Heather N Buffington-Anderson
Heather Buffington Anderson specializes in African American and American expressive cultures, Popular Music, Jazz, Music and Politics, and Twentieth Century Music. She received her PhD in Musicology and a Portfolio in African and African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. In her dissertation, she explores the music and activism of Oscar Brown Jr., Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, and Nina Simone, artist-activists at the margins of the Black Arts and jazz discourses, in an effort to expand connections between Black Power politics and music. She has presented at national and regional meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and Society for Ethnomusicology. Her work has appeared in American National Biography and she has a chapter forthcoming in the edited volume the Oxford Handbook on Protest Music. She is the co-author and current Faculty Coordinator of a Diversity Grant in Higher Education and Scholarship in the Humanities, from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her newest ethnographic and archival project explores Black String Band traditions in North and South Carolina.
Phone: 970-372-9634
Phone: 970-372-9634
less
InterestsView All (37)
Uploads
Papers
This paper examines the ways in which artist-activists Oscar Brown, Jr. and Nina Simone manipulate vocal timbre as a strategy of resistance within the context of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. Through analyses of Brown, Jr.’s “Rags and Old Iron,” and Simone’s “Four Women,” this paper aims to highlight how these vocalists present multiple timbres, or “voices.” In hearing these as polyvocal performances, we may understand timbre as a site for resisting and disassembling expectations of Black vocality as well as an activist strategy for reimagining Black identity.
Background information
Challenging the notion that timbre is an “unmanipulable attribute,” Nina Eidsheim’s research demonstrates that the voice can emit many timbres. Eidsheim explains that because the voice arises from inside the body, vocal sounds are commonly understood as natural expressions, which becomes a metaphor for unified subjectivity. Timbral character, Eidsheim explains is heard “according to schemas of racialized, gendered or otherwise categorized bodies in accordance with the values of the given society” (2008, 178). Her fieldwork on vocal morphology demonstrates that while is no distinction between voices of different races, and that such notions are rooted in biological essentialism, critics continue to locate Blackness in timbre as a way to name racial difference.
Evie Shockley explains that gender norms and hierarchies figured heavily in constructions of Blackness within the Black Power era. Black music was at the center of the Black Power Movement and theorizations of a Black Aesthetic. The voice and vocality were central to the aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement as poets often performed their work shifting “from casual talk to heightened speech and sometimes to musical chant,” while free jazz musicians sounded the extremes of vocal capacity evoking sounds of screams, cries, and wails (Keyes 2004, 34). However, the discourse of the music of this era often figures male instrumentalists’ sounding of the human voice – particularly John Coltrane’s scream – as not only innovative, but also as a powerful reference for many Black Arts poets and theorists. As such, vocalists are absent in discussions of radical black aesthetics and politics. Focusing on the voice, and particularly timbre, provides an opportunity to rethink radical Black politics as hypermasculine, and may bring into relief narratives of Black vocalists who were critical to developing complex and perhaps competing formulations of radical Black identities.
Methodology
Within this paper, transcriptions of recorded and live performances of “Rags and Old Iron” and “Four Women” are presented in notational and spectrographic formats and analyzed for timbral variations. These analyses are read in dialogue with a reception study of Brown, Jr.’s and Simone’s critical reception from both mainstream and Black press publications in an effort to understand the ways in which various audiences hear and interpret the vocality and identities of the performers. The musical analyses and reception studies are interpreted through Evie Shockley’s notion of polyvocality in black women’s poetry. Shockley’s theoretical framework builds upon Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s trope of “speaking in tongues,” which describes the ability black women develop to “speak in a plurality of voices as well as in a multiplicity of discourses” (Henderson 1989, 22). Speaking in tongues – which involves both speaking and hearing – allows for a simultaneity of languages and received meanings. Henderson argues that black women have developed such a heteroglossia to be heard by others simultaneously as homogenous and heterogeneous to their audiences. Shockley’s model allows for diverging polyvocal projects with varying purposes and objectives; such a framework avoids essentializing black women’s voices, and responds to the voice which changes tone, timbre, and language over time and space. My modulated approach of polyvocality is centered around vocal timbre and I suggest both Brown, Jr. and Simone present multiple multiplicity of voices in various forms that are spoken, chanted, sung, and texted. Through the lens of polyvocality, it is possible to understand how artists-activists reformulate racial and gender hierarchies within the Black Power Movement.
