Papers by David Cosper
Frontiers of Narrative Studies, 2024
This work begins with an exploration of various analytical techniques for discerning and describi... more This work begins with an exploration of various analytical techniques for discerning and describing details of vocal performance in the song "Episodes," from Philadelphia Hip Hop group The Roots' 1996 album, Illadelph Halflife. I pair this musical analysis with textual exegesis drawing on narratology and speech act theory. Reconciling the two analytical approaches, I conclude by suggesting a refreshed notion of affective realism in late twentieth-century Hip Hop, characterized by consistency between poetic, phonetic, illocutionary, and performative dynamics in rap verse.
... In the following chapter, I analyze several recordings of jazz pianist Jaki Byard, suggesting... more ... In the following chapter, I analyze several recordings of jazz pianist Jaki Byard, suggesting that Byard's marginal position in mainstream jazz criticism may result from the way his music seems to flout several narrative discourses thought to be ... Advisor: Maus, Fred Everett. ...
Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2023
The centrepiece of this essay is a close reading of Henry Mancini's score for the 1967 suspense f... more The centrepiece of this essay is a close reading of Henry Mancini's score for the 1967 suspense film Wait Until Dark, starring Audrey Hepburn. Drawing on poststructuralist narrative theory, I explore the implications of a blind protagonist for received thinking about focalisation and propose a music-informed narrative reading of the film. Informed by feminist disability studies and the work of film critics including Steven Shaviro, Stan Link, Vivian Sobchack, Michel Chion, and others, I propose that, unlike other films with visually impaired protagonists, which affirm the stability of visual experience by presenting blindness as an epistemological prop for theorising sight, Wait Until Dark effects a decentring of vision in cinematic experience that challenges traditional associations between sight and selfhood. Based on musical and narrative analysis, I argue that Mancini's score is significant to this process.
The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, 2019
Jazz Perspectives, 2021
This article proceeds from the observation that language describing the performances of jazz musi... more This article proceeds from the observation that language describing the performances of jazz musicians and prizefighters with reference to one another is common to both sports writing and jazz criticism. I take this as an invitation to explore the historical context, critical significance, and musical implications of the interrelationship of these two crafts, with particular focus on Miles Davis’s score to the documentary film A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971). This begins with an unpacking of Davis’s well-documented commitment to “the sweet science” in light of discourses of race and masculinity in mid-century US jazz culture. I then offer a close reading of one of the Jack Johnson session recordings as a musical analogue of the unique boxing cadence of Muhammad Ali, a contemporary athlete who embodied the Black Power era reimagination of Jack Johnson realized in Davis’s score/album.
Jazz Research Journal, 2013
In this work, I explore the resonance and recurrence of visual metaphors in the discourse surroun... more In this work, I explore the resonance and recurrence of visual metaphors in the discourse surrounding contemporary jazz composition and performance, much of which I suggest resists analytical approaches privileging cyclicity in form and relationships between precomposed and improvised tonal language. I argue that, as a recurrent conceptual glitch, these analytical approaches often focus exclusively on performative process rather than on listener experience and on strictly aural rather than synesthetic models of listener subjectivity. As an alternative, I propose a cinematographic narrative approach based on theories of visual subjectivity and the composition of visual images. As an example, I discuss the music of bassist and composer Ben Allison.
Jazz Perspectives, 2013
Abstract As a pianist and improviser, Jaki Byard (1922–1999) seems to have had an unabridged, if ... more Abstract As a pianist and improviser, Jaki Byard (1922–1999) seems to have had an unabridged, if unbound, history book of jazz styles at his fingertips. Rather than synthesizing these in “add-and-stir” fashion, Byard often strings together coherent stylistic gestures in delightfully unintuitive ways. His solo and small-group records of the 1960s and 1970s consistently demonstrate this proclivity for creative anachronism. Yet despite having performed with, recorded with, or taught many better-known jazz performers over an exceptionally long and productive career, Byard has often been relegated to a marginal position in prevailing popular and academic jazz histories. In this context, I approach Byard as a kind of “symptom bearer” whose failure to fit comfortably into received style-based historical narratives offers a unique opportunity to interrogate the critical apparatus behind them. In response, I suggest an alternative theoretical approach to Byard's stylistically transgressive performance-as-historiography based in contemporary narrative theory.
