Friday, January 16
Session 1 (10:00am–12:00pm)
Lydia Bangura and Mira Walker, “To A Loved One”: Black Feminist Collaboration in Two Songs by Florence Price
The theorizing of Florence Price’s music would not be complete without an understanding of how she collaborated with performers and composers during her lifetime. This 20-minute lecture recital seeks to develop a theory of collaboration between contemporaneous composers and performers, as well as extend collaboration across temporal boundaries through the analysis and performance of Price’s songs. Building on existing scholarship in performance studies (Johnson 2003) and Black feminist theory (hooks 1981; Hill-Collins 1990), my definition of collaboration is inflected with a Black feminist ethos. By studying Price’s collaborative relationships with other Black women in the interwar period, I theorize how Price’s role as a collaborator was not only fundamental to the way she navigated her career but was integral to the aesthetic properties of her music. I argue that collaboration is both an ethic and a performed aesthetic that bears musical traces of the collaborators involved.
Featuring the performance of two short songs with accompanying analyses, I detail how Price was inspired by the Black women she was in community with and attuned to their unique artistic sensibilities. More specifically, I examine two of Price’s pieces featuring texts by African American poet Louise Charlotte Wallace. I also feature letters written between Price, Wallace, and W.E.B. DuBois, demonstrating how Price was instrumental in helping Wallace’s poems receive recognition in the NAACP’s publication, The Crisis. The two pieces contain fingerprints of both women, as well as evidence of their mutually beneficial relationship as Black women artists. Drawing from performance and analysis scholarship (Cook 2013; Leong 2020), I then emphasize the agency of the performer and posit them as an additional active collaborator, rather than a vessel for the composer’s intentions. By including my own intentions as a scholar-performer, I fashion an alternative response to music academia’s characterization of performers as beholden to authority, duty, and faithfulness. I demonstrate how modern-day Black women performers can participate in and further Price’s spirit of collaboration.
Magdalena Wolfarth and Carlotta Lipski, Hate Speech – Interactions Between Public Discourses and Songs of Ethel Smyth, Cecilie Ore, and Jennifer Walshe
This lecture performance investigates how women composers have responded to mechanisms of exclusion, marginalization, and hate speech in and through vocal music. Through spoken commentary and live musical performance, the project explores the tension between public discourse and personal expression – and how the singing voice can become a space of resistance. Drawing on three distinct compositional voices from different eras and social contexts, the performance traces a line from historical struggle to contemporary irony.
Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), composer and suffragette, challenged patriarchal norms both in life and in her songs. Often ridiculed by the musical establishment, her work embodies defiance and political self-assertion. In her work, Cecilie Ore (*1954) critically addresses current social issues. Her vocal works weave together music and activism, drawing attention to forms of hate speech embedded in everyday structures and inherited narratives. Jennifer Walshe (*1974) takes this discourse into the realm of irony, hyperreality, and performative overload. Her compositions dissect the absurdity and violence of online speech cultures, manipulating language and voice to reflect the fragmentation of identity in digital spaces.
Together, these composers offer a rich spectrum of artistic responses to verbal and structural violence. The lecture performance does not merely present their music as illustration but activates it as a form of embodied thinking – where song becomes both a site of vulnerability and a tool of critical resistance. By crossing genres, aesthetics, and historical contexts, the performance asks: How does music respond when language wounds? And how can the voice reclaim agency in the face of discursive violence?
Rachel Short, “Utterly” Wilde: Constructing Gendered Aesthetic Identity Through Song
Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour of America publicized the opera Patience and his own persona as a self-invented modern celebrity. Contemporary press highlighted and often ridiculed Wilde’s effeminate physical mannerisms, foppish clothing choices, witticisms, and his statements regarding art, often arguing against the gender-transgressing aspects of the aesthetic movement. Part of the fervid response to his visit included publication of over a dozen pieces for solo piano and songs for voice/piano with text and music that playfully parodied characterizations of Wilde and the aesthetics he was known for. The sheet music cover art is iconic, and the music is often mentioned by scholars of Wilde and the American fin-de-siècle. However, the way the sheet music sounds when performed has been underexplored. What exactly was “Wild” in this Wildeiana music? Which of the approbative pieces captured in music his “flippity-flop” catch phrases such as “utterly utter,” and how did they attempt to musically match aspects of his persona? Conversely, which pieces, lacking anything intrinsically unique in their music, were merely connected to him as a marketing gimmick?
This lecture-demonstration sheds light on the way the music sounds–what is “wild” about it. As examples, I analyze and perform samples of Wildeiana songs housed in UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, such as: “Quite Too Utterly Utter!! an Aesthetical Roundelay” (Coote); “Oscar, Dear!” (Rosenfeld), and “Too Utterly Utter, Or, The Aesthetic Girl (Dumont/Mullaly). Also of interest is the “Flippy Flop Young Man” (Adams, Johngmans). Musically, the songs and dance suites about Oscar Wilde feature extensive use of accented non-chord tones to achieve desired characterizations. The musical characterizations can be seen in conjunction with the lyrics and sheet music covers that play up his “feminized” poses. This multifaceted analysis and performance provides greater appreciation for how Wilde’s tour and the surrounding songs affected and interacted with fin-de-siècle contemporary American music, marketing, gender, and culture.
