Opening Song Research Articles

Blues Poetics and Blues Politics in Walter Mosley's "RL's Dream"

In September 1998 the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's American Music Master Series held a tribute for blues legend Robert Hellhounds on My Trail a film by Robert Mugge documenting the event, out the next year and features a mixture of academic workshops and performances by various artists from Johnson's famed repertoire. The film beautifully alternates snippets from lectures, discussions, and interviews with complete concert pieces, most of which take place in Cleveland's grand, I. M. Pei-designed building. About halfway into the film, we see Steve LaVere, the agent of Johnson's estate, announce during one of the sessions that a short piece of film found some months before might be featuring The piece, projected during the session, displays a street scene, with a young, smiling, seemingly assertive black man planted in front of the camera and playing his guitar, with long fingers and an apparent virtuosity that are eerily reminiscent of the king of the Delta blues. Presenters then wonder aloud, and ask around for the audience's opinion, with Robert Lockwood, Jr., well-known as Johnson's stepson and a brilliant bluesman in his own right, leading the consensus that this is not It is finally established that the person playing the guitar in the film cannot be Robert Johnson because a Delta Theater poster visible behind him places the scene in January 1942, four years after Johnson's death. As a conclusion, this segment of the documentary ends with a presenter quoting Lockwood's words from the previous evening: don't care how many times you look at this film--it ain't never gonna be Robert Johnson. Lockwood catches us red-handed. Even I, watcher of the documentary and thus several times removed from the hypnotizing figure playing his guitar in the sunshine, have been straining my eyes to recognize in the long face, the somewhat dreamy gaze, the posture, the fast-moving, spidery fingers, traces of the man I know mostly from the famous photograph of him, in which he sits high, holding his Gibson as if were a part of him, elegant, enticing yet impenetrable. With his comment Lockwood ironically conjures up the mythologies that surround Johnson: his Faustian pact with the devil at a crossroads somewhere in the Mississippi Delta, the mysterious circumstances of his death, the disturbingly prophetic lyrics, and from there his potential ability to materialize on a screen if we just look hard enough. In the documentary's opening song, Bill Morrissey sings about the legendary bluesman whose sound came from a hole where a soul once had been, and in whose eyes it was there to see he had crossed the other side. During a panel on the impact of the blues on popular music, five white men aligned behind a table offer wise reflections on Robert Johnson as a myth, as a mysterious, even cartoonish figure who has been endlessly romanticized. Ultimately, though, is Lockwood who performs the work of demystification, bringing Johnson down to size, and us down to earth. The cultural fate of Robert Johnson is symptomatic of the contemporary climate surrounding the blues. In a perceptive discussion Daniel Lieberfeld focuses on the House of Blues phenomenon to expose how, once again, an African American cultural product has been appropriated and exoticized for the thrill of white audiences. The plaster reliefs of great blues figures on the ceiling of the House of Blues in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he points out, form a frieze that symbolically 'friezes' the blues in time, presenting a decontextualized and, indeed, whitened image of the famous bluesmen. Similarly, in his book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, George Lipsitz explains how the mythmaking machinery has turned Robert Johnson into a lonely, romantic figure precisely by detaching him from his socio-economic circumstances, transforming him into an individual artist who produced his art almost magically and without an eye to commercial considerations. …

Mathis Lussy's "Traité de l'expression musicale" as a Window into Performance Practice

In his Traite de l'expression musicale of 1874, Mathis Lussy proposes that musical expression is implicit in the musical surface and therefore that sensitive performers respond to the same surface in the same manner. Through an analysis of the opening song of Schumann's Frauenliebe und -leben based on Lussy's theory, this paper explores Lussy's proposition. Following the analysis, twelve recordings of this song made over the past 45 years are compared. Lussy's proposition is correct with respect to variations of tempo. However, this same comparison reveals that two very different interpretive models of this song exist when one considers how these variations of tempo aid in the projection of the formal structure. There would appear to be a correlation between a poetic model and recordings from the 1940s and 1950s, and between a prosaic model and recordings from the 1970s. 45[L]es artistes manifestent des expressions identiques sans autres differences que celles qui resultent de leur delicatesse de sentiment, de leur virtuosite plus ou moins grande (Lussy, Traitd, 1-2). expressiv response to a particular ev nt. Whether a perrmer slows minutely or excessively to an even is of critical portance to how a performance integrat s local details with eir role in shaping the larger musi al structure. To my seni ility, it i ssen ial at the comm response to individual ents be carefully c ntrolled so that the structure is clearly ticulated. This is suggested b Lussy's appeal that an exe siv eb e balanced by a proportionate xpressive flow. e interpretative model presented by Schumann and Miller dicate that there may be more than one wa whereby this alance i successfully accomplished. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.25 on Mon, 12 Sep 2016 04:33:42 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms