“The Way We Play”: Black American History, Humanity, and Musical Identity

Abstract

"'The Way We Play': Black American History, Humanity" and Musical Identity, considers the ways that Black Americans have turned to musical performance as a modality of socio-political expression and unity; ultimately, I am guided by the question of how Black Americans hear and represent themselves in musical sound. I aim to elucidate the shared practices of Black music-making across time and space, through close examination of three historically-situated case studies across an almost 100-year time span. In Chapter 1: Sounding Blackness, I provide a theorization of Black musical identities; arguing that historically and culturally-informed study of Black musical identity challenges arguments of anti-essentialism and exclusionary notions of humanity. The following three chapters are representative case studies. Beginning with vocalist Alberta Hunter (1895-1984), I provide a conceptualization of Black vocality as rooted in practice and genealogy rather than biology. Within this chapter, I advance a theorization of the “qualia of Blackness” as a way to understand how listeners recognize certain sounds as Black. The next chapter examines the career of vocalist Luther Vandross (1951-2005) and how he navigated his interactions with American and Black American musical audiences as a queer Black man. I focus particularly on Vandross’s performance practice, which was influenced by Black women vocalists, as a call for recognition of the value of Black life, music, and family. I conclude with a chapter on trumpeter Marquis Hill (b. 1987), focused on his genre-crossing performances that combine influences from myriad Black musics throughout history, advancing a concept I call “temporal rupture.” I further argue for greater consideration of how musicians’ experience the process or practice of improvisation within a group, especially regarding perceptions of meter and rhythm. By foregrounding music analysis as a key part of my methodology, I illuminate musical commonalities across a range of established genre categories and time periods. Informed by my experience as a jazz saxophonist, I employ detailed transcription and analysis of recorded material, as a critical part of this process. A critical goal of this dissertation is to actively bridge the gap between musicology and Black studies through a robust interdisciplinary line of inquiry and methodology. Combining these two modes of inquiry with conceptions of semiotics derived from the field of linguistic anthropology, I argue for historically, spatially, and culturally constituted Black musical identities.