Kaitlyn Clawson-Cannestra (University of Oregon) Ariel and Belle: Constructions of Gender within Renaissance-Era Disney Princess Songs
Beginning with The Little Mermaid in 1989, Disney Princesses experienced a “Renaissance Era” of new and increasingly strong female characters. Since a singer’s voice gives us a window into their identity, in this project, I look at how two Renaissance princesses express new constructions of gender through song. Ariel, for example, is the first princess to dream of something entirely non-romantic: she wants to be “where the people are” (above land, living a human life). Belle, too, wants “something more than this provincial life,” and is smart, resourceful, and won’t settle for the first handsome man who proposes to her (Beauty and the Beast, 1991).
In this paper, I argue that lyrics, vocal timbre, and form all contribute to changing gender aesthetics in the Disney Princess franchise around the year 1990. Their lyrics reveal new desires, new character traits, and new types of relationships with their princes and their communities. Their vocal timbres sound stronger—for example, Belle is the first princess to belt, in 1991—and are also much more varied, allowing the princesses to express greater emotional palettes. Finally, Alan Menken’s iconic songs are significantly longer and more complex formally than earlier princess songs like those of Snow White (1937) and Aurora (1959), revealing more complex characters. These leading women are no longer flat objects of the prince’s affection, but they have hopes and dreams of their own, sometimes even rescuing the prince rather than being rescued.
My work is inherently interdisciplinary, building upon feminist (Butler 1990), cinema (Lloyd 2020), and of course, music (Bádue and Schorsch 2021; BaileyShea 2021; Potgieter 2016) scholarship surrounding Disney, voice, and song. I additionally refer to the work of Eidsheim (2018), Heidemann (2016), Malawey (2020), and Nobile (2022) for my discussion of the princesses’ vocal timbres. With this project, I seek to expand our understanding of how the human voice relates to gender performance, and how songs can be used in movies to amplify that gender performance.
Session 2 (1:30pm–3:30pm)
Cee Adamson, Expanding the Canon: Reimagining Art Song for the Transfemme Treble Voice
In the Western classical tradition, voice type has long been associated with binary gender: low voices are typically associated with stories of wandering, stoic men, while high voices are often linked to expressions of softness, vulnerability, and yearning. For transfeminine singers with treble ranges, this creates a significant artistic barrier. Much of the most emotionally complex repertoire is written for baritones and tenors, and these works often remain inaccessible due to their original keys and masculine-coded texts.
This lecture-demonstration examines how art song cycles traditionally performed by cisgender men (and male-identified, lower-voiced singers) can be reimagined for transfemme treble voices without sacrificing their expressive power. Focusing on Schubert’s Winterreise, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel, and Poulenc’s Chansons gaillardes, I introduce three creative strategies to enable new interpretations: targeted transpositions, minimal text modifications, and reordering or pairing songs with brief spoken interludes. Live examples will briefly illustrate each approach, potentially including Schumann’s “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” Schubert’s “Gute Nacht,” Poulenc’s “Sérénade,” and Vaughan Williams’s “The Vagabond.”*
This session invites voice teachers, pianists, and scholars to reconsider what’s possible in the song repertoire. Instead of discarding the canon, we can broaden it by adding new timbres, stories, and identities that reflect the full spectrum of who we are as artists, scholars, and humans.
Megan Ihnen, Voice + X: Spatiality, Timbre, and Collaboration Beyond the Keyboard
The art song repertoire has long been dominated by voice and piano collaborations, with the piano acting as both harmonic foundation and expressive partner. But what happens when the piano isn’t there? This lecture-recital explores the interpretive, logistical, and collaborative possibilities that emerge when singers perform art song with non-piano instrumentations—voice and bassoon, voice and percussion, voice and viola, and more.
Rooted in over a decade of professional performance and commissioning work, this presentation examines how non-keyboard partnerships transform our understanding of intimacy, text setting, and timbral tuning in song. Drawing on repertoire developed through long-standing duos—including two contemporary works, White Ash by Mara Gibson and The Wind Will Take Us by Niloufar Iravani—this session offers an inside look at how different instrumentations unlock distinct interpretive decisions. The interplay, especially between breath-driven instruments and voice, invites alternate forms of phrasing, vowel shaping, and pitch blending that challenge standard assumptions about song structure and performance hierarchy.
Additionally, the presentation will touch on the practical and aesthetic catalysts for this repertoire shift: limited access to high-quality pianos in non-traditional venues, the economics of collaborative programming, and the desire to build ensembles that can spatially explore the performance space. The works featured also point toward a more inclusive and flexible future for song.
Ultimately, this talk argues that expanding the art song ensemble to include “Voice + X” is not only viable, but vital to the genre’s evolution—opening new paths for composers, performers, and audiences alike.
