This dissertation is an analysis of Elaine Mitchener’s structurally improvised work SWEET TOOTH, initially devised in 2017 and 2018 for an ensemble of four. I focus on the February 22, 2018 London premiere at St George’s Church in Bloomsbury, where Mitchener, an experimental vocalist and movement artist, performed the piece with Sylvia Hallett (accordion, violin and voice), Mark Sanders (percussion), and Jason Yarde (saxophones).
I have previously examined this piece in a co-authored essay with Mitchener entitled, “‘Water long like the dead’: The interruption and flow of time in Elaine Mitchener’s SWEET TOOTH,” as part of the volume Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today, edited by Harald Kisiedu and George E. Lewis. This essay concentrated on how, with its improvisatory performance style, SWEET TOOTH’s structure, including harmonic and pitch content, emulates the simultaneous interruptions and flow of what Antonio Benítez-Rojo refers to as the “Plantation Machine”: the mechanics of transatlantic slavery that have continued to repeat and reveal themselves in renewed but connected ways as part of an expanded framework, where the Caribbean exists as what Benítez-Rojo describes as a “meta-archipelago,” a de-centered, multidimensional nexus without boundary that is also realized through SWEET TOOTH.
In this thesis, I argue that the air is as vital to the Caribbean’s borderless flow as the sea, in that its vibrational qualities also repeat and oscillate through space and time. Specifically, I explore what Ashon T. Crawley describes as the “choreosonics” of SWEET TOOTH: how the combination of movement and sound together displace the air, making the work multi-sensory, and enabling travel between the interconnected histories, time zones, and dimensions that form the conditions of the Machine: the hold of a slave ship, the deep seas of the Atlantic Ocean, a Caribbean sugar plantation, spiritual realms and unknown worlds. Furthermore, I consider how “in-between,” or “blue” zones are formed, which facilitate these connected sites to simultaneously exist and be disrupted, as well as how aural triggers conjure these spaces in the present through memory, real and imagined. Finally, I analyze the means through which the Afro-Jamaican religion kumina is incorporated and practiced as part of SWEET TOOTH in the hope of transcending into an otherworldly realm: an act of defying the Machine. Ultimately, I demonstrate that whilst SWEET TOOTH replicates, and even belongs to the Plantation Machine complex, the work simultaneously finds ways to cut through and resist it: to frustrate its repetitions with the desire to completely disrupt it in perpetuity.
shouting forever into the receiver (2022), a musical composition for large ensemble, attempts to recreate the repetitious condition of the Plantation Machine. This is achieved primarily through auxiliary instruments and their resulting effects on the work’s overall sound world and temporal state. A two-way walkie-talkie device introduces feedback and radio interference into the soundscape symbolizing the Machine’s persistent looping system, also simulating the cries of the plantations. Furthermore, a confluence of separate time zones is created through a chorale-like section of massed harmonicas and seven wind-up music boxes playing well known pre-programmed melodies by Beethoven, Mozart and Strauss composed during the establishment of the Plantation.
Thus, not only is the past connected to the present through these aural memories, the ties between Europe and the plantations are purposefully emphasized. Eight players play two harmonicas simultaneously, breathing independently, each creating their own time zone with every repeat of the exhale-inhale action. The music boxes wind down at their own rate generating additional cyclical layers of time, thus emulating the eccentric situation of the Caribbean, which is without center or axis. A “blue” space is formed as a result, an expansive new site of connectivity where it is possible for transformation to occur or to, indeed, transcend out of the Machine.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/m7d2-a577 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Kendall, Hannah |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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