Narrative Culture, 2015
Billie counted offf the tune and started the pre-refrain verse, with only the piano accompanying.... more Billie counted offf the tune and started the pre-refrain verse, with only the piano accompanying. .. and the soldier hoped that Holiday, having sensed that he was diffferent from all the others, was perhaps granting him more than she allowed lesser supplicants.. .. In the lyrics, she was waiting by the water, longing for her lover's ship to return. She was singing the music he had ached to hear, was singing it to him as if he, soon to head offf by sea to war, was that lover for whom she pined, and this thought vibrated in him like a recently arrived arrow.. .. The applause ebbed away, into foam and then nothing. The tone arm bobbed over the deep black space as it skated toward the label with the two blackbirds perched on telephone lines that become a musical stafff. The whispering ended, the tone arm flew home, the LP stopped turning, and he wept like a child. (1) This kind of experience, in which listeners feel themselves either to be spoken to or speaking through popular songs, seems to be a common one. It is itself the subject
We have seen … the end … of ideologies that prepared a smooth passage from the past to the future... more We have seen … the end … of ideologies that prepared a smooth passage from the past to the future or that had indicated what the future should keep from the past -whether for reaction, progress, or even revolution.
Reviews by David Cosper
Dissertation by David Cosper
Dissertation (University of Virginia), 2011
The foundation of this dissertation is the notion that the variety of ways in which listeners exp... more The foundation of this dissertation is the notion that the variety of ways in which listeners experience the agency of musical performers is analogous to the variety of ways in which readers experience narrators in works of fiction. I find this way of thinking preferable to more common approaches based on perceived similarities between musical performance and the interpretation of literary texts, which I see as a recurrent conceptual glitch in many discursive approaches to performance that often stands in the way of speaking to listeners‘ experiences in meaningful ways. I suggest that narrative studies, itself a busy interdisciplinary project, offers a rich theoretical vocabulary with the potential to help bring the criticism and analysis of recorded musical performances into line with listeners‘ experiences of them.
The body of the dissertation consists of three sample analyses of musical performances in various genres, using a theoretical model of musical performer as narrator. The first case study begins with the project of exploring and explaining differences between several performances of an individual piece of instrumental classical music, Franz Schubert‘s Wanderer Fantasy. In the following chapter, I analyze several recordings of jazz pianist Jaki Byard, suggesting that Byard‘s marginal position in mainstream jazz criticism may result from the way his music seems to flout several narrative discourses thought to be fundamental to analytical engagement with jazz performance. The final case study focuses on the music of the Icelandic pop singer Björk, whose distinctive narrative agency I find to be resonant with Mikhail Bakhtin‘s writing on literary narration.
In these three case studies, I argue not for any particular "hearing" of these recordings, but rather for an interdisciplinary approach I find to be responsive to a wider variety of listening experiences than many more common theoretical discussions. I hope to open up a space between several preexisting theoretical discourses in which it is possible to craft theoretical solutions specific to individual listeners‘ experiences of individual musical performances and to demonstrate that narrative theory can be a therapeutic and regenerative resource in the continuing project of developing new and
useful ways of discussing musical performance.
Uploads
Papers by David Cosper
Reviews by David Cosper
Dissertation by David Cosper
The body of the dissertation consists of three sample analyses of musical performances in various genres, using a theoretical model of musical performer as narrator. The first case study begins with the project of exploring and explaining differences between several performances of an individual piece of instrumental classical music, Franz Schubert‘s Wanderer Fantasy. In the following chapter, I analyze several recordings of jazz pianist Jaki Byard, suggesting that Byard‘s marginal position in mainstream jazz criticism may result from the way his music seems to flout several narrative discourses thought to be fundamental to analytical engagement with jazz performance. The final case study focuses on the music of the Icelandic pop singer Björk, whose distinctive narrative agency I find to be resonant with Mikhail Bakhtin‘s writing on literary narration.
In these three case studies, I argue not for any particular "hearing" of these recordings, but rather for an interdisciplinary approach I find to be responsive to a wider variety of listening experiences than many more common theoretical discussions. I hope to open up a space between several preexisting theoretical discourses in which it is possible to craft theoretical solutions specific to individual listeners‘ experiences of individual musical performances and to demonstrate that narrative theory can be a therapeutic and regenerative resource in the continuing project of developing new and
useful ways of discussing musical performance.
The body of the dissertation consists of three sample analyses of musical performances in various genres, using a theoretical model of musical performer as narrator. The first case study begins with the project of exploring and explaining differences between several performances of an individual piece of instrumental classical music, Franz Schubert‘s Wanderer Fantasy. In the following chapter, I analyze several recordings of jazz pianist Jaki Byard, suggesting that Byard‘s marginal position in mainstream jazz criticism may result from the way his music seems to flout several narrative discourses thought to be fundamental to analytical engagement with jazz performance. The final case study focuses on the music of the Icelandic pop singer Björk, whose distinctive narrative agency I find to be resonant with Mikhail Bakhtin‘s writing on literary narration.
In these three case studies, I argue not for any particular "hearing" of these recordings, but rather for an interdisciplinary approach I find to be responsive to a wider variety of listening experiences than many more common theoretical discussions. I hope to open up a space between several preexisting theoretical discourses in which it is possible to craft theoretical solutions specific to individual listeners‘ experiences of individual musical performances and to demonstrate that narrative theory can be a therapeutic and regenerative resource in the continuing project of developing new and
useful ways of discussing musical performance.