Tung Nguyen, Đặng Hữu Phúc’s “60 Romances for Voice and Piano” – An Introduction to Art Songs in Vietnam
Western classical music was formally introduced in Vietnam in the early 20th Century during the French Colonial period. Despite the late introduction, Vietnamese composers were able to study and adapt the knowledge of Western classical music to compose a substantial amount of instrumental and vocal music since the 1930s. Songs emerged as the dominant vocal genre, but they were composed without an accompaniment part, which left the accompaniment task to the performer or a separate arranger. This trend of composition resulted in faster output, but did not often convey the original intention of the composer. Even though many of these songs included sophisticated structure and lyrics taken from literary sources, the lack of a written-out accompaniment makes it difficult to classify them as true ‘art songs’ in the Western classical tradition, where composer-written accompaniment is a defining feature.
In 2012, composer Đặng Hữu Phúc – one of Vietnam’s most prominent composers – published his “60 Romances for Voice and Piano,” and this publication can be considered as the first Vietnamese Art Songs collection, as Mr. Phúc wrote the piano accompaniment parts himself. Within the collection, the songs are either standalone compositions or are grouped according to the music material – e.g., songs that use traditional Vietnamese folk tunes and melodies, and specific literary themes – e.g., songs about different seasons in Vietnam. This paper presentation aims to highlight the development of songs and specifically art songs in Vietnamese classical music since the beginning of the 20th century, to introduce selections of Đặng Hữu Phúc’s art song collection to foreign listeners and performers, and to provide IPA resources for nonVietnamese speakers to prepare this repertoire successfully. I envision that my paper presentation will facilitate further interest in the vocal repertoire of Vietnamese classical music and inspire greater inclusion of this repertoire in recitals and academic study worldwide.
Pharel Silaban, Sonic Diplomacy and Fragmented Memory: reimagining the Song Cycle in Trisutji Kamal’s “Siklus Kehidupan”
Trisutji Kamal’s Siklus Kehidupan (“Cycle of Life,” 1999) stands as a landmark in the Indonesian art song tradition, blending cultural memory with a hybrid musical language. As one of Indonesia’s pioneering female composers, Kamal reimagines the Western song cycle through a postcolonial lens by integrating self-authored poetry with a non-linear musical structure rooted in Indonesian expressive traditions. While traditional Lieder song cycles often emphasize a teleological arc and cohesive tonal planning, Siklus Kehidupan resists such conventions in favor of fragmentation, tonal ambiguity, and emotional episodicity. This paper positions Siklus Kehidupan as both a compositional statement and an act of cultural diplomacy, wherein Western idioms such as harmonic syntax and motivic development are reinterpreted through Indonesian tonalities, metaphors, and localized aesthetics. Through detailed musical and textual analysis, the paper argues that Kamal’s work articulates a micropolitics of intercultural exchange, reflecting a postcolonial subjectivity shaped by both national memory and global musical discourse. Comprising three contrasting songs, Realisme (“Realism”), Sebuah Penderitaan (“A Suffering), and Kabar (“News”), the cycle moves from intimate reflection to socio-political commentary. Each song employs distinct musical strategies to evoke identity, grief, and resistance. From floral metaphors and modal lyricism to chromatic fragmentation and rhythmic agitation, Kamal’s compositional language invites deep interpretive engagement. For performers, the cycle presents significant challenges, requiring both pianist and vocalist to navigate its layered dramaturgy with stylistic agility, emotional nuance, and cultural fluency. As a collaborative performance, it becomes an act of sonic diplomacy, calling for the integration of musical traditions while maintaining cultural specificity. By situating Siklus Kehidupan within global art song discourse, this paper advocates for its inclusion in international recital practice and affirms Kamal’s role in expanding the canon through acts of transcultural dialogue.
Masterclass, Louise Toppin (4:00-6:00pm)
Keynote address, Matt BaileyShea (7:30pm)
Saturday, January 17
Session 3 (10:00am–12:00pm)
Paula Liliana Alva Garcia, Texture and Performance in “Seis Canciones” by Eduardo Toldrà
“Toldrà was the musician and the man… and he was always a composer not committed to anything other than his inspiration.” These are the words of Federico Sopeña from his book Memorias de Músicos, in which he talks about what it meant to be Eduardo Toldrà’s friend. Toldrà was a Catalan violinist, composer, and conductor who was especially active in the 1920s and 1930s. Enticed by superb poetry and the small dimensions of the canción lírica, he constructed free musical forms to best suit each poem he set. Despite his contributions to the development of Spanish art song, his music remains relatively unexplored. Scholars have produced biographical studies of Toldrà (Capdevila 1972), and brief comments about his songs appear in a book about Castilian songs by different Spanish composers (Draayer 2009), but his songs deserve more detailed examination.
