Students Audrey Slote, Dana DeVlieger, and Mikkel Vad Present at Society for American Music Conference

Audrey Slote (MA, music theory, advisee of Matthew Bribitzer-Stull), Dana DeVlieger (PhD, music theory, advisee of Sumanth Gopinath), and Mikkel Vad (PhD, cultural studies with music minor, advisee of Sumanth Gopinath) presented at the annual Society for American Music Conference in New Orleans, LA from March 20-24, 2019.

Abstracts

Whose Resistance?: Protest, Abstraction, and Whiteness in POLIÇA’s “How Is This Happening”
Audrey Slote, University of Minnesota
In November 2017, Minneapolis-based electro-pop band POLIÇA released the single “How Is This Happening” in response to the election of Donald Trump. The band framed their February 2018 show in Minneapolis—which featured the single—with the goal “to destroy white supremacy.” In this presentation, I first examine how the song reflects political resistance through texture, timbre, and repetitive structures. I then problematize the song’s message of anti-Trump resistance in relation to the purported goal. Rather than amplifying the voices of people of color, the song’s classical elements and sonic ambiguity risk leaving them out of the conversation.

Promoting Creativity? The Ambiguous Terms of Music Copyright Law
Dana DeVlieger, University of Minnesota
The American copyright system purports to promote creativity by incentivizing creators with exclusive rights to their works for a given period. In recent years, however, several music copyright cases have called into question whether the system serves to promote creativity or to limit it. One problem with copyright law is the absence of clear guidelines stipulating what “creativity,” “originality,” and “substantial similarity” mean in a legal context. This paper suggests that legal professionals, music scholars, and the creators of popular music must come to an understanding of these concepts before any other issues with music copyright law can be addressed.

“Very Female, with the Allure of a Foreign Aura”: European Voices in the U.S.
Mikkel Vad, University of Minnesota
This paper listens to the voices of female European singers and the way they were heard in the U.S. in the fifties and sixties, situating this meeting of voices and cultures within a reception history of European jazz in the U.S. that highlights the intersection of race, gender, and class, which are also tied to notions of jazz, pop, and classical music. With the singers Alice Babs and Caterina as case studies, I show how ideas of femininity, race, nation, and place were constructed through vocal performances that used tropes from classical and folk music with an emphasis on high-pitched vocal stylings, melismas, and “white” timbres.