Results
Both Oscar Brown, Jr. and Nina Simone accesses the notion that timbre is heard and seen as a construction of identity within their performances; however, each vocalist disrupts the notion of timbre as something that is essentialized – as something fixed – by quickly donning and shedding various vocal guises. By shifting timbral attributes including articulation, diction, tone, vibrato, and register, Brown and Simone present characters in rapid succession. Both vocalists theatrically sound fragmented musical codes to reference the class, gender, race, age, or region specific of their characters. The use of sonic caricature, which is often combined with humor and irony, challenges negative racialized stereotypes. By fragmenting and reassembling these codes, Brown and Simone collapse sonic expectations of Black vocality. Consideration of the vocalists’ reception shows that while these polyvocal performances were challenging to mainstream critics – many of whom referred to Brown and Simone as artists who “defy categorization” – many Black critics and intellectuals recognized their use of timbre and genre as aesthetic strategies to reimagine Black identity and radical Black politics.
Conclusions
Timbral variation is central to both Brown and Simone in their process of reimagining Black manhood and womanhood respectively within the Black Power era. Using timbre to achieve mutability and multiplicity in the voice, Simone deconstructs four stereotypes of black women in her composition, including the Mammy, the Tragic Mulatta, Jezebel, and the Sapphire. Similarly, Brown, Jr. alternates between various vocal timbres within “Rags and Old Iron” to effectively challenge singular notions of Black masculinity within the Black Power Era. Timbral analysis and theorizations of timbre provide a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which musicians resist and protest gendered and racialized constructions of the voice.
References
Eidsheim, N. S. (2008). Voice as a Technology of Selfhood: Towards an Analysis of Racialized Timbre and Vocal Performance (Ph.D.). University of California, San Diego, United States -- California. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/docview/304655431/abstract/197368F59B8413EPQ/1
Eidsheim, N. (2016). Voice as Action: Towards a Model for Analyzing the Dynamic Construction of Racialized Voice. Current Musicology, 93(2012). Retrieved from http://currentmusicology.columbia.edu/authors/nina-eidsheim?authors=nina-eidsheim
Eidsheim, N. S. (2011). Marian Anderson and “Sonic Blackness” in American Opera. American
Quarterly, 63(3), 641–671. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2011.0045
Keyes, Cheryl Lynette. 2004. Rap Music and Street Consciousness. University of Illinois Press.
Shockley, E. (2011). Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Conference Presentations
The requirement of accessible string instruments for Claflin University students indicates a potential expansion of Black string band musicians beyond the Piedmont region and into Spartanburg and Orangeburg counties of South Carolina. Using archival research I present a history of Black string music at Claflin University within the context of Black old-time traditions in South Carolina. Within the last year, I have been working with students to transcribe and perform Black string band music. Along with the historical analysis, I also present an ethnographic study of Claflin students and their ideas on race and identity as they engage with Black string band traditions.
revival of the traditions with the recent success of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The requirement of accessible string instruments for Claflin University students indicates a potential expansion of Black string band musicians beyond the Piedmont region and into Spartanburg and Orangeburg counties of South Carolina. Using archival research I present a history of Black string music at Claflin University within the context of Black old-time traditions in South Carolina. Within the last year, I have been working with students to transcribe and perform Black string band music. Along with the historical analysis, I also present an ethnographic study of Claflin students and their ideas on race and identity as they engage with Black string band traditions.
Simone’s call and response between African American poetry and music can be situated within the context of the Black Arts Movement. Artist-activists of the Black Arts Movement often performed and created in collaboration with one another, experimenting across genres and media. This essay explores the intertextuality of Simone’s protest music, focusing on her musical setting of Langston Hughes’s poem “Backlash Blues” and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “When Malindy Sings.” Simone layers these two poems with additional material, including spoken word in “Backlash Blues,” and the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which is referenced, but not heard in Dunbar’s “When Malindy Sings.” I argue Simone’s additional lyrical and spoken word content, combined with the blurring of musical genres, functions as a strategy to place Black women’s perspectives centrally within Black Power politics.
This essay provides a gender analysis of the critical and scholarly reception of both albums in an effort to underline how constructions of gender within jazz informs discussions of each artist’s approach to challenging genre boundaries. Guthrie Ramsey and Mark Anthony Neal suggest Glasper’s album captures a post-genre moment, which can be understood as a major innovation in the jazz tradition. I argue that Spalding’s album can also be included within this frame, and suggest that her absence from this discussion can be explained by her dual role of bassist and jazz vocalist. Vocal jazz is not only gendered feminine, but also commercial, and artificial, which limits Spalding’s role to vocal interpreter rather than innovator. Additionally, I suggest that both Glasper and Spalding are in dialogue with many women jazz musicians who challenged genre boundaries, and that a larger narrative of genre fragmenting and layering is necessary within the jazz discourse.
