How To Disappear Completely

Singing It: Performed Representation in Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess"

Last night, I presented (for class) on Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, challenging critiques of its so-called "whiteness" by illustrating how African American participation in its performance could (and did) drastically affect the music and thus the representation conveyed. The overarching issue was the impact of performance on musical representation, beyond and sometimes against, composer "voice." I played two clips of "Summertime," one by Anne Brown (Bess in the original performance) and the other by Billie Holiday and her orchestra. Anne Brown was classically trained, and the symphony accompanying her was a standard symphony orchestra. The wide vocal range, vibrato technique, and instrumentation (weighted towards the string section) of the accompaniment all strongly indicated the concert hall and "Western Art." Billie Holiday, on the other hand, had a jazz/blues band (muted trumpets, clarinets, strong rhythm section) behind her. Her range was narrower and delivery more characteristic of "popular" singing. In between verses, there was a break for a horn solo (also more characteristic of jazz style). To me, the versions are like night and day. How cool to find that, yes, even African Americans don't speak for all members of the group: each one has a different experience to tell. I liked the particularity, how just a performer could so completely change a song's meaning and sound. In the first, the Western Art sound was being used by an African American to deliver a message of competance: blacks were just as capable of the "refinement" that whites claim to possess. Stripped away is the "primitive" emphasis on rhythm and complex timbre (growling/muted instruments, roughness of voice, etc.) usually associated with the jungle and by (erroneous) extension, African Americans. Though Gershwin has been criticized for his "inauthentic" scoring of African American spirituals (since Anne Brown was the "original"), I think the performance of Western Art by an African American at the time was extremely positive. Thus, Billie Holiday's version, which actually fits a whole lot better with our notions of "black music," seems much less subversive to me. However, her version could be taken as a "Here, Gershwin, this is how it's really done" rebuttal.

Things to do before the semester ends:
Turn 8-pg presentation into 15-pg paper (not hard, since I was stripping it down in order to make room for the sound clips and still keep it all within 20 minutes, anyway).
15-pg paper integrating Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Goffman in theories of meaning in music.
Thesis proposal.
Apply for scholarships.

I'm tired. I didn't get to bed till 4 this morning, because after the presentations the grad students went to a night club in Toronto where one of the students' old band was playing. They finished up around 12am, at which point reminisces began. We didn't get out of there till 2am, and with the hour drive back to Hamilton, plus the dropping off of students at respective houses, my head didn't hit the pillow till nearly 4. I had wake up again to finish a paper, but now that I have turned that in, I am putting Kind of Blue in the CD player and zonking out.