Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination

A book review is presented for Braxton D. Shelley\u27s Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)

In and Around Music Theory and the Academy: A Perspective

This article is part of a special forum titled “Ethnic Diversity in Music Theory: Voices from the Field.” In a narrative style, it presents the perspective of a mid-career music theorist who identifies himself as African American. While this perspective uses personal anecdotes, childhood memories, and a little humor to frame the narrative, issues of diversity, marginality, and race are at the center of the discussion. Also presented are directed calls for the Society for Music Theory to make even greater strides toward engaging teachers and students from HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and other institutions that primarily serve people of color. Such engagements would diversify the ranks of our membership and graduate student populations, as ethnically diverse perspectives might compliment our historical, analytical, and critical discourses

Say What? Topics, Signs, and Signification in African-American Music.

Expressivity lies at the heart of the African-American musical experience. The cultural history of African-Americans is reflected in oral and written musical traditions. Social, religious, and other aspects of the culture are readily recognized in expressive devices unique to African-American music. The purpose of this study is to illustrate how the distinctive elements and musical traditions of African-Americans provide essential insights for detailed analyses of expression in African-American music. The works of two Black scholars, Samuel A. Floyd and V. Kofi Agawu, are central to this study. Floyd\u27s The Power of Black Music is important because it identifies the social and cultural climates within which African-American musical traditions evolved and locates the authentic tropes of the core culture. In Playing With Signs, Agawu expands the semiotic theory of topics (a theory used to read expressive and referential signs) and formulates a union of musical expression and formal design. By combining aspects of Floyd\u27s and Agawu\u27s aims and approaches, this study seeks richer interpretations of the expressive power of selected works by African-American composers. The aim of the present study is to adapt Agawu\u27s theory of topics to the study of expression in music of African-American composers. In conjunction with conventional analytical methods, this study identifies and traces the following topics which reflect musical and cultural traditions of African-Americans: (1) Call and response, (2) Signifyin(g), (3) Spiritual/supernatural, (4) Blues, and (5) Jazz. The core of this study features analyses of works by William Grant Still, Charles Mingus, David Baker and Hale Smith. In each of the analyses, one or more of the aforementioned topics contributes notably to a distinctly African-American expressive profile. Therefore, this study investigates the strong correlation between cultural experience and expressivity in African-American music, and contributes to the limited number of analyses of concert music by African-American composers