Following the release of her protest anthem and increasing association with Civil Rights organizations SNCC and CORE, Simone was featured in several jazz festivals including the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966 and the Longhorn Jazz Festival in 1967 in Austin, Texas. This paper examines connections between Simone’s Civil Rights activities, her inclusion in jazz festival performances and jazz critics’ reevaluation of her position within the jazz community. It also proposes that the increase in Simone’s headline appearances at jazz festivals is directly linked to her activism and the reception of her protest songs. Prof. Anderson argues that jazz festivals provided a space and opportunity for Simone to extend her activism and voice her political views. Working with documents from the Rod Kennedy Presents archive from the Briscoe Center for American History, there will be a prime focus on Simone’s performance and reception at the Longhorn Jazz Festival.
This paper examines the ways in which artist-activists Oscar Brown, Jr. and Nina Simone manipulate vocal timbre as a strategy of resistance within the context of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. Through analyses of Brown, Jr.’s “Rags and Old Iron,” and Simone’s “Four Women,” this paper aims to highlight how these vocalists present multiple timbres, or “voices.” In hearing these as polyvocal performances, we may understand timbre as a site for resisting and disassembling expectations of Black vocality as well as an activist strategy for reimagining Black identity.
Background information
Challenging the notion that timbre is an “unmanipulable attribute,” Nina Eidsheim’s research demonstrates that the voice can emit many timbres. Eidsheim explains that because the voice arises from inside the body, vocal sounds are commonly understood as natural expressions, which becomes a metaphor for unified subjectivity. Timbral character, Eidsheim explains is heard “according to schemas of racialized, gendered or otherwise categorized bodies in accordance with the values of the given society” (2008, 178). Her fieldwork on vocal morphology demonstrates that while is no distinction between voices of different races, and that such notions are rooted in biological essentialism, critics continue to locate Blackness in timbre as a way to name racial difference.
Evie Shockley explains that gender norms and hierarchies figured heavily in constructions of Blackness within the Black Power era. Black music was at the center of the Black Power Movement and theorizations of a Black Aesthetic. The voice and vocality were central to the aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement as poets often performed their work shifting “from casual talk to heightened speech and sometimes to musical chant,” while free jazz musicians sounded the extremes of vocal capacity evoking sounds of screams, cries, and wails (Keyes 2004, 34). However, the discourse of the music of this era often figures male instrumentalists’ sounding of the human voice – particularly John Coltrane’s scream – as not only innovative, but also as a powerful reference for many Black Arts poets and theorists. As such, vocalists are absent in discussions of radical black aesthetics and politics. Focusing on the voice, and particularly timbre, provides an opportunity to rethink radical Black politics as hypermasculine, and may bring into relief narratives of Black vocalists who were critical to developing complex and perhaps competing formulations of radical Black identities.
Methodology
Within this paper, transcriptions of recorded and live performances of “Rags and Old Iron” and “Four Women” are presented in notational and spectrographic formats and analyzed for timbral variations. These analyses are read in dialogue with a reception study of Brown, Jr.’s and Simone’s critical reception from both mainstream and Black press publications in an effort to understand the ways in which various audiences hear and interpret the vocality and identities of the performers. The musical analyses and reception studies are interpreted through Evie Shockley’s notion of polyvocality in black women’s poetry. Shockley’s theoretical framework builds upon Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s trope of “speaking in tongues,” which describes the ability black women develop to “speak in a plurality of voices as well as in a multiplicity of discourses” (Henderson 1989, 22). Speaking in tongues – which involves both speaking and hearing – allows for a simultaneity of languages and received meanings. Henderson argues that black women have developed such a heteroglossia to be heard by others simultaneously as homogenous and heterogeneous to their audiences. Shockley’s model allows for diverging polyvocal projects with varying purposes and objectives; such a framework avoids essentializing black women’s voices, and responds to the voice which changes tone, timbre, and language over time and space. My modulated approach of polyvocality is centered around vocal timbre and I suggest both Brown, Jr. and Simone present multiple multiplicity of voices in various forms that are spoken, chanted, sung, and texted. Through the lens of polyvocality, it is possible to understand how artists-activists reformulate racial and gender hierarchies within the Black Power Movement.
Results
Both Oscar Brown, Jr. and Nina Simone accesses the notion that timbre is heard and seen as a construction of identity within their performances; however, each vocalist disrupts the notion of timbre as something that is essentialized – as something fixed – by quickly donning and shedding various vocal guises. By shifting timbral attributes including articulation, diction, tone, vibrato, and register, Brown and Simone present characters in rapid succession. Both vocalists theatrically sound fragmented musical codes to reference the class, gender, race, age, or region specific of their characters. The use of sonic caricature, which is often combined with humor and irony, challenges negative racialized stereotypes. By fragmenting and reassembling these codes, Brown and Simone collapse sonic expectations of Black vocality. Consideration of the vocalists’ reception shows that while these polyvocal performances were challenging to mainstream critics – many of whom referred to Brown and Simone as artists who “defy categorization” – many Black critics and intellectuals recognized their use of timbre and genre as aesthetic strategies to reimagine Black identity and radical Black politics.
