Professional Presentations

"What the [Ear] Arranges: Broadway Tonality in Sunday in the Park with George"

Telephone Hour: A Quarantine Colloquium • Monday, February 8, 2021

A case study in how the creative process of musical theatre-making affects the relationship between harmonic function and key: first in a single measure, then throughout a song, and finally across an entire arc of musical numbers.

The image below is from the first song in the score of Sunday. The apparent key is F-Sharp Minor; the apparent key signature is E Major. In this presentation I discuss why this apparent misalignment exists; how it may have happened; and what it means musically and dramatically for similar moments in the rest of the show.

 

 

"Torch Song Ternaries: Broadway Medleys as Reinterpretation"

Society for Music Theory • November 8, 2020

https://vimeo.com/nbblu/smt2020

Music-analytical studies of songs from book musicals are generally work-centric. Such approaches prioritize musical meaning and interpretation through the dramatic context of a libretto, paralleling the critical valuation of the “integrated” musical. But musical theatre entertainment is considerably more varied than sitting down in a theatre for a live performance of a dramatic work. And for a canon that upholds stereotypes as much as it subverts them, performances that surpass the bounds established by mid-twentieth-century texts offer sites of potent and imaginative reengagement.

In this paper I examine one such category of performances, using Audra McDonald's "Children Will Listen/You've Got to be Carefully Taught" as a case study. McDonald's medley turns Stephen Sondheim’s equivocal, pleading lullaby from *Into the Woods* on its head by switching back and forth with a serene, mid-register rendition of Lieutenant Cable's outburst against the perniciousness of racism while on active duty in Rodgers and Hammerstein's *South Pacific.* A close reading of musical form shows how these two songs haunt each other, reframing an explicitly instructive lyric with particularized immediacy.

McDonald's performance is part of a broader practice of subverting expectations of song types like torch songs—“freighted with gender and sex-coded meanings” (Hubbs 1996)—through juxtaposition, alternating two affectively opposed songs into a newly constructed ternary form. These performances most often happen in cabarets, recitals, and concerts—beyond the Broadway stage, where play with musical form is much more rigidly codified—providing a liberating space to confront theatrical stereotypes and animate intersectional subtexts.