[Saturday @ 1:45pm – 2:45pm, Room 6]
Rachel Hottle
“Joni Mitchell, the Guitar/Body Interface, and Musical Composition as Life Writing”
Abstract
In normative Western musical encounters between a body and an instrument, the body learns to interact with the physical interface of the instrument as given. When the body in question is disabled and cannot interact with the normative instrumental interface, this relationship can shift, more evenly distributing accommodation between the two parties. Joni Mitchell’s musical career richly illustrates this reconfigured relationship between body and instrument. Mitchell contracted polio as a child, which weakened her left hand. According to Mitchell herself, this disability spurred her to alter the interface of the guitar, creating a system of over fifty different tunings and innumerable hand shapes which facilitate the harmonic and timbral languages that are a strikingly original facet of her work.
I argue that Mitchell’s musicking expands the concept of disability life writing to include musical composition and performance as ways of knowing and communicating one’s lived experience of the body. The knowledge contained within the guitar as epistemic thing changes as each tuning unlocks a new array of sonic possibilities. Through this lens, the guitar becomes a creative collaborator in the life writing process, an actant in an ethical relationship with Mitchell as composer and performer. The resulting music can thus be interpreted as an audible and affective trace of the particularities of this relationship between two bodies.
I demonstrate some of the particular audible traces of this relationship through an analysis of Mitchell’s song “For the Roses” (1972). In this song, the guitar is tuned to an open major chord, a category of tuning used on over half of Mitchell’s songs for guitar. The unique voicing used on this song—the guitar’s strings are tuned to G–G (an octave above)–D–G–B–D—affords particular sonic possibilities, including unique chord voicings and spacings, distinctive timbres, and complex sonorities that push the boundaries of tonality.
Music theoretical research has historically privileged formalist approaches that interpret music as a static text. By focusing on the embodied experience of composing with an instrument, this project contributes to the growing corpus of work that emphasizes music as a dynamic, living cultural performance.
Biography
Rachel Hottle is a PhD candidate in music theory and gender and women’s studies at McGill University in Montreal. Her research interests include embodiment, ontologies and epistemologies of music theory, timbre, and critical pedagogy. She holds an M.A. in music theory from McGill University and a B.A. in music and biology from Swarthmore College. Her master’s thesis examines the interactions of form and narrative in the music of American singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom. Rachel has presented her work at several regional chapters of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, as well as the annual meeting of the SMT. She is currently working on her dissertation, which investigates the relationships between bodies and instruments through the lenses of disability studies and phenomenology.
Stephanie Probst
“From Blind Writing to Hyper-Visuality: Intersections between Music, Dis/Ability, and Tactile Interfaces in (Musical) Typewriters”
Abstract
As Friedrich Kittler prominently relates (1986, e.g. 278, 281), early technological developments towards the typewriter were intricately linked with aspirations of facilitating writing and reading for the blind. Pioneering figures include blind pianist Maria Theresia Paradis and inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, or the collaboration between the blind friends Louis Braille and Pierre-François Foucault. Another crucial reference for the design of typewriters famously comes from music, specifically the keyboard as a haptic interface that should afford an easy transition for the hands of (female) amateur pianists (Kittler 1986, Dolan 2012). Triangulating these origin narratives and revisiting various inventions from across the 19th and 20th centuries, this talk zooms in on the intersections between typewriter design and the sensory conditions of blindness, visuality, and tactility on the one hand, and aurality and musical skill and application on the other. Beyond highlighting dependencies and influences, I seek to disentangle different strands of desires and technological and notational affordances.
Thus, exploration of the abilities and needs of blind writers and suitability of different interfaces at once informed a more general understanding of physiological and cognitive conditions in the interaction with new technology and ultimately led to engineering enhancements. But when considering the desire to make the typed artefact legible to blind and sighted readers alike, technological solutions soon diverge. The case becomes more intricate still in the context of rendering music notation. As music was recognized as a suitable activity for the blind from the beginning of their institutionalized education, approaches to provide study materials and scores accompany first steps towards assisted linguistic writing and reading. But unlike models for textual typing, the operation of the few typewriters developed for setting music relies heavily on visual control and thereby precludes blind people from their use. Devices for blind music notation meanwhile accommodate an entirely different format of musical representation. Comparing these writing interfaces and the sensory engagement that they afford thereby provides a critical assessment of visuality in music notation and points towards more accessible alternatives.
Biography
Stephanie’s PhD-dissertation (Harvard University, 2018) investigated intersections between music theory, psychology, and the visual arts in theories of melody in 1920s Germany. Her current book project examines tactile interfaces for musical writing and reading in notational devices for blind musicians, musical typewriters, melographs, and music rolls for player pianos.
Stephanie has served as co-organizer and blog-editor for the SMT interest group for the History of Music Theory. Recent articles appeared in the Journal of Musicology, SMT-V, and Music Theory Online, and in 2021 she co-edited a themed issue on “Visual Music” for the online journal Kunsttexte.de.