Doctoral Colloquium (Music): Fabrice Marandola, Claire McLeish (McGill)

The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.

Students (Music) for whom attenance is required must sign the attendance sheet at the colloquium.

 

Is the Notation of Gesture Context-Dependent?

Fabrice Marandola

The development of motion capture technologies and the expansion of new designs for Digital Music Interfaces create a need for new ways to represent the interaction between a sound and the gesture(s) from which it originates. During the past decades the use of electronic devices introduced a new paradigm of gestures that questions the usual relationship between the musician gestures and the resulting sound, leading to a reflection on the categorization of different types of sound producing gestures. Using such categorization as a sounding board, as well as examples from previous research on percussion gesture analysis, transcription of ethnomusicological material and the interpretation of many musical works (with or without electronic devices), I will aim to contribute to a better understanding of the parameters governing the complex network of relationships between context, notation, capture and gesture.

 

Fabrice Marandola holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Paris IV-Sorbonne and has conducted in-depth field-research in Cameroon. In 2015-16, Marandola was Senior Research Chair at Sorbonne-Universités to lead a multidisciplinary research project on musical gesture. Marandola is currently an Associate Professor of Percussion and Contemporary Music at the Schulich School of Music and has an active career on the Canadian New Music scene. He is a member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology of Montreal (CIRMMT) of which he was Associate Director/Artistic Research from 2009-2014.

“All Samples Cleared!”:

Hip-Hop Sampling Aesthetics and the Legacy of Grand Upright v. Warner

Claire McLeish

In 1991, Gilbert O’Sullivan sued Biz Markie for sampling his song “Alone Again (Naturally)” in Markie’s rap, “Alone Again.” This case, Grand Upright v. Warner, is often framed as a symbolic end to hip-hop’s golden age. I use the lawsuit as a point of entry into debates about hip-hop during a time of aesthetic transformation. Specifically, I present a corpus study spanning 1988 to 1993, consisting of hip-hop songs of various subgenres drawn from Billboard charts. Unlike previous studies on this period, I consider both canonical artists (such as Public Enemy and De La Soul) and commercially successful, mainstream artists (like MC Hammer and Sir Mix-A-Lot). My study reveals a decrease in the average number of samples per song and a radical shift in how these samples are used. I situate my claims within the discourse of hip-hop historiography, as well as the intersections of legal institutions and musical aesthetics.

Claire McLeish is a doctoral candidate in the Musicology program at McGill University; her dissertation research examines digital sampling and golden age hip-hop. McLeish works as a course lecturer, teaching “Popular Music After 1945” and “Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture.” Her paper “‘All Samples Cleared!’” received an honorable mention for the Peter Narvaez Essay Prize at IASPM 2019.