David Metzer

Actors with disabilities have rarely appeared in musical theater and when they have, they have been limited to playing characters with disabilities. Two recent musical productions, however, have cast actors with disabilities for characters that were originally written as non- disabled. In Chapter Two, I demonstrate that Deaf West Theatre Company’s 2015 adaptation of Spring Awakening cast a mixture of Deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing actors to perform together. This production also featured Ali Stroker, the first woman in a wheelchair to perform on Broadway. Stroker was later cast for the role of Ado Annie in Daniel Fish’s 2019 revival of Oklahoma!, the subject of Chapter Three of this thesis. This study explores how these contemporary musical productions address issues of disability inclusion and representation within the United States. I place these productions within the history of the disability rights movements and d/Deaf rights movements, revealing how these performers in the shows have advocated for disability visibility. Each chapter presents an analysis of how these productions challenge ableism. Through music, staging, choreography, and performance, these productions expose the blind spots in ableist history. Furthermore, scholars on American musicals have yet to explore how music functions in creating visibility for disability. This study, however, offers musical analyses of several songs from each musical. Conducting close readings of these songs, I examine lyrics and music, including such elements as vocal delivery, rhythm, texture, and dynamics. My analytical readings show visibility for Deaf, hard-of-hearing, and wheelchair-using bodies. By placing these songs within the context of disability, and through an analysis of musical and dance elements, this study shows how disabled performers have challenged audiences to hear what they have to say about disability and the particular stories that they choose to tell. The thesis reveals the significance of these actors’ performances in efforts of erasing disability stigma and allows the audience member to reflect on current injustices to do with casting and representation in the United States.

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Most singer-songwriters in the 1960s and 1970s wrote protest music in opposition to the Vietnam War and in support of the Civil Rights Movement. Cree musician Buffy Sainte-Marie (b. 1941), however, was one of the few artists composing songs to call out the wrongs done to Indigenous peoples in North America, such as land dispossession, treaty violations, relocation, and Residential Schools. This study demonstrates how Sainte-Marie’s music addresses Indigenous injustices within both Canada and the United States. Discussions of Sainte-Marie’s music have dealt mainly with her lyrics. This study, in contrast, examines both lyrics and music, including such elements as harmony, timbre, form, vocal delivery, and dynamics. Furthermore, her songs are placed within the history of the protest music genre, revealing how Sainte-Marie uses aspects of the genre to advocate for Indigenous rights. Each chapter presents an analysis of how Sainte-Marie’s songs disrupt colonialism. Her music offers a history that challenges and exposes the blind spots in settler histories. Sainte-Marie also addresses the concerns of the American Indian Movement during the 1970s and the sexism that took place within the organization. By placing Sainte-Marie’s songs within the protest music genre, and through an analysis of both textual and musical elements, this study highlights the importance of her music in challenging the listener to really listen to what she has to say and the particular stories that she chooses to tell. The thesis reveals the significance of Sainte-Marie’s music in efforts of decolonization and allows the listener to reflect on current Indigenous injustices still taking place in North America.

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Experimental composer and performer Joan La Barbara treats the voice as a musical instrument. Through improvisation, she has developed an array of signature sounds, or extended vocal techniques, that extend the voice beyond traditional conceptions of Western classical singing. At times, her signature sounds are primal and unfamiliar, drawing upon extreme vocal registers and multiple simultaneous pitches. In 2003, La Barbara released Voice is the Original Instrument, a two-part album that comprises a selection of her earliest works from 1974 – 1980. The compositions on this album reveal La Barbara’s experimental approach to using the voice. Voice Piece: One-Note Internal Resonance Investigation explores the timbral palette within a single pitch. Circular Song plays with the necessity of a singer’s breath by vocalizing, and therefore removing, all audible inhalations and exhalations. Hear What I Feel brings the sense of touch into an improvisatory composition and performance experience. In October Music: Star Showers and Extraterrestrials, La Barbara moves past experimentation and layers her different sounds into a cohesive piece of music. This thesis is a study of La Barbara’s treatment of the voice in these four early works. I will frame my discussion with theories of the acousmatic by Mladen Dolar and Brian Kane and will also draw comparisons with Helmut Lachnemann’s musique concrète instrumentale works. In doing so, I will chart La Barbara’s experimentation and use of the voice in its original function. Specifically, the voice as the first means expression, not requiring text or traditionally musical elements, but as an communicative wordless instrument.