My lecture-demonstration focuses on Toldrà’s Seis Canciones (1941), with settings of classical Castilian poets including Lope de Vega, Garcilaso de la Vega, Pablo de Jérica, and Francisco de Quevedo. Like many of Toldrà’s songs, the Seis Canciones are very tonal and relatively easy to grasp from an audience’s perspective. Yet from a performer’s perspective, they pose many challenges, not least because of the many textural shifts in the accompaniment and the complex interaction of voice and piano.
In my lecture-demonstration I approach the set from the perspective of texture and show how this is a crucial parameter for musical performance. Just as Toldrà’s music has been relatively underexplored, so has this musical parameter, which is often regarded as “secondary” to the “primary” parameters of harmony, melody, and rhythm (see Meyer 1989). Drawing upon recent studies of texture by De Souza (2019) and Rodgers (2027), I discuss the many shifts in texture within Toldrà’s songs, considering how they interact with the vocal melody and with the text. Many of these songs have varying accompaniments and drastic rhythmic changes for singers and pianists; therefore, understanding how they connect is a vital tool for a successful performance.
Collin Ziegler, Songs of Régine Wieniawski
In the year 1900, a young Polish-English woman named Régine Wieniawski, born and raised in Brussels and then established in London, published her first two songs for voice and piano. One of the songs, the economical, strophic “Down By the Sally Gardens,” includes surprising melodramatic flourishes as well as a startling direction to “sob.” Soon after this, she began setting the poems of Paul Verlaine, whose Symbolist poems, Wieniawski wrote, “contained all the emotions life could offer.” Throughout her career, critics praised her specifically for her settings of Verlaine. They are “elegant yet free from mannerism, modern yet unaffected,” as if the composer were “shielding herself […] behind the poem” (French critic Georges Aubry); she composes “with utter subtlety and sincerity […] with a kind of touching and well-merited devotion and rare understanding” (American writer Mary Hoyt Wiborg). In comments like these, characterizing her songs’ reception across the early decades of the twentieth century, Poldowski and her music were understood via a Symbolist model—articulated by Poldowski in her critical writings—in which music is a site for the sincere enactment of experience and feelings. By playing her own accompaniment and singing—by many accounts in a harsh, idiomatic style— Poldowski seemed to endorse this reading, making song into an intimate, almost confessional act. Yet there was another side to Poldowski, one that was been overlooked in the few critical studies of her life and music. In the context of her later songs and instrumental works, we encounter Poldowski’s sharp sense of humor, in which she could, through satire of genre and style, cut to the core of the emerging modernist musics and their accompanying theories. In pieces like the “Hall of Machinery—Wembley” for piano and the suite of piano pieces, “Caledonian Market,” Poldowski employs stylistic gestures to push musical caricature to the limit. But it is in the 1920 Verlaine setting, “Sur l’herbe,” driven by fast, spasmodic stylistic changes and no less than twelve meter changes, that we see how Poldowski pushed song far from the Symbolist notion of sincerity and toward an individual, ironic vision that centered shapeshifting and ventriloquizing. By putting these two personas of the composer-singer side by side, I attempt to read these opposing aesthetics as symptoms of Poldowski’s treatment of song: as essentially polymorphous, and detached from the self. And by doing so, I hope to outline the historical forces that made such a realization unpalatable to twentieth-century audiences determined to hear song otherwise.
Liz Pearse, “…to all the girl singers I have known” – Milton Babbitt’s Songs for Treble Voice
Though his compositional output spanned nearly 80 years (1930s-2011), Milton Babbitt’s songs are considerably less popular than his works for other forms of ensemble. However, his limited output for treble voice and piano is a treasure trove of musical styles and eras, clever and sometimes unusual poetry, and a wealth of challenges that advance the musicanship of any performer willing to approach his songs’ particular demands.
Having performed most of Babbitt’s treble voice/piano repertoire, I believe they are deeply moving and deserving of performance by a wider group of adventurous singers. In this discussion, I will present a performer’s analysis and guide to the treble songs of Milton Babbitt. I will include strategies for approaching “difficult” pitched material through row study, internalizing intricate rhythmic material, navigating disjunct and rangy melodic lines, and developing a sense of satisfying expression within a seemingly cerebral musical landscape.Though numerous songs will be introduced, I plan to focus on Babbitt’s work Phonemena, the incipit to which reads: “dedicated to all the girl singers I have known” (an irritatingly endearing statement). This particularly athletic vocal work presents a unique study, as it exists in two forms, one for voice and piano (1969-70), and one for voice and tape (from 1975, utilizing the RCA Mark II’s unique sound world). I will compare the experience of performing both versions of this work, which present wildly different temporal challenges for the singer.
Orla Shannon, Songs by Mary Turner Salter
This paper explores the expressive and structural ambitions in two songs by the American composer Mary Turner Salter: The Cry of Rachel (1905) and The Lamp of Love (1907). Beyond a modest biographical record (Kinskella 1919; Villamil 2004; Kimber 2021; Rodgers 2022), Turner Salter’s prolific output of over 200 vocal works has yet to receive sustained analytical attention and remains largely associated with the parlour song tradition. The songs examined in this paper, however, represent a more expansive, dramatic mode of writing—striking not only in noting Turner Salter’s lack of formal musical training, but also for the ways in which they negotiate the aesthetic boundaries to have historically separated music of the private and public sphere.
