Many scholars have recently shown a keen interest in analyzing music created by Black women, yet Dorothy Rudd Moore’s (1940-2022) music is understudied, evidenced both by the lack of published scholarship and professional recordings of her music. Weary Blues (1972)—a single-movement chamber piece for baritone voice, cello, and piano—adapts Langston Hughes’ 1925 poem “The Weary Blues.” My analysis suggests that Moore refuses Eurocentric analytic approaches to theories of tonality by employing a music vernacular that blurs the distinction between classical and jazz compositional styles. This liminal space between classical and jazz idioms becomes easier to understand when viewed through the lens of Black literary theories of migration narrative (Griffin 1995) and worrying the line (Wall 2005).

This paper weaves together music analyses with theories of Black literature to demonstrate how interdisciplinary dialogue furthers both the field of music theory and literary studies. For example, Moore does not use any exact repetitions within the piece, which presents a unique analytic frustration. However, when viewed through Wall’s legacy, Moore’s modified repetitions within Weary Blues present themselves as instances of a longstanding Black artistic tradition of worrying the line, which occurs when singers and writers slightly alter repeated lines of text to emphasize, clarify, or subvert its original meaning. This often happens within blues poetry to represent the improvisational nature of blues music in a written form (Wall 2005). By “the line,” I refer not to the text of the poem, but specifically to the motives, scales, and harmonies used within the composition. I then expand upon Griffin’s work on migration narratives, which explores changes that literary figures undergo during northward migration post emancipation. I introduce a concept called migration tonality to address Moore’s adaptation of a type of pitch centricity rather than a strictly tonal or atonal vernacular within the piece. This delightful tonal language demonstrates how Moore further worries the lineage of (a)tonal compositions. Ultimately, I demonstrate that incorporations of interdisciplinary theories greatly enhance the types of music available for analysis, and that the field of music theory can increase the richness of extant theories outside of the field.

This presentation explores the impact of Elizabeth Cotten’s left-handed guitar technique on chord voicings, motive, and texture in her music. Cotten played a right-handed guitar upside down, picking with her left hand and fretting with her right hand. Cotten developed a unique style of playing based on the reversed relationship between her hands and the order of the strings on the guitar, which required her to reconfigure the chord fingerings and strumming and picking patterns she used. I show that Cotten prioritizes ergonomic principles in her approach to fretting, reconfiguring chord voicings to allow her right wrist to maintain a more neutral wrist position and transposing hand shapes around the fretboard to facilitate minimal movement at the level of the individual finger. This prioritization of ergonomics facilitates characteristic melodic figures that are recognizable throughout her work. I also demonstrate examples of novel textural patterns in Cotten’s work that are facilitated by her inverted picking technique. I analyze how Cotten's fretting and picking techniques dynamically interact to create motives and textures in her song “Washington Blues.” I demonstrate specific ways that Cotten’s music-making relies on active negotiations between her physical capabilities and limitations, as well as more abstract musical concerns such as rhythm, melody, and phrasing. By focusing on the embodied experience of composing with an instrument, this project contributes to the growing corpus of analytic work that emphasizes music as a dynamic, embodied performance.