AMS/SMT Conference Paper Run-Throughs
Jacob Reed, “K-pop’s Western Sound and Korean Musical Agency”
Audrey Slote, “Democratized Form: Collage and Cohesion in the Music of Bon Iver”
Aimee Gonzalez, “Real y maravillosa: Reviving Colonial Music in Post-Soviet Havana”
Wednesday, 30 October 4:30-6:00 pm, Logan 801
Abstracts:
Jacob Reed, “K-pop’s Western Sound and Korean Musical Agency”
Recent incidents of purported plagiarism have brought to the fore a longstanding issue in the reception of K-pop: its image as a copycat industry of “derivative” songs that “sound Western” (Seabrook 2012/2015). Given the typical focus of Anglophone journalists and scholars (e.g. Anderson 2020, Oh 2023) on American K-pop reception, these borrowings have often been construed as a bid for U.S. popularity. While this may be true for some groups, I argue in this paper that a more comprehensive understanding of K-pop’s musical debts can be garnered by recentering its domestic and regional agents and contexts. To this end, I focus on some of K-pop’s most blatant “copycats”: songs that overtly recompose and interpolate Western models. Rather than simply targeting Western audiences, these direct borrowings can be understood in multiple other ways: as “culturally odorless” (Iwabuchi 1998) products for regional (East Asian) export, or as acts of homage and/or creative subversion akin to borrowing in Western hip-hop (Schloss 2004; Williams 2013).
To establish the dissociation between such borrowings and U.S.-oriented marketing, I first examine two “Western soundalikes” that received almost no global promotion: Dalshabet’s “Big Big Baby” (2014; rewrites the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams”) and FIESTAR’s “Sea of Moonlight” (2012; rewrites A-ha’s “Take On Me”). The latter (American member Cheska notwithstanding) made China their major international market, highlighting how “Western borrowings” can be mobilized to regional (not global) ends. I then explore acts of creative homage via musical borrowings, via songs that use paratexts to flaunt their musical borrowings from The Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive”: BIGBANG’s “Alive” (2012) and T-ARA’s “Roly-Poly” (2011).
To conclude, I analyze a different kind of borrowing, in which K-pop producers showcase their creativity by reworking Western Classical models. Thus, SNSD’s “Into the New World” (2007) forms a kind of riddle by sneaking in pitch content from the New World Symphony. Meanwhile, Red Velvet’s “Feel My Rhythm” (2022), shows off creativity in how it chops and flips Bach’s “Air on the G String.” Finally, GFRIEND’s “Summer Rain” (2017) exhibits its songwriters’ ingenuity by inverting the harmonic logic of the interpolated song (Robert Schumann’s “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai”).
Audrey Slote, “Democratized Form: Collage and Cohesion in the Music of Bon Iver”
What happens when folk music—a genre known for its constructions of authenticity—collides with collage, a compositional strategy whose hybridity destabilizes such constructions? This collision characterizes recent albums by indie-folk collective Bon Iver. The borrowed sonic materials of Bon Iver’s collages both distance the newer music from the band’s old style and coalesce into musical structures that are at once wholly coherent and richly intertextual. While collage has been extensively studied in twentieth-century art music (Burkholder 1995, Losada 2009) and in relation to explicitly intertextual popular music forms like mashups (Boone 2013), relatively little music-theoretical attention has been paid to it in other popular musics. This paper examines the multiple affordances of collage in Bon Iver’s 2016 album, 22, A Million. Centering the album’s fourth track, “33 GOD,” as a case study, I analyze how samples and quotations simultaneously underscore its formal trajectory and gesture toward a web of interrelated narrative and harmonic contexts.
In the first part of my analysis, I trace how samples and quotations interact with original material to form a coherent narrative and harmonic shape. Adapting Catherine Losada’s concept of harmonic saturation (Losada, 2009), I first examine how layers of borrowed material complement harmonic and semantic content present in Bon Iver’s newly composed music. I then zero in on the meaningful interactions in the song’s first section between sung verses and samples from Jim Ed Brown’s 1971 country hit, “Morning.” Finally, I consider borrowed materials in “33 GOD” in relation to their original contexts, analyzing how they radiate outward toward related harmonic areas and texts. Drawing upon Christine Boone’s definition of the paint palette mashup, I argue that the obscurity of the references invites the tracing of materials back to their sources—a challenge taken up in internet spaces like YouTube and
Genius.com. “33 GOD” therefore both models a kind of intersubjectivity
and becomes a site for collaborative encounter. This democratized aspect of Bon Iver’s music takes on an additional layer of meaning vis-à-vis frontman Justin Vernon’s pro-democracy activism. The new aesthetic signals a shift from solitary singer-songwriter to relational network.
Aimee Gonzalez, “Real y maravillosa: Reviving Colonial Music in Post-Soviet Havana”
This paper examines the role of colonial music and architecture in articulating Cuban cultural heritage in the wake of the economic and ideological crisis known as the Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Using Laura Doyle’s framework of inter-imperiality, I argue that Havana’s ongoing revival of colonial Catholic sacred music that emerged in the 1990s sonically reinscribes reconstructed cultural heritage onto the restored colonial spaces of Havana. As such, my paper demonstrates how this musical revival is intrinsically tied to the revitalization of the previously neglected colonial Historic Center of Old Havana in the wake of new touristic and religious opportunities since the 1990s carried out by the institution of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana. Focusing on the historiography of Cuban chapel master Esteban Salas (1725–1803) and the resonances of cultural theories by writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) within Havana’s contemporary revival of colonial music, I demonstrate how writings about—and performances of—colonial music have supported a cultural politics that reclaims and reimagines the colonial past from the perspective of the postcolonial present. This imaginative, presentist perspective conveys two ideas: cultural and racial mixing as inherent in Cuban identity, and a sense of agency for contemporary Cuba in infusing hegemonic Spanish and European culture with subaltern cultural practices. Building on work by music scholars such as Marysol Quevedo and Susan Thomas who illuminate the richly textured relationships among art music, cultural institutions, race, and class in twentieth-century Cuba, I argue that the revival of colonial music is a means through which the fraught colonial past is enrolled in the needs of the post-colonial, post-Revolutionary, post-Soviet present to foster local identity in place and project a sense of belonging at a time of profound change and uncertainty. More broadly, I suggest how an inter-imperial analysis can help unpack the complexities of the borders between the past and the present to understand how empires and post-empires co-form musical economies and cultural institutions in contemporary Cuba.