Rather than framing these songs within familiar narratives of neglect, the paper assesses Turner Salter’s compositional approach from the perspective of genre expansion. It argues that these songs fuse together domestic intimacy with operatic breath, thereby challenging the binary between ‘parlour’ and ‘art’ song traditions of the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival newspaper reviews and out-of-print published scores, the paper ultimately invites reconsideration of the spaces—both physical and conceptual—in which women’s compositions were expected to circulate.
The presentation will conclude with a performance of the two aforementioned songs by Orla Shannon (soprano) and Gustavo Castro-Ramirez (piano), offering an opportunity for Turner Salter’s music to resonate anew.
Session 4 (1:30pm–3:00pm)
Sam Falotico, Performed, Mediated, and Reconfigured Identity in Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s Recent Works
This paper examines the recent work of Japanese pop singer-model Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, focusing on how her post-2018 music videos reconfigure her long-established audiovisual persona. Known internationally for her hyper-kawaii (cute) aesthetics and surrealist pop visuals, Kyary’s early work gained acclaim for its playful, quirky blending of sound and image, exemplified in hits such as “PONPONPON” (2011) and “Fashion Monster” (2012). Yet, her more recent output—such as “Kamaitachi” (2020), “Gentenkaihi” (2021), and “Gum Gum Girl” (2021)—marks a striking stylistic shift. While these works retain a highly stylized audiovisual language, they increasingly foreground themes of alienation, self-fragmentation, post-internet girlhood, and Japaneseness. This paper argues that these recent music videos constitute a kind of “late style,” wherein Kyary reflects on and reconfigures the very tropes that once defined her identity.
Combining conventional methods of song analysis (form, melody, timbre) with media theory, intertextuality, and semiotics, this paper explores how music and image together construct a persona in tension—fragmented, stylized, and self-aware. In “Kamaitachi,” Kyary plays out a romantic tragedy infused with references to Japanese folklore and time travel, merging pop theatricality with traditional narrative forms. “Gentenkaihi” dramatizes internal struggle by pitting Kyary against mirrored versions of herself, drawing on tropes of martial arts and action cinema to reframe song performance as both spectacle and confrontation. Finally, “Gum Gum Girl” embraces abstraction, pairing sparse, looping vocals with digitally manipulated imagery that renders Kyary’s presence both spectral and stylized.
By shifting the focus away from kawaii excess and towards posthuman fragmentation, these works offer novel insights into how performance operates across media and disrupts assumptions of a continuous, linear identity. Building on interviews and prior critiques of Kyary’s work (Finan 2020; Iseri 2015; St. Michael 2012), this paper offers a new reading of Kyary’s post-2018 work as a late style that complicates existing narratives of kawaii, femininity, and pop performance. More broadly, it situates Kyary—and J-pop artists generally—within conversations in song studies where they have been largely overlooked, particularly with regards to media hybridity, issues of identity, and the negotiation of cultural meaning within a globalized pop marketplace.
Annie Liu, Locomotion in Text and Song: Mu Shiying’s “Shanghai Foxtrot” (1934) and Li Jinhui’s “Express Train” (1928/32)
A member of the “New Sensationist” writers in the 1930s, Mu Shiying writes with endless sensory language and description, creating a rich and embodied tableau of Shanghai nightlife. In Mu’s 1934 short story “Shanghai Foxtrot,” “a ‘Shanghai express’ pushes out its belly, ‘da da da,’ in the rhythm of the fox-trot” (Field, 2014). Famous popular music composer Li Jinhui’s 1932 song “Express Train,” recorded by child star Zhou Xuan, opens with the unmistakable sounds of a train starting up, expertly simulated by a jazz band, and describes a brief yet intense courtship. This musicalization of train sounds via language in “Shanghai Foxtrot” mirrors the production of train sounds via musical instruments in “Express Train.”
In this exploration, I analyze how Mu Shiying, Li Jinhui, and Zhou Xuan evoke the extramusical sound of locomotives textually, timbrally, and rhythmically. I then theorize how the train functions as a symbol of modernity in 1930s Shanghai through sonic aspects like speed and noise. Scholars like Andrew Jones (2001) and Eugene Marlow (2018) have discussed the presence of trains in early Shanghai popular song (shidaiqu) and early twentieth-century American popular music as a symbol of new technology, rapid social change, and international modernity. These examples illustrate the centrality and musicality of the train within the 1930s Shanghai soundscape as expressed in both literature and popular music. Through this investigation, I synthesize perspectives from sound studies, music analysis, and textual analysis to survey and reconstruct the sensory experience of the train in jazz age Shanghai.
Anabel Maler, Signing Divas: Sign Language Covers of “Defying Gravity”
“People are taking the lyrics of ‘Defying Gravity’ and really holding space with that, and feeling power in that.” When Tracey E. Gilchrist began to ask Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande (co-stars of the 2024 Wicked film adaptation) about queer people “holding space” with the lyrics of “Defying Gravity,” she could not have anticipated the flood of viral internet attention that followed. But Gilchrist’s seemingly confusing question was rooted in a truth about the power of the song “Defying Gravity” and—in particular—Erivo’s cover of the iconic diva number.
This paper examines a specific tradition of covering “Defying Gravity” in American Sign Language. Sign language cover songs involve the performance of an existing piece of aural music in a signed language. This repertoire of songs has recently begun to receive scholarly attention but remains underexplored in the analytical literature. Through my analysis of four ASL covers of “Defying Gravity,” I argue that sign language cover artists leverage the resources of musical sign language in order to enact divahood in different ways in their performances.
For example, in Sandra Mae Frank’s interpretation of Elphaba’s diva moment, divahood comes from a bold rejection of expectations, enacted through her use of non-manual markers and body shifting. Amber Zion’s interpretation of Elphaba’s divahood rests in her fundamental “witchiness”—Zion’s cover embraces the cackling witch stereotype and transforms it into a vision of female empowerment. In Joshua Castille’s interpretation, divahood is enacted through the power of dramatic characterization and through a beautiful, subtle transformation in Elphaba’s character. In Ben Featherstone’s cover, he accomplishes what Gilchrist called “holding space” for its lyrics in a new and profound way: by fully transforming the song into a triumphant celebration of Deaf culture and sign language.
For signers of “Defying Gravity,” the song’s lyrics offer a space for enacting divahood and pushing back against oppression and normalcy. They also provide a space for making statements about Deaf pride, the value of signed languages, and Deaf musicians’ dreams for equal access and acceptance in the world of musical theatre.
Session 5 (3:30pm–5:00pm)
Nathan Dougherty, “Nègres et blancs song égaux á tes yeux”: Ourika, Race, and Sentimentality in Three 1820s French Romances
Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) was a sensation. As The Literary Magnet reported in 1824, “all Paris is ‘Ourika’ mad.” In the novel, a young Senegalese girl is raised by a white aristocratic woman. A growing awareness of racial prejudice makes her realize that she will never marry a white Frenchman because of the color of her skin, which ultimately leads to her death. Though its long-celebrated antiracist message has recently been called into question, Duras’s sympathetic black heroine nonetheless inspired an “Ourika mania,” leading to new trends in fashion and myriad imitative novels, plays, and poems. Though often overlooked, Ourika also featured in a number of French romances.
In this paper, I draw attention to three Ourika romances published in the 1820s, exploring ways in which the salons songs by Amadée de Beauplan, Jérôme-Joseph Momigny, and Alphonse Leduc complement and complicate the already ambiguous racial themes in Duras’s novel. In some ways, the songs betray widespread racial anxieties, reaffirming the supposed impossibility of interracial marriage and of Ourika’s assimilation into French society. At the same time, however, I argue that the romances minimize racial difference, particularly compared to music in contemporaneous Ourika plays. While in theatrical works, Ourika is musically othered by singing exotic “Creole airs” – as Robin Mitchell notes, more standard French songs would have defied audience expectations by making Ourika “seem too French” – in the romances, she sings in the same French style as her white peers, thereby contesting stereotypes concerning black intellect, subjectivity, and musicality. More broadly, I engage with work on sympathy and sentimentality by scholars such as Stephen Downes, Doris Y. Kadish, and Brycchan Carey to position the Ourika romances alongside a larger group of French salon songs published in the 1820s that employed the sentimental mode to encourage white French listeners to develop empathetic bonds with black subjects and to foster a sense of connectedness across racial difference. In so doing, I show that such songs responded to, and participated in, larger abolitionist and antiracist debates.
Echo Davidson, The Diva of Rebetiko: Roza Eskenazi and the Gendered Life of Song
Rebetiko—often called the “Greek blues”—emerged in the cafés‐aman of late-Ottoman Smyrna, migrated with Greek and Sephardic refugees after the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe, and soon resounded from Piraeus tavernas to American diaspora nightclubs. At the center of this soundscape stood Roza Eskenazi (ca. 1895–1980), a Sephardic Jewish singer-dancer who recorded over 500 sides in Greek, Turkish, and Ladino during the 1930s–40s, becoming the most prolific voice of the genre. Yet Eskenazi remains marginal in rebetiko scholarship, which often centers male bards and nationalist historiographies (Gauntlett 2001; Holst 2006; Pennanen 2004).