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Experimental composer and performer Joan La Barbara treats the voice as a musical instrument. Through improvisation, she has developed an array of signature sounds, or extended vocal techniques, that extend the voice beyond traditional conceptions of Western classical singing. At times, her signature sounds are primal and unfamiliar, drawing upon extreme vocal registers and multiple simultaneous pitches. In 2003, La Barbara released Voice is the Original Instrument, a two-part album that comprises a selection of her earliest works from 1974 – 1980. The compositions on this album reveal La Barbara’s experimental approach to using the voice. Voice Piece: One-Note Internal Resonance Investigation explores the timbral palette within a single pitch. Circular Song plays with the necessity of a singer’s breath by vocalizing, and therefore removing, all audible inhalations and exhalations. Hear What I Feel brings the sense of touch into an improvisatory composition and performance experience. In October Music: Star Showers and Extraterrestrials, La Barbara moves past experimentation and layers her different sounds into a cohesive piece of music. This thesis is a study of La Barbara’s treatment of the voice in these four early works. I will frame my discussion with theories of the acousmatic by Mladen Dolar and Brian Kane and will also draw comparisons with Helmut Lachnemann’s musique concrète instrumentale works. In doing so, I will chart La Barbara’s experimentation and use of the voice in its original function. Specifically, the voice as the first means expression, not requiring text or traditionally musical elements, but as an communicative wordless instrument.

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From the earliest outbreak of “Beatlemania” in 1963 to the announcement of their breakup in 1970, The Beatles fulfilled, exceeded, and reformed our conceptions of popular music. They have enjoyed an enduring popularity with critics and audiences and have cemented their position as one of the most celebrated acts in popular culture. Although it would be difficult to attribute their success to a single factor, it could be argued that their eclectic sound ensured their mass appeal. As their careers progressed, The Beatles effortlessly combined and moved between different genres. Many of these genres were atypical for popular music of the 1960s and can be regarded as parody. This thesis approaches parody as an important stylistic trait of The Beatles’ music. Parody is a broad concept that can be found in a number of forms of art and entertainment. By drawing from literary criticism and musicological discourse, this study develops a broader understanding of parody in which popular musicians evoke the music of another genre through borrowing and create a critical distance between their work and the preexisting one. Further investigation reveals how The Beatles applied parody to their music and how it was used by the band to connect with their listeners. In such songs as “Back In The U.S.S.R.” and “Happiness Is A Warm Gun,” The Beatles parody different musical genres in order to evoke social commentary. Genre parody is not exclusive to individual songs. It is one of the unifying threads in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in which The Beatles parody the English music hall and use genre to connect themes on the album. Despite these instances, parody remains an underexplored practice in their music. Many scholars of the band will acknowledge the musical and critical elements associated with parody; however, they do not use the term, nor identify parody as a recurring practice in The Beatles’ music. This thesis hopes to shed light on this topic and add to our understanding of the rich legacy of The Beatles.

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Throughout his career, Benjamin Britten was actively involved in the composition of music for television and film, for projects ranging from documentary soundtracks for the General Post Office Film Unit (1935-36) to television adaptations of his operas. This thesis will examine the television production of Peter Grimes, which was shot under Britten’s supervision in 1969 at the Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh. The production has Peter Pears, Britten’s partner and collaborator, in the title role, a role that he also performed in the 1945 premiere of the opera.As in many of his operas, Peter Grimes encourages the audience to sympathetically identify with a character who is an outsider in society. Grimes, for example, is rejected by the people in the local village, yet is made to be a multi-dimensional character who the audience is encouraged to feel sympathy for. The thesis will examine how gesture is used in the production to create a sympathetic connection between Grimes and the audience. It will also pay particular attention to the use of camera techniques to enhance this connection through different shots including close-ups and framing the individual against the crowd. In addition, it examines how the gestures performed relate to and interact with the accompanying score. The gestures used by Grimes in three scenes of the opera will be examined in detail: the Prologue, Interlude IV, and Act III scene ii.This thesis will examine Britten’s perceptions of the character of Grimes, his involvement in the television production process, and his views on acting. Through looking at Pears’s copies of vocal scores, it will also explore his relationship with Grimes and how he approached gesture in his operatic roles.

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Hungarian-born Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt’s (1919-2012) multimedia work, Foci (1969), was written during a time of rapid technological and social change. Composed for taped and live voices, electronics, and instruments in Montreal amidst the political upheavals of the Quiet Revolution, Foci is a work that exemplifies new directions in musical technique that were being explored in Canada at the time. Foci is also a work that comments on broader cultural developments in a period known as late modernity. Sociologists such as Jock Young and Anthony Giddens have described this period as one that is characterized by an increase in the dissolution of traditional social and personal boundaries, a rise in individual autonomy, and the permeation of anxiety into all spheres of life, which Albert Camus argues is the result of one’s increased awareness of the Absurd.The thesis will explore how Foci can be read as a work that embodies various struggles that the individual of late modernity encounters, including the challenge of creating oneself from a philosophical blank slate (Chapter 2), reconciling traditional notions of religion and faith with late-modern ones (Chapter 3), navigating through interactions with others and groups while balancing the need for individuality and uniqueness (Chapter 4), and finally, confronting the late-modern idea that any singular truth is untenable (Chapter 5). By studying the sociological context of Foci in conjunction with its musical characteristics, an understanding of the work’s place and significance in Canadian music history as well as in the changing social and cultural conditions of the 1960’s is acquired.

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