the foremost concerns of the ethnomusicologist exploring Black music is time. The passage of time is critical to the conception and perception of music. Music is also perceived in relation to the times in which it is heard and learned. Not only is a grasp of time’s contextual meaning necessary to make music - but time is also consequential to the study of music and the development of culturally informed curricula. These studies and their application in higher education have taken on different frames. For example, sankofa has been employed as a strategy for reclaiming history. Likewise, Afrofuturism as an aesthetic reconciles history with future to affirm the present. Both frames are useful tools when traversing music, memory, and time. Separately, these papers consider the legacy of academic studies of contemporary Black music, the reimaginings of a 17th century Black woman archetype, and the possibilities generated by a reconsideration of a storied Black genre. In tandem, these papers hold, as their unifying concern, an abiding attention to Black women as they navigate their own sonic narrative formations. It is with this anchor that we propose a panel that explores the reclamation of Black musical futures in curriculum development, music history, and music theory.
Presentations in the Session
Lessons from Lemonade and the Future of Interdisciplinary Black Music Courses
Birgitta Johnson
University of South Carolina
What is the future of Black music in higher education when Black music courses still struggle to become a part of the standard curriculum in music programs? Eight years ago, I developed a music history course dedicated to centering the artistic contributions of Black women in music performance, advocacy and community building. Beyoncé’s visual album, Lemonade, and Candice Benbow’s globally successful #LemonadeSyllabus were the key inspirations. Released a month after Lemonade, Benbow’s #LemonadeSyllabus included over 200 citational sources provided by over 50 Black female thought leaders from across several disciplines. It proved that Lemonade, when viewed as an interdisciplinary work, can also provide a critical and more expansive framework for developing Black music courses. After offering one of the first university-level classes dedicated to Lemonade in the fall of 2016, I continued to teach and evolve it enough to secure a dedicated course number for the class and have it cross-listed between the African American Studies department and the Music department, where it can now fulfill an elective requirement for music majors. “Lemonade and Beyond…” was developed as a way to explore Beyoncé’s first masterwork as well as the musical contributions of Black women artists in blues, classical, gospel, soul, disco, and hip-hop music over the last century. This presentation will explore the evolution of the course, student experiences with the curriculum, and how a multi-disciplinary approach has become a means to encourage more nuanced readings of Black women artists and Black music scholarship as a whole.
Aemilia Bassano, Muse of the Dark Lady Portal: Black Women Channeling Verse & Reclaiming the Shakespearean Legacy
Alisha Lola Jones Skinner
University of Cambridge
William Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets (127–152) have echoed through the ages, inspiring fresh interpretations that intertwine history, verse, and music. Portrayed in these overtly sexual poems is the “Dark Lady”, a woman with black wiry hair and "dun"-colored skin. Central to the resound is the muse Aemilia Bassano Lanyer (1569–1645), a Jewish Venetian poet of Moroccan ancestry and the first woman to publish original poetry in England, lauding women in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Growing up in a family of instrument makers and composers, Bassano Lanyer’s romantic and social standing intersects with Shakespeare’s prolificacy, hinting at her possible influence on the Shakespearean corpus. The speculative Dark Lady tradition functions as a gateway, stirring contemporary Black women creatives, channeling the sonic and literary reverberations of the “dark lady” archetype through innovative expressions. From “The Shakespeare Lady” aka Margaret Holloway’s “theater of hunger” performances, which brought Shakespeare to the streets, to the debut of Anne Odeke’s play Princess Sussex (2024) as the first woman of color to be playwright in her own play at Shakespeare’s Globe, to Rhiannon Giddens’ ballet Black Lucy and The Bard (2022), based upon Caroline Randall Williams’s poetry in Lucy Negro Redux (2015) intuiting the dark lady’s identity, these transmissions tune into the divine feminine, highlighting Black women’s reclamation of contested histories. Through a womanist witness, this research examines the continuum of past and future artistry conducting Shakespearean verse as a vibrant, musical legacy that amplifies marginalized voices and activates global soundscapes.
Black Gospel Revelations: Time Travel and Sonic Afrofuturism in Contemporary Gospel Music
Lauren Elizabeth Eldridge Stewart
Washington University in St. Louis
Afrofuturist aesthetics within gospel music may seem counterintuitive, given the contrast between Afrofuturism’s fantastical possibility and gospel’s groundedness, but further contemplation reveals gospel’s foundation in a spiritual tradition attentive to past, present, and future. That attention is both pragmatic and wonderous – it is critical that Black people well-acquainted with an unstable world possess a pedagogy of time. The Afrofuturist impulse is foundational to the genre, and multiple recent songs reflect a time-traveling and time-honored attention to “who was, and is, and is to come.” (Revelation 4:8) Black women singers of gospel have cultivated a lexicon of vocal techniques reverberating far beyond the genre. I turn towards these techniques, demonstrated by Tunesha Crispell, Maranda Curtis, and Lacresia Campbell, to better understand the lessons conveyed by Afrofuturism. This presentation compiles an aesthetic theory of sonic Afrofuturism for application to contemporary gospel music, a genre that resonates in many locations across the African diaspora. Musicians frequently connect across the superficiality of national boundaries in a practice that I have written about called motivic traveling (2022). Now I consider the connections that musicians form across time to make sense of time itself.
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