This talk recenters Eskenazi by asking how a Jewish woman navigated—and reshaped—the masculinist, nationalist, and antisemitic terrains of interwar Greek popular music. Drawing on digitized 78 rpm discs, film footage, and liner-note memoirs (including Ketikidis 1987 and Charles Howard’s reissue notes), I trace her arc from Smyrna cabarets to Athenian recording studios and diaspora stages. Musical-analytical readings of “Ανάθεμά σε” and “Smyrneiko Minore” reveal Eskenazi’s distinctive ornamentation, modal agility, and vocal expressivity—features often overlooked in formal studies of rebetiko. Engaging voice studies (Eidsheim 2015) and feminist ethnomusicology (Koskoff 2000), I argue that her sonic persona and shifting performance styles enacted a Sephardic feminist agency that challenged dominant aesthetics of both Greek nationalism and gendered decorum.
Exploring how archival recordings, projected translations, and vocal demonstrations intersect, the project reflects on the ethical and affective dimensions of reviving historical song. In situating Eskenazi within broader debates on diaspora, media, and minoritarian memory (Hirschon 1989; Shryock 2004; Manuel 2015), I foreground the enduring resonance of her music and its capacity to unsettle nationalist ownership of tradition. Eskenazi’s repertoire—still sampled from Istanbul to Melbourne—models a trans-Mediterranean sonic commons that reframes how we think about song as both cultural artifact and embodied inheritance.
Sam Reenan, Thematic Allusion and Racial Transformation in “Onaway! Awake, Beloved!”
Considering the logistical challenges of a complete staging of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s spectacular cantata trilogy Scenes from the Song of Hiawatha, op 30, it is no surprise that the tenor aria “Onaway! Awake, Beloved!” has taken on a life and reception history of its own. Stagings promoted the aria in the interwar years and during the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth, with celebrated tenors in the role of Chibiabos, “the sweetest of all singers.” Stand-alone performances accompanied Coleridge-Taylor’s spiritual arrangements and the premiere of Florence Price’s Symphony in E minor at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. And today, in contemporary published art-song anthologies, the aria has transformed into a principal means of transmission of Coleridge-Taylor’s most acclaimed composition. Yet, extracting “Onaway! Awake, Beloved!” from its original context erases an essential critical frame. The aria, which appears in the second half of the first cantata, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, recasts numerous thematic ideas from earlier in the work, creating long-range linkages that shape an interpretation of the song’s text-music dynamic. Resurrecting these thematic allusions can offer new interpretive perspectives on the “song of love and longing” that the aria purports to represent. Moreover, the original cantata’s adaptation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s text, which cobbles together characters and stories from disparate Indigenous sources, situates the aria against a complex racial and sovereign backdrop. This presentation considers how “Onaway! Awake, Beloved!” has come to represent a work of African-American musical heritage through its cultural uptake in Black performance spaces. With the context of its African-American reception in mind, I re-examine the musical linkages across Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast in order to conceptualize the work of the song as a transformation of Indigenous myth into African-American lived experience.
Recital, Louise Toppin and John O’Brien (7:30pm)
Sunday, January 18
Session 6 (10:00am–12:00pm)
Douglas Boyce, Setting, and Framing: Views from a Compositional Praxis
The conventional notion of musical “settings” of text proffers a binary logic between music and text. This can take multiple forms: the music amplifies textual meaning, or text anchors music’s vocal explorations; the result (generative or interpretive) pulls between these two poles. Scholarship has enriched this territory greatly, from Lawrence Kramer’s “songfulness” capturing “a fusion of vocal and musical utterance judged to be both pleasurable and suitable independent of verbal content”, where singing renders verbal content superfluous, or Dunsby’s engagement with Rushton’s “transvocality” in music from Brahms, Berberian, Schubert, and Kurtág, and the semiotic considerations of text and music in Agawu and Cumming.
While this scholarship is powerful, this paper brings a maker’s perspective, exploring compositional techniques as strategies for action across an expanding domain of possible cogent mapping of text, voice, instrumentality, and form, from traditional ‘setting’ to detached ‘framing’ of spoken utterance to the abstracting ekphrasis of reference and invocation. I’ll present four compositions involving text-music relationships: My *A Book of Songs* sets three American poets: Jorie Graham, B.J. Ward, and Wallace Stevens, and their exploration of human finitude and love. *Scriptorium* sets four Melissa Range poems about mortality and faith, using modernist counterpoint that evokes medieval practices and theological concepts. *Ars Poetica*, created with poet Marlanda Dekine, frames rather than sets text, blending Gullah-Geechee heritage with Western art. Finally, *Sails Knife-bright in a Seasonal Wind* traces the imagery of Derek Mahon’s *Achill* through dream-like, atomistic instrumentality. Each represents different strategies for mapping relationships between text, voice, instrumentality, and form.
As these instances are explored, the text/music relationship will be articulated as a notable form of generative hermeneutics—a cycle of interpretation where the range of setting, framing, and ekphrasis are presented not as distinct processes of technics, but rather as differentiated yet coextensive processes where a work’s relationship to text and its internal “songfulness” unfolds through distinct features of affect, technicity, and imagistic articulation of poetic themes, emerging from the creative tension between vocal utterance and semantic specificity.
