Pulse Persephone was composed by the electronic music pioneer, Daphne Oram (1925-2003), who had co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Studio just four years earlier. The analysis presented here is a work in-progress towards a chapter I am writing for Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers, vol. 4 (forthcoming).

Commissioned for a historic exhibition of Commonwealth arts at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, this four-minute piece combines musique concrète recordings of traditional instruments from British Commonwealth nations with electronically-generated tones to produce music appropriate for this international event, which staged cultural difference in an era when many of these countries were gaining independence from British rule. The “Treasures from the Commonwealth” exhibit, opening in September 1965, marked the first time that art works from some of these nations had been featured in a British art gallery, and correspondingly, Pulse Persephone is now recognized as the first electronic composition to incorporate traditional instruments from non-Western cultures. While both the auspicious origins of this composition and the historic importance of its composer certainly justify further research, this presentation will offer an analysis of the piece to focus more on key aesthetic ideas that distinguish Oram’s work as a composer of electronic music.

“Au pied de mon lit,” the fifth song from Lili Boulanger’s Clairières dans le ciel, is fewer than forty measures long, yet in that span it uses six distinct piano textures. Some of those textures underline shifts from one formal section to another; others happen in the middle of a section, or even the middle of a phrase. The changing accompanimental patterns, in other words, create their own form—a textural form that at times aligns with the form created by harmony and melody, but more often conflicts with it. Texture, traditionally considered a “secondary” musical parameter, has typically been seen as less essential than the “primary” parameters of melody, harmony, and rhythm; Camilla Cai, in an article about texture in Felix Mendelssohn’s and Fanny Hensel’s piano music, argues that texture has been devalued in part because it has been feminized, viewed as merely sensuous, decorative, and auxiliary. A song like “Au pied de mon lit,” however, shows that this “secondary” parameter can be of primary importance. Drawing upon recent studies of texture by Jonathan De Souza and Johanna Frymoyer, I present a methodology for exploring the interaction of textural form and harmonic-melodic form, as well as poetic form, using Boulanger’s cycle as a case study. Looking at her songs from this perspective—and treating texture as a driving force in her music, not just a surface feature—reveals how she ingeniously juxtaposes, blends, and transforms textures to create dynamic musical shapes. Moreover, it invites us to expand our conception of “form” in general; a single piece, I suggest, is not in a single form but in many forms at once, the number of forms dependent upon the number of parameters we attend to, the degree of correspondence or conflict among them, and the elements that captivate us most.

When we think of hearing culture in music, we tend to think of features that are unique to a cultural repertoire. Many of these features are present in folk or traditional musics, like Aksak rhythms in Turkish music, the mariachi in Mexican music, the angklung in Malay music, ragas in Indian music, or the erhu in Chinese music. In global popular music, however, these signifiers of cultural identity are sometimes missing. When the structural elements of a song resemble Western classical or popular music, such as being in a major/minor key, having progressions that are functional or idiomatic to genres like rock, or a rhythmic delivery clearly influenced by hiphop, we look for cultural distinction in the song’s non-English lyrics. But translating and interpreting lyrics requires expertise that not many have.

To make cross-cultural engagement more accessible, I propose that we hear cultural identity by listening closely to, and comparing, vocal delivery across songs. As a case study, I invite participants to listen to songs by the Taiwanese singer, Teresa Teng, across languages/dialects like Japanese, Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese, Indonesian, and English. I hope to show that Teng’s vocal delivery is different in different languages. While some difference is attributable to lyric meaning or assonance, I suggest that there are differences that respond to cultural expectations of her audiences in Asia.

Pre-listening: https://tinyurl.com/4d88htkr