Conclusions
Timbral variation is central to both Brown and Simone in their process of reimagining Black manhood and womanhood respectively within the Black Power era. Using timbre to achieve mutability and multiplicity in the voice, Simone deconstructs four stereotypes of black women in her composition, including the Mammy, the Tragic Mulatta, Jezebel, and the Sapphire. Similarly, Brown, Jr. alternates between various vocal timbres within “Rags and Old Iron” to effectively challenge singular notions of Black masculinity within the Black Power Era. Timbral analysis and theorizations of timbre provide a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which musicians resist and protest gendered and racialized constructions of the voice.
References
Eidsheim, N. S. (2008). Voice as a Technology of Selfhood: Towards an Analysis of Racialized Timbre and Vocal Performance (Ph.D.). University of California, San Diego, United States -- California. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/docview/304655431/abstract/197368F59B8413EPQ/1
Eidsheim, N. (2016). Voice as Action: Towards a Model for Analyzing the Dynamic Construction of Racialized Voice. Current Musicology, 93(2012). Retrieved from http://currentmusicology.columbia.edu/authors/nina-eidsheim?authors=nina-eidsheim
Eidsheim, N. S. (2011). Marian Anderson and “Sonic Blackness” in American Opera. American
Quarterly, 63(3), 641–671. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2011.0045
Keyes, Cheryl Lynette. 2004. Rap Music and Street Consciousness. University of Illinois Press.
Shockley, E. (2011). Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
The requirement of accessible string instruments for Claflin University students indicates a potential expansion of Black string band musicians beyond the Piedmont region and into Spartanburg and Orangeburg counties of South Carolina. Using archival research I present a history of Black string music at Claflin University within the context of Black old-time traditions in South Carolina. Within the last year, I have been working with students to transcribe and perform Black string band music. Along with the historical analysis, I also present an ethnographic study of Claflin students and their ideas on race and identity as they engage with Black string band traditions.
revival of the traditions with the recent success of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The requirement of accessible string instruments for Claflin University students indicates a potential expansion of Black string band musicians beyond the Piedmont region and into Spartanburg and Orangeburg counties of South Carolina. Using archival research I present a history of Black string music at Claflin University within the context of Black old-time traditions in South Carolina. Within the last year, I have been working with students to transcribe and perform Black string band music. Along with the historical analysis, I also present an ethnographic study of Claflin students and their ideas on race and identity as they engage with Black string band traditions.
Simone’s call and response between African American poetry and music can be situated within the context of the Black Arts Movement. Artist-activists of the Black Arts Movement often performed and created in collaboration with one another, experimenting across genres and media. This essay explores the intertextuality of Simone’s protest music, focusing on her musical setting of Langston Hughes’s poem “Backlash Blues” and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “When Malindy Sings.” Simone layers these two poems with additional material, including spoken word in “Backlash Blues,” and the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which is referenced, but not heard in Dunbar’s “When Malindy Sings.” I argue Simone’s additional lyrical and spoken word content, combined with the blurring of musical genres, functions as a strategy to place Black women’s perspectives centrally within Black Power politics.
This essay provides a gender analysis of the critical and scholarly reception of both albums in an effort to underline how constructions of gender within jazz informs discussions of each artist’s approach to challenging genre boundaries. Guthrie Ramsey and Mark Anthony Neal suggest Glasper’s album captures a post-genre moment, which can be understood as a major innovation in the jazz tradition. I argue that Spalding’s album can also be included within this frame, and suggest that her absence from this discussion can be explained by her dual role of bassist and jazz vocalist. Vocal jazz is not only gendered feminine, but also commercial, and artificial, which limits Spalding’s role to vocal interpreter rather than innovator. Additionally, I suggest that both Glasper and Spalding are in dialogue with many women jazz musicians who challenged genre boundaries, and that a larger narrative of genre fragmenting and layering is necessary within the jazz discourse.
Following the release of her protest anthem and increasing association with Civil Rights organizations SNCC and CORE, Simone was featured in several jazz festivals including the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966 and the Longhorn Jazz Festival in 1967 in Austin, Texas. This paper examines connections between Simone’s Civil Rights activities, her inclusion in jazz festival performances and jazz critics’ reevaluation of her position within the jazz community. It also proposes that the increase in Simone’s headline appearances at jazz festivals is directly linked to her activism and the reception of her protest songs. Prof. Anderson argues that jazz festivals provided a space and opportunity for Simone to extend her activism and voice her political views. Working with documents from the Rod Kennedy Presents archive from the Briscoe Center for American History, there will be a prime focus on Simone’s performance and reception at the Longhorn Jazz Festival.