Laura Loge with Steven Luksan, piano, An Introduction to the Golden Age of Norwegian Art Song
Edvard Grieg put Norway on the musical high-art cultural map in Europe and the western world through the last half of the 19th century. Music from his Incidental Music for Peer Gynt continues to be ubiquitous throughout our culture. However, he was merely one of many accomplished composers to come out of Norway during the “Golden Age” of Norwegian music and art. Many followed him, or were relegated to live his shadow, but still produced an impressive quantity and quality of art songs. Unfortunately, because Norwegian is not part of the typical singer’s music education, these songs remain largely out of reach for most singers outside of Scandinavia.
For this short lecture recital, I will offer brief introductions to a small selection of Norwegian composers from the 19th and early 20th centuries. To accompany this information, musical examples highlighting their contributions and differing styles will be offered, as well as discussion of what can be described as the unique “Norwegian sound.” Composers who will be introduced include Edvard Grieg, Agatha Backer Grøndahl, Christian Sinding, and Alf Hurum. A short song for each composer will be performed live, as circumstances allow. Alternately, recorded selections will be played.
Finally, guidance will be offered about available resources for singers to approach this repertoire – from finding scores and recordings, to finding support in learning to sing in Norwegian. A Guide to Norwegian Pronunciation and and extensive list of additional composers to explore will be provided for each in attendance.
Li Shuyi, Singing Through Images: Performer-Created Visual Art as Analytical and Expressive Tool in Art Song Interpretation
This presentation explores how performer-generated visual art can serve as both an interpretive tool and an expressive extension of vocal performance. Drawing on a recent recital I curated and performed—featuring art songs paired with my own original paintings—I examine how the process of translating music and poetry into visual form can deepen a singer’s engagement with repertoire and enrich the audience’s experience.
Each painting was created in response to a specific song and emerged through a highly integrative process: close reading of the poetic text, analysis of the musical structure, emotional reflection, and embodied rehearsal. This artistic translation led to a series of visual works that do not simply accompany the music but function as interpretive counterparts—what I consider a form of “visual hermeneutics.” Engaging with the music visually revealed unexpected formal and emotional relationships, helping me clarify choices in phrasing, vocal color, and dramatic pacing. For instance, decisions about color, texture, and spatial composition in the paintings often paralleled dynamics, harmonic motion, and shifts in poetic voice within the song.
In this lecture-demonstration, I will focus on several selected songs from the recital, presenting their corresponding paintings, excerpts from the performances (live or recorded), and reflections on how creating visual art shaped my interpretive decisions. I will also consider how these images offered the audience a parallel entry point into the music, creating a multisensory experience that supported deeper engagement with each piece.
By integrating performance and visual creation, this project challenges the conventional separation between analysis and expression. It suggests that singers can act not only as interpreters, but as creators of meaning across disciplines—developing personalized methods for exploring and communicating the inner life of song. This approach may offer new possibilities for vocalists seeking to enrich their understanding of repertoire and invite audiences into a more intimate and imaginative relationship with art song.
Lisa Neher, mezzo-soprano and Dianne Davies, pianist: “Paradigm Shift” Lecture Recital
Paradigm Shift is a lecture recital of art songs written and performed by a duo of women composer-performers about earth’s animal and plant life and humanity’s role and responsibility to protect our planet. Through this music, we explore environmentalism, the lives of animals and ecosystems, and the climate crisis from our perspectives as modern women.
Natural imagery has been a staple of art song for hundreds of years, but has primarily been used as a mirror or metaphor for human experiences from a man’s point of view. In Debussy’s Ariettes oubliées (Forgotten songs), natural imagery is used as metaphors for human sexuality. In Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller-Maid), the brook is anthropomorphized as a confidant, friend, and ultimately the method of suicide (drowning) for the male protagonist. While Schubert’s piano writing includes text painting illustrating the sounds of water flowing in the brook, the brook is only important in relation to the protagonist’s experiences. As contemporary composers, we aim to explore nature and the climate crisis on its own terms, considering animals and ecosystems as living entities with interesting experiences of their own, not purely as metaphors for the human experience. Musical imagery in our work portrays the circumstances and habitats of the animals themselves, and is intended to prompt audiences to consider humanity’s impact on our fellow creatures, versus using the animals and habitats as metaphors for human emotions and behaviors.
In our presentation, we will discuss how our lives as women with a diverse range of interests and concerns guides the music we write and perform, and how we translate those ideas into the musical motives, textures, forms, and text setting you will hear in the songs. We will discuss our interpretive choices as performers and how they are informed by our close relationship to the subject matter. Through this work, we advocate for art song as a relevant, modern, living genre that can reflect the lives and concerns of people living today. As a genre historically dominated by male composers and poets, we are particularly passionate about building repertoire from a woman’s perspective.
Program: “We Want to Hope” from No One Saves the Earth from Us But Us
“Echolocation” from Love in a Time of Climate Change
Rainforest Animals Suite #1
The Spix Macaw
The Poison Dart Frog
The Jaguar
Cascade Song Festival * January 